Book review: Railways of the Raj by Michael Satow & Ray Desmond

Railways Of The Raj by Michael Satow & Ray Desmond With a Foreword by Paul TherouxOxford University PressPrice: Rs 275; Pages: 118 The Princess of Wales' day saloon on the specially designed Royal train and First-class compartment for Europeans Circa 1882There may initially be a flicker of doubt whether this elegant publication sets out to celebrate the romance of the railways or the Raj (suspicion, too, as the rash of books on the Raj proliferates). But this is dispelled by the realisation that the Raj could hardly be worth a celebration without the railways, for the gigantic commercial enterprise of Empire, the administration of a far-flung sub-continent, the very romance of governing would be rendered incomplete without the railway track.Paul Theroux, that inveterate chronicler of the railway journey in contemporary times, quite rightly points out that "the railway was the bloodstream of the Raj....it was the imperial vision on a grand scale.....(for) it involved millions of people, it required immense paperwork, the clipboard, the manifests in triplicate, the endless chain-of-command from Director to Sweeper-so it suited the complexity of Indian life, and it was an institution of limitless subtlety."Whether suitable or not to the hierarchy of the Indian natives (in 1874 one Hindu deplored the fact that the railways seated "the sweepers, the chamars, and the like classes of people in the same carriage along with Hindustanis of the higher order") or capable or not for exasperated white men ("the white man is often in a hurry, the Indian never: the Indian train strolls accordingly at a decorous twenty miles an hour" snapped one irritated visitor), the fact was the railway bridged more than one gap. It called for resilience, politically and financially, and great feats of engineering.Influence: The two original rail-building companies were the East Indian Railway (with a capital of just 1 million) which established the Calcutta-Raneegunge track of 120 miles and the Great Indian Peninsula Railway for the Bombay-Thane section. This was in 1853; the Mutiny was just around the corner. "Whether," ask the writers, "the existence of a continuous railway between Calcutta and Meerut in 1857 would have altered the course of Indian history is open to doubt.... it might have shortened the agony of the Mutiny, but it is unlikely that the East India Company would have survived much longer." If anything, the advent of the railway ensured the supremacy of the Raj, it helped entrench the control of the new administrators. The railways contributed to both the centralisation and dispensation of power. "The Raj," says Theroux, "had no shortage of symbols, but the railway (became) the greatest of them."From the symbol grew the legends, the myths, the exuberant whimsies of railway travel. Certainly Rudyard Kipling wouldn't have spawned his net of stories so wide if it hadn't been for the railways (almost all his early stories were from material gathered on railway journeys, then printed and sold in pamphlet-sized books in Wheeler's Railways Series). A pair of bullocks drew five loaded wagons for the Gaekwad of Baroda's small gauge track in 1863Certainly the royalty of the period - indigenous or foreign - wouldn't have had such a heyday without the opulent comfort of railway travel (the railway became so fashionable that the Maharaja of Gwalior produced a silver centrepiece for his banqueting table which, at the touch of a button, rose to reveal a silver model train distributing liqueurs and cigars to guests).This may be a rudimentary account of the advent and progress of the Indian railway, but it's fascinating stuff, especially as the authors have gone to considerable lengths to acquire a large selection of old photographs, woodcuts, engravings and sketches to enrich their brief but cogent text. Many of the illustrations appear together in such a perspective for the first time, and the panorama they provide is spectacular.Published By: AtMigration Published On: Nov 26, 2013 10:51 IST--- ENDS ---

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Book review: Railways of the Raj by Michael Satow & Ray Desmond

There may initially be a flicker of doubt whether this elegant publication sets out to celebrate the romance of the railways or the Raj (suspicion, too, as the rash of books on the Raj proliferates).

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