Rahul Bhattacharya’s ‘Railsong’: Parallel tracks of a railway employee and the nation’s journey

Trains are not simply vehicles to carry passengers from one place to other. They are a remarkable institution exemplifying the pulse and rhythm of the nation. Millions of people, unfamiliar with one another, are herded together, sometimes in collective solidarity, but often in mutual discomfort; leaving their familiar stations behind, they march towards a destination. Railways enable and facilitate this journey. In this massive collective marathon, they represent the spirit of the nation; they become the nation, forging a community of strangers.

As a character in ‘Railsong’says regarding the Railways in the 1970s: “It is the Indian Railways that makes India… Every day we carry ten million passengers and half a million tonnes of goods, on a network of seven thousand stations, using eleven thousand locomotives… Indian Railways does not see religion, caste, language, state boundaries, summer, winter, rain. We have to meet the challenges because without Indian Railways, this country will not be India.”

This novel by Rahul Bhattacharya weaves together three different narratives. It is the story of Charulata, the main protagonist, as she leaves her little town of Bhombalpur behind and migrates to Bombay to take up an assignment with the Railways. The book is about her relationships and encounters, tragedies and triumphs, dilemmas and predicaments, nostalgia and nightmare, and romantic entanglements. It is also the story of Indian Railways, the bureaucratic establishment, lethargy and inertia, and the rhythm and mystique. But at a subterranean level, the book also tells the story of the Indian nation in its journey during the four decades from the 1960s to 1990s.

The novel makes references to the principal events of these decades and offers a flavour of the times. As it proceeds, we notice that Charulata’s life is a micro-reflection of the life of the Indian nation. Each decade merges seamlessly into the next, yet it is possible to distinguish one from the other.

The 1960s was a period of deprivation. Young Charulata saw a severe famine and lived through it. She experienced the fragility and cruelty of human life. The Seventies were a decade of great turbulence, marked by the JP movement and the Emergency. There was a great railway strike in 1974, which threatened to bring the movement of people to a standstill.

Some people thought the strike, and the JP movement in general, was a necessary act of protest against corruption and authoritarianism. For some others, it was simply a nuisance and an attempt to blackmail the country. Charulata comes across a large number of characters, both kind souls and villains. They all belong to their own times and context, people we have all encountered at some point or the other.

In the 1980s, Charulata experienced excessive bureaucratisation as she joined the Railways as a clerk in the personnel department. She got exposed to the links between corruption and inefficiency. A great debate raged on the merits and demerits of privatisation of the economy. The ’80s was also the decade of the ‘Ramayana’ serial on Doordarshan. And, above all, it was the decade of the Shah Bano dispute, symbolising the clash between modernity and secularism on one side and regressive clerics on the other. The decade also saw the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid dispute receive a boost, which was to cast its shadow on the politics of the subsequent decades.

It was in the ’90s that the mosque was demolished and the Indian society was communalised further. The ebbs and flows of national life found their reflection in the life of Charulata. Through her life, the book reaches out to tell the story of the times.

Good fiction serves as an important social science function, even though it may not be treated as social science per se. It offers its readers a flavour of the times they may or may not have lived through. The novel throws up many ideas. People belonging to those times imbibe the ideas and treat them as natural. However, a new decade brings forth very different ideas. These ideas have great relevance for social science enquiry.

The book is a compendium of many of these ideas. It has a rich and expansive canvas, both in space and time.

It is quite usual for individuals, communities and nations to pause and look back, even as they prepare to march forward. Their present is generally volatile and future uncertain. It is, however, the past which remains stable and certain. That is what makes nostalgia such an attractive emotion. The novel has plenty of nostalgia to offer its readers.

— The reviewer is a visiting faculty at BML Munjal University, Gurugram