Abstract
The railways in India drew considerable attention from two of the most influential thinkers of modern times, Karl Marx and Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1850s, Marx was a distant but passionate observer of the emergence of the railways in India and he was convinced that the new transport system would prepare the ground for a bourgeois civilization, precursor to socialist revolution. Apparently informed by the nineteenth-century spirit of ‘improvement’, Marx linked the railways to industrialization, communication and formative intercourse between the inhabitants of disparate villages, communities and castes across India. He also envisioned that the railways would lower the intensity of famine by mitigating the problem of means of exchange; and that the digging of tanks or borrow-pits for embanking the railways would lead to the creation of an extensive irrigation system which would contribute to agricultural development.1 About half a century later, Mahatma Gandhi took a completely different view. He not only denounced the railway for its role in promoting British imperial penetration in India, but he also blamed it for the transmission of plague and the bringing of famine by draining lands that would otherwise have been cultivated in the hinterland of India. Gandhi also complained that the sanctity of holy places — whose inaccessibility had meant that they were visited only by real devotees prepared to endure difficult journeys -had been lost as a result of easy railway transportation and visits by ‘rogues’.2
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Notes
Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, reprinted in Ian J. Kerr (ed.), Themes in Indian History. Railways in Modern India (Oxford, 2001), pp. 62–7.
M.K. Gandhi, ‘The Condition of India: Railways’, reprinted in Kerr, Railways in Modern India, pp. 77–80; see also David Arnold, Science, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India (Cambridge, 1987), p. 127.
Hena Mukherjee, The Early History of the East Indian Railway 1845–1879 (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1994); Mukul Mukherjhee, ‘Railways and their Impact on Bengal’s Economy: 1870–1920’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 17(2) (1980): 191–209; I.D. Derbyshire, ‘Economic Change and the Railways in North India, 1860–1914’, Modern Asian Studies 21(3) (1987): 521–45; Daniel Thorner, ‘Capital Movement and Transportation: Great Britain and the Development of India’s Railways’, Journal of Economic History, 11(4) (1951): 89–402.
Ravi Ahuja, ‘“The Bridge-Builders”: Some Notes on Railways, Pilgrimage and the British “Civilizing Mission” in India’, in Harald Fischer-Tine and Michael Mann (eds), Colonialism as Civilizing Mission: Cultural Ideology in British India (London, 2004), pp. 95–115. For an interesting study of the place of railways within the discourse of modernity and the national imagination and practice, see Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self (New York, 2007).
Ira Klein, ‘Malaria and Mortality in Bengal 1840–1921’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, 9(2) (1972): 132–60.
‘Railways in India. Bengal’, The Colonial Magazine & East India Review, 16(65) (1849): 349–50; An Old Indian Postmaster, Indian Railways; As Connected with the Power and Stability of the British Empire in the East etc. (London, 1846); J.P. Kennedy, A Railway Caution! Or Exposition of Changes Required in the Law & Practice of the British Empire etc. (Calcutta, 1849).
Transit, A Letter to the Shareholders of the East Indian Railway and to the Commercial Capitalists of England and India (London, 1848), p. 8.
K.G. Mitchell and L.H. Kirkness, Report on the Present State of Road and Railways Competition and the Possibilities of their Future Co-ordination and Development, and Cognate Matters, in Governors Provinces (Calcutta, 1933), p. 6. The Bengal and Assam Railway comprised 3485 miles on 31 March 1945. See M.B.K. Malik, Hundred Years of Pakistan Railways (Karachi, 1962), p. 18.
A Sketch of Eastern Bengal with Reference to its Railways and Government Control (Calcutta, 1861), pp. 13, 21–2, 49.
O.C. Lees, Waterways in Bengal: Their Economic Value and the Methods Employed for Their Improvement (Calcutta, 1906), p. 9.
For details of the arguments and counter-arguments, see R. Cort, The Anti-Rail-Road Journal; or, Rail-Road Impositions Detected (London, 1835).
Act V of 1864 (The Bengal Canal Act, clauses 3–4) thus reads: ‘It shall be lawful for the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal … to authorize … to make and open any navigable channels, or to clear and deepen any navigable channel and to stop any nagivable channel … no action or suit shall be brought against the State in respect to any injuries or damage caused by or resulting from any act done.’ Quoted in B.B. Mitra, Laws of Land and Water in Bengal and Bihar (Calcutta, 1934), p. 250.
S. Finney, Railway Construction in Bengal. Three Lectures Delivered at the Sibpur Engineering College in January–February 1896 (Calcutta, 1896), p. 5.
H.W. Joyce, Five Lectures on Indian Railway Construction and One Lecture in Management Control (Calcutta, 1905), p. 20.
Joyce, Five Lectures, pp. 59–60. For a note on the colonial engineers as ‘the handmaidens of capitalist enterprise, charged with turning profit from water’, see William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire (Oxford, 2007), p. 147.
The Times, 13 October 1922, p. 11. For the first major account of the impact of railway embankments on the water system and agriculture in Bengal, see C.A. Bentley, Malaria and Agriculture in Bengal. How to Reduce Malaria in Bengal by Irrigation (Calcutta, 1925).
Some geologists suggest that Chalan beel is an abandoned bed of the river Ganga (Padma). See, Bisheswar Bhattacharya, ‘Bange Ganga’ [The Ganga in Bengal], Bangabani, 3(2) (1331 BS, AD 1925): 171.
M. Abu Hanif Sheikh et al., Chalan Beel Anchaler Nadimalar Shankyatattik Bissleshon [Statistical analysis of the rivers of the Chalan Beel], Institute of Bangladesh Studies Journal, 7(1) (1406 BS, AD 2000): 125, 129.
W.H. Nelson, Final Report on the Survey and Settlement Operation in the District of Rajshahi, 1912–1922 (Calcutta, 1923), p. 8.
Kiran Chandra De, Report on the Fisheries of Eastern Bengal and Assam (Shillong, 1910), p. 71.
C. Addams-Williams, Notes on the Lectures of Sir William Willcocks on the Irrigation in Bengal Together With a Reply by Sir William Willcocks (Calcutta, 1931), p. 10.
This narrative of the construction of the Hardinge Bridge is heavily drawn from Hooghly to the Himalayas. Being An Illustrated Handbook to the Chief Places of Interest Reached by the Eastern Bengal State Railway (Bombay, 1913), pp. 25–6.
Seith Drucquer, ‘On the Rivers in East Bengal’, Geographical Magazine 12(5) (March 1941): 352.
H.S.M. Ishaque, Agricultural Statistics by Plot to Plot Enumeration in Bengal 1944 and 1945 (part II, Alipore, 1947), pp. 8–9.
For a discussion of the elite and middle-class approval of the railways, see Iftekhar Iqbal, ‘The Railway in Colonial India: Between Ideas and Impacts’, in Roopa Srinivasan et al. (eds), Our Indian Railway: Themes in India’s Railway History (Delhi, 2006), pp. 175, 180–3.
Report on the Embankments of the Rivers of Bengal (Calcutta, 1846), pp. 1–4.
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Iqbal, I. (2010). The Railways and the Water Regime. In: The Bengal Delta. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289819_6
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