No Indian Railway = No India?

 Imagining the Nation

In the mid-1880s the Indian political figure Madhav Rao (successively diwan of the princely states of Travancore, 1858-1872, Indore, 1873-1875, and Baroda), exclaimed: "What a glorious change the railway has made to old and long neglected India." He asserted that "if India is to become a homogeneous nation, and is ever to achieve solidarity, it must be by means of Railways as a means of transport, and by means of the English language as a medium of communication". Roughly a century later in the 1980s, the late Madhavrao Scindia, then Minister of State for Railways, wrote: "Apart from indicating the milestones of its progress from Bori Bunder to the Metro Railway at Calcutta, from a colonial instrument to being a major artery of national life today, the history of our Railways will also depict the romantic story of our national striving for economic self-sufficiency, and the birth and growth of modern India". More recently, the homepage of Indian Railways' Internet site proclaimed proudly that "IR" brought people together.

What Madhav Rao believed was happening, Madhavrao a century later accepted as a fait accompli, and the powerful techno-bureaucrats of IR happily embraced in their never-ending struggle to justify IR's claim to a substantial share of the national budget. The railways, India's pre-eminent form of mass transportation, had contributed significantly to the creation and integration of the Indian nation. This is a claim, suitably qualified and nuanced, that finds support among more scholarly writers, and which is sympathetically endorsed here. Indeed, some historians have argued that without the development of a large network of railways, there would have been no India as we know it; in effect, no railways, no India. Perhaps so, or perhaps the assertion is misleading since the making of modern India would have unfolded very differently in the absence of railways, though it still would have unfolded.