The Railways as social contract

In the last chapter of his latest book, The Social Life of Indian Trains, Amitava Kumar writes: “The railway is part of the public wealth, perhaps among our most shared precious resource, and when we are travelling on trains, ‘we are not just passengers but also fellow members of the republic.”

- ARUSHI BHASKAR

This is a perfect summation of both the book, and the impulse to read it.

Slim, at just 130 pages, the book might be a bit of a disappointment for readers looking for an in-depth account of the history and socioeconomic aspects of the Indian Railways. Kumar rarely gets into the nitty-gritty of historical details, and chooses instead to zoom in on his own train journeys and those he knows as anecdotes — these he then skillfully zooms out from to present the mammoth enterprise as an everyday reality of Indian society across regions.

For the purpose of writing this book, Kumar undertook several train journeys over the course of a year, and the most interesting (and the one that takes up most space in the volume) is the three-day long Himsagar Express, which took him from Jammu to Kanyakumari. Even someone who was mildly curious about trains would have wondered what the experience of taking this train would be like: The fantastical dream of covering the length of India by train, encountering people one would normally not meet otherwise, and more.