Asia Times: India's railways: New-found sympathy for the devil


	April 24, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

India's railways: New-found sympathy for the devil
By Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI - Exactly a century and a half after British colonials brought the steam engine and the railways to the subcontinent, few can deny its overwhelming role in the lives of the people on a subcontinent that is incurably riven by caste and religious prejudice.

Less than two months before India celebrated the 150th anniversary of Asia's first steam engine, which came chugging out of the Indian port city of Mumbai, a group of impoverished Muslims set fire to a train carriage full of Hindu devotees returning from the temple town of Ayodhya in northern Uttar Pradesh. That unleashed a communal conflagration in western Gujarat state that has yet to die out.

Like the telephone, that other great invention of human communication from the Victorian era, the railways had been considered by people of these parts as yet another instrument of the devil. By 1874, the railways in India were sufficiently established for a Hindu worthy to complain that the third-class carriages seated "sweepers, the chamars [low-caste cobblers] and the like classes in the same carriage along with Hindustanis of the higher order". A Muslim paper in Lucknow pressed for the provision of "separate carriages for the respectable classes of the natives". But the British were firm that it was not the responsibility of of railway companies to recognize "the distinctions of creed and caste, so as to provide one carriage for a Brahmin [highest caste] and another for a pariah [lowest caste]".

Still, native Hindu rulers demanded that British railway builders keep their tracks clear of their palaces so that beef-eating passengers would not pollute them en passant as it were. And Muslim rulers had similar requests to keep pork-eating passengers at a non-defiling distance. Old-timers from the pre-Partition days, before colonial India was divided into Muslim Pakistan and largely Hindu (though professedly secular) India, recall that water sellers at railway stations would yell out "Muslim pani" (Muslim water) or "'Hindu pani" (Hindu water) as if water could have religion too.

And, of course, no one catered to low-caste Indian passengers.

Mahatma Gandhi, the man who led the subcontinent to independence from Britain in 1947 and who fought to prevent the Partition, viewed the railways as an instrument of colonialism - one that was used to move the military quickly to suppress revolts in a far-flung land and also to drain away raw materials and wealth from the hinterland.

In a sense, Gandhi's struggle against colonialism began the day he was thrown out of a first-class compartment in South Africa because of his color. Gandhi, nevertheless, made good use of the railways in the pursuit of his social and political goals. But having taken a vow of simplicity, he made it a point to travel only by third class. And he never changed his view that the railways accentuated the evil nature of man because "good travels at a snail's pace while evil has wings".

But his efforts failed to prevent the Partition and the railways played a major role in what became the greatest exchange of populations - millions of Hindus moving to India and millions of Mulsims moving in the reverse direction. The classic novel Train to Pakistan, by noted writer Kushwant Singh, encapsulates the violence and trauma of the Partition, which many regard as true ethnic cleansing preceding what was to happen in Bosnia-Herzegovina decades later. Thousands who crammed into carriages and clambered on to their roofs never made it to their intended new homes and were slaughtered on the way. Trains arrived at stations in both Pakistan and India trailing blood and their carriages disgorged more dead people than living.

Post-Partition, India plunged into a fit of socialism that saw the nationalization of the railways and the abolition of the third class altogether. Rich and poor are divided into just two classes: a sumptuous first class, almost as costly as flying in several sectors, while ordinary (second-class) travel is cheaper than anywhere else in the world.

But while demands for carriages separated along caste are no longer heard, well-known dalit (lower caste) leader Martin Macwan says that in states such as Gujarat, train passengers refuse to talk to each other until they have first identified each other by caste and found it acceptable.

Indian Railways grew into the world's second-largest rail network, with more than 14,000 trains carrying up to 14 million passengers a day - more than the population of many countries. And that during a period when railways around the world were giving way to airlines and to road networks for automobiles.

Now, after 150 years of service, Indians are beginning to look back in pride at a service considered one of the more agreeable legacies of the British Raj - even if it did somewhat steamroller prized social distinctions. There are, for instance, plans to build a railway museum in Mumbai, the capital of the western state of Maharashtra, where it all began when the first train service in Asia began from Mumbai to Thane on April 16, 1853.

On April 16 of this year, no fewer than six federal ministers were among the dignitaries who boarded the seven ivory-and-cinnamon-liveried coaches drawn by a vintage "iron horse" to steam through the same route from the gothic gem of a station, Victoria Terminus, to Thane. People took time off from work to gawk at the period coaches, in luxurious leather upholstery, wooden panels, brocade hangings and chandeliers that once transported the likes of maharajas and colonial governors. It was as close a re-enactment as possible of a historic moment.

Despite the general neglect of heritage and the phasing-out of the steam era, many old lines have survived with carriage and engines from another age intact. For example, the Fairy Queen, a vintage steam locomotive, takes tourists on a ride through time to the desert forts of the former feudal state of western Rajasthan.

In India's northeast, the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway still takes passengers into the misty mountains of the eastern Himalayas as it has been doing since 1881, and is on the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO) list of World Heritage sites. It is, in fact, the only railway other than the Semmering Railway in Austria to be so honored.

According to UNESCO's citation, the "Darjeeling Himalayan Railway is the first and still the most outstanding example of a hill passenger railway. Opened in 1881, it applied bold and ingenious engineering solutions to the problems establishing an effective rail link across a mountainous terrain of great beauty. It is still fully operational and retains most of original features intact." The citations went on to call the Darjeeling railway "an outstanding example of the influence of an innovative transportation system on the social and economic development of a multicultural region, which was to serve as a model for similar developments in many parts of the world".

That description could well fit the subcontinent's railways as a whole.

(Inter Press Service)