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

4. New Destinations: The Image of the Postcolonial Railway

· 100 ·· CHAPTER 4 · New Destinations: The Image of the Postcolonial Railway The postage stamp, an aspect of visual culture mandated by the state and disseminated in the form of a mobile commodity, reflects simultaneously the rhetoric of the state and the cultural iconography around which the identity of a nation coalesces. In India, as elsewhere, this tiny object has often used the train as a symbol of the nation; the railway’s primacy derives from the fact that this particular technology helped constituteasynchroniccommunitybycirculatingmailwithinacivicspace .An Indian postage stamp was issued during the colonial period in 1937 with a picture of King George VI adjacent to the mail train, visually conjoining imperial rule with national mobility. Railway stamps do not represent only mail trains, however. A stamp memorializing the centenary of the first passengertrain ,issuedfiveyearsafterindependence, juxtaposedtheoldsteam locomotive with the new, sleeker engine of 1953, representing progress. A later stamp, issued in 1982, also recalls the colonial past by representing history in the form of a vintage four-wheel rail coach shadowed by an older steam engine. State sovereignty—the name “India”—is inscribed onto the image in both English and Hindi. The picture of the two trains and the national designation pull together two modern concepts into one image, naturalizing a relation between technology and the state and legitimizing contemporary development in terms of a colonial past that rested its authority in mobility. Movement helped to produce the postcolonial nation in India. This was not because mobility was new to the subcontinent (it was not), but for several related reasons. First, organized movement constituted a powerful rhetoric of modernity: As the logic went, to be mobile was to be modern , and to be modern was to belong to a nation. Second, movement was integral to the nationalist movement, a point perhaps best represented by NEW DESTINATIONS 101 Gandhi’s unceasing tours of India by rail, but also evident in nationalist writers’ focus on the subject of the train. Third, India as a nation had its origins in movement because it was realized in part by the mass migration of Partition. Fourth, mobility helped bring the nation into being through the active construction of space. Finally, as the example of the postage stamp shows, cultural objects secured a correlation between mobility, modernity, and the nation through the power of representation. The rhetoric of modernity as mobility was surely inherited from the colonial discourse that promoted technology in general and the railway in particular as a means of achieving modern nationhood. Colonial rhetoric had focused on the railway as a way to progress; as a means to secure the colonial state, the Indian railway had always been tied to an emerging polity. Given the centrality of technological development during the colonial period, it is not surprising that after independence, the railway would maintain its key ideological role within India. The train, previously a symbol of colonial rule, became the sign of an independent, industrialized nation. The national narrative of mobility cannot simply be seen as a carryover from Britain, for it materialized from within India’s distinct history. In addition to the legacy of colonial rhetoric, this national identity embodied by the railway also drew on the struggles of the independence movement, including the critiques of economic underdevelopment that had been disseminated by people like Dadabhai Naoroji and Mohandas Gandhi. Moreover, the symbol of the train as nation emerged from the particular history of India that included a massive displacement of peoples. One of the important early debates in the Indian public sphere, namely the relationshipbetweenruralandurbanconstituenciesinthenewnation ,shaped the perceived cultural role of the train. Finally, the train was seen as an instrument in an ongoing negotiation of difference in a state that sought to amalgamate an extraordinary number of diverse ethnicities, religions, castes, classes, and languages. In the mid-twentieth century, the railway enabled Indians to grasp the nation imaginatively; it did so in official rhetoric as well as in symbolic references, icons, and narratives that constructed national identity through movement. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who led the newly independent India into a period focused on the dream of development, advanced a vision of India through the railway. During his term, which 102 NEW DESTINATIONS lastedfrom1947to1964,Nehrurenewedthecommitmenttotechnological advancement that had been the cornerstone of colonial expansion. Nehru aspiredtotransformtraditionalIndia,“tobuildhernewtemplesofmodern times in the form of these engineering wonders.”1 Those wonders included large-scale projects, such as hydroelectric, flood prevention, and irrigation works...