Amitava Kumar blends reportage, history, pop culture and political memory, using journeys from the Himsagar Express to the Darjeeling toy train to examine truth, violence, intimacy and sociology of Indian Railways
Amitava Kumar’s recent fiction corpus, which includes novels like My Beloved Life and A Time Outside This Time, involves a certain bleeding of categories. Through their playful, formally inventive blend of fact and fiction, they challenge our notions of journalistic, objective “truth”. In comparison, Kumar’s nonfiction work, especially books like Evidence of Suspicion and A Matter of Rats, tends to follow a relatively old-school one-two structure.
First, the journalist in Kumar drives the narrative, bringing us personal stories from his subjects, usually a cross-section of Indian society. Then in the second act, Kumar brings his considerable essayistic talents to the fore, building upon his reportage with layers of history and sociology, combined with a critical reading of secondary sources across pop culture. The third act and/or epilogue usually involves a return to the journalistic mode, even if briefly.
In his excellent new work of nonfiction, The Social Life of Indian Trains: A Journey (Aleph), the reportage sections bookending the narrative are two train rides. The first one is a 72-hour journey aboard the Himsagar Express, from Kashmir all the way to Kanyakumari, where Kumar meets a colourful cast of characters from various sections of Indian society. The second one is on Darjeeling’s famous ‘toy train’, recreating an earlier journey from his childhood. Using these two reported sections as narrative ‘anchors’, Kumar turns his astute gaze on the sociological and political significance of the Indian Railways.
Knowing India through trains
I enjoyed the compendium of train images and scenes Kumar strings together from Indian pop culture. The famous train scene in Pather Panchali, signifying the arrival of modernity in the countryside, the Hindi poet Dushyant Kumar’s lines ‘tu kisi rail si guzarti hai (you pass through like a train)’, adapted beautifully by the film Masaan, where an Indian Railways job holds out the promise of regeneration for a traumatised young woman. And, of course, the pair of train scenes from the film Gandhi, of which Kumar focuses on the lesser-known one—Gandhi returning to India after 20 years and travelling third-class by choice to truly share the life experience of his countrymen:
“The steam engine blows smoke and we see the train chugging through a changing landscape. Water buffaloes and huts give way to a barren brown emptiness with immobile cattle. Then we are crossing undulating hills with tea gardens and women working among the bushes and then, in another mad cut, a line of women in Rajasthani garb digging beside the railway line. Next, the train advances past what looks like a deep stone quarry. From a suited lawyer, Gandhi has now become a peasant.”
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These segments in the book are entertaining, yes, but also a reminder of the unique, public-private nature of the train journey. You are by yourself but you are never alone—this is the central paradox of the train ride, because of which it occupies a liminal space in society. Strangers can, with a straight face, ask you intensely personal questions, considering it par for the course given the nature of your shared predicament (sharing space for days on end in a metal box-with-wheels).
Trains and violence
In fact, in Kumar’s own previous novel Immigrant, Montana (published in India as The Lovers), the first chapter has a really clever passage that sums up this ‘public privacy’ of the Indian train ride: “In India, the only public mentions of sex were the advertisements painted on the walls that ran beside the railway tracks. I read the ads when I travelled from Patna to Delhi for college, and was filled with anxiety about what awaited me when, at last, I would experience sex. On the brick walls near the tracks, large white letters in Hindi urging you to call a phone number if you suffered from premature ejaculation or erectile dysfunction or nightly emissions. A nation of silent sufferers!”
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It is precisely because of this ‘public privacy’ that Kumar is also attentive to the way trains and violence have become intertwined in the Indian imagination. The corpse-laden trains from Partition lore, the more recent tragedies such as the Samjhauta Express blasts, or the July 2023 targeted killing of three Muslim men aboard the Jaipur-Mumbai Superfast Express, by an RPF (Railway Protection Force) officer; the list is a long and bloody one. Kumar is fascinated in particular with a Bhisham Sahni story called ‘Amritsar Aa Gaya Hai’ (The Train Has Reached Amritsar), set during the Partition of India.
In the third act of this story, a hitherto mild-mannered Hindu character called Babu unleashes terrible violence upon his Muslim co-passenger. In Babu’s fall from grace Kumar locates the moral and political downfall of the notionally liberal Indian man: “Trains in India, in particular, are shared social spaces; all kinds of interactions between people and, often, exchange of conversation and food mark a journey. What Sahni’s story captures brilliantly are the ebb and flow of these public relations and the eruption of violence in this seemingly enclosed space. (…) It is impossible to read the story and think any longer of the train as a thing of metal, solid and unchanging; instead, we see it like a river, forever changing, forever moving, absorbing everything from the bordering land, and also altering the landscape it is passing through.”
The Social Life of Indian Trains is another admirable entry in Kumar’s bibliography, one that forces you to reconsider what you thought you knew about arguably the country’s most important public-sector organisation.
