The Indian railway is a machine of steel and steam and a machine of memories. In a wide-ranging interview on The Ewer with Aditya Sangwan, Arup K. Chatterjee explains why the story of India’s railways is also the story of modern India — its hopes, its violences, and its strange intimacies. Drawing on archival research and personal memory he moves with ease from Victorian boardrooms to platform chatter, from princely state experiments to Gandhi’s trenchant criticisms. Below I distil the highlights and the big takeaways from the conversation.
From Childhood Memory to Academic Project
Chatterjee begins by confessing his own affection for public institutions. Growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, he says, railway imagery was part of everyday Indian life — on television, in films and in family stories. That affection became scholarly curiosity. His research took him into archives from 2014 onwards and resulted in books that treat the railway as cultural biography as well as infrastructure.
Railways as National Project and Industry
Two claims run through Chatterjee’s account. First, railways were a technology of integration. He quotes earlier observers — notably Karl Marx and the British travel writers he discusses — who saw railways as an engine that could make India legible as a connected territory, even as colonial rulers repurposed that connectivity. Second, the railways never came alone. The rise of tea, coffee, oilseeds and other cash crops was entangled with the growth of rail lines. In Chatterjee’s phrase, culture itself becomes an industry around stations: stalls, vendors, canteens and a whole platform economy.
Colonial Design, Militarisation and Spectacle
Chatterjee does not romanticise the story. He emphasises the colonial logic beneath much early railway planning. After the 1857 rebellion the British learned that railways could be attacked and so they refigured major stations as fortified, monumental spaces. “Victoria terminals,” he notes, blend Gothic aesthetics with fortification. Trains also served military ends — troop movement, quick redeployments and a visible assertion of imperial power — even as royal tours made the railway into a spectacle for the public.
Everyday Life, Caste and Modernity
The interview is strong on the ordinary and the intimate. Chatterjee highlights diverse Indian responses to rail travel. For some, railways broke down older barriers; for others, colonial anxieties about caste and “custom” persisted in prejudiced travel writing. Regional writers and pamphleteers show a different side: for many Indians, railways spread literacy, enabled pilgrimage travel and knitted distant places into a shared horizon. Chatterjee stresses that usage patterns — who traveled, from which class carriage, and when — can be read from archival ticket figures and train statistics.
Gandhi, Radicals and the Platform as Public Theatre
Chatterjee sketches how the railway became a political theatre. Gandhi moved quickly to make stations central to non-cooperation and swadeshi campaigns, treating them like the social media of their age — fast, visible, capable of spreading sentiment nationwide. Revolutionary acts, from the Kakori conspiracy to the actions connected with Bhagat Singh, also used trains and stations as both targets and stages. The platform was thus a site of mass mobilisation and symbolic contest.
Princely Experiments and Regional Variation
Not all railways were imperial. Several princely states built their own lines and experimented with different gauges, showing a complex, fragmented railway history where local rulers sometimes led innovations. Chatterjee draws attention to the often overlooked state and private efforts that complicate a simple “British built the railways” narrative.
The Double Edge of Progress
Throughout the conversation Chatterjee keeps returning to a fundamental ambivalence. Railways stimulated markets, movement and national imagination. They also carried costs: ecological disruption, theatrical displays of imperial power, and architectures designed for control as much as travel. He names famines, canal dislocations and the material toll of rapid expansion as part of this story.
Why the Railway Story Still Matters
For Chatterjee, studying the railway is a way of reading India’s modern social life. The lines on a map are also lines of social force: caste, commerce, colonial control, regional politics and mass mobilization. In a modern India where infrastructure still shapes memory and identity, revisiting the railway past helps explain present choices about connectivity, justice and inclusion.
Tea, Plantations, and the Making of a Diaspora
Arup Chatterjee reminds us that the story of India’s railways cannot be separated from the story of tea and the global appetite that drove plantation capitalism. As he explains, planters in Ceylon and Assam needed labour and networks to make plantations viable. That meant recruiting workers from Tamil Nadu and sending them across the sea. Railways and marine passages together created not only new markets but new diasporas.
“Lipton bought estates in Ceylon … labourers came from Tamil Nadu. That is how a Tamil diaspora formed.” — Arup K. Chatterjee
The consequence was both economic and cultural. Lines on a map became migration routes. Stations and ports became nodes that linked local labour markets to imperial tastes. Chatterjee argues that without these commodity circuits — tea, cotton, spices — the railway project would have looked very different.
Bridges, Failed Marine Passages and Pamban
History is full of half-formed plans. Chatterjee traces how ambitious projects — an attempted marine passage or a bridge from Dhanushkodi to Sri Lanka — were proposed for strategic and commercial ends. Though the grand bridge never became a reality, the Pamban Bridge (1914) stands as the railway’s answer to a rejected maritime plan and as a symbol of how imperial infrastructure reshaped geography and myth.
“Pamban Bridge was a rejected plan’s outcome … the railway gave us another Ram Setu.” — Arup K. Chatterjee
Catering, Canteens, and the Culture of Travel
Travel on the Indian railway came with its own culinary economy. From pantry cars to station dining rooms, the railways spawned a hospitality industry that shaped memory and taste. Chatterjee names G.F. Kellner & Co. and other firms as part of a railway cultural economy that offered everything from guest houses to refrigerated provisioning. Eating on the platform or in a dining room became part of the railway experience — often celebrated, sometimes mocked, but always remembered.
The Human Cost of Construction
Beneath the romance of lines and stations lies another story: the staggering human toll of building railways. Chatterjee notes grim estimates — dozens of deaths per mile during construction in some regions — and the everyday dangers faced by labourers digging tunnels across hill ranges. The narratives of engineers and mythic workers mingle with tragic facts. These costs remain a crucial part of the railway story that modern accounts must not forget.
Ghosts, Folklore, and the Railway Imagination
Railways also reshaped India’s literary and folkloric imagination. Chatterjee maps an uncanny triangle between trains, tea and ghost stories. From Kipling’s spectral tales to regional legends about haunted tunnels, the railway becomes a repository for anxieties about modernity, displacement and loss. Filmmakers and writers like Satyajit Ray translated that spectral railway into unforgettable stories.
“Ghosts on the railways are the past manifesting in the present.” — Arup K. Chatterjee
Image suggestion: still from The Darjeeling Limited or Pather Panchali (if you have rights) or a vintage film poster; alt text “Film scene with train imagery”.
Cinema, Popular Culture and a Moving Nation
Chatterjee shows how movies have compounded the railway’s symbolic heft. From Sholay and Pather Panchali to DDLJ, trains carry narrative weight — as escape routes, as sites of encounter, as metaphors for migration and diasporic yearning. The railway’s cinematic life helps explain why the rails remain an emotional fixture in India’s collective imagination.
Partition, Violence and the Railways
Perhaps the most harrowing chapter is the railway’s role during Partition. Trains were instruments of mass migration and, at times, violence. Chatterjee treats this subject with care and calls readers to confront literature that memorialises these journeys — from Manto’s stark stories to Khushwant Singh’s chronicles. The railway, for all its connective promise, also became a corridor for loss.
Today’s Dilemmas: Congestion and Privatisation
Chatterjee brings the conversation back to the present. He highlights enduring legacies — route congestion, neglected stretches and persistent questions about whether the railways should remain primarily a public service. Beyond technology, Chatterjee urges a literate public debate on railway economics, staffing, safety and the meaning of infrastructure in a modern democracy. He argues for nuanced discussion free from partisan heat: data, context and public literacy should guide policy.
Why this History Matters
If the railway is a machine, it is also a mirror. Through its tracks we see imperial strategy, commercial circuits, everyday intimacies and national dramas. Chatterjee’s interview reminds us that the train is at once tool and text. To read the railway is to read modern India: its promises, its exclusions and its persistent capacity to move people and ideas.
“Railways are not just technology; they are social histories on the move.” — Arup K. Chatterjee
Arup K. Chatterjee 