The book “Railways and The Raj: How the Age of Steam Transformed India” by Christian Wolmar is a good book for reading about the history of the Indian Railways & it’s impact on Indian society as it existed in the 19th century .
Below are some things in the book I found interesting .
(1)The author is an old school leftist which means that unlike today’s Islamo leftists he comes across as sympathetic to the Indians
(2) He recounts how the first trains were viewed by some as an ‘iron demon’ driven by magic and powered by children and young couples buried under the sleepers to provide sustenance for the ‘fire chariot’.
(3) Grant Duff, an official in the India Office during Gladstone’s government, had argued: ‘If we are not in India to civilize and raise India, we had better leave it as soon as we can and wind up our affairs’
(4) For some Indians, The railways were seen as such an ungodly, even evil, invention that earned it the name of ‘iron demon’ (‘lokhandi rakshash’ in Marathi) Marathi because the first train started from Mumbai (then Bombay).
(5) The most potentially damaging rumor was that the authorities ‘had to bury children and young couples under the rail sleepers to “power” the rail engine;
(6) it was alleged that British sepoys [soldiers], therefore, were perpetually looking for and catching hold of young couples and children on the streets’ to provide the sustenance for the engines.
(7) The book reveals how the creation of the Indian railway system was perceived by the Victorian upper classes as a kind of massive do-gooding exercise that would transform Indian society for the better
(8) The British were greatly helped (in 1857) by the Sikhs of the Punjab — a group that remained loyal, partly out of their dislike of the Muslims who were involved in the rebellion
(9) We also get to read that while the British people realized that changes were needed, nothing shifted the opinion of the rulers that they were in India to civilize the nation, whether its people wanted that or not.
(10) Thanks to the railways Britain kept its overall balance of payments in surplus thanks to its ability to sell large quantities of manufactured goods to India
(11) Since the Bengal Nagpur railway (Also called the Famine railway) was funded by the Rothschild family, this led to the irony of the richest family in the world benefiting from taxes extracted from poor peasants in order, supposedly, to prevent them starving
(12) The EIC was skeptical of the desire or ability of the impoverished Indian population to travel on the railways and had expressed those doubts publicly, suggesting there would be little business from a population ‘rendered immobile by poverty, and religious restrictions
(13) There were even suggestions from railway managers that Indians, apparently unlike the rest of the human race, disliked empty compartments where they could sit in comfort.’
(14) As for the high death rate in hot conditions, the companies again blamed it on the passengers themselves for boarding the train when they were too ‘old, ill or unfit to travel
(15) In the first couple of decades, not only were there no toilets in any class but, remarkably, many railway officials were reluctant to unlock the doors of the third-class compartments to let their occupants out to use station facilities.
(16) On the station platforms, privies and urinals were provided for the European passengers in buildings while Indians had to make do with tattis, in effect holes in the ground protected by flimsy bamboo or grass shelters.
(17) Upper-caste Hindus would only accept water from Brahmin watermen and Hindus and Muslims required separate provision. One compromise was to have a Brahmin for the upper-caste Hindus and a lower-caste Hindu bhistee for everyone else
(18) Backed by their government guarantees, the railway companies could afford the luxury of using expensive European labour which fitted well with their prejudices
(19) Indians were not allowed to become engine drivers because it was said that they lacked sufficient ‘talent, energy, general knowledge and reliability’ and would be unable to cope with the hard work as a result of ‘privations which caste rules subject them to’.
(20) There were white policemen for a white people whose natural expectations of police accountability and courteous manner were far greater than anything the villagers and townsfolk of colonial India could ever expect from their police.
(21) If locals started to encroach on railway land or a bazaar sprung up in the vicinity, the native huts would be torn down and relocated. Bazaars, in particular, were perceived as a great threat as they were considered to be places where morals were lax and prostitutes rife
(22) Even the vegetation was subject to a kind of biological apartheid. Any trace of local plants was to be removed and the areas around the houses were laid out with the sort of flowers and bushes that could be found in the garden of a British country cottage.
(23) When strikes were called by workshop employees demanding better conditions the management however, held firm helped by the fact that the Europeans and Eurasians stayed at work & remained loyal to the company, putting in extra shifts which enabled the workshops to keep functioning
(24) The management were concerned, about costs, given that the Eurasians (now known as Anglo Indians) were better paid than Indians in order to maintain their European lifestyle. Moreover, they could not be sent to remote stations away from other members of their communities as they could not be expected to live solely amongst Indians. They had a separate status, even if they were not quite European.
(25) There was a recruitment drive for young Christian Indians. This was because they tended to be more rootless than native Indians, who were tied to their caste and religious groups, which meant that it was easier to move them around the railway to take up jobs in different places.
(26) The railway companies’ response to complaints by Indian passengers was much like their earlier excuses about not providing toilets and cramming people into third-class carriages, arguing that these were the conditions in which local people were content to travel
(27) Although the introduction of the railways made pilgrimages easier for Indians the conditions they travelled in were horrific . As early as 1873, a doctor, M. C. Furnell, recounted the scene at Allahabad when his train stopped to pick up many pilgrims. He went on to describe how the pilgrims, mostly elderly, were packed rather brutally by the British guard into the carriages until the train ‘swallowed the crowd … like a gorged boa constrictor’.when he pointed out to a European guard that the pilgrims were in some difficulties, the somewhat cheery response was that the ‘pilgrims is worse than ’osses, Sir’ .One petition described ‘the promiscuous huddling together’ entailed in railway journeys and stressing how such proximity left Hindu pilgrims ‘unable to eat or even drink water because people of other castes were present in the same compartment
(28) The prevalence of disease had been largely dismissed in the days of the East India Company as merely one of the penalties of life in the tropics
(29)The greater good of the native population never seemed to have been a factor for the railway companies .
(30) While it was third-class passengers who bore the brunt of the discriminatory practices of the rail companies, elite Indians were not immune to suffering other types of railway-induced humiliation. There were many examples of British passengers objecting to sharing accommodation with Indians, even when they had paid the fare to travel in premium classes
(31) Bapu once said ‘Railways, lawyers and doctors have impoverished the country so much so that, if we do not wake up in time, we shall be ruined’, This was part of a wider denunciation of modern society in which Gandhi felt the role of the railways was to propagate evil. He also said Good travels at a snail’s pace — it can, therefore, have little to do with the railways.
(32) THE DISCONNECTION BETWEEN the experience of the European users of the railway and that of the average Indian was quite remarkable. It was as if the conditions endured by Indian travelers took place on a completely different system to the one used by passengers in premium classes
(33) Lord Minto was a hawkish supporter of military expansion his most famous quote was ‘The Raj will not disappear in India as long as the British race remains what it is, because we shall fight for the Raj as hard as we have ever fought’
(34) Unlike on most modern trains, the device (chain) on Indian trains activated the brakes directly, rather than simply communicating a warning to the driver, and therefore could be used to stop the train in order to disrupt services. For example, in Uttar Pradesh, trains were stopped and mail vans were robbed to raise funds for the nationalist movement. The Kakori case being the most famous among them
(35) The railways also had a role to play during the post partition period . Here is one such account from the same period. As the train was about to start, a large group of Muslims, armed with axes, rifles and knives, surrounded the carriages and started murdering the male passengers. The Pakistan military did not intervene and soon actually joined the mob in shooting passengers. Those of the passengers who tried to run towards the platform out of the compartments were shot dead by the police and the military and those who went out of the compartments towards the maidan [the public open space] were butchered by the Muslim mob.
(36) In the post Independence Era the desirability of Railway jobs was not so much the pay, which remained relatively modest, but the permanency of the position and the generous extra benefits which became possible once the private railroads were merged and nationalized .
(37) The most famous railway strike general railway strike was started on 8 May 1974, organized by George Fernandes, the recently elected leader of the All India Railwaymen’s Federation. In terms of action, the strike was amazingly successful. Most of the network ground to a halt, stations were empty, goods trains held up for lengthy periods and few passenger services operated. The following year Indira Gandhi responded to widespread unrest at her rule by imposing a state of emergency for nearly two years, which suspended democratic processes and gave her the power to rule by decree, effectively turning India into a dictatorship. It was independent India’s darkest hour
(38) Although ticketless travel started as an an anti-colonial protest it remained a huge problem after Independence, despite India becoming an independent democratic nation.
(39) The colonial authorities responded to the building of the early lines by ensuring provincial (state) police forces added the oversight of the railways to the list of core duties and this inevitably took up a considerable part of their work. The cost was shared equally by the local provinces and central government, and this was the genesis of what is now the Government Railway Police (GRP) run by each state and still funded in the same way.
(40) The railway companies themselves employed chowdikars (watchmen) to keep an eye on railway property. Their numbers and functions grew over time, and after Independence they formed the basis of the Railway Protection Force(RPF) .Despite obvious suggestions that these two forces should merge, they remain separate to this day, adding complexity and at times confusion to the policing of the Indian railways