Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility

2. The Machine of Empire: Technology and Decolonization

· 48 ·· CHAPTER 2 · The Machine of Empire: Technology and Decolonization In 1854, an account appearing in the English-language Calcutta journal Bengal Hurkaru and India Gazette narrated the travels of a scholar who went by train to Hooghly, “but declined to undertake the return journey , because, said he, too much travelling on the car of fire is calculated to shorten life, for seeing that it annihilates time and space and curtails the length of every other journey, shall it not also shorten the journey of human life?”1 Although such criticisms on the part of Indians were dismissed by most British as the worries of “antiquated Hindoos,”2 they presented a sociological and even ontological critique of the values of a technology-centered modernity. The Victorian imagination had heralded the railway’s “annihilation of time and space” as paradigmatic for a modern consciousnessmodeledontheefficientmachine.Asearlyas1879,however, a concerned colonial official had warned that British rule in India was “so hard and mechanical in its character” that “to the great mass of the people, the English official is simply an enigma . . . a piece of machinery possessing powers to kill and tax and imprison.”3 The official’s comment differed sharply from the dominant colonial discourse, which had idealized the science that produced the railway. That discourse had designated the train as both the emblem of a universal rational utopia that would be Britain’s lasting gift to India and the site for articulating and containing what most colonial writers viewed as India’s irreducibly different culture. The voices that emerged from that space of difference, however, challenged the dominant narrative of the train, and, by extension, the culture of colonialism. Writers put forward two types of challenges to the colonial discourse of the railway: One group questioned the justice of the railway’s implementation in India; the second group condemned a modern consciousness based on the paradigm of the machine. These different types of challenge to the machine mark a dividing line, containing within an intelligible THE MACHINE OF EMPIRE 49 THE MACHINE OF EMPIRE group on each side a diverse array of writers who otherwise might diverge on the political spectrum. The first group, roughly termed here the “social critics,”4 worked within a post-Enlightenment theoretical framework. This group was made of both proindustrial Indian nationalists and progressive British journalists, philanthropists, and concerned colonial officials. These individuals narrated the history of the Indian railway through a discourse of political, social, and economic critique, including a critique of underdevelopment known as the “drain theory,” and a public discussion of famine, environment, labor, and racial discrimination. This group produced, as the critic Manu Goswami phrases it, “an insurgent grammar of political economy”5 thatcounteredthediscourseoftechnologyjustifyingacolonial presence in terms of the railway. Incontrast,thesecondgroupchallengedonmoralgroundsthetheoretical framework of the Enlightenment, specifically its devotion to science. They turned to Indian tradition—a specific version of Hinduism in particular —for a radical reform movement. For spiritual political leaders Swami Vivekananda (Narendranath Datta), Aurobindo Ghose, and Mohandas Gandhi, and for literary writer Rabindranath Tagore, the machine acted not as a symbol of emancipation, as had been cultivated by the British, but as a powerful emblem of the British way of ruling. Among them, there were some important political differences: Tagore, for example, opposed the authoritarian nature of nationalism and publicly argued with Gandhi on the methods of nationalist movements. Yet as a group, these “spiritualists ” focused on the railway as representing a modality, a way of being, that was both culturally alien and morally corrupt. Britain, they charged, had thesoulofamachine.Usingtwodifferentepistemologicalframeworks,the social critics and spiritualists confronted the dominant colonial narrative that elevated the train as a means for India’s emancipation and challenged colonialism itself in the process. Social Critics As early as the 1860s, through the more radical nationalist politics of the 1920s, social critics recorded the economic problems that colonialism presented . According to their writings, colonial policies had forced a change to commercial agriculture from subsistence farming, destroyed traditional industries to make way for imports, and promoted unfair business practices.6 These critics also charged the railway with having a role in the 50 THE MACHINE OF EMPIRE THE MACHINE OF EMPIRE worsening of conditions for Indians, including increased peasant debt. They enumerated the railway’s failure to bring emancipation through mobility: how the railway had promoted economic inequality, led to famine and environmental devastation, and contributed to labor exploitation and racial discrimination. The...