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

Conclusion: Terrorism and the Railway

· 149 ·· CONCLUSION · Terrorism and the Railway The trains are the great social laboratory of [Mumbai]. And today, they became a charnel-house. Suketu Mehta, “Indian Bomb Attacks: Analysis,” Washington Post, July 11, 2006 Tokyo 3/20. Madrid 3/11. London: 7/7. Some of the most significant terrorist incidents in recent years have occurred on a train, including the 1995 Tokyo gas attack, the 2004 Madrid bombings, and the 2005 London Underground explosions. In a country that commonly refers to its railway as its lifeline,1 the number of railway-related bombing fatalities in India has totaled more than 500 in the past ten years alone. The most recent violence took place in Mumbai’s main railway station, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly the Victoria Terminus), where gunmen shot randomly at travelers as part of coordinated bloodshed in the city. Two years before, Mumbai’s commuter rail was the site of extreme violence, with bombs exploding on July 11, 2006, on one of the busiest rail lines in the world. Colonial and nationalist writers promoted the railway as a moving box in which cultural, racial, and historical differences could be enclosed within a civic, secular, and public order. Photographs taken at the scene of Mumbai’s 2006 bombing show platforms covered in debris and gashed carriages exposing interiors to the open air (Figure 11). The strange scene of trains turned inside out seems to signal some kind of endpoint. Has modernity, emblemized by the train, reached its terminus, or is this violence just another expression of the modern? This book has argued that one may interpret the prevalent image of the railway in India to show how modernity’s commitment to mobility has consigned it to a reconfiguration that is partially its undoing. This chapter reads the symbolic aspects of terror as they intersect with that real and imaginative history of the Indian railway to argue that what we are seeing are actually the inherent contradictions of modernity expressed in the form of violence. 150 CONCLUSION Narratives of Terror / Counternarratives of Modernity The image of the airplane in the sky was forever changed by the acts of 9/11, as Ian McEwan suggests in his novel Saturday: “Everyone agrees,” he writes, “airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed.”2 To understand terror, one must think through its imaginative component, how terror is at once something in the world with material effects and something comprised of representation and interpretation. One must include both these elements because the real and the fantastic are so closely intertwined in the discourse of terrorism, distinguished not as opposites but as different ways to represent relations to the world.3 In interviews about the 2006 Mumbai bombings, several people “recognized” the bombings as (re)enactments of different fictional films. As Vyjayanthi Rao points out in her article on Bombay’s 1993 “Black Friday” bombing, this slippage represents how particularly in this city defined by its cinematic identity, narratives around the bombing and perpetrators are “cinematic in the sense that cinema provided the imaginary for constructing plausible social scenarios around the unusual personas involved in the bombings.”4 Whether filmic depictions were indeed the inspiration for Figure 11. Commuters wait for a train at Mahim railway station in Mumbai a day after bombs exploded on the railway lines. Photograph courtesy Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/ Getty Images. CONCLUSION 151 the bombers, observers of this violence certainly understood the factual and the fictional in terms of each other. As the actual bombings begin to inspire fictional accounts, like Nishikant Kamat’s 2008 Hindi film Mumbai Meri Jaan, they too become part of that imaginative world that charts what terror means to an Indian constituency—and to an international society at large. After accounting for the representational and interpretive aspects of terror and considering how they constitute a community, one might then look at the way that collective imagination converges on an object. Roland Barthes’s theory of the rhetoric of the symbol explains how an image may naturalize a symbolic message by disguising the dense unnatural structures and processes of representation embedded in that object.5 “In every society,” Barthes argues, “various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs” (italics in the original).6 The iconic object comes to stand in for a complex amalgamation of sometimes competing referents...