In this All India Radio, Akashvani, documentary feature “Gandhi’s Track to Swaraj,” Professor (Dr.) Arup K. Chatterjee contributes a concise yet illuminating account of the Indian railways’ early development and imperial underpinnings. His commentary situates the railway network within both local entrepreneurial initiatives and inter-company rivalries, thereby reframing a familiar colonial narrative.
Dr. Chatterjee begins by drawing attention to an often-overlooked precursor of passenger operations: the Red Hill Railroad, constructed near Chennai in Chintadripet to transport quarried stone rather than passengers. This early line predates more celebrated milestones and underscores the railway’s initial function as a resource conduit rather than a public conveyance. He then recounts the contest between John Chapman of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway and Roland McDonald Stevenson of the East India Railway Company. According to Dr. Chatterjee, Chapman’s company secured its place in history by running the first locomotives—Sahib, Sultan, and Sindh—on 16 April 1853, from Bori Bandar (Bombay) to Thane.
Beyond these pioneering moments, Dr. Chatterjee emphasizes the railways’ deep entanglement with British commercial and strategic interests. He details how industrialists such as Dwarkanath Tagore (grandfather of Rabindranath Tagore) invested in early track construction to expedite coal transport from the Raniganj fields to Calcutta. Although Tagore’s vision remained unrealized at his death in 1845, his enterprise was subsumed by Stevenson and the East India Railway Company, which subsequently prioritized passenger and freight traffic under colonial auspices.
Dr. Chatterjee further observes that the railway’s first decades were marked by considerable adversity. Between 1856 and the late 1850s, the network endured widespread disruptions—including the Santal Rebellion and the Indian Rebellion of 1857—which cost the East India Company an estimated £3 million in damages. Only after the early 1860s did a coherent administrative framework emerge, laying the groundwork for subsequent expansion.
Turning to the railway’s economic rationales, Dr. Chatterjee identifies three principal motivations behind its construction: tea transplantation, cotton cultivation, and military logistics. He recounts how Robert Fortune’s successful introduction of Chinese tea saplings to Assam in the 1820s prompted the British to develop a rapid transport link for plantation products. Similarly, the post–American Civil War cotton shortage reinforced India’s value as a raw-material source, while the need to mobilize troops and munitions motivated the robust engineering of bridges and station edifices. Dr. Chatterjee notes that structures such as Lucknow’s bridgework and Victoria Terminus were designed with “armorial” characteristics—combining defensive features with monumental Gothic styling—to facilitate both commerce and colonial control.
By the conclusion of his segment, Dr. Chatterjee has effectively demonstrated that the origins of the Indian railways cannot be understood solely in terms of modern national integration or benign technological transfer. Instead, he frames the railway as a “public institution” born of competing corporate interests, local industrial ambition, and imperial strategy. His analysis lays a vital historical foundation for the program’s subsequent exploration of Mahatma Gandhi’s complex relationship with the rails—an interplay of personal dignity, mass mobilization, and symbolic resistance.
Dr. Chatterjee’s contributions provide listeners with a nuanced account of the railway’s material and political genesis. By foregrounding early industrial experiments, corporate rivalries, and strategic infrastructure, he enriches our understanding of how these iron pathways both enabled and constrained India’s colonial and postcolonial trajectories.
Arup K. Chatterjee 