Railways and The Raj E-Book

Christian Wolmar

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

The epic story of the British construction of the railways in India, as told by Britain's bestselling transport historian. 'Christian Wolmar is Britain's foremost railway historian.' The Times 'Our leading writer on the railways' Guardian 'Christian Wolmar is in love with railways... He is their wisest, most detailed historian' Observer India joined the railway age late: the first line was not completed until 1853 but, by 1929, 41,000 miles of track served the country. However, the creation of this vast network was not intended to modernize India for the sake of its people but rather was a means for the colonial power to govern the huge country under its control, serving its British economic and military interests. Despite the dubious intentions behind the construction of the network, the Indian people quickly took to the railways, as the trains allowed them to travel easily for the first time. The Indian Railways network remains one of the largest in the world, serving over 25 million passengers each day. In this expertly told history, Christian Wolmar reveals the full story of India's railways, from its very beginnings to the present day, and examines the chequered role they have played in Indian history and the creation of today's modern state.

Leseprobe

Dedicated to Deborah Maby who has put up with me in good times and bad, and is the best possible travel and life companion.

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

List of Maps

Foreword by Monisha Rajesh

Introduction

Acknowledgments

  1. A Railway for India

  2. Building for India

  3. Controlling the Railways

  4. Starving Off the Line and Fighting On It

  5. Life on the Lines

  6. Working on the Line

  7. Not Always Loved

  8. Establishment of the Railway

  9. Towards Independence

10. Indian at Last

11. … And Today

Select Bibliography

References

Index

A Note About the Author

Picture Section

By the same Author

Copyright

ILLUSTRATIONS

SECTION ONE

Lord Dalhousie (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Alice Tredwell (The Institution of Mechanical Engineers)

Inauguration of the East Indian Railway to Burdwan, 1855 (© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans)

Construction of the railway through the ghats (The Institution of Mechanical Engineers /Mary Evans)

Reversing station (Hulton Archive /Getty Images)

Empress Bridge (De Agostini /Biblioteca Ambrosiana/Getty Images)

Bridge collapse, 1863 (British Library Board. All Rights Reserved/ Bridgeman Images)

Lahore station (© Corbis/ Getty Images)

Victoria Station (SSPL /Getty Images)

Bengal–Nagpur Railway worksite, 1890 (DeGolyer Library, Central University Libraries, Southern Methodist University)

Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis / Getty Images)

Khyber Pass Railway (Peter Jordan /Alamy Stock Photo)

Rawalpindi station, 1910 (Mary Evans /Grenville Collins Postcard Collection)

Cotton bales being loaded at Akola station in Maharastra, c. 1930 (SSPL /Getty Images)

Victoria Station booking hall, c. 1930 (SSPL /Getty Images)

Gandhi (Dinodia Photos /Getty Images)

Nationalist protesters blockading the railway, 1945 (Universal History Archive /UIG via Getty Images)

Indian refugees during the Partition of India and Pakistan, 1947 (Bettman /Getty Images)

SECTION TWO

Indian State Railways posters (Swim Ink 2, LLC /Corbis /Getty Images)

Indian Railways logo (india view /Alamy Stock Photo)

Indian railway scenes from the 1980s by Chris Gammell (Courtesy of Bernard Gambrill and Roy Dension)

Locomotive on the Konkan railway (Dinodia Photos /Alamy Stock Photo)

Nilgiri Mountain Railway (IndiaPictures /UIG via Getty Images)

Mumbai commuter line (Pal Pillai /AFP /Getty Images)

Accident at Kasara near Mumbai, September 2012 (Mahendra Parikha / Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Cement bags being transported (Prashanth Vishwanathan /Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Hawkers at Agra station (Robert Nickelsberg /Photonica World /Getty Images)

Crowded train in New Delhi (Manan Vatsyayana /AFP /Getty Images)

Protesters at Borivli station (Prasad Gori /Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Commuters at Chennai station (Alexander Mazurkevich /Shutterstock.com)

Rush hour outside Sealdah station in Kolkata (Steve Raymer /National Geographic Creative /Bridgeman Images)

Pictures of the author’s trip round India, February 2016 (Courtesy of Deborah Mabey)

MAPS

Indian Railway Network, 1871

Indian Railway Network, pre-1947

Indian Railway Network, 2017

Great Indian Peninsula Railway, 1909

North Western State Railway, 1942

(NB: Place names on maps refer to the contemporary versions.)

Indian Railway Network, 1871

Indian Railway Network, pre-1947

Indian Railway Network, 2017

Great Indian Peninsula Railway, 1909

North Western State Railway, 1942

FOREWORD

SINCE INDIA’S FIRST train clanked and puffed its way along the 21-mile track from Bombay to Thane in 1853, Indian Railways has captivated writers, charmed filmmakers, and fired the bellies of historians eager to trace the tracks back to the very first sleeper laid. Lovingly known as the Lifeline of a Nation, India’s railways are the arteries that keep the country’s heart beating. So much more than a simple method of transport, the railways are a microcosm of Indian society, carrying more than 25 million passengers every day, blasting through cities, crawling up mountains and skimming along coasts.

To write about India’s railways is a challenge as vast, sprawling and complex as the network itself, which I discovered in 2010 when I spent five months travelling the length and breadth of the country to research my travelogue, Around India in 80 Trains. As a British Indian I was reminded on a daily basis by my fellow passengers that these trains had been the brainchild of the Brits, but to wind in the history and politics behind the birth of the railways would have doubled the length of my book, and I knew it was best left to accomplished railway experts, like Christian Wolmar, to accept the gargantuan task.

The horrors of empire are left blank in the history books of British schools, and the trope ‘but we gave you the railways!’ is swift to emerge in discussions on legacies of the British Raj. Ignoring the fact that many countries developed a railway system without the devastation of colonization, apologists for empire remain blinkered to the British motivation. As India marks seventy years of Independence, this much-needed history seeks to demolish a number of infuriating myths. Wolmar expounds, with aplomb, how the building of the railways was hardly an act of benevolence towards the Indian people, more a fast-track plan to govern more efficiently, facilitate the plunder of loot, and line their pockets at the expense of the Indian taxpayer who footed the bill for the railways’ construction. But we also discover how Indians learnt to harness the railways and weaponize them against the very people who had put them in place.

Eschewing the dryness of other books on the subject, Wolmar’s historical detail is pumped with colour and life. 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’. We travel deep into the mountainous ghats where 6,000 daily explosions often sent workers tumbling into the ravines below, watch troops being evacuated during the Second World War, and gain a fly-on-the-wall look at Gandhi’s relationship with the railways. Tracing the evolution of Indian Railways, Wolmar rightly caps off his exploration of their role in today’s modern age by buying a ticket to ride along the Konkan Railway, the missing link that the British were too frightened to attempt building. Flanked by the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, this 460-mile feat of engineering excellence was left in the hands of Indian railway workers who completed construction of the line in 1998. And if we’re ever to trust a writer on India’s railways, it should be one who isn’t afraid to sit in the open doorway of a moving train, chai in hand, watching the country roll past in all its glory.

Monisha Rajesh, author of Around India in 80 Trains

INTRODUCTION

AS WITH SEVERAL of my railway histories, Railways & the Raj is an attempt to set out a complex story in a clear and simple way, which few other authors have attempted. There are surprisingly few books about Indian railway history and none have covered the story of their creation, their influence and their enduring legacy in one volume. Railways & the Raj is consequently an overview of a railway system that merits far more study and analysis than it receives. I have tried to touch on all the major events and the various ways in which the railway has been important for the subcontinent, but inevitably much has been left out.

India is a vast nation and it has seen huge political transformation since the advent of the railways, changing from a country controlled by a company to being Britain’s most important colony and eventually an independent state. In the process, India has lost parts of its territory, which left me with something of a dilemma over what to include and what to leave out. My compromise has been to include the story of railways now in Pakistan and Bangladesh while they were part of India, but to mention them only briefly in the sections about post-Independence India.

I have offered brief explanations of general historical background because the story of the railways is so strongly intertwined with the history of the country. Indeed, while railways played a key part in the history of nations covered by my other books, such as those on American railroads or the Transsiberian, few people could challenge the notion that India is the nation where the railways have been most influential in historical terms. But, after being so bound up with India for more than a year during the course of writing this book, I may be biased.

Many place names have officially changed since Independence, however, I have used the contemporary version throughout the book in order to fit in with the events being described. Therefore, for events up to Independence, old versions of names are used, while new ones are only used after the change had been made (which happened at different times for various places). For example, Bombay is referred to until the book reaches the mid-1990s, when its name was changed to Mumbai, which it is called thereafter, and that is reflected in the index. Some names have been changed merely to reflect the use of Indian English, or sometimes to reflect the local language, and in these cases the more modern spelling has usually been used everywhere in the book. When states are referred to, the modern names have been used throughout because they have been added to help the reader locate the town or city on a modern map. Therefore, Karnataka is used rather than Mysore, and Tamil Nadu rather than Madras State. This process is still taking place: for example, the state of Odisha has been known as Orissa only since 2011. Apologies for any inconsistencies.

Muslims were largely known as Mahommedans in the nineteenth century and again there were numerous possible spellings.

There are a few linguistic and cultural oddities, too. India uses two numerical terms that are unique to the subcontinent: a ‘lakh’ is 100,000 and a ‘crore’ 10 million – consequently ‘million’ is rarely used. The currency is now just rupees, which presently hover around 90 to the pound, and there are 100 paise to the rupee. Under the British, there was a complex system of rupees, divided into 4 annas, which were further divided into 12 pies (or sometimes 4 paisa, not to be confused with the present paisa since there were 64 paise in a rupee rather than as present, 100). As a result there were 192 pies in a rupee until India decimalized in 1957.

Another possible area of confusion is over who ran India. In the nineteenth century, India was ruled by a Governor-General appointed by the British government, but the title became Viceroy and Governor-General from 1858, usually shortened to Viceroy.

The structure of the book is largely chronological, though when a few themes are covered, there is inevitably a bit of jumping about. Railways & the Raj is something of a primer which I hope will inspire readers to travel on Indian trains. That is an unforgettable experience and the railway journey my partner, Deborah Maby, and I took in early 2016 was very helpful in providing the backdrop. Consequently, the book ends with a description of the first section of our trip partly written by her. Despite the recent surge in road construction and the introduction of low-cost airlines, the very heavily used railways remain the backbone of the Indian transport system.

Train travel in India is not an easy experience, even for the Westerner with ample funds, but do not be put off. First, you have to book the journey, which can be done online via the Indian Railways website; this, however, is full of confusing information and unnecessary complications. Moreover, Indian websites are quite often unobtainable, in my experience, as it takes a long time to connect.

In London, there is a special agency which deals with Indian Railways and can work out the route for you – so a bow to Shankar at S. D. Enterprises in Wembley, who sold me the India railpasses, a real bargain at just £147 for twenty-one days of second-class AC travel (just double that for first-class AC), but also, crucially, booked all the trains, which is the tough bit.

When you get to India, even if you have not booked online, you need to confirm by entering the PNR – Passenger Number Registration – for each leg of the journey into the system before you travel, a process that is made more tedious by having to relog on to the site every time by filling in a Captcha form. That, however, is the easy bit. The information about your coach and berth number only becomes available on the website a few hours before departure, although it is sometimes posted up at the station on old-fashioned computer paper an hour or so before the train leaves. But not always. At Kolkata, despite queuing for half an hour and only reaching the ticket office by barging my way to the front, which is the sole way to get there in India, the woman behind the counter refused to accept my PNR number, even when I pushed it through to her on a piece of paper. It was only when a couple of fellow travellers loudly complained that she eventually entered the number in her computer and provided the carriage and berth number. There was no apology. Otherwise it would have been guesswork to find the right carriage on a train that was half a kilometre long.

Just to add to the complexity, the various zones of Indian Railways differ in their approach over food provision. On some trains there are endless chains of seemingly officially sanctioned sellers, offering almost as varied a selection of food and drink as their counterparts on the platform. The best is the chai seller who for a few rupees will pour out a small cup of chai, a tiny sugary milky brew that in some parts of the country is heavily spiced with masala. On other trains, there is nothing on offer. The long-distance trains usually, but not always, provide meals to passengers in first and second class, consisting of a byriani, for 75 rupees, or rice with a selection of moderately spicy dishes for 120. It is always edible and sometimes delicious, depending on the skill of the pantry chef.

On other trains, there are no sellers or even meals provided and the only opportunity for sustenance is to buy food from the platform traders, who, despite serving a Westerner who clearly had more money than they would ever have, never attempted to cheat me. The main problem is change, as handing over a 100-rupee note causes consternation, and a 500-rupee note – made illegal since my trip – was impossible to offload on the platform.

Sanitary conditions, too, can be inconsistent. On the train between Chennai and Kolkata, there was, again, a steady stream of cleaners who would either sweep or spray disinfectant which they wiped up with a filthy mop, ensuring its effect was negligible. On others, there would only be a fellow occasionally dropping in to empty the bucket used as a dustbin, or, quite possibly, no one would turn up at all.

Despite all this, for the most part the trains deliver you on time – and certainly, given their cheapness, on budget – and in one piece, as their safety record has improved immeasurably in recent years. The key is, as those overused slogans suggest, to keep calm and enjoy the journey. Things may indeed go wrong, but the experience, in a world that has become all too predictable and over-conscious of risk, is what matters. So this book may be a history of Indian railways, but it is also an injunction to go there and enjoy the ride. There is no better way to see India, and there is no better country in the world to explore. Few are disappointed.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

MY THANKS TO Rajendra Aklekar for showing me Mumbai’s stations and helping in many other ways, including reading the draft; Bernard Gambrill and Peter Lewis for reading the draft; Rupert Brennan Brown (once); Ian Kerr; Ram Chandra Acharya; David Elworthy; Roy Denison; and James Nightingale at Atlantic Books, my faithful publishers. A special thanks to Paul Waters at the British Overseas Railways Historical Trust (which, incidentally, needs bigger premises) for allowing me to use the library extensively and opening it up for me several times. And of course to my partner, Deborah Maby, who makes the lonely days writing worthwhile. Apologies to anyone left out and of course all errors are my responsibility. If you find any mistakes or blatant omissions, do not hesitate to contact me via my website, www.christianwolmar.co.uk, and do follow me on Twitter @christianwolmar

Christian Wolmar

April 2017

ONE

A RAILWAY FOR INDIA

THE BRITISH NEVER really conquered India. But the railways did. Remarkably, the British takeover of India was a commercial operation, carried out by the East India Company in conjunction, at various times, with the British government and its army.

The East India Company first arrived in India as early as 1600 but was for much of its first century what it said on the tin, a trading company interested in profit principally from cloth and spices, and later in a wider variety of produce such as silk, tea and opium. Gradually, though, the Company became something more: an overt weapon of imperialism. By the mid-eighteenth century, ‘company’ troops were fighting the French for control of India and over the next decades, through a mixture of treaties with local maharajahs and wars against both local and European opponents, the Company ruled over large swathes of its territory. There were, however, still large chunks, such as Hyderabad and parts of the vast Deccan plain, that were under the control of local maharajahs, and Portugal and France still had coastal interests.

By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, while railways were being built in many countries across the world, the East India Company was in full control of the subcontinent but was not particularly keen to join the party. After the almost simultaneous opening in 1830 of the world’s first major railways in England and in the USA, a few progressive Indian business people had suggested creating a network in India. There were a couple of local initiatives that are sometimes claimed to be the first lines in India, but they were in reality more akin to the wagon ways that had long existed in the UK to transport minerals from mines to the nearest waterway than fully fledged railways. In 1836, work started on a short line near Madras at Chintadripet to transport granite for roadbuilding, and it opened, as the five-mile-long Red Hill Rail Road, the following year. Although the traction was mostly provided by animals hauling the wagons and, on the return trip of the empties, by a combination of gravity and a sail, one or possibly two or three very crude ‘rotary’ steam locomotives were apparently deployed for a while, but details, as with all these early schemes, remain sketchy. The promoter, Captain Arthur Cotton, sought to be allowed to carry passengers on the line but was refused permission by the Madras authorities. However, there is a report that on one journey, in August 1838, twenty-one passengers in four carriages were hauled by one of these locomotives, thus, if true, preceding by fifteen years the opening of the Bombay–Thana line, the usual date given by historians as the subcontinent’s inaugural passenger journey.

There were other early initiatives, such as a line on a dam project at Rajamundry in Andhra Pradesh, where wagons were hauled by men on tracks, greatly helping the movement of heavy stone. A few years later, an extensive network, stretching more than ten miles, was created to assist the construction of the Solani aqueduct in Uttaranchal in northern India. That line also appears to have seen the first extensive use of a steam locomotive in India, a large six-wheeled standard-gauge engine imported from Leeds. Assembled in situ from parts sent from Britain and carried overland to the site, it was named Thomason in honour of the lieutenant-governor of the North-Western Provinces and was reckoned to be able to haul 200 tons at a speed of 4 mph. There are doubts over its fate and even its precise manufacture, but the generally accepted version is that, after only nine months in service, ‘it disintegrated in a boiler explosion’, which, apparently, was ‘to the delight of the construction workers who had viewed it more as a hindrance than a help’.1

However, none of these early uses of railway technology had any long-term significance in terms of the development of the subcontinent’s rail network. Nor did the odd attempt by Indians to push for the construction of railways, such as the suggestion, in 1844, of a Bengali merchant, Dwarkanath Tagore, who offered to fund a third of the capital of a line linking Calcutta north-west to the Burdwan coalfields. There were other expressions of interest by Indian industrialists, but nothing came of any of these schemes.

It was pressure from merchants in Britain that persuaded the British government to consider the introduction of railways in India. The Governor-General of India from 1844 to 1848, Lord Hardinge, who in effect ruled the nation, suggested that the East India Company should support initiatives by railway promoters to build an east–west line across India. He was clear about the compelling reasons for wanting to see the line built as, in his opinion, ‘on military considerations alone, the grant of one million sterling … may be contributed to the great line when completed from Calcutta to Delhi, and a pecuniary saving be effected by a diminution of military establishments’.2 Hardinge’s argument that facilitating rapid transport between major cities would permit a reduction in the number of troops required to be kept in barracks was the first articulation of a line of thinking that would play a key role in the early history of India’s rail network. Supporting the ability of the military to remain in control of the country was always a useful extra line of reasoning to deploy in favour of the railways and, indeed, this military rationale was to play a key role in the development of Indian railways. The military imperative was not, however, the initial stimulus for the railways’ introduction, nor a major component of their ultimate raison d’être.

The East India Company, whose power was beginning to wane in the face of a more detailed oversight of the subcontinent by the British government, was initially opposed to the building of railways. Its board, known as the Court of Directors, set out a series of reasons why railways and India were not compatible in a letter to the Governor-General. It was a comprehensive list which included weather-related phenomena such as the ‘periodical rains and inundations’ and ‘violent winds’, the hostile nature of the flora and fauna, the fact that it would be impossible to fence in the railway and the difficulty in attracting ‘competent contractors and trustworthy engineers’. The killer point seemed to be, in the eyes of the London-based board, the effect of the ‘vertical sun’, though they did not explain precisely what they meant by that.3 In reality it was a bureaucratic response designed to avoid doing something in the face of pressure from the government. One key aspect of disagreement was that the government realized the promoters would require a guarantee on their rate of return, an inducement the East India Company vehemently opposed.

The Company’s resistance proved to be to no avail. The forces pushing for the railways were far greater than those arraigned against them. The key supporters included the powerful textile manufacturers, who were anxious to source cotton in India and sell the finished product to its people. Alongside them were the shipping interests, who were not only keen to carry the increased trade between the two nations that would result from the development of a rail network, but also, specifically, to supply their relatively new steamships with coal from the mines of western Bengal, which could be brought to the port of Calcutta by rail, allowing them to refuel on the way to points further east. The vision outlined by the supporters and railway promoters was indeed alluring, holding out ‘the prospect of vast and opulent India becoming, once opened up by railways, a fabulous supply house of cotton and wheat and a huge consumer of textile and other manufactured products of Britain’.4 This powerful combination of business interests held much influence in the British parliament and ultimately forced the East India Company begrudgingly to accept the inevitability of railways coming to India.

However, the initial plan for the railways seemed to take into account the Company’s misgivings by covering only two sections of line, totalling a mere 142 miles. The idea was that the two lines would be ‘experimental’ because of the doubts over the viability of railways in India, and, therefore, if they failed or proved technically impossible, the plan could be discontinued without substantial investment. This was pretty timid stuff since by the time the go-ahead was given in 1849, the railway age across the world was in full swing, with most major countries having developed networks and the UK already boasting a system that would soon top 5,000 miles. Modest as it was, the scheme would still ensure India would be a pioneer, by building the first system in Asia.

The primitive nature of India’s transport network was another factor that made railways attractive. There was a system of crude roads, but travel on them was notoriously slow, especially as oxen and buffalo, far more suited to the climate than horses, were used to haul the carts that carried both people and agricultural produce. There was one exception, which interestingly later led to an experiment in running steam trains on roads rather than rails. This was the Grand Trunk Road, which opened in 1839 between Calcutta and Delhi, and was extended to Peshawar (now in Pakistan) twenty years later. For its time, it was a very good, well-surfaced and wide road, so much so that in the early 1870s a mechanically minded army officer, Rookes Crompton (who later founded the Crompton company, which made light bulbs), decided to try to run steam vehicles along it. Crompton, stationed at Nowshera on the Grand Trunk Road near Peshawar, brought over steam engines from Edinburgh to run on the road in an effort to speed up transport. Bullock carts travelled at the glacial pace of only 2 mph, slower than walking pace, and the army feared this was not fast enough for troops. The high standard of the trunk road and the sluggishness of the carts persuaded the Governor-General, Lord Mayo, to fund the experiment. With the first engine, The Primer, Crompton embarked on a journey of thirty miles from Umballa to Kalka in the Punjab but encountered various difficulties, such as the vehicles being too heavy for the bridges and the shortage of coal (wood provided insufficient power). He persevered with two other engines which he had tested back in the UK, but again technical problems with crankshafts and the high cost of the solid rubber tyres led to the abandonment of the scheme, though Crompton claimed that the ‘train’ could haul nineteen vehicles and a load of forty tons, and climb up to as much as a 1 in 18 gradient at speeds of 5 mph or more. It was, though, never going to be reliable enough, and, instead, a rail line was soon built connecting Umballa and Kalka with Delhi.

Interestingly, similar experiments had taken place in the UK and France before the railways won out, as they did in India. However, it was inconceivable that the road network could be the solution to nineteenth-century India’s transport needs. Much of the network was far older than the Grand Trunk Road, having been built under the Mughal Empire, and it had fallen into neglect after its collapse in the late eighteenth century. The terrible condition of the roads was a catalyst for the development of the railways, both for commercial and for military purposes.

The lack of cheap transport made the export of many commodities uneconomic as the costs were too high in relation to their value and there was considerable spoilage, given the crude nature of the carts. There were the odd exceptions, such as Bengali rice, which could be exported thanks to cheap river transport. Indian cloth, a product expensive enough to be transported over long distances, was also sold extensively abroad (until the British imposed tariffs to protect its mills). However, for the most part, the absence of cheap and reliable transport meant that many regions were effectively cut off and unable to trade, greatly limiting the size of potential markets and consequently restricting the potential economic development of the subcontinent.

It is easy to be cynical about the altruistic reasons often cited at the time for the encouragement of railways in India, but selflessness was a genuine force in Victorian administration. Many supporters of the iron road saw the railways as a civilizing influence, one that would, to put it bluntly, make India a bit more like us. These arguments cannot simply be dismissed as merely masking imperialism under a cloak of altruism, since the case for railways was made by numerous prominent Victorians and accorded with their wider view of Britain’s role in the world. Lord Dalhousie, who succeeded Hardinge as Governor-General, himself put it succinctly: ‘They [the railways] will lead to some similar progress in social improvement that has marked the introduction of improved communication in various Kingdoms of the Western World.’5 Or as, twenty years later, Grant Duff, an official in the India Office during Gladstone’s government, 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.’6

The railways also had a great champion who was to be crucial to their introduction. In the history of railway development in every country of the world, there is invariably a pioneering figure who can be characterized as the father of the railways (they are all men). In the case of India, it is undoubtedly Lord Dalhousie who merits this title. He took over as Governor-General in 1848 and was, according to the historian John Keay, ‘a modernising and imperious workaholic’7 who routinely worked sixteen- or even eighteen-hour days. He was a firm advocate of Britain’s imperial role, believing that extending it wherever possible would be good for India. During his eight-year tenure, several princely states were taken under Britain’s wing thanks to his clever policy of assuming control over any state where a ruler had died without having a son who could inherit the title. Dalhousie had already been involved in the railway industry back in the UK as President of the Board of Trade – the ministry responsible at the time for the railways – in Robert Peel’s government during the collapse of the railway mania in 1845. Dalhousie’s voracious appetite for work was not wasted, and he was one of those politicians who could master both the big picture and the smallest detail. When he accepted the role of Governor-General of India, he made it clear that he alone would determine policy in the subcontinent, independent of party politics back home, and consequently much of the shape, policies and practices of Indian railways today are a result of the ideas he set out in two renowned ‘minutes’ written in 1850 and 1853 respectively to the East India Company’s Court of Directors.

These are extraordinary and extensive documents, written personally in long hand with the second one running to 216 pages and penned with an eye to future historians. Dalhousie did what the British government had never done at home and planned a network of railways, setting out in some detail the order in which they should be built. He cited political and commercial reasons for their construction, and dismissed the long list of objections cited by the Court. There were no insuperable engineering problems, he argued, though he accepted the main difficulty was the fording of India’s vast rivers. He did not attempt to disguise the fact that there were good commercial reasons for the establishment of railways, which would open up coalfields and other sources of minerals for exploitation. Dalhousie pointed out how much time would be saved if there were a line linking Calcutta with Bombay, obviating the need for the long sea voyage through the Palk strait between Ceylon and India. Since his relentless expansion of British control over India necessitated the occasional war, Dalhousie did not omit the military imperative, repeating the notion that the railways would ensure the security of British rule more cheaply. In sum, railways ‘would encourage enterprise, multiply production, facilitate the discovery of latent resources, increase national wealth and encourage “progress in social improvement”’.8

What was there not to like? Well, there was the fact that this was a nakedly imperial project that not only would later attract the wrath of nationalists but which also limited the usefulness of the railways to the country in which they were being built. As Ian J. Kerr, the most productive historian of Indian railways, summed it up, ‘The interests of the Indians were incidental although, as represented in the writings of Dalhousie and many Britons, the progressive consequences for India of the railroads was a self-evident truth.’9 In other words, the benefits of railways for the subcontinent may have been incidental, but they were nevertheless substantial.

There was, however, the issue of how these lines would be built. Already promoters in Britain had created railway companies with the intention of constructing lines in India, and they had put forward numerous competing schemes. It was a cut-throat business, and the various interests were not averse to criticizing each other’s plans, which did little to help the overall cause of the Indian railways, and partly explains why so little progress was made in the 1840s.

The Government of India was in no position to carry out the work itself, and, in any case, such a direct involvement of government went completely against the prevailing UK ideology of the time. The private sector had to be involved, but the way that the railways had developed in Britain, through a system of promoters petitioning Parliament, was clearly unsuitable in the Indian context. There was no question of companies coming forward to suggest where lines were to be constructed. Dalhousie and his successors had drawn lines on the map where they wanted to see routes built and that was how the outline of the system was determined, though they may have been influenced, at times, by earlier maps put forward by private interests.

However, attracting private companies to what was, as the Court of Directors had intimated, a pretty risky enterprise, required a substantial inducement. While direct subsidy was out of the question in Victorian Britain, it was clear that no railways would be built unless the private companies were given a deal that satisfied their investors. For much of the 1840s, negotiations between government and the private companies were stuck over the precise financial arrangements and the degree of risk that the investors would have to bear. The only way of breaking the deadlock was for the government to provide a guaranteed rate of return. The government had initially sought to limit the level to 3 per cent but the companies held out for more, and the eventual figure agreed in March 1849 was 5 per cent, a very healthy level at a time when interest rates were 3 per cent, and consequently the arrangement guaranteed sufficient investment funds would become available.

This generosity on the part of the British government was not all it seemed. While the investment funds would come almost entirely from Britain, the risk was borne by Indian, not British, taxpayers, who would be required to meet any shortfall between the rate of profit from operating the railways and the 5 per cent guarantee. While there is disagreement over how much this would eventually cost the Indian people, Ian J. Kerr reckons ‘the revenues of the Government of India were tapped for some £50 million to meet the guarantee’.10 Moreover, the railways, or rather the railway companies, enjoyed other benefits too, such as not having to pay for the land or for the legal costs of acquiring it, something that proved a heavy burden for British railway companies. The guarantee ensured that British investors came forward in large numbers. These were not capitalists in search of a quick buck but, rather, ordinary people with a bit of money to set aside and earn a steady rate of return. According to one researcher, ‘the middle classes predominated – widows, barristers, clergymen, spinsters, bankers and retired army officers’.11 Both sides were happy. The railway companies got their funding at relatively low rates of interest, while the British bourgeoisie found a safe place for their money.

Dalhousie set out the plans in great detail, even ruling on the question of gauge, the distance between the two rails. At the time, across the world, there was no consensus on what this should be. The size varied between 7ft 0¼in and 3ft 3⅜in (or, rather, metre gauge), with many variants in between. Indeed, there were several countries where no common gauge had emerged triumphant and in Britain itself railways were being built with two very different gauges: the 7ft 0¼in favoured by Brunel’s Great Western Railway, and 4ft 8½in that prevailed elsewhere. Indeed, the latter was already becoming known as ‘standard gauge’ for it was widely used in Europe – though with exceptions such as Spain and Russia – and was becoming dominant in the USA.

The promoters of Indian lines had pressed for standard gauge and that was the basis of the initial agreement between the government and the companies signed in 1849. However, Dalhousie favoured a 6ft gauge, feeling that the particular conditions of India, with its mountainous terrain requiring steep gradients and its high winds, needed the stability of a wider gauge. After much debate, a compromise was reached in London with the adoption of a 5ft 6in gauge, and later many lines in remote or mountainous parts of India used metre gauge (3ft 3⅜in). In a far-sighted move, which was to make increasing the capacity of the system much easier in later years, the major trunk network was built to specifications for double tracks, with wider and stronger bridges, even when initially only a single track was laid.

Dalhousie’s second minute set out in precise detail the routes of the initial trunk network. He based his selection on three criteria: the political and commercial advantages of the routes, the ease of construction in the face of engineering challenges, and their potential as a main line connecting various branches. His plan envisaged connecting the principal cities and extending across most of the subcontinent. There was to be a 1,500-mile line across the top of India from Calcutta along the Ganges valley to Allahabad and then to Delhi, through the Punjab to Lahore (in what is now Pakistan). Two lines would stretch out of Bombay, one linking up with the Calcutta–Delhi line, the other eastwards to Poona and onwards. Madras, too, would have a couple of lines stretching out from it, and, of course, the idea was that all routes should be connected at a later stage. All of these lines would eventually be built.

By the time Dalhousie’s second minute was despatched in April 1853, work had already started on the first two ‘experimental’ lines. They were a rather random choice: a short 21-mile-long suburban line stretching from the centre of Bombay to Thana, and a 100-mile-long main line from Howrah, the other side of the Hooghly River from Calcutta, since the crossing was initially deemed to be too difficult and expensive. It was intended to reach Burdwan in order to transport the coal from the Raniganj coalfields through to the port of Calcutta. While deemed experimental, there was little doubt that these two railways would be the forerunners of what was to become a major national network as set out by Dalhousie.

The promoter of the Bombay line was the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, whose grand name rather contrasted with the modest nature of its inaugural railway. The company, formed in London in 1843, had long focused on linking Bombay with its outlying districts as its principal investors included a strong cohort of Liverpool cotton manufacturers who were keen to find new sources of raw materials. It was their involvement which proved to be decisive in establishing that the first line should run from Bombay into its hinterland, where the cotton grew. Despite its large production of cotton, India exported very little because of the poor internal transport system dominated by bullock carts, which were unreliable, particularly at times of drought and famine, resulting in ships often being kept waiting at ports for produce that never arrived. A promotional pamphlet published by the British cotton merchants, Railways for Bombay, argued that the Americans, who were flooding the British market with their cotton, did so thanks to their extensive railway network. Creating a rail network in India would not only solve the problem of internal transport but also free the British market of dependence on the potentially unreliable supply from America.

The initial protagonist for the Great Indian Peninsula Railway was one of those amateur enthusiasts who litter the history of early railways. John Chapman was a carriage manufacturer who had rather grander ideas about designing a flying machine, but soon gave up on the plan. He had been a successful manufacturer of knitting machinery for export to the Continent until he ran afoul of British export controls designed to limit foreign acquisition of machinery that could threaten the domestic industry. He was a kind of James Dyson of his time and was to play a key role in turning the dream of Indian railways into reality. Chapman wrote a pamphlet on the need for better transport for cotton and brought together a group of promoters to create the Great Indian Peninsula Railway company. He was motivated enough to take himself to Bombay to undertake a survey of potential routes, but initially chose an alignment that involved passing through already populated areas. As Rajendra Aklekar puts it, ‘The plan would have changed the Bombay we know today, if the arrangement had worked.’12 Instead, the route from Bombay to Thana, a significant town described by Marco Polo, who visited in 1290, as a ‘great kingdom’ with a substantial port, was selected and incorporated into legislation passed in the British Parliament.

Once the agreement between the government and the companies over the guaranteed rate of return had been made, the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, keen to get started, appointed James Berkley as ‘chief resident engineer’, and despatched him to Bombay. He was widely recommended, especially by Robert Stephenson, who had built the London & Birmingham Railway and had appointed Berkley as engineer on a couple of railways in the Midlands. On Berkley’s arrival in February 1850, he wasted no time in rolling up his sleeves, and work started on the line between Bombay and Thana at the end of October that year, with a British contractor, Faviell & Fowler, in charge. The Bombay terminus was to be at Bori Bunder, the site today of India’s grandest railway station, Victoria Terminus (now officially known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, although Bombay residents, especially taxi drivers, still call it ‘VT’).

The scale of the enterprise, even for such a relatively short line, can be judged by the fact that Faviell & Fowler took on nearly 10,000 workers to undertake the task. And, inevitably, the cultural differences that were to dog much railway construction on the subcontinent appeared almost immediately. As Aklekar puts it in his history of the line, this first engagement between British rail engineers and ‘native’ workers ‘led to a giant clash of cultures, with British engineers trying to extract their money’s worth, and the workers, in truth, demanding respect for their ways and religious practices’.13 One of the firm’s partners, Henry Fowler, complained in a letter to England about how difficult it was to persuade the workers to start work at six in the morning rather than the customary eight: ‘It is the most difficult thing to alter the existing system as almost every custom the natives have is founded on absurd but invincible prejudices – generally of religious character.’14

Just to complicate matters further for the British contractors, there were the multifarious divisions and sub-divisions into castes whose members refused to work with those of another caste and at times even tried to prevent others from working at all. Fowler was to learn the hard way that Europeans (the word ‘European’ was used widely and was effectively synonymous with ‘British’ or ‘white’) were pariahs. He wrote how one particularly hot day on site he made the mistake of grabbing a worker’s water pot only to see ‘the innocent vessel … immediately doomed to destruction as the fact of my touching it had defiled it’.15 Such incidents could lead to walkouts by groups of men, angered at a slight or by an insensitive overseer. Poor Fowler never acclimatized to India and illness soon forced him back to the UK, where he died in 1854 at the tender age of just thirty-four, leaving the hardier Faviell in sole charge.

The difficulties Faviell faced were unprecedented and he had to learn on the job while in the full glare of the curiosity of local people and the attention of the British rulers. He had tried to recruit British labour, but the men failed to adapt either to the climate or to the culture, and, with only meagre wages on offer, the lucky ones who did not succumb to illness soon returned home. Native labour was cheap and abundant, except during the rice harvest, when many workers returned to their smallholdings, thereby creating a temporary shortage.

The contractors were under pressure to keep costs down. The East India Company remained sceptical of the advantages of the railway and had watched developments in the UK, where many schemes foundered with investors losing their money, with horror. Before work started, they had warned the Government of India to watch the pennies and drew its attention to a ‘great error committed by Railway Companies in Europe in the hope that you will studiously avoid a similar error’, which was that ‘large sums of money … have been most unnecessarily and extravagantly expended in ornamental works, especially those connected with the stations and offices of the Company’.16