“Those Two Thin Strips of Iron”: The Uncanny Mobilities of Railways in British India

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] In memory of my father, Sushil Kumar Bhattacharya (1922-2006), who polished the wheels of the railways of the Raj when he was a boy, and took me adventuring on third-class train trips when I was a little; and of my mother, Gitanjali Bhattacharya (1929-2013), who roundly scolded us when we returned filthy and exhausted from our travels.

[2] Throughout this paper, I use the contested term “native” to draw attention to the homogenizing and disdainful European attitudes towards the colonized peoples of India.

[3] Modernity is a notoriously elusive term, with a considerable body of scholarship on the subject. I intend only to establish a workable sense of how I reference the term in this paper. For a readable summary of theories of modernity, see Miles Ogborn. See Rita Felski for analysis of the gendered dimensions of theories of modernity. For an important challenge to the conventional Eurocentric framing of “modernity” through the concept of “alternative modernities,” see Dipesh Chakrabarty.

[4] As I have argued elsewhere regarding the complicated masculinity of the “Babu,” literary uses of the uncanny are especially suited to representations of the irreconcilable tensions of colonial hybridity, which require the assimilation of the alien within the self (Bhattacharya n. pag.).

[5] For a detailed analysis of how railways ushered in new ways of thinking of the psychic costs of accelerated physical and social change, see Jill Matus.

[6] The passage appears in a letter to John Carlyle, dated September 13, 1839, reproduced in Froude. Carlyle was travelling back to London from Scotland.

[7] See Michael Freeman's cultural history of railways in Britain for more on Victorian fears about the railways’ destructive influence on natural and traditional ways of life (27-56).

[8] The first railway tracks in India were constructed in 1853, from Bombay (Mumbai) to Thane (Thana), a distance of twenty-one miles. By 1901, there were 24,185 miles of operational tracks (Kerr, Engines of Change 6-16). For an ethnographic study of how railways developed, see Bear.

[9] The unanticipated influx of Indian passenger traffic and onlookers at railway stations precipitated concerns about crowd control (Goswami 109). Bear argues that concerns about native crowds at railway stations pointed up the “paradoxical dual face” of the Raj as both “a liberal ‘reforming’ agency and a military occupation” (37).

[10] For more on the historical conditions of third-class railway travel in colonial India, see Ritika Prasad (23-57).

[11] Edwin Arnold, The Marquis of Dalhousie's Administration of British India. Vol. 2 London: Saunders, Ottley, 1865.

[12] By the end of the century, nationalists were denouncing railways as part of the colonial exploitation that drained wealth and resources from India to Britain. Indians were also outraged by the conditions of travel for native travelers and the development of an over-zealous railway bureaucracy. Nevertheless, many elite Indians perceived railways as the technological premise of a modern, independent future free of colonial control (Aguiar 50-72).

[13] The accounts were first published in Macmillan's Magazine in 1863 as a series of “letters home” by a Henry Broughton to his friend, Charles Simkins. The letters were subsequently edited for an anthology in 1866.

[14] Arrian, a second-century A.D. Roman philosopher of Greek origin, wrote Indica, a book ostensibly about Alexander's campaign in the Indus, but with exaggerated commentary on Indian customs, manners, and geography. The classical allusion highlights Trevelyan's sense of the temporal gap between the Indian hinterland and the modern European perspective that views these scenes with alienation.

[15] For more on the evolving attitudes of the colonial administration's regarding railway security, see Bear (21-34).

[16] Albert Pionke offers a detailed argument on how the story shows profound ambivalence about the imperial mission by emphasizing that colonial forms of knowledge and communication can never fully comprehend India.

[17] Buchanan coined the phrase “hooligan imperialism” in a scathing review that contrasts Kipling's disreputable, pragmatic, and free-wheeling characters with more idealistic notions of empire builders who dedicated themselves to the civilizing mission (776).

[18] The Oxford English Dictionary defines this usage of the Anglo-Indian term “pukka” as connoting authenticity and proper, correct, or socially acceptable conduct.

[19] The story was first published in 1893 in the Christmas issue of Illustrated London News and anthologized in The Day's Work (1898).

[20] Other postcolonial interpretations of the story are in the same vein as Prakash's reading. Benita Parry, for instance, finds that the story “whole-heartedly applauds that passage through which the British donate and the Indians receive technological progress” despite this dynamic being “momentarily traversed by the British engineer's opium-induced vision of the gods in conclave” (60). However, as I have tried to show, such postcolonial readings do not fully account for the narrative aporia that casts doubt on Findlayson's perspective.

[21] Marian Aguiar argues that this unlikely pairing is Steel's representation of the oppositional relationship between the “colonial technological order and the differentiated India that was inherent to its narrative” (46).