Tracking Modernity: India's Railway and the Culture of Mobility (review)

Marian Aguiar's Tracking Modernity: India's Railway and the Culture of Mobility argues that the complexities of colonial and postcolonial modernity are embedded in the Indian railway. In addition to being a fascinating cultural exploration of the ways that trains shaped modern Indian society, it is also a sophisticated and multifaceted exploration of the deeply rooted connection between modernity and mobility. Its strength lies in the fact that Aguiar takes neither of these terms for granted and disallows any simple corollaries. Through a detailed analysis of various representations of the Indian railway, Aguiar demonstrates that modernity includes both those who are mobile and those who are disempowered by technologies of mobility; that it consists of both universal development and concepts of difference; and that the mobility that often accompanies it can be both compulsory and emancipatory. In this way, Tracking Modernity provides a crucial addition to the emerging fields of mobility and critical transport studies and to well-established debates about global modernity.

At a time when academic discourse is overwhelmed by discussions of "deterritorialization," the nomad, and the erasure of time and space, Aguiar's work is a refreshing and historically grounded discussion of a form of mobility that is rooted in a national context, bound by space, and still a complex, nuanced site for exploring the dynamics of a shifting modernity. To that extent, Aguiar extends many of the arguments made by Caren Kaplan's Questions of Travel (1996), a seminal text that articulates the theoretical impetus for emphasizing the lived experiences of modern, mobile subjects over mystified notions of displacement and exile. However, while Kaplan focuses much of her critique on poststructuralist discourses, Aguiar builds upon Kaplan's insistence on distinguishing the critical registers of different types of movement and launches into a materialist exploration of a very distinct written and visual archive. Tracking Modernity is predicated on the notion that the train in India was a transformative technology that did more than simply reshape the physical landscape. Because of its ideological power, the railway also transformed institutions, subjectivities, and cultural discourses in powerful and sometimes unexpected ways, making it an enduring and potent symbol in modern film and literature from and about India. Aguiar's book, then, joins works such as Todd Presner's Mobile Modernity: Germans, Jews, Trains (2007), Ian Kerr's Railways in Modern India (2001), Kristin Ross's Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and Reordering of French Culture (1996), and Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), that use modes of transport such as trains, cars, and ships to explore intersecting questions of modernity, mobility, imperialism, and citizenship. Aguiar's approach, however, is unique in the way that it conjoins questions of mobility and modernity and "tracks" the way in which they become key to understanding many of the continuing contradictions of both colonial and postcolonial spaces. Aguiar grounds her arguments by centralizing and historicizing questions of privilege, race, class, and religion, emphasizing difference rather than the universal experiences of a modernity "at large" and in flux.

The first half of Tracking Modernity explores how the railway served distinct and radically different political interests during the colonial period and in the immediate decolonization context. British discourse about the train aimed to establish the train as a public, secular, and orderly space that served the interest of the state and created proper, capitalist subjects who followed timetables, worked in the wage labor system, and traveled in an organized manner. But as was so often the case, colonial technologies never actually transformed subjects in exactly the way the colonialists dictated. For instance, Aguiar discusses British travel memoirs that describe the chaotic ways in which Indians used the trains. Far from becoming proper Victorian passengers, Indians, to the dismay of British observers, "abused" the system by fare dodging, traveling as fake "sadhu" holy men, and dangling their feet out of the window. There was also concern about the way in which [End Page 204...