SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

THIS IS A limited bibliography of books I have used as sources or read in the course of writing this book and therefore is by no means comprehensive. It might, though, provide a few suggestions on ‘what to read next’. I have confined myself to books on the railways, leaving out the wider history books I used.

As mentioned in the introduction, there are not as many books on Indian railways as the subject deserves. There is certainly plenty of scope for more. The most prolific academic writer on the topic is Ian J. Kerr, a Canadian historian, who has written or edited several excellent books on the Indian railways. His Engines of Change: The Railroads That Made India (Praeger, 2007) is an outstanding short account, well-described by the subtitle, and his Building the Railways of the Raj 1850–1900 (Oxford University Press, 1995) is also aptly titled. He also edited two volumes of papers which proved very useful, the oddly named 27 Down: New Departures in Indian Railway Studies (Orient Longman, 2007), which comes complete with a CD featuring extra material, and Railways in Modern India (Oxford University Press, 2001). Another compilation that had several useful articles is Our Indian Railway: Themes in India’s Railway History (Foundation Books for the Ministry of Railways, 2006), edited by Roopa Srinivasan, Manish Tiwari and Sandeep Silas.

A rare general book, useful but dated, is Railways of India (David & Charles, 1974) by J. N. Westwood. Railways of the Raj (Scolar Press, 1980) is one of the few useful picture books which mostly contain only captioned photographs as it has a couple of chapters on history and, best of all, an elegant foreword by Paul Theroux.

There are a couple of general histories of the railways written by Indians commissioned by the Ministry of Railways. In 1953, to mark the 100th anniversary, the ministry published J. N. Sahni’s Indian Railways: One Hundred Years, 1853–1953 (Ministry of Railways, 1953), which frustratingly lacks a lot of detail and is fairly hagiographic, and thirty-five years later the much more informative and detailed A History of Indian Railways, by G. S. Khosla. Another rather uncritical effort is 150 Glorious Years of Indian Railways (English Edition Publishers, 2003), by K. R. Vaidyanathan.

M. A. Rao’s short account, Indian Railways (India Book Trust, 1999), first published in 1975 but updated in 1999, is slightly more objective, though still coloured by the fact it is written by a former general manager of the railways. Bill Aitken’s Exploring Indian Railways (Oxford University Press, 1994) is a rather acerbic and self-indulgent account of the history and current state of the railways but has a few excellent insights and descriptions.

Two books that look at the wider impact of the railways are Laura Bear’s Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy and the Intimate Historical Self (Columbia University Press, 2007), which is somewhat academic but very well-researched, and Rikita Prasad’s Tracks of Change: Railways and Everyday Life in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2015), which details many aspects of travelling on the railways in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Again, the long subtitle of Sarah Searight’s Steaming East: The Hundred-Year Saga of the Struggle to Forge Rail and Steamship Links between Europe and India (The Bodley Head, 1991) is an accurate description of an interesting account of how hard it was to reach India even in the steamship age. Rajendra B. Aklekar, in Halt Station India: The Dramatic Tale of the Nation’s First Rail Lines (Rupa Publications, 2014), describes the building of India’s first railway, between Mumbai and Thane, and he brings it to life by walking along the route, finding small relics of the original line.

There are all too few books covering the history of particular lines or regions. One of the best is Sarah Hilaly’s The Railways of Assam (Pilgrims Publishing, 2007), which sets out in context the building of the railways in that remote part of India. R. R. Bhandari’s Western Railway: A Glorious Saga (Western Railway, 2008) is a typical PR exercise as its title implies with a few useful facts. Couplings to the Khyber (David & Charles, 1969) is a remarkable first-hand account of building the lines in the North-West Frontier by their chief engineer, P. S. A. Berridge.

Hill-station railways have attracted a disproportionate amount of interest and are covered in numerous books, such as Bob Cable’s Darjeeling Revisited: A Journey on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (Middleton Press, 2001) and V. M. Govind Krishnan’s Nilgiri Mountain Railway: From Lifeline to Oblivion (Star Publications, 2012), a slightly chaotic but detailed account.

Of the books covering the modern era, the best is Bankruptcy to Billions: How the Indian Railways Transformed (Oxford University Press, 2009) by Sudhir Kumar and Shagun Mehrotra, a rather rose-tinted view of how the economics of Indian Railways were turned around in the mid-2000s.

The best travelogue-type book I came across was Monisha Rajesh’s Around India in 80 Trains (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2012), and I also enjoyed Peter Riordan’s Strangers in My Sleeper: Rail Journeys and Encounters on the Indian Subcontinent (New Holland, 2006).

In researching a book like this, one comes across wonderful curios that are deserving of a wider audience. Two of the best are Bengal Engineer (Pentland Press, 1994), a series of letters by an engineer working on India railways from the mid-nineteenth century, edited by Peter Vaux, the man’s great-grandson, and S. T. Hollins, No Ten Commandments (Arrow Books, 1958), which only has a couple of chapters on the railway but is a remarkable and well-written account of police work throughout the last forty years of the Raj. I also came across John Thomas’s Line of Communication: Railway to Victory in the East (Locomotive Publishing Company, 1947), a pamphlet about the role of the railways in the war on India’s eastern front.

I have copies of most of these books if you are unable to trace them: do email me via the website www.christianwolmar.co.uk.