A Book of Railway Journeys by Ludovic Kennedy

Author:Ludovic Kennedy [Kennedy, Ludovic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784972738
Publisher: Head of Zeus

ELSEWHERE

India

1. In the days of the Raj

For the British the railway stations of upcountry India were fulcrums of Anglo-Indian security, as those cable stations were oases in the Outback of Australia. Steam, piston grease, the stuffy smell of waiting-rooms, starched white dining-room napkins, smudgily printed time-tables, soldiers at junction platforms drinking tea out of saucers—all these were basic ingredients of Anglo-India, as organic to the Raj as hill-stations or protocol. The Indian railways stimulated the Englishman’s imagination, and gave him a Roman pride. In Indian cities the grandest and most ornate of the public buildings were usually the railway stations and offices, hulking mock-oriental caravanserais, Saracenic, Moghul, all domes, clocks, whirligigs, stained-glass windows, immense glass-and-girder roofs, beneath which the railway lines lay like allegories of order in chaos. There the great trains steamed and hissed: the British engine-driver grandly at the cab of the mail-train locomotive; the British conductor with his check-board at the first-class carriage door; the British stationmaster at the end of the platform, dressed splendidly in dark blue, like an admiral at the quay; the British passengers stalking down the platform in a miasma of privilege, pursued by coveys of servants and porters with bags, children, bedding, and possibly a goat to be tethered in the guard’s van, and provide fresh milk for the journey. All around was the theatrical confusion of India, which Empire had tamed: a frenzy of Indians, in dhotis, in saris, in swathed torn rags, in nosecups, ankle-bangles, turbans, baggy white shorts, scarlet uniforms, yellow priestly robes, topees, bush-jackets, loin-cloths; hawkers shouting in hollow voices and peering through train windows with blazing eyes; office messengers hurrying importantly by to post their letters in the mail-coach box; entire families sitting, sleeping, clambering about, feeding babies or apparently dead on piles of baggage, tied up with string; and sometimes a desperate beggar, a man with no face or legless boy darted terrifyingly out of nowhere to seize upon a likely straggler,

The British gentry travelled first-class, usually with a servant compartment next door—on the South India Railway a little window linked them, for milord to give his orders through. The Indian gentry travelled second-class; British other ranks, commercial men and mechanics went intermediate; and pushed, levered, squeezed, squashed into the slatted wooden seats of the fourth-class compartments, travelled the Indian millions. A journey across India took anything up to a week, and the wise sahib took his own padded quilts and pillow, his own tiffin-basket (which should always be kept furnished, Murray’s Handbook advised, “with potted meats, biscuits, some good spirit, and soda water”), and a few good books (such as, Murray suggested, Sir W. Hunter’s Indian Empire, or Sir Alfred Lyall’s Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India). There were refreshment rooms at most junctions, but the experienced traveller telegraphed his requirements ahead, and as the train drew into Chanda or Gadag, out of the shadows would leap a man in white, carrying your luncheon on a tray, covered with a napkin—fiery curry,

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