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Indian Railways has been a source of patriotic pride, controversy, endless cover-ups, labyrinthine bureaucracy and death on an industrial scale since its founding in 1951. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong, his first novel in 15 years since The Sly Company of People Who Care, explores its other major and fiercely contested impact on Indian society, as one of the country’s foremost employers of women and sources of female empowerment, especially in rural areas.
We follow the irrepressible, motherless Charu Chitol, from her childhood in 1960s smalltown Bihar with her rail employee father, a frustrated writer and frustrated socialist, through her dizzying encounters with rapidly modernising big-city Bombay, and on to a railways personnel department job, first office-bound, then as a roving welfare officer, investigating pensions claims, frauds and other abuses. The book ends in the early 1990s, all post-independence goodwill long spent.
The tension between private and public, family hopes and societal devastations, record and reality as India’s defining story is one the novel makes clear time and again – it’s in the title, one half steel production, one half dreams. Similarly, Charu’s peregrinatory personal life, and the setbacks, alienation, abuse and gut-wrenching tragedies she encounters in her professional one, must be subsumed come what may into thousands of miles of track, rigidly unchanging timetables, troop movements, postal deliveries and meal services. The Indian Railways, as one character says, “does not see religion, caste, language, state boundaries, summer, winter, rain”. It doesn’t see flesh and blood either.
The product of an intercaste marriage – her father has abandoned both his Brahmin surname and millennia of genetic purity, much to his mother’s displeasure – Charu has a childhood marked by famines, strikes and her father’s growing political activism. The family are forced to flee to sanctuary provided by the marginalised tribal Asur community in the countryside. Once an adult, she symbolises that truly epochal change of modern India, as a single woman leading a working life alone in the big city. Charu “has lost her parents, her home, the pale shadow of her childhood, her wayward quest for an education … but she has unearthed from the cosmic debris this job”.
Bhattacharya is especially good on Charu’s growing pains, the “tumultuous calls of her body” she and her female relatives undergo, and the realisation that she and her brothers, “subject to the same misfortune, might undergo radically different fates”. In one brilliantly rendered scene, Charu has her first period and thinks that each time she must wait for next month “for her dying to resume”. Her womanhood is marked by another transition: from the child given food to someone who cooks and has to “wait for the served to finish before themselves eating”. Bhattacharya contrasts Charu’s growing recognition of her place in society with her father’s renascent, cost of living-driven socialism, which, unthinkingly, never crosses the threshold of the family home.
You do at times wish Bhattacharya would inject more of the wildness and feeling that Charu displays into the book’s structure. We go through the political changes, the wars, the elections, the massacres and outrages one after the other. It’s slightly too episodic and compartmentalised – rather as though every British novel had mandatory conversations about the 2011 riots. The real magic strikes when Charu is daydreaming alone or mourning her dead mother; in unexpected insights into the semi-shunned Asur and Anglo-Indian communities; and in a magnificently rendered death scene halfway through.
But Bhattacharya has a fine command of the playful, slippery, punning diction of the modern Indian writer, the soup of adverbs and nouns and adjectives masquerading as each other, a product of English’s status as communal secondish language (its main role has become to allow India’s various ethnicities and religions to insult one another intelligibly online). People haughtily “pride off”, or “untruth” their way out of things; maternal-invoking obscenities are rendered piously as “mother-swear”; Bombay has “soundclouds” and “peopleswarms”. The world of the railways, of personal liberation accompanied (and perhaps powered) by an ardent love of Victorian legalese, quotas and quadruplicate, of socialist strike leaders who will become BJP defence ministers, is ripe for all sorts of political and personal joshing.
Bhattacharya and Charu Chitol, with her “periodic relocations” and “crises of direction”, are very amiable company. The book brims with heart and compassion and is clearly deeply felt. Decades pass, people die, paperwork piles up, wages rise by central diktat; there are promotions, examinations, heartbreaks – and they’re all rendered with an artful and sympathetic eye. The novel bristles with outrage at the difficulty of living a life of one’s own and the disappointments of marriages and careers; marvels at the quicksilver joys of solidarity. We can only hope Bhattacharya’s next novel isn’t 15 years in coming.
