Satyajit Ray’s Haunted “First-class Compartment” | Ghosts on Indian Railways | Bilateral View Podcast Series | Episode 4

Episode 4 of Bilateral View features a discussion on India’s preeminent filmmaker, author, and Oscar awardee, Satyajit Ray’s fascination with the railways and ghosts. The discussion takes up Ray’s short story, “First-class Compartment” as an allegory of India’s colonial and postcolonial histories, and problematizes Indo-British cultural and political ties through Ray’s ghosts. The allegorical and political meanings of ‘ghosts’ and ‘spectres’ are enriched by French philosopher Jacques Derrida’s book, Specters of Marx (1993). It is also argued that like R.K. Narayan and Ruskin Bond, Ray kept alive a Kiplingesque tradition of railway literature drawn from colonial author and Nobel Laureate, Rudyard Kipling. The conversation addresses tropes of ghosts and spectres as metaphors that represent surpluses from the colonial regime and an idiom to talk about Indian sufferings and millions of famine deaths during colonial railway expansions in nineteenth-century colonial India.