Railways Modernised India
Modern era starts with the Industrial Revolution in Europe which influenced the colonised countries as these constituted the periphery of the central imperialist countries. However, the time and period of inception of modernity is controversial. Modernity is a change European society was undergoing and injecting these changes in the colonised oriental world for “their own benefits” and had in a way modernised these part. These impacts can be positive or negative depending on the receptiveness of the society or say modernity is dialectical in itself. The transfer of these changes brings cultural transformation in the recipient society. Irrespective of the characteristics of this society, just in order to exploit resources and being opportunistic sometimes yields bad consequences to these societies. But this is not true in all cases. The concept of modernity has kept adding characteristics to itself with time. In colonial or national context, modernity was the idea of liberation or differences in the society, influencing as well as being influenced by the colonial projects. Latter sounds more pronounced as the introduction of education, postal services, telegraphs, railways etc. has helped in the nationalist movement of India. Modernity has many equivalents, one of these is technology. Technology is the metonym for modernity. The equation fosters a conceptual reduction of technology itself, for technology appears as self-evident testimony to a series of interconnected ideologies, including rationality, progress and secularism. (Aguiar, 2008) Technology sounds to be the product of Western modernisation which has been introduced to the colonies as modernity mania1 of the colonisers. One of the major impacts India experienced as being the part of British Colony was introduction of railways. Railway is the carrier of modernity in India. Mainly this introduction of railways in India was meant for enhancing the procurement of raw materials through these networks over space in metropolitan colonization and acted as regenerating the annihilation of old Asiatic society. The railway became modernity’s most prominent emblem: historian Eric Hobsbawm once called it “a synonym of ultra modernity. (Aguiar, 2008) India’s potentialities as a source of raw materials and as a market for British manufactured goods appeared limitless. India had to be covered with the network of steam railways that
1
John Chapman, promoter of the Great Indian Peninsular Railways wrote in 1850 of “ the double hope of earning an honourable competency and of aiding in imparting to our fellow subjects in India, a participation in the advantages of the greatest inventions of the modern times”
would link that heart of the country with the main stream of world commerce. The pressure from different interest groups resulted to an agreement for two experimental railways in India namely one line was to run in a short distance from Calcutta in a northwesterly direction towards Burdwan coal fields and another was to run in a northeasterly direction out of Bombay toward the cotton fields of the Deccan. (Thorner, 1951) The introduction of railway in India was an initiation towards modernization of India in the sense that it involved precise mechanical technology, heavy engineering and was the most advanced means of communication of its time in the country. The lines were first owned and controlled by the private enterprises of Britain which connected the important satellite towns with the countryside enclaves and later with the shift in the phase of ownership transfer to Government of India, auxiliary lines were laid down which connected remote areas. This brought more land under cultivation and with it, a larger degree of connectivity across country. The spread of railway network was expected to bring with it the era of modernisation in India but the society became more non-egalitarian and dependent. The richer section of the community of the villages now was able to make more profits through the exposure to market and the ownership of land became prominently power symbol. The poor labourers in the field and the subsistence type of agriculture with traditional technology remained traditional. The disparity enhanced on different scales of space and individual relations. This distorted the cultural aspect of the village society as now it oriented towards the market where values, norms, rationality are guided by the market. The traditional and cultural fabric of Indian society was being challenged by the technology imposed on naive dwellers of this space. If this technology would have been started to operate from bottom to top, situation has had taken different course, probably in India’s Development track as envisioned by Karl Marx. Marx saw railways in India as the ‘forerunners of modern industry’. He was of the belief that the railways would have positive effect of dissolving the hereditary division of labour and the caste system. He also expected that the railways would bring to the villages knowledge of modern technology which would enable the rural artisans to modernise their traditional crafts. He thus visualised the railways initiating the process of capitalism from below, which he was at the time of studying in the economic history of Britain. (Chandra, 2012) Since railways were laid down to maximise the British profit, it could never be in benefit of India’s development. This product of colonisation in India had not developed out of the inner needs
and contradictions in Indian society; it was imposed in the interests of British capitalism on the Indian society. The significance of railway in India has been so much that one could study historical as well as spatial changes dividing into pre-railways and post railways periods. Imagery of Indian railways has always been of crowd of various regions, culture, languages connecting people over space and reducing time, thus converted into cultural notion. The cultural changes it has induced in Indian society can be termed as colonial modernism specifically as in other colonial countries. This was also a facilitator of wealth drain from India to Britain as it made the exploitation faster and deeper as per the motive behind its establishment. The adoption of any technology in itself requires modifications in the existing structures of the recipient society. Thus reorienting oneself to adjust the infrastructural needs became pre-requisite. This is one form of media imperialism through railways in India. For railways, the bridges, the stations, the tunnels etc are the representation of technological modernity which accompanied railways in India. This is not like that Britain didn’t undergo such structural modification but since the technology had evolved there which was simultaneous with the pace of time and situation, these changes were not imposed on its society rather desirable. The technological modernity is closely related to the authority or power of the one who has the claim into the invention of it, a kind of biased in the sense that who has power can promote new changes as the society struggling for freedom and basic needs can only take slight advantage of these changes. However this transition is unwanted but inevitable as they are subjected to it. The contribution of railways to India’s modernity was in the evolving and strengthening of liberation ideas. On the material ground, the modernity was being represented through cultural transition in the society. It was a common place where all Indians were same sharing common space in the coaches irrespective of their religion and caste especially. The separate coach for British people was an object of alienation acting as sensitising nationalism among Indians. This sentiment of nationalism aroused as well as fuelled by railways was also facilitated by the railways to spread across the country. However this railway was also the space where the sentiment of brotherhood was brutally butchered at the time of partition. The massacres. beatings and rapes in and around the trains eroded the ideal of the secular nation, breaking down the civil dreams of modernity. The railway is seen for deterritorializing and reconstructing time and space through movement. The train to particular destination from a given source describes the composition of its passengers making it vulnerable to anti social targets too. Thus the secular collectiveness is challenged as the communal and religious
identities supersede the secular national identity, the very essence of the railways as the equivalency to Indian modernity. In present day context, trains from Bihar to Mumbai and Assam are vulnerable to attacks. A mechanical object like railways can be such an influential medium of transforming a society with a discourse of its consequences is amazingly remarkable. The way it worked differently for colonies and imperialists can be observed in the present day economic situation, spatial specialisation and enhanced regional disparity in the backward underdeveloped economies of newly independent colonial countries. In India, it has accelerated the rate of draining of resources from wider areas as the railway lines were the arteries of British system in colonial India. This has very little say in modernising Indian society and economy. The railways represent a notion of life when a material is occupied with human, the material turns abstract like immaterial and becomes living and abstractness is the characteristics of modernity. If we consider this, it is obviously expected that railways modernised India; but there comes another question for who India modernised which needs to be answered.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aguiar, M. (2008). Making Modernity: Inside the Technological Space of the Railway. Cultural Critique , 66. Chandra, B. (2012). Karl Marx, His Theories of Asian Societies and Colonial Rule. In B. Chandra, The Making of Modern India : From Marx to Gandhi (pp. 292-384). New Delhi: Orient Blackswan Private Limited. Thorner, D. (1951). Capital Movement and Transportation : Great Britain and the Development of India's Railways. The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 11, No. 4 , 389-402. Schiller, H.I. (1978). Media and Imperialism. Reue Francaise d'etudes Americaines, No.6, Mass Media et Ideologie Aux Etats- Unis, October, pp.269-281
