What do you think?
Rate this book
THE SOCIAL LIFE OF INDIAN TRAINS: A Journey
The history of Indian trains is older than India itself. For over 150 years, the train has been part of the lives of most Indians. Today, Indian Railways transports hundreds of crores of passengers, about five times the current population of India. And, the railway lines that criss-cross the country, and are even longer than our majestic rivers, bind the landscape into a whole and give it a sense of a nation.
To explore just how trains in India have seeped into the national psyche, and to explore the gigantic enterprise that is Indian Railways, acclaimed writer Amitava Kumar took several journeys on some of the country’s celebrated trains, from the Himsagar Express, which traverses one of the world’s longest rail routes, a distance of 2,335 miles, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, to the legendary Darjeeling mountain railway that has been praised in movies, literature, and songs. He then goes into the history of Indian trains, extols the magic of train travel, and explains how the importance of the railways will only grow as more and more Indians use a variety of trains to travel out of (and between) their villages, home towns, and cities to various destinations in pursuit of work and leisure activities
To explore just how trains in India have seeped into the national psyche, and to explore the gigantic enterprise that is Indian Railways, acclaimed writer Amitava Kumar took several journeys on some of the country’s celebrated trains, from the Himsagar Express, which traverses one of the world’s longest rail routes, a distance of 2,335 miles, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, to the legendary Darjeeling mountain railway that has been praised in movies, literature, and songs. He then goes into the history of Indian trains, extols the magic of train travel, and explains how the importance of the railways will only grow as more and more Indians use a variety of trains to travel out of (and between) their villages, home towns, and cities to various destinations in pursuit of work and leisure activities
Kindle Edition
Published January 16, 2026
3 people are currently reading
31 people want to read
About the author
Amitava Kumar
40 books167 followersAmitava Kumar is a novelist, poet, journalist, and Professor of English at Vassar College. He was born in Bihar, India; he grew up in the town of Patna, famous for its corruption, crushing poverty, and delicious mangoes.
He is the author of Nobody Does the Right Thing; A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb; Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate, a New York Times “Editors’ Choice” selection; Bombay—London—New York, a New Statesman (UK) “Book of the Year” selection; and Passport Photos. He is the editor of several books, including Away: The Indian Writer as an Expatriate, The Humour and the Pity: Essays on V. S. Naipaul, and World Bank Literature. He is also an editor of the online journal Politics and Culture and the screenwriter and narrator of the prize-winning documentary film Pure Chutney.
Kumar’s writing has appeared in The Nation, Harper’s, Vanity Fair, The American Prospect, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Hindu, and other publications in North America and India.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
Review of advance copy
The book doesn't justify the title. A lot more can, and should, be written
December 8, 2025
Amitava Kumar has increasingly become one of my favourite authors, and in this short treatise writes about something that has been part of my childhood (since I am a Railway Kid). A longish essay, a good view of the veins that cover India, however I wished there was more of the journey in itself than a commentary on trains.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
In India, the train is never just a mode of transport. It is memory, migration, class divide, chance encounter, and quiet companionship compressed into steel compartments and rattling tracks. "The Social Life of Indian Trains" by Amitava Kumar understands this instinctively. Rather than offering a celebratory coffee-table history of Indian Railways, he gives us something more intimate and far more unsettling, a social portrait of a country constantly in transit, carrying its contradictions along with its luggage.
This is a book written not from observation towers or official archives alone, but from lower berths, unreserved compartments, station platforms, and long silences shared with strangers. The author's India is not stitched together by timetables; it is held together by conversations, prejudices, memories, and aspirations exchanged between departure and destination.
One of the book’s most compelling thematic achievements is its insistence on reading trains as social spaces. He approaches the railway carriage the way a sociologist might approach a village square or a city bus stop. Class hierarchies, linguistic divisions, caste anxieties, political opinions, and generational fears are all present, often more nakedly, inside a train compartment than in polite public discourse.
The journey aboard the Himsagar Express, stretching from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, becomes the book’s emotional spine. This is not just a geographic crossing of India, but a slow immersion into its uneven realities. He listens more than he speaks. Migrant workers, fellow passengers, ticket collectors, and elderly couples are not treated as colourful side characters; they are the text itself.
The author's historical engagement is deliberately restrained. He reminds us that Indian Railways predates Indian nationhood and was never a benevolent gift. The British rail project was as much about extraction, control, and administrative convenience as it was about connection. The brief but powerful invocation of Mahatma Gandhi, thrown out of a first-class carriage in South Africa, serves as a reminder that trains have always mirrored power structures rather than dissolved them.
What stands out is the author's refusal to romanticise the past or blindly celebrate the present. He acknowledges the railways’ unifying symbolism while also documenting declining services, rising fares, and the creeping corporatisation of what was once imagined as a public commons. This tension, between nostalgia and realism, runs quietly but persistently through the book.
✍️ Strengths :
🔸Trains function as metaphors for migration, aspiration, exclusion, and continuity without ever becoming forced symbols.
🔸Passengers are presented with dignity, complexity, and contradiction, not as sociological specimens.
🔸The book does not shy away from contemporary anxieties, polarisation, rhetoric, and economic pressure, filtering them through everyday conversations.
🔸The author's prose is precise, patient, and quietly evocative, allowing ordinary details to accumulate meaning.
🔸The five-section division gives the book rhythm, preventing the travelogue from becoming meandering.
✒️ Areas for Improvement :
▪️Some sections feel more observational than immersive, creating moments of emotional distance.
▪️While geographically expansive, certain regions feel like brief encounters rather than fully inhabited spaces.
▪️Shifts between history, travel, and political reflection occasionally feel abrupt rather than organically braided.
In conclusion, this is not a book you rush through. It invites slow reading, much like a long train journey invites reflection between halts. The author gives us Indian Railways not as spectacle, but as lived reality, imperfect, noisy, intimate, and indispensable. When you finish the book, you do not simply close the last page; you carry with you the urge to watch more closely, listen more carefully, and perhaps board a train with nothing but time, a notebook, and an openness to being changed.
This is a book written not from observation towers or official archives alone, but from lower berths, unreserved compartments, station platforms, and long silences shared with strangers. The author's India is not stitched together by timetables; it is held together by conversations, prejudices, memories, and aspirations exchanged between departure and destination.
One of the book’s most compelling thematic achievements is its insistence on reading trains as social spaces. He approaches the railway carriage the way a sociologist might approach a village square or a city bus stop. Class hierarchies, linguistic divisions, caste anxieties, political opinions, and generational fears are all present, often more nakedly, inside a train compartment than in polite public discourse.
The journey aboard the Himsagar Express, stretching from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, becomes the book’s emotional spine. This is not just a geographic crossing of India, but a slow immersion into its uneven realities. He listens more than he speaks. Migrant workers, fellow passengers, ticket collectors, and elderly couples are not treated as colourful side characters; they are the text itself.
The author's historical engagement is deliberately restrained. He reminds us that Indian Railways predates Indian nationhood and was never a benevolent gift. The British rail project was as much about extraction, control, and administrative convenience as it was about connection. The brief but powerful invocation of Mahatma Gandhi, thrown out of a first-class carriage in South Africa, serves as a reminder that trains have always mirrored power structures rather than dissolved them.
What stands out is the author's refusal to romanticise the past or blindly celebrate the present. He acknowledges the railways’ unifying symbolism while also documenting declining services, rising fares, and the creeping corporatisation of what was once imagined as a public commons. This tension, between nostalgia and realism, runs quietly but persistently through the book.
✍️ Strengths :
🔸Trains function as metaphors for migration, aspiration, exclusion, and continuity without ever becoming forced symbols.
🔸Passengers are presented with dignity, complexity, and contradiction, not as sociological specimens.
🔸The book does not shy away from contemporary anxieties, polarisation, rhetoric, and economic pressure, filtering them through everyday conversations.
🔸The author's prose is precise, patient, and quietly evocative, allowing ordinary details to accumulate meaning.
🔸The five-section division gives the book rhythm, preventing the travelogue from becoming meandering.
✒️ Areas for Improvement :
▪️Some sections feel more observational than immersive, creating moments of emotional distance.
▪️While geographically expansive, certain regions feel like brief encounters rather than fully inhabited spaces.
▪️Shifts between history, travel, and political reflection occasionally feel abrupt rather than organically braided.
In conclusion, this is not a book you rush through. It invites slow reading, much like a long train journey invites reflection between halts. The author gives us Indian Railways not as spectacle, but as lived reality, imperfect, noisy, intimate, and indispensable. When you finish the book, you do not simply close the last page; you carry with you the urge to watch more closely, listen more carefully, and perhaps board a train with nothing but time, a notebook, and an openness to being changed.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Indian trains are loud, crowded, stubbornly alive. They smell of steel and sweat and fried snacks wrapped in old newspapers. They carry gossip, grief, ambition and boredom. So when a book calls itself The Social Life of Indian Trains, you expect something roomy. Something that stretches. Amitava Kumar’s book, unfortunately, doesn’t. What it offers instead is a neatly packed travel diary, pleasant enough in parts, reflective in others. The trains are there, yes. So are memories, references to films and books and a handful of statistics dropped in like ballast to steady the narrative. But the promised “social life” never quite shows up. Not in any sustained or nuanced way.
Much of what’s here already circulates freely on Instagram reels and nostalgia threads. Trains as unhygienic spaces occupied by unruly crowds, as witnesses to nation-shaping incidents, as metaphors for the widening chasm between duty and desire. And for a book that gestures toward history, sociology and political critique, this feels like a low bar.
Meanwhile, the everyday brutality continues, which is addressed well in the book. What makes the book especially frustrating is not that it criticises India, but that it shrinks it. India becomes grievance without grace, suffering without texture. The cultural beauty, the regional stubbornness, the small solidarities that survive despite everything. These barely register. And trains, of all things, deserve better than being reduced to backdrops for personal frustration and political disappointment.
There must be sharper, deeper, more generous books on Indian railways that treat trains as systems shaped by people who live inside them, clean them, dirty them, depend on them. This one feels limited. Not offensive. Not useless. Just smaller than it thinks it is. And for a subject that spans the country, smaller is not enough.
Much of what’s here already circulates freely on Instagram reels and nostalgia threads. Trains as unhygienic spaces occupied by unruly crowds, as witnesses to nation-shaping incidents, as metaphors for the widening chasm between duty and desire. And for a book that gestures toward history, sociology and political critique, this feels like a low bar.
Meanwhile, the everyday brutality continues, which is addressed well in the book. What makes the book especially frustrating is not that it criticises India, but that it shrinks it. India becomes grievance without grace, suffering without texture. The cultural beauty, the regional stubbornness, the small solidarities that survive despite everything. These barely register. And trains, of all things, deserve better than being reduced to backdrops for personal frustration and political disappointment.
There must be sharper, deeper, more generous books on Indian railways that treat trains as systems shaped by people who live inside them, clean them, dirty them, depend on them. This one feels limited. Not offensive. Not useless. Just smaller than it thinks it is. And for a subject that spans the country, smaller is not enough.
February 2, 2026
Since my dad worked in the railways, I've always believed that Indian trains remember us better than we remember them. Going back to the thought while reading The Social Life of Indian Trains, it was like reverting to the usual, but with more attention. Definitely, not nostalgia attention. Amitava Kumar has no thesis to bring along. He comes along as a passenger. As a waiting, watching, listening, and avert-and-then-again-looking individual.
.
The volume comes in shards, like snapshots, memories, and short essays, just as the train travels, where nothing is fully embarked and dis-embarked. You bring the previous journey along on the one you are in, whether you like it or not.
What lingered with me was the way the book treats issues of inequality with such subtlety,Shah went on. It is a matter of what is stated, versus what is shown through actions. Who does or does not take up space. Who does or does not apologize for occupying space. Who does or does not sleep with their space left alone. Caste and class are mentioned, Shah continued, “They are not mentioned.
.
They are experienced.
In this collection, there is an element of integrity in the way in which humans appear. People are not relegated to symbolism. People are not stripped of emotion. Faces come and go, as in life, with only impressions remaining. The collection is aware of the fact that not all life we meet has to be our story.
I also appreciated what the book refuses to do. It does not romanticise trains, nor does it turn them into a national metaphor. Trains here are tiring, crowded, intimate, awkward, necessary. They demand adjustment of bodies, tempers, expectations. In that sense, they resemble living in India itself.
.
The volume comes in shards, like snapshots, memories, and short essays, just as the train travels, where nothing is fully embarked and dis-embarked. You bring the previous journey along on the one you are in, whether you like it or not.
What lingered with me was the way the book treats issues of inequality with such subtlety,Shah went on. It is a matter of what is stated, versus what is shown through actions. Who does or does not take up space. Who does or does not apologize for occupying space. Who does or does not sleep with their space left alone. Caste and class are mentioned, Shah continued, “They are not mentioned.
.
They are experienced.
In this collection, there is an element of integrity in the way in which humans appear. People are not relegated to symbolism. People are not stripped of emotion. Faces come and go, as in life, with only impressions remaining. The collection is aware of the fact that not all life we meet has to be our story.
I also appreciated what the book refuses to do. It does not romanticise trains, nor does it turn them into a national metaphor. Trains here are tiring, crowded, intimate, awkward, necessary. They demand adjustment of bodies, tempers, expectations. In that sense, they resemble living in India itself.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
In The Social Life of Indian Trains, Amitava Kumar turns a familiar mode of transport into a lens through which India itself can be read. This is not a conventional travelogue, nor is it a dry history of the railways. Instead, the book unfolds as a series of reflective journeys—physical, social, and cultural—where trains become moving microcosms of the nation.
Kumar’s strength lies in observation. Whether he is travelling on the Himsagar Express, stretching from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, or reflecting on the iconic Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, he is attentive to the people, conversations, silences, and contradictions that fill these compartments. Trains here are not merely vehicles; they are spaces where class, language, memory, migration, and aspiration collide. The writing is meditative, often lyrical, and rooted in lived experience rather than grand theorising.
Read the full review here: https://www.aliveshadow.com/category-...
Kumar’s strength lies in observation. Whether he is travelling on the Himsagar Express, stretching from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, or reflecting on the iconic Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, he is attentive to the people, conversations, silences, and contradictions that fill these compartments. Trains here are not merely vehicles; they are spaces where class, language, memory, migration, and aspiration collide. The writing is meditative, often lyrical, and rooted in lived experience rather than grand theorising.
Read the full review here: https://www.aliveshadow.com/category-...
January 21, 2026
If I had to define this book in a single sentence I'd say - It felt like I was reading the personal diary of Amitava Kumar.
Filled with anecdotes of his experiences and memories of Indian trains, this book brought back so many memories. He took the toy train to Darjeeling with his parents when he was 5 and that little trip still holds a special place in his heart even half a century later.
We all have memories associated with Indian trains and a multitude of experiences varying from unhygienic environments to irreplaceable memories made in those compartments. This book made me think about all the unforgettable trips I have had with family and friends.
As we say, "Life is about the journey, not the destination," trains make those journeys long lasting and special.
The author talks about how strangers behave like a temporary family and shower you with little acts of kindness, and how a railway station becomes a haven for runaway children.
There are so many recommendations of books and movies, it became the highlight of the book for me.
Filled with anecdotes of his experiences and memories of Indian trains, this book brought back so many memories. He took the toy train to Darjeeling with his parents when he was 5 and that little trip still holds a special place in his heart even half a century later.
We all have memories associated with Indian trains and a multitude of experiences varying from unhygienic environments to irreplaceable memories made in those compartments. This book made me think about all the unforgettable trips I have had with family and friends.
As we say, "Life is about the journey, not the destination," trains make those journeys long lasting and special.
The author talks about how strangers behave like a temporary family and shower you with little acts of kindness, and how a railway station becomes a haven for runaway children.
There are so many recommendations of books and movies, it became the highlight of the book for me.
February 3, 2026
Don't waste your time & money on this book.
It is just a random collection of thoughts with a few sentences about train journeys thrown in.
Unfortunately the return window for the digital copy had closed, otherwise I wouldn't have had to even spend any time writing this review
It is just a random collection of thoughts with a few sentences about train journeys thrown in.
Unfortunately the return window for the digital copy had closed, otherwise I wouldn't have had to even spend any time writing this review
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews