Global Courant
A devastating one train accident that has left nearly 300 people dead has refocused international attention on the importance of railways in the lives of Indians.
Indeed, for many Western observers, images of men and women crammed into overcrowded cars serve as a metaphor for modern India.
Take, for example, a report by the German newspaper Der Spiegel on the population of India surpassing that of China. Published just weeks before the accident in Odisha province on June 2, the now much criticized cartoon depicted a shabby Indian train crammed with passengers running past a streamlined Chinese train with only two people on it.
Where does this enduring image of western Indian railways – and India – come from?
As a scholar of Indian history and author of the 2015 book Tracks of Change: Railways and Daily Life in Colonial IndiaI believe the answers lie in the gigantic infrastructure projects of the 19th century – forged at the intersection of colonial dictates and capitalist demands.
A carrier of cargo, not people
Railways remain the backbone of passenger transport in India and carry a portion 23 million people every day. In the pre-pandemic fiscal year 2018-2019 7.7 billion passengers travel in India. By comparison, even after a dramatic post-pandemic increase, airline passenger traffic was 123.2 million in 2022.
But when they were first planned in the 1840s, Indian railways were intended to primarily carry freight and livestock, not people.
Indians were thought unlikely to become train passengers by directors of the English East India Co, a trading monopoly that gradually annexed and administered large parts of India under the control of the British crown.
Many people at the time disagreed that Indians were immobile people, pointing out that the country had a long history world Trade across vast oceanic networks.
Early colonial railroad policies, however, were driven by ubiquity Orientalist imaginings of a people immobilized by poverty, living in isolated villages and constrained by religious restrictions that prohibit travel.
First train of the East Indian Railway – 1854. Photo: Wilimedia Commons
The trope intertwined with colonial thinking that railroads would promote greater industrialization, which in turn would promote a capitalist economy. It also corresponded to the practical needs of a colonial trading monopoly that required raw materials for English industries, such as cotton, to be transported quickly and efficiently from India’s interior to port cities from where they could be shipped.
Relegated to cheap seats
Nasty the natives‘, as the British often referred to their colonial subjects, to use the railways, the colonial government introduced low fares, especially in third class cars – the lowest and cheapest category of rail travel.
The decision to introduce lower rates seems contrary to the profit-driven objectives of a capitalist company, where money is raised by private companies recorded in the United Kingdom.
However, British capitalists and shareholders in these private companies had nothing to fear for their profits, which were guaranteed by the Indian taxpayer. The colonial government of India guaranteed these companies a 5% annual return on their investment whether or not the venture turned a profit.
Despite the doubters, the new Indian the railways attracted more and more travelers.
The registered half a million passengers in 1854, when the tracks became operational, it increased to 26 million in 1875. By 1900 annual passenger numbers were 175 million and then nearly tripled to 520 million in 1919-1920. By the time of the Partition of India in 1947, it had risen to over 1 billion passenger journeys annually. Indeed, images of overcrowded trains came to epitomize the upheaval of partition, using the railway system to transport parts of uprooted peoples across the forthcoming border between Pakistan and India.
Third class passengers, mostly Indians, made up almost 90% of this traffic.
However, these rising figures did not lead to tariff reductions. Nor did they lead to substantial improvements in the conditions of overcrowded, unsanitary third-class travel.
Crowded Indian train. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Instead, railroad companies sought “the greatest economy of space and cargo,” such as a rail manager said so. Inadequate rolling stock, largely imported, exacerbated matters.
A tool for ‘self-control’
The generally British railway managers seemed disinclined to deal with systematic overcrowding, which included the carriage of passengers in wagons intended for livestock. On the contrary, they maintained that such overcrowding was caused by the peculiar habits and tendencies of Indian passengers: their alleged aversion to empty carriages and their tendency to follow each other “like sheep” in overcrowded carriages.
These trappings were soon turned into a more public narrative, especially among Western minds. Journalist H. Sutherland Stark, writes for the industry publication Magazine of the Indian State Railways in 1929, stated that although he was “inexperienced” in railroad administration and traffic control, he knew railroad facilities were not the problem. On the contrary, Indian passengers lacked the mental preparedness, “self-control” and “method” necessary to travel as “healthy people”.
Stark suggested passenger education as a solution to the perceived problem, making rail travel an aid to “self-restraint and mass orderliness.” He was not alone in suggesting a congruence between rational train travel and reasonable public behavior. Although the nationalist leader in the 1910s condemned railroad management for perpetuating the humiliations faced by third-class passengers, Mahatma Gandhi also suggested training train passengers as a means of creating a civic body of citizens.
A running metaphor
More than a century later, this image remains, but ironically it now serves as a foil for understanding contemporary India. In a piece published in The New York Times on 12 March 2005, the author praised the then new Delhi Metro, emphasizing that it had “none of the chaotic squalor of hawkers and beggars typical of India’s mainline railways, nor the desperation of travelers hanging on the sides of the trains” .
Delhi Metro yellow line train. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
As the debate rages over whether security has come second to “shiny modernization projectsin India – early analyzes suggest signaling failed could have caused June 2, 2023, accident – railways continue to represent India’s history.
In the heyday of the empire, they were viewed as the technology by which Britain would drag India into capitalist modernity. In 1947, they became a leitmotif for the trauma of the partition which accompanied the independence of India and Pakistan. As the coverage of the Odisha accident reminds us, in the West it remains a metaphor for the evaluation of contemporary India.
Ritika Prasad is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina – Charlotte.
This article has been republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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