Day 77 : Book Excerpt : The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change

After conducting a year-long survey of landscape, possible routes and profitability, Macdonald Stephenson, a Scottish engineer, proposed the first Indian railway scheme in 1845. Stephenson’s ambitious scheme of ‘triangulating India with railway’ – at an estimated cost of about fifty million pounds – envisaged the creation of a vast railway network that would connect Kolkata, Delhi, Mumbai and Madras and other major towns in between. Doubt was cast on the practicality of such a huge project, but the debates that followed endorsed the necessity of railways in India. As far as the territorial breadth of the railways was concerned, both Stephenson and his early critics envisioned Kolkata as the eastern-most terminal of the future railway network in India. Regions east of Kolkata or eastern Bengal, along with Assam, were excluded from the purview of the scheme.

The disadvantages of excluding eastern Bengal from the initial railway projects were soon identified. A fifteen-page monograph, published in 1848 by one ‘Transit’, pointed to the relative merits of extending the railways into the Ganga valley. He strongly criticized Stephenson’s new East Indian Railway Company, which was to connect Kolkata to Bihar and then to run through the Doab region via the short but circuitous route of the Rajmahal Hills. Transit thought that the projected line ignored Bengal trade and would get ‘out of Bengal as fast as it could into the hills’. In insisting that the trade of Bengal should be considered in the future expansion of the railways in India, Transit appeared to have been informed by a wider vision of the water regime of the lower Ganga valley which provided the sole impetus for an extensive range of trade and commerce. Transit reminded the British and Indian capitalists:

The Ganges Valley is your manufactory – your trading ground – your source of wealth. I look not to towns, to provinces, to districts, or to individuals; I look not to transporting sepoys, or cannon, or gunpowder, or arms ... not to Manchester twist, or Welsh iron, or Swansea copper, or French brandy, or Burton ale; I look not to Purneah indigo, Patna opium, Benares sugar, or Chuppar saltpeter, Mirzapore cotton, or the grain of the chete; but, on the broad principle of the greatest benefit of the greatest number, I say, that by the Ganges you catch the whole.

Transit suggested that the resources of north-eastern India could be better served by connecting Kolkata by railway to the ‘nearest permanent spot’ on the bank of the lower Ganga Valley. He found the starting point of the Bengal Delta, where the Kosi river meets the Ganga near Malda, to be an ideal terminus for a railway from Kolkata. He argued that the whole accumulated trade of the Ganga valley, comprising an area of 150,000 square miles and containing a population of 40 million, was bound to pass through this ‘narrow neck’ of the country, not more than five miles in width.
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Other views, however, considered the Ganga as a competitor to the railway, and if the expansion of the railways in Bengal over the following decades is examined in relation to Transit’s scheme, it would appear that while the commercial importance of the Bengal Delta as pointed out by Transit was fully taken into consideration, there was a fundamental difference between his scheme and the railway projects that were actually carried out. Instead of engaging with the Ganga Delta via the ‘neck’, the railways entered its fluvial heart, and in consequence they began to con test rather than complement the water regimes of the delta. With a view to eventually connecting Kolkata with Dhaka, the first railway line was opened from Kolkata to the lower Ganga bank in Kushtia in September 1862. In 1871, this line was extended southward to the Goalundo bank of the Ganga. With its many branches extending along both banks of the lower Ganga, it came to be known as the Eastern Bengal Railway (EBR).

Between 1874 and 1879 the Northern Bengal State Railway, extending from Sara to Sirajganj, was constructed, with branches extending to Dinajpur in the west and Parbatipur in the east. In July 1884 the government acquired the EBR and in 1887 it was merged with the Northern Bengal State Railway. The entire Eastern Bengal Railway (the word ‘State’ was dropped in 1915) was situated on the west bank of the Brahmaputra river, with the single exception of the Bahadurabad-Dhaka-Narayanganj line. The first section of the Assam-Bengal Railway (ABR) was opened between Chittagong and Comilla in 1895. The line was constructed to meet the demands of the tea companies in Assam, which wanted railway facilities for the export of tea via the port of Chittagong. This line lay on the left bank of the Ganga and both banks of the Brahmaputra. It served the province of Assam, and the districts of Dhaka, Mymensingh, Chittagong, Noakhali and Comilla. In 1942, the ABR was taken over by the state and was merged with the EBR to form the Bengal and Assam Railway. The expansion of the railways was such that by 1933 Bengal had more railways by area than any province except the United Provinces.

~~The Bengal Delta: Ecology, State and Social Change, 1840-1943 -by- Iftekhuar Iqbal