We follow one woman across decades of change in this deeply compassionate novel of independence and dreams
I
ndian Railways has been a source of patriotic pride, controversy, endless cover-ups, labyrinthine bureaucracy and death on an industrial scale since its founding in 1951. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong, his first novel in 15 years since The Sly Company of People Who Care, explores its other major and fiercely contested impact on Indian society, as one of the country’s foremost employers of women and sources of female empowerment, especially in rural areas.
We follow the irrepressible, motherless Charu Chitol, from her childhood in 1960s smalltown Bihar with her rail employee father, a frustrated writer and frustrated socialist, through her dizzying encounters with rapidly modernising big-city Bombay, and on to a railways personnel department job, first office-bound, then as a roving welfare officer, investigating pensions claims, frauds and other abuses. The book ends in the early 1990s, all post-independence goodwill long spent.
The tension between private and public, family hopes and societal devastations, record and reality as India’s defining story is one the novel makes clear time and again – it’s in the title, one half steel production, one half dreams. Similarly, Charu’s peregrinatory personal life, and the setbacks, alienation, abuse and gut-wrenching tragedies she encounters in her professional one, must be subsumed come what may into thousands of miles of track, rigidly unchanging timetables, troop movements, postal deliveries and meal services. The Indian Railways, as one character says, “does not see religion, caste, language, state boundaries, summer, winter, rain”. It doesn’t see flesh and blood either.
