Railsong

by Rahul Bhattacharya

A breathtaking novel about 
a woman forging a life for herself on the railways, Railsong is the story of an individual coming of age amid the social and political upheavals of twentieth-century India.

In a newly independent India charged with national vigor, Charu, the motherless daughter of a railway worker, pines for freedom from the shackles of her impoverishment and meagre prospects. As diesel engines replace steam and the calamitous churn of drought, famine and a great strike engulfs her town, Charu dares to imagine a different future for herself. She boards a train and flees westwards, leaving behind the oppressive domesticity of her childhood for the alluring modernity, and apparent opportunities, of Bombay.

Unfazed by the everyday discriminations around her, she becomes an unlikely hero:
a railway woman and census enumerator who keeps her heart open—sometimes guilelessly—to her nation’s vast possibility. Sweeping, elegiac and at times wonderfully comic, Railsong is a powerful portrait of grit, optimism and the force of character that enables one remarkable woman to live on her own terms in a country full of contradictions.

Genres: Fiction, India

416 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication February 17, 2026

About the author

Rahul Bhattacharya is a writer, journalist and editor. His first novel, The Sly Company of People Who Care, won the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. Pundits from Pakistan, his first book, was a Wisden Cricketer top ten cricket book of all time. He was born in Bombay and lives in Delhi with his wife and two daughters.

Reviews

[Sayari Debnath · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll never forget Charu Chitol.

[Parvathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember loving The Sly Company Of People Who Care, and I remember feeling that there was something special about that young writer. It took Bhattacharya thirteen years to write another book...and I was lucky enough this time to get an autographed copy, courtesy a friend.
This one is a very different novel. But it is special too, in its own way. It is not everyday that a man writes convincingly from a woman's point of view. But Charulata Chitol, as the heart of this book, is lovely. She grows up in a fictional railway town, daughter of a Bihari mother and a Bengali father, who in the idealism of the India of the fifties and sixties, decides to give up his high caste surname for the indeterminate one of Chitol. That idealism stays with Charu through her life, as she runs away to Bombay looking for freedom and independence, as she encounters the bureaucracy of a railway job, as she tries to work through the complications of an inter-state marriage. Through her life we see the life of a nation, as Bhattacharya weaves in, ever so subtly, the events that shaped India in the latter half of the twentieth century. And also through her life, we see the change in women - as they begin to work outside their homes, negotiating an autonomy society is loathe to grant them. But the magical core of the book is the Indian Railways - its ordinary employees, the clerks and the sweepers and the station masters and the ticket inspectors. Charu, as she travels the trains as a welfare officer, meets them all and sees in them the complex richness that is India. Bhattacharya writes a love song to this behemoth - as it chugs along, inspite of all its problems, carrying a billion Indians across the land, irrespective of their caste or religion or language.
I don't know if I loved this as much as I loved The Sly Company, but Bhattacharya tells a good tale, slow-moving in parts, but heart-warming and rewarding as a whole.
A recommend.

[Natasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

As slow-moving as the titular trains winding through the book, with little of the promised song. Although Charu was an interesting and complex character, her mundane adventures and the ponderous writing style that relayed them failed to engage.

[Jenn]

DNF. This just isn't working for me. I'm bored.

[Muskan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it twice, a quick read through the second time. But Charulata Chitol is a heroine in the truest sense of the word.

Although it’s a 4.5 for me because as beautiful as the story is, the awkward clunkyness of the prose in some parts really starts getting to you.

[Radhika Ayalur · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’ve journeyed into the new year with Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong… with Charulata Chitol’s adventures and astonishing range of musings for company.
I have followed her from a sleepy railway township in eastern India where she grew up with her brothers. And I’m sitting with her in a concert hall in faraway, deliriously liberating Bombay where she is about to meet the man she may possibly spend her life with.
At that point, she is waiting… for life to get going. A wait that is filled with new adventures and old grievances, could-be boyfriends and nosy colleagues… a wait in which she feels she is on the threshold of something… but what?
And then she realises that the wait is the real deal.
“Without the wait, everything is hollow. Without meaning. Why must I resist the waiting? The journeys we navigate everyday failing to recognise the exquisite. … the sadness, the richness, the pleasure of the waiting and the wandering… we forfeit all for the mundane”

And so she waits: for trains, for buses and bullock carts, for the decisions that must surmount red tape and optics, for her family to come to terms with her choices.

I liked the way the events in independent India’s history and the span of its geography are woven into Charu’s story. I loved the way her story shifts gears once she arrives at Bombay, her absorbing of the sights, sounds, smells and tics. And her intense desire to “belong” to this chaotically endearing city.

I’m gobsmacked at the amount of research it must have taken to chronicle a railway employee’s life and fieldwork in such rich detail.

At the close of the last chapter (which hangs at a critical date), Charu is “vividly sentimental and sensationally alive.”
As I close the book, I can say much the same for myself.

[Nirbhay Kanoria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rahul Bhattacharya's Railsong is an ambitious and dizzying novel that succeeds in what it sets out to tell - the story of Charulata, a.k.a., Charu, Chitol.

Born to a humanist (and equally important, Indian railway employee) father, who trades in his high-caste last name for an invented and uncategorisable Chitol, Charu's story begins in Colonial India and ends after the demolition of the Babri Masjid.

As the railways criss-cross and connect India, Charu too travels, physically and metaphorcally, in a time when few women would dream of leading a life that was not laid out for them by their fathers or husbands. She marries outside her community, takes up unconventional jobs, and lives life on her terms.

All the praise being heaped on this book isn't enough. It's an excellent and moving read.

[Ruchi Patel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is a beautifully crafted tapestry of personal longing, political undercurrents, and the quiet revolutions that take place inside ordinary lives. Rooted in social history and alive with the spirit of change, the book follows its protagonist through the rhythms of everyday existence—railway journeys, domestic moments, inner conflicts—and turns them into something luminous and memorable.

What stands out most is the lyrical quality of the prose. The writing is gentle yet powerful, full of emotional intelligence and an unhurried depth that lets you settle into the character’s world. The narrative moves with a subtle elegance, blurring the line between the personal and the political—echoing a time when freedom, identity, and the longing for more shaped the texture of daily life.

There’s a quiet courage in the storytelling. Instead of relying on dramatic twists, the author explores the profound in the ordinary—capturing the tenderness, humour, and tragedies that unfold over days and years. The result is a novel that feels both intimate and expansive, one that honours the weight of history while never losing sight of the human heart at its centre.

A deeply evocative, gorgeously written book—perfect for readers who love character-driven stories, poetic writing, and narratives grounded in real social landscapes.

[Rohini Raman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nostalgic, quietly powerful, empathetic, and richly detailed. The journey of Charu set against the backdrop of Indian Railways and the various socio-political situations overlapping with themes of gender, identity, caste and relationships is magnificent.

The lyrical prose and the winding sentences combined with grit, wit and dry humor are a testament to the author's writing skills.

What a pick for the book club!