Engines of Change: The Railroads That Made India

by Ian J. Kerr

The former Jewel in the Crown of the British Empire, India remains, by any measure, a major economic and political actor on the world scene. Without her extensive railway network―completed against all odds by her British colonial masters―it is impossible to imagine what might have become of the diverse lands and peoples of the subcontinent. These railway networks brought them together as a colony; these networks fostered the nationalism that would be Britain's downfall. This rail network both remade the physical landscape and brought social-cultural cohesion to a diverse and wide-ranging populace. It would be common rail travel that Gandhi would employ to reach the masses. From its romantic mystique to its dangerous reality, it is rail travel today that keeps vital social, cultural, economic and political forces moving.

India's railroad history serves as a unique lens to her larger story of triumph over adversity. By 1905, India had the world's fourth largest railway network―a position it retains in the early 21st century. The railroads were at the organizational and technological center of many of the inter-related economic, political, social, cultural, and ecological transformations that produced modern India through, and out of, its colonial past. In addition to this vast technical achievement, and (in keeping with the series focus), there is an equally important and wide-sweeping human-interest tale to be told with evocative vignettes of the triumph of the human spirit (one billion strong!) in the face of great adversity.

Genres: India

224 pages, Hardcover

First published December 30, 2006

About the author

A specialist in the history of India's railways, Ian J. Kerr was formerly Professor of History and Senior Scholar in the Department of History at the University of Manitoba.

Reviews

[Shreedhar Manek]

Informative.

[Sricharan AR · Rating 3 out of 5]

There was opposition of one tribe, the Sultan Khel, to the construction of the line, but their participation in the construction was obtained when an executive engineer suggested to them the loaded trains climbing steep gradients would move slowly and could be easily looted. “Build the railways and loot the trains” became the basis upon which the Sultan Khel’s cooperation was achieved.

A story recounted by a railway engineer in India in the 1870s evocatively captures Indian insistence on the use of Indian ways of working:

It has been often attempted to introduce the wheelbarrow mode of work, but with little success. The basket of antiquity—probably antediluvian— still holds its own. I have heard of an instance of an enthusiast in wheelbarrows who, having exhausted his morning energy in the fond endeavor to restrain a gang of coolies from using the objectionable basket, had the mortification, on making his evening tour of inspection, to find them carrying the wheelbarrows on their heads, in the belief that it was only a convenient modification of the principle.

[Amar Nawkar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book while I was travelling on the sub urban trains of Mumbai and was impressed with the way the book connected me to my daily commute , earlier expeditions in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. I feel the greatest strength of the book lies in the way Author quotes references and connects the dots from different historical records. This is what good historians do, don't they?

Best one,
Recommended