Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility by Marian Aguiar (review)

The railways were among the most important infrastructural projects undertaken in British colonial India. Intended to strengthen British rule and facilitate an externally oriented trade by connecting the inner provinces with seaports, by the 1860s India’s railway network was the largest in Asia and the fourth largest in the world. Indian railways provided the British with a venue for large-scale investment that was guaranteed by the government of India, the risk being carried by Indian taxpayers. The railways were justified by generations of British administrators as a harbinger of progress: they were a social instrument that would dissolve the boundaries of the Hindu caste system—only to impose a new racialized structure of class that mimicked caste hierarchies. From the Indian point of view, the transformative effect of the railways—economic, social, and cultural—was seen both as an imposition of a colonial order that drained the wealth of the nation, and as a tool that promised the forging of national identity. The colonialists and nationalists both seemed to have agreed that it was a modernizing force. Marian Aguiar’s new book, Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility, provides a cultural analysis of this transformation and is the first book-length treatment of the representation of the railways in India.

Aguiar’s primary analytic is mobility: “the close relationship between images of mobility concerned with a specific technology and the notion of modernity within the Indian context.” Approaching modernity as a “rhetoric that has functioned through a cluster of representational and material practices,” her exploration begins with the nineteenth-century colonial context and concludes with contemporary representations of the Indian railways (xiii). Touching on well-known figures and events, the temporal breadth of this study allows us to follow the legacy of colonial tropes and their mutations.

In chapter 1 Aguiar focuses on the colonizer’s perception of the railways as bringing mobility to an ostensibly stagnant India. Mobility, equated with economic and social advancement, framed the traveler’s experience of the Indian landscape as a panoramic unfolding. The railway coach promised the British traveler in India an insular introspective space protected from the chaos of Indian life. She notes that this insularity was a fantasy, enabling certain narrative strategies about the appropriate use of public space “that elaborated features of Indian difference—the bodily, the religious, and the domestic” (26). Here the key examples are Rudyard Kipling’s and Flora Annie Steel’s works from the 1890s that demonstrate the difficulties of wishing to maintain the logic of colonial difference within a rhetoric of empire that professed to surpass caste and religious differences. At the same time Aguiar notes that these writers inaugurated an “early counternarrative of modernity” that was expanded upon by later critics (47). It is difficult to see Kipling’s and Steel’s works as counternarratives. Merely recording cultural difference does not amount to a counternarrative; what matters is its deployment. Indeed, literary works in other Indian languages, such as Durgacharan Ray’s Debganer Martye Agaman (1880), had invoked these motifs to produce countervisions of modernity more than a decade before Kipling’s and Steel’s works were published.

In chapter 2 Aguiar turns to the critics of the railways who enlarged the symbolic parameters of the railways. Here she distinguishes between two groups: the “social critics” who operated “within a post-Enlightenment theoretical framework” and pointed out the failure of the railways to bring prosperity to Indians, and the “spiritualists” who challenged the moral premise of Enlightenment science and turned to Indian “traditions” to produce their critique of colonialism (49). To nationalists such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Mahadev Ranade, and Romesh Dutt, railways represented the crisis of India’s political economy as they relentlessly pointed out its role in de-industrializing India, and the social costs of a racialized railway system. Social reformers such as Florence Nightingale and Vaughan Nash wrote about...