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The Great Indian Railways: A Cultural Biography (Bloomsbury 2018)

The Purveyors of Destiny: A Cultural Biography of the Indian Railways (Bloomsbury 2017).

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Critical Acclaim

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Dozens of books have been written about Indian rail, but perhaps only Arup K Chatterjee’s The Great Indian Railways captures the wonder of a behemoth made of 42,226 miles of track, 108,000 daily services to 7,325 stations and 1.2 million employees.’

Chris Haslam, The Times (United Kingdom)

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‘[The Purveyors of Destiny] is a rare and unique perspective on the cultural history of an organization as perceived by writers, critics, films, colonial rulers and local citizenry from the 1840s till today … The most powerful chapter is the one on Partition, where the Railways bec­ome the ‘Dumb Waiters’ and purveyors of destiny of two nations. The horrors of Partition generated a large number of books, short stories and films, reminding us of the bestiality and violence on a scale rarely seen in history, while the national leadership looked on helplessly. Here, the author draws from Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Krishan Chander’s Peshawar Express, a story where the train itself is the narrator of events that took place on it, Bhisham Sahni’s Amritsar Aa Gaya, Sadat Hasan Manto’s Kasri Nafisi and many more … Arup K. Chatterjee vividly captures the debates about its impact and on its changing cultural inf­luence over time…Chatterjee is a professor of English; his command over language and facility with it, apart from his unique perspective on the railways, makes this exceptional book compulsive reading.’

Vinoo Mathur, Outlook India

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‘Arup K. Chatterjee’s book, The Great Indian Railways, is not just about Indian Railways. It is about how the railways are deeply embedded in the psyche of the Indian mind and how railway premises in India are a reflection of the society. Among the several books presently on the subject in India, some on history, some specialised, statistical, anecdotal, archival documentation or simply photographic, this book, now into its second edition, fills up the vacuum of railways’ cultural contribution to the society by comprehensively chronologically documenting how the railways, as the author puts it “with or without our knowing, have come to define manifold aspects of Indian culture.”

‘And it begins with a perfect example on how one of the author’s grandfathers as someone originally from Benares — although a Bengali — used to keep his homesickness away, simply by visiting the railway station. “During his lunch hour, each day, he would visit Howrah Station and wait for the train from Benares, if only to catch of a glimpse of the people arriving from his hometown and return with a spring in his step.”

‘Starting chronologically from 1843 to the 1990s, the six chapters, with the prologue and introduction, take one on a kaleidoscopic journey of literature, life, reel and real stories, also weaving in numerous events as India moved from the times of the East India Company to the world wars, its fight for independence and from Lal Bahadur Shastri to Dr E Sreedharan. While on this journey, the author writes of people and nuggets of history, including the genesis of tea and railways, the association of Wheeler and Higginbotham’s book stalls and the railway catering controversy of the 1950s.

‘When I say the book takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey of literature and films, it includes not just fiction, but major works from the era as the chapters move ahead, right from various archival railway accounts by early planners, travelogues to the slices of fictional train journeys in popular works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne and RK Narayan and even Shah Rukh Khan. The mention of the travels of Sherlock Holmes on those old-English teakwood trains pulled by steam puffing engines, to the quaint Malgudi station that gives us a sense of isolation, and numerous little railway plots in Bollywood and Hollywood — all take the narrative ahead.’‘

Rajendra Aklekar, Mid Day

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‘Chatterjee’s courage in undertaking such a vast endeavour is laudable … the book is thoroughly enjoyable, even if it is just for its rich trivia.’

The Telegraph

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For [Chatterjee], the railways is not just an actually existing entity, but is, rather, a myth of tremendously Indian proportions, invoked and evoked in all forms of the national and popular imagination …This book attempts not just to create a new genre, but to set down new tracks for thought, method and writing in the area of culture studies …The perspective Chatterjee brings to this subject is a new and courageous one: rather than drafting a catalogue of novels, films, diaries and journals that have the railways as their theme, which would be expected in such a work, he investigates how the railways themselves affect the form and content of their own representations … The greatest achievement of this book is that it gathers and collects the myths, narratives and histories of the Indian Railways from sources as disparate as colonial archives and popular movies. Chatterjee successfully conjures up the magic in a lucid style, while maintaining the gravity and solemn tone reminiscent of a train journey

Huzaifa Omair Siddiqi, Scroll

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‘Arup K. Chatterjee in his The Purveyors of Destiny: A Cultural Biography of the Indian Railways traces the 156-year-history of the Indian Railways from an unusual angle—how the railways influenced the cultural milieu of India through not only literature, films and songs, but also catalyzed revolutionary changes in the country’s political and social canvas. It was the beginning of a new India after the first passenger train ran in Bombay on August 15, 1853. Railways are yet to reach all nooks and corners of India. The changes therefore are continuing.’

Gautam Gupta, The Hindu

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‘Arup K. Chatterjee is the prime engine driver in these trains of thought, and the purpose of this wonderful book, is to introduce the reader to the ever expanding archive of representation (a train whistle here would be most appropriate) of the Indian railways.  As the son of a loyal PWI or Permanent Way Inspector of the Central Railway of India, let me line-clear at the outset with the author’s own insistence of that cute train song from Sholay ‘station se gadi jab chhoot jaati hai to, ek do teen ho jati hai’.  Like these nau do gyaara lines, the book signifies in tantalizing numerical order vitality, progress, and the delightful critical prospect of decoding all those epiphanies brought to light that in many ways open up for me, all over again, my own private operatic love affair with the Indian railways … Chatterjee’s “second great rendezvous with the railways” that comes with the samaan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles.  Mine came with my first reading of A Study in Scarlet in Bombay-Poona’s original Deccan Queen’s first class compartment which was a sealed coupe with polished wooden walls, a freshly cleaned carpet, and ornate reading lamps.  This Sherlock Holmes story, like Chatterjee’s:  was an abridged and illustrated version of the novel and was presented to me as “a boon  for I could read about and see how a first class carriage looked” since I was in one that exactly resembled the kind Watson and Holmes often took in their railway journeys from Baker Street to the hinter lands of England … it is important to spend some time focusing on the author’s resurrected examples of those “representations” in Indian cinema and Indian literature, especially for those Indians who tend to be stubbornly and even foolishly stranded in galaxies so far far away from the conspicuous Indian terrain that so memorably coaxed and guided Chatterjee’s generation and mine, flanked as we were by those two proverbial railway track lines, permanently on either side of us … Chatterjee [also] offers us superb insightful readings of Ray’s signified train moments.  The train enters the chamatkara mental landscape of Apu in Pather Panchali as he runs with his sister Durga in an explosive field of kaash flowers.  “This tingling encounter with a train belching black smoke” is one that none of our five senses can ever forget.  Then, in Aparajito, there is another train that takes away Apu’s family to Benaras from their ancestral village.  But there, as the author notes, the train further estranges Apu from his mother when she goes back to her village and he embarks on his future in the distant city of Calcutta … It is in Nayak, however, that Ray really makes, as Chatterjee so brilliantly enunciates, “the luxury train function as the site of so many perpetuating desires“ that “transmute from the interiors of first class cabins, to the restaurant car” where the baring of souls is wonderfully achieved between an arrogant film star progressively humbled, both by the train’s steady rhythmic motions and the good faith permeations of an honest female interrogator. [Then] Rudyard Kipling becomes the prime literary signifier of Indian Railways for Chatterjee and very correctly does he commence on Kipling’s “tyrannical Te-rains” with an interesting reading of all the train references in Kipling’s great novel, Kim.  There is the characteristic idea of “the supposed solidarity of the characters” that joins friends and unites the anxious in “this thing,” the “te-rain,” which as the burly Sikh artisan reassures the lama and Kim “is the work of the Government.” This spurs the academic in Chatterjee to educate us about the idea of “governmentality” as deployed by Michel Foucault from his college de France lectures delivered between 1978 and 1979.  Chatterjee portmanteaus skillfully between the government’s “power” (Foucault’s singular historical idea and predominant critical utterance) and its creations of certain “mentalities” that visibly and ideologically affected “territories, communication and speed” that were first brilliantly cited by Kipling and later by Indian authors like Sa’adat Hasan Manto.  Chatterjee offers scintillating readings of how Kipling, in his story “The Bridge Builders” reaffirms the “myth that the world of Eastern mystical legends co-exists facilitating the osmosis of social, scientific and even metaphysical reason aboard the railways.”  But then he slyly deconstructs this idea by showing how Flora Annie Steel’s “In the Permanent Way” short story derails Kipling’s myth as being a hollow one by allowing “a whole train to go over an English railway engineer and an Indian Hindu saint who are so locked in each other’s arms” that it was hard to separate or even distinguish which was Shriver’s Martha Davy and which was Wishinyou Lucksone, semantically, historically, or culturally … Looking at these ugly Diesel locomotives pulling all the Indian trains today,  one nostalgically longs for “the black beauties” (as those great W.P and W.G. steam engines were once called.) Since their “iron flesh” was stripped of “all their embellishments,” what we are left with today is an ugly skeleton network of what was once, undeniably, a great Indian Railway.  Thank you Arup Chatterjee for at least resurrecting its ghost in all the right Proustian ways in today’s conspicuous Bharatian world of appalling mediocrity.’

Darius Cooper, The Beacon

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