Indian Railways: Glorious 150 Years by R. R. Bhandari; Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, New Delhi; 2005; 252 pages, Rs 250.
-----------------------------
When S. N. Sharma set about writing a book on the history of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, he could not but voice a lamentation on the absence of an authoritative source of reference he could draw upon. “While preparing the history of the G. I. P. Railway, I was amazed to find that there were hardly any books on this subject,” wrote Sharma in his preface. “The only book I could get was that of Frank J. Clark’s ‘The Great Indian Peninsula Railway, Under the Original Company’s Administration,” a 46 page book written in 1900. Thus, I had almost no secondary source of information...”
When S. N. Sharma set about writing a book on the history of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway, he could not but voice a lamentation on the absence of an authoritative source of reference he could draw upon. “While preparing the history of the G. I. P. Railway, I was amazed to find that there were hardly any books on this subject,” wrote Sharma in his preface. “The only book I could get was that of Frank J. Clark’s ‘The Great Indian Peninsula Railway, Under the Original Company’s Administration,” a 46 page book written in 1900. Thus, I had almost no secondary source of information...”
As late as
1984 when Sharma began work on his book, a person wishing to research the
railways of India had but two works to serve as a guideline. On its first
hundredth anniversary in 1953, the Railway Ministry came out with a book, the
first ever history of the railways of India, titled ‘Indian Railways—One
Hundred Years: 1853 – 1953’. This general work, authored by J. N. Sahni is
profusely illustrated with photographs and provides a fascinating overview of
the growth of the railways beginning with the first proposals to set up the
system, and moving on to various other themes such as locomotives and early
rolling stock, signaling, electrification and goods transportation. Sahni’s
work, although general in nature, has served as a haven of delight for well
over half a century for enthusiasts who have been lucky enough to lay their
hands on a copy, and contained enough detail to serve as a reference for many later works on the subject.
About two
decades later in 1975, a second history made an appearance. Titled “Indian
Railways”, and authored by M. A. Rao, this new work was put out by the National
Book Trust, India. Rao’s work won immediate approval. The author has written
his book in a reader friendly manner using a fresh slant of his own, and has
succeeded in creating an account that holds special appeal for the person who
wishes to explore history in some detail with no previous knowledge of the
railway and its working.
There
exists yet another approach that can be used for reconstructing the history of
an organization, and this is a method which manifests itself in the writing of
an author who works on the premise that the basic chronological developments,
already set forth in the works of others, would only serve to tire the reader
if recounted a second time, and therefore sets out to delve deeper beneath the
surface of events. When an approach of this kind forms the basis of research,
it becomes a work eminently suited to the needs of the serious scholar.
The late Shri
Ratan Bhandari’s work titled “Indian Railways: Glorious 150 Years” is a work
of this kind. Occupying a space of 252 pages and illustrated with both colour
and monochrome photographs, Bhandari has succeeded in endowing his work with a
quality that sets it apart as a history that takes a profound look at the past.
That the
author has chosen as the basis of his work a desire to explore what lies behind
the camouflage of unfolding events is at once observable in the opening few
pages of the book where the reader is treated to a little known controversy
over who, in fact, was the real originator of the scheme of a railway network
in India.
The first
proposal to have a system of railway lines in the country is generally
attributed to Sir Rowland Macdonald Stephenson, who in 1844 proposed six rail
routes strategically located so as to promote military and commercial interests
of the British. However, Captain Edward Davidson, Deputy Consulting Engineer
for Railways to the Government of Bengal, writing in 1868, challenged this
position when he asserted that the first proposals were in fact made nearly a
month in advance by Messrs. White and Borrett on behalf of the Great India
Railway Company.
The truth
of the matter is that proposals for laying a railway had been made from several
quarters; a report by the Court of Directors of the East India Company in 1846
listed no less than fifteen such projects. It was Lord Dalhousie who suggested
that it would be advantageous to entrust the construction of railways to
independent companies instead of the government’s own officers, using land
provided by the East India Company, and by 1862, a total of seven companies had
come into operation, namely, Great Indian Peninsula Railway, East Indian
Railway, Madras Railway, Bombay, Baroda and Central India Railway, The Sind,
Punjab and Delhi Railway, Great Southern of India Railway, and Eastern Bengal
Railway, with a total track mileage that seemed to grow phenomenally with each
passing year.
 |
| Shri Ratan Raj Bhandari, India's foremost railway historian. Picture courtesy of Shri Nikhil Bhandari |
The
subject of railway locomotives is covered in adequate detail in a later chapter
where we are told that the trendsetters in railway construction were the East
Indian Railway and the G. I. P. Railway companies. Vulcan Foundry, and Kitson, Thompson
& Hewitson of Leeds took the lead in supplying the earliest engines to
India. From here begins a remarkable tour acquainting the reader with various
non-standard designs, the setting up of the British Engineering Standards
Committee which went on to recommend in 1905 a total of seven classes to
replace the impossibly large number of locomotive designs that had come into
use till then, and various Indian Railway Standards designs as well as other
war-time and post-war locomotive designs.
On the
subject of rail travel, Bhandari’s work is understandably silent, for this is a
subject that is covered in adequate detail in various other works. In fact, the
reader who wishes to gain a fuller appreciation of the colonial nature of the
railways of India would do well to take a break after the first two chapters
and turn his attention to matters of a less involved nature telling about the
rail traveller’s experience in pre-partition India.
A great
deal has been written on the punctuality, speed, and impeccable service offered
on board the Frontier Mail and Deccan Queen, trains that went on to become
legends of their time. The English gentry traversing the hot Indian plains in a
luxurious first class carriage carrying along a pile of luggage and
telegraphing meal orders in advance at stations enroute is an all too familiar
picture. Fascinating as these accounts are, they present nonetheless a
one-sided view of the picture and tend to obscure the true nature of colonial
railways in India. The fact is that the great majority of rail travellers were
the natives of the country for whom third class was the only available mode of
travel, carrying none of the conveniences and refinements available to the
travelling English elite. Conditions for natives travelling by rail were gruesome
and appalling. The absence of toilets in trains meant that Indians relieving
themselves over the edge of the platform during a halt at a station had come to
be accepted as a part of railway culture. Added to this were overcrowding, dirt
and filth, lack of proper hygiene amongst the passengers themselves, corruption
and lack of courtesy among railway staff, and poor facilities in waiting rooms.
Mahatma Gandhi who had made third class his chosen mode of transport has left
in his autobiography a gruesome picture based on his travels across the
country; he would even go so far as to campaign against inhuman conditions on
the railway, but sadly with little success.
There was
thus a vast divide between conditions for the European rail traveller and the
native of India. While Bhandari’s work bypasses this issue altogether, it does
provide the reader a tantalizing glimpse into the reasons for this great
divide. The railway project in India was entirely a British enterprise,
constructed and run by the British to serve British interests. The prime motive
in bringing the railway to India was to facilitate the movements of troops, and
the transport of agricultural produce such as cotton, jute, wheat, sugarcane
and oilseeds from the interior of the country to the ports where they would be
shipped to England. The earliest railway companies were ‘guaranteed’ companies.
Under the old guarantee system, the British Indian Government entrusted the
construction and operation of railways to companies. Together with land for
construction offered free of cost, the government also offered the company the
guarantee of an interest, usually 5 percent of the capital raised. As the
interest was guaranteed, it measnt
that irrespective of whether the company made a profit or not, its investors
residing in Britain were assured of a 5 percent return on their investment. If
the company performed poorly, the shareholder had nothing to fear; his interest
would come from the Indian taxpayer’s pocket.
The old
guarantee system was introduced with the object of inducing British capitalists
to invest in the railway project in India. Every mill owner, every cotton
baron, every charlatan who could put together a few pounds now offered to
become a shareholder knowing that his profits were assured. With such an inflow
of capital, the companies were left with no incentive to observe economy in
construction and went ahead full steam pushing the railway deeper and deeper
into the heart of the country, spending outrageously large sums on their works,
while sadly paying no attention to the needs of the lower class traveller. This
is no mere conjecture. Mr. C. H. G. Jenkinson, Assistant Engineer of Western
Rajputana State Railway remarked in 1873 that, “.... the Indian Railways have on
an average cost enormous sums, out of all proportions to the wealth of the
country.... No one could have travelled far in this country by rail without
remarking the profuse liberality with which money has been spent, without the
minutest regard to the wants of the country, or indeed to the habits of the
natives....”
Such then
were the conditions in which the early railway companies thrived. It was an age
of massive construction, the laying of hundreds of miles of track across the
Indian plains, bridging mighty rivers, a time of continual planning and
execution of design, a time of constant debate within committees on various
matters. The author brings to life these formative years with astonishing
clarity and detail. He goes on to tell us about railway administration,
reorganization, and finance, supplementing his material with a large amount of
colonial correspondence carefully selected from heaps of old, crumbling files
in archives. From here onwards, the book makes easy reading, for we are treated
to the wonder of railway bridges, various forms of motive power, signaling,
hill railways, and production units.
The author
was an acclaimed expert in railway heritage; indeed, no worthwhile work on
history can ever be said to originate from the desk of a person who is not a
heritage enthusiast in the first place. Ratan Bhandari developed a taste for
the heritage trail under the tutelage of Mike Satow, the father of the railway
preservation movement in India. Mike had been touring India, often by private
plane, hunting up condemned old locomotives that would go on to grace the
museum in Delhi he had in mind, engines that would remind the world of the
timeless appeal of India’s steam age. His decisions were respected; his orders
carried out to the letter; for Satow, although an Englishman by birth, had been
appointed Honorary Heritage Advisor to the railways of India after a long and
successful career as the Managing Director of the Imperial Chemical Industries
in India.
It was
under the influence of Satow, then, that Bhandari grew to be a heritage buff.
“Mike Satow was my guru,” recalls Bhandari. And what a marvelous influence it was!
By the end of his career with the railways when he held the office of Member of
the Railway Board, Shri Bhandari had authored well over a dozen books, tracing
the growth of the railways since earliest times in nearly every nook and corner
of the country. His works stand as models of clarity and precision.
Railway
history is inextricably linked with rail heritage ; the one tells about the
past, the other is a remnant of the past. Bhandari’s preoccupation with rail
history was fired by an all-consuming desire to preserve India’s railway
heritage. His vision, as set out in one of the concluding chapters is
all-encompassing. In his view, rolling stock, locomotives and station buildings
form only an infinitesimal part of heritage. Of equal importance are bridges
and viaducts, railway towns, and locomotive sheds. Railway records and archival
material preserved in files are in a class by themselves, while smaller items
on the lines of train tickets and passes, builders’ plates and models should on
no account be thought of as insignificant. One can almost work backwards and
form a picture of the author’s conception of what constitutes railway heritage.
And if we are to accept his definition, heritage becomes the sum total of what
remains of a railway after its character has been altered under the effect of the
various changes brought about by time and changing technology ; heritage is the
sum total of the remnants of a railway, both large and small—remnants that
arouse nostalgia and serve as a pointer to the past.
The
heritage enthusiast may be found forever turning to the past. He soon finds
that relics from the past by themselves do not make much sense, and he soon
tires of them unless they are supplemented with information about the past.
Again, mere historical fact telling us about the past does not arouse our
interest unless we have concrete material telling us about what the men who
lived in those days were like. Bhandari was always the digger, and he dug
deeply. While at the Railway Staff College, Baroda, he dug deeply enough and
came up with a set of short biographies of the principal builders of the
railways in India. These were men with a background in engineering science holding key positions on company managed railways who were destined to employ their skills learned at home in a far away land. Several names stand out... Walter Home, E. R. Calthrop, Colonel J. P. Kennedy, Franklin Prestage.... Bhandari wrote a total of nine such biographies. But for him, no one would probably have even known of these
grand old men, pioneers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century who chose
to sail to a far off inhospitable land for the purpose of laying the railway
across the country.
Bhandari
possessed the gift of an eagerness to share with others what he had discovered
after long years of painstaking work. This book places in the hand of the
reader a vast amount of historical material. The writer’s thoroughness in
research makes itself evident in a level of rigor he has achieved that will
satisfy the deepest longings of the scholar who is straining to get a
behind-the-scenes look at the making of the great institution known as Indian
Railways.
NOTE: Read about Shri Bhandari's history of the Bengal Nagpur Railway at the following page:
http://railwaysofraj.blogspot.in/2011/08/number-1-down-mail.html
.....................................
 |
| This railway institute dating to 1916 is a fine example of rail heritage |
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Shri Ratan Raj Bhandari (1946—2012), India’s foremost railway historian, was born on 9 August 1946. Having graduated in Mechanical Engineering with a Gold Medal from MBM Engineering College in Jodhpur, Shri Bhandari first served for a period in the Bhilai Steel Plant in Madhya Pradesh, then in 1968, joined the Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineers. During his stay in the railways he held several top ranking positions: he served as Chief Mechanical Engineer of Southern Railway, Divisional Railway Manager, Vishakapatnam, later holding the chair of Director of Rail India Technical and Economic Services Limited. His career culminated in his appointment as General Manager of South Eastern Railway, Calcutta, after which he served a term as Member Mechanical of the Railway Board and ex-Officio Secretary, Ministry of Railways, Government of India, New Delhi. Following his retirement from railway service in 2006, Shri Bhandari settled in his hometown of Jodhpur where for a period he served as a Member of the Central Administrative Tribunal, Jodhpur.
Throughout his working life Shri Bhandari was driven by a passion for railway heritage, its documentation, and its preservation. There never will be a second Bhandari again; no one works that hard at rail heritage anymore. Despite his onerous responsibilities, he found time to pursue his fascination with ardour. Those who knew him spoke of him as a quiet, unassuming man with a keen interest in history. A true gentleman in every sense, he will be remembered by fans everywhere for the rich legacy he leaves behind in the form of a set of definitive works documenting in fine detail the growth of the railways in the Indian subcontinent.
Shri Ratan Raj Bhandari (1946—2012), India’s foremost railway historian, was born on 9 August 1946. Having graduated in Mechanical Engineering with a Gold Medal from MBM Engineering College in Jodhpur, Shri Bhandari first served for a period in the Bhilai Steel Plant in Madhya Pradesh, then in 1968, joined the Indian Railway Service of Mechanical Engineers. During his stay in the railways he held several top ranking positions: he served as Chief Mechanical Engineer of Southern Railway, Divisional Railway Manager, Vishakapatnam, later holding the chair of Director of Rail India Technical and Economic Services Limited. His career culminated in his appointment as General Manager of South Eastern Railway, Calcutta, after which he served a term as Member Mechanical of the Railway Board and ex-Officio Secretary, Ministry of Railways, Government of India, New Delhi. Following his retirement from railway service in 2006, Shri Bhandari settled in his hometown of Jodhpur where for a period he served as a Member of the Central Administrative Tribunal, Jodhpur.
Throughout his working life Shri Bhandari was driven by a passion for railway heritage, its documentation, and its preservation. There never will be a second Bhandari again; no one works that hard at rail heritage anymore. Despite his onerous responsibilities, he found time to pursue his fascination with ardour. Those who knew him spoke of him as a quiet, unassuming man with a keen interest in history. A true gentleman in every sense, he will be remembered by fans everywhere for the rich legacy he leaves behind in the form of a set of definitive works documenting in fine detail the growth of the railways in the Indian subcontinent.
..........................
NOTE: Read about Shri Bhandari's history of the Bengal Nagpur Railway at the following page:
http://railwaysofraj.blogspot.in/2011/08/number-1-down-mail.html
.....................................
Ravindra Bhalerao