Today, Sasaram is known for its quaint Urdu-Hindi-Bihari accent, rock quarrying, and perhaps a few other notorious attributes. I know of the town chiefly from my experience of living in an unnecessarily snobbish bungalow-colony in Tatanagar, where a lot of domestic labour and construction workers used to hail from Sasaram-that is until at least twelve years ago. My experiences and theirs were made possible chiefly with the Great Indian Railways chugging along, quietly in the background.
I might be beginning to be unreasonably oblique. Frankly, I do not mind if some maverick reviewer were to put this book in the list of toilet paperbacks. In the interest of a national service, I do hope lavatories in the railways keep running water, and toilet paper. The ones adjacent to my compartment have clearly run out of those supplies of basic human necessity, week’s ago.
The occasion of writing a preface to a second edition certainly seems exaggerated. What might have been the reasons for The Great Indian Railways going into a second edition, anyway? Perhaps the first print run was too small, and it ran out soon enough-in nine months, no more. Or perhaps, the author and publishers had discovered some form of alchemy of turning the book to an encyclopedia, to which year after year some bits may be added, and new pages passed off under new covers, as new indeed. Indians as we are, we seem to be ordinary folks. As an author does not quite understand how much their work of writing has been subsidized by the success of other books, we who are passengers do not quite realize how many of our journeys have been subsidized by journeys that goods take in this country. In many ways, our joys, our anguishes, our comforts and our strains are also subsidized by that of those travelling with us.
When I woke up today morning, one of my shoes went missing. I wondered if there was a hound at large somewhere in the train, to which the scent of my flesh had been fed. Perhaps a nemesis from my past. Alas, no Baskerville Hall awaits me at Jamshedpur, save a middle-class apartment.
As I begin coming to terms with this loss, the train arrives at Kanpur. The well-meaning elderly folk from yester night depart, and a family of eight arrives to take two parallel rows of the compartment. There is mewling and puking all morning. I feel like stewing my residual leather shoe and asking one of the caterers to feed my co-passengers, en family. To make matters worse, a waitlisted passenger comes and sits by my feet, and begins to ask questions-in short, getting on my delicate nerves. He gets off at Dehri-on-Sone. Before leaving the platform, he knocks on my window from outside, and points out to the small netted carrier, by my feet.
He has left a packet of potato wafers, there for me. It is unopened. Along with that there is a balloon. He may have thought I was going home to a daughter or son. Perhaps he too was. I feel much sobered now. The Great Indian Railways does have that effect of you. You cannot be misanthropic on them, for too long.
To borrow a phrase my wife uses often nowadays, it 'purveys your destiny.' By 'purvey' she of course means a cross between `transport' and 'alter.'
I myself never explained what I really meant by 'purveyors,' nor was I asked by anyone except her. Perhaps you will recount, or lay your hands upon, the short story, 'The Purloined Letter,' by Edgar Allan Poe.
A French philosopher of the last century, Jacques Derrida, wrote a pleasurably esoteric essay on it, titled, 'The Purveyor of Truth.' Inter alia, he took issue with the reading of the story by another French thinker and psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan. Derrida seems to have been intrigued by things similar to what had always puzzled me, since much before I chanced upon his essay. For instance, the all-important incriminating letter! No one actually intends to know or disclose the contents of it-neither the characters in the story, nor the critics who wrote about it. The purveyor of truth was actually the concealed of truth. This is how Derrida's 'Purveyor of Truth' became my `Purveyor of Destiny.'
Train journeys were not-as I came to realize-only meant to transport people to their destinies. Or merely imaginary realms of legendary romances. They were also meant to conceal the journeys-those quiet and palpable personal histories-lost in the milling and the madding crowd at a railway platform.
`To purvey' also means 'to cater.' It is very unlikely that a caterer will frankly tell you what and what state of ingredients they have actually served you. As with railway food-and our somewhat primitive desire to be served luncheons or suppers on a train-so with railway technology, and even more, so railway economics, we seem to be-as I have said-ordinary folk. As an author might only expect higher royalties notwithstanding the road to perdition his book may be on, railway passengers such as we can only clamor for enhanced subsidies to the railways by the government, regardless of how grossly understaffed the organization is, or how many unmanned crossings and train derailments plague the establishment.
The Great Indian Railways too is a beneficiary of that ordinariness. It is also the beneficiary of the voice of the railways. Ask any of the spirits of bygone caretakers of the `black beauties'-the erstwhile steam engines of the Indian Railways-and they will tell you how human the trains are. Christian though the architects were who build the railways, like a Jew, the trains have 'hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions...hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is.'
Shaw's response was discouraging. He was of the opinion that European literature had had enough of Wilde. That, besides the aesthete's own stock of legends and writings! Pearson persevered, notwithstanding the opposition.
On reading his The Life of Oscar Wilde (1946) it appears • that neither the English nor the French were truly deserving of Wilde's genius. One of the lesser known reasons for this was that his French was charged with 'atrocious pronunciation,' by English ears. The French on the contrary found it fluent, but must have been incredulous, all the same. I fear, this cultural and literary biography of the Indian Railways is about to tread a ground rather similar-both to Pearson's biography of Wilde, and the public reception of the life of an aesthete.
Pearson found a highly influential censor in Shaw whom he chose to overlook. I, for one, was not blessed with the disapproval of any contemporary doyen. I can only hope that the reader does not wish that I had one indeed.
My choice to introduce Pearson, Shaw and Wilde into a prologue written for a railway book might appear bewildering and obscure. But there are two decisive reasons for the choice. First is, of course, reading and literature almost always complete a train journey. In fact, so deep are the connection between reading (and writing) and the trains that very often one might not even read the book they purchased at a railway station, but rather construct their own met fictions on the selfsame narrative, during the course of the journey. But buy a book they absolutely must. The second reason-and this leads to the underlying rationale of the book-is that the trains are not always experienced directly. Our railway experiences are not confined to railway journeys. They work through associations. These associations may come through commodities such as food, cutlery, furniture, upholstery, varnishing, earthenware, chains, locks, keys, suitcases, newspapers, recycled-newspaper-bags, books, and many others. They may also come through narrative voices, tropes and characters such as in romantic plots, fruit or tea vendors, ticket inspectors, uniforms, lavatories, vestibules, railway tracks, and so on. Railway experiences, therefore, are very likely to extend beyond railway compartments-such as in a world of representations-in detached spaces of psycho geographical portability.
The Great Indian Railways straddles two worlds of writing-the open-ended galaxy of nonfiction and the closed universe of academic writing. And yet, the book is passionately different from both. Undoubtedly, a lot has been said and written about the Indian Railways, and there has been persistent interest in the subject among readers and spectators.
Nonetheless, no book has so far tried to visualize the vast wealth of another industry that the railways gave birth to-the industry of thinking or representing the railways. In fact, as the book observes, this industry began much before the railways, themselves. It might even outlive the trains-for it has certainly outlived the steam engines.
Perhaps the academic might find fault in the lack of adequate citations-despite there being over six hundred of those, anyhow. Writers and readers of easy-breezy nonfictions might argue the language is too contrived for them. I do not wish to drive home a strong case against either of these critics. I cannot yet decide who is French or English, between the two. Nor do I hold any disregard for their opinions. But I am confident of the fact that the handling of a subject as the railways requires two things, chiefly, that both might miss at first.
First is the abandonment of an excess of probity, proof or empirical data. Two of the finest instances I can remember of my own childhood's railway experiences were not of any railway journey but that of encountering the trains in proxy. One was at the Benares railway station, at the age of five." I am told I was rather enthralled by a miniature toy-train inside a glass cabinet. I distinctly recollect imagining its interiors to be more luxurious and spacious that the real train I was to board. I had not been exposed to an adventurous railway setting prior to this. Yet the
* Some readers of this portion have ironically forced me to include a footnote-an undesirable over-explanation-in a chapter where none was intended originally. A part of this incident really happened at the Mughal Sarai Railway Station, which is about 12 miles from the Benares. The miniature toy-train was indeed at the Benares station, where we were awaiting the arrival of one of my uncles. From there, we went to Sarai, which in fact is the proper stoppage for the Kalka Mail. As one of my impatient critics recently pointed, the Kalka Mail has never passed through the Benares Railway Station in its hundred-and-fifty-year-old history. However, he had quite conveniently ignored two things. One was-as may be self-explanatory-that the incident happened around a five-year-old child, whose recollection after twenty-five years may well have undergone some psycho geographical transformations. The second, Sarai and Benares are sister towns, and their railway stations are often considered extensions of each other, even today, among the towns' older generations.
toy-train promised an adventure infinitely greater than the Kalka Mail that was yet to arrive at the station. If I was asked to prove how this is so, or cite satisfactory sources, I might just succeed today, at a time when I can only reflect and fabricate. Back then, however, when the experience was much more tangible and absolutely authentic, an academic interrogation would have traumatized the young witness and have him fail miserably.
Book's Contents and Sample Pages
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Christian (207)
Agriculture (83)
Ancient (956)
Archaeology (522)
Architecture (504)
Art & Culture (813)
Biography (587)
Buddhist (528)
Cookery (156)
Emperor & Queen (497)
Hindu (859)
Islam (229)
Jainism (254)
Literary (887)
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