Railroads for India were proposed initially in the mid-1830s. Fifteen years of promotion and debate ensued until key decisions in favor of the Great Indian Peninsula Railway (hereafter GIPR) and the East Indian Railway (hereafter EIR) were made in March 1849. Thus, finally, railroad building in Britain’s largest imperial possession began in 1850. The ceremonial turning of the first sod for the GIPR occurred at Bombay on October 31, 1850. Work on what became the main railroad in Bengal and in the Gangetic Valley, the EIR, began near Calcutta in 1851.
In 1853, the governor-general of India, Lord Dalhousie (in office 1848–1856) laid out a comprehensive plan for the development of the trunk lines. The capable, hard-working, and assertive Dalhousie was a committed technological modernizer. His political responsibilities before he went to India had made him familiar with British railroads. Dalhousie later claimed he had unleashed in India the “great engines of social improvement, which the sagacity and science of recent times had previously given to Western nations—I mean Railways, uniform Postage, and the Electric Telegraph.”
Dalhousie’s influential, lengthy (216 pages handwritten in a sprawling, bold hand) memorandum—a “minute” in the language of the day—deserves close study. It provided justifications and guidelines for the system of railroads that was developed in South Asia under British auspices in the third quarter of the 19th century. The governor-general emphasized the political and military benefits railroads would provide. “Immeasurable” advantages would accrue to a colonial administration composed of a “comparative handful” of British administrators and soldiers scattered over the subcontinent. Railroads would enable Britain “to bring the main bulk of its military strength to bear upon any given point in as many days as it would now require months, and to an extent which at present is physically impossible.”
Dalhousie also noted the “commercial and social advantages” of railroads. These advantages included an increase in trade between India and Britain: more Indian “produce,” including raw cotton, would be transported to Britain, and more manufactured British goods would be sold in India. Railroads would encourage enterprise, multiply production, facilitate the discovery of latent resources, increase national wealth, and encourage “progress in social improvement” similar to that which occurred in Europe and the United States of America.
The hardheaded Dalhousie stressed the political, military, and economic benefits accruing largely to Britain, to the Anglo-Indian connection, and to the colonial regime. He sought to influence calculating decision makers in London: his political masters, and also potential British investors from whom the bulk of the financing for India’s railroads had to be obtained. Thus, in the 1850s and for many decades, India’s railroads were conceived and executed as a colonial project. British authorities, with little input from Indians, decided when and where lines would be built—and a good deal more. India’s railroads were meant to serve British interests first and foremost, among which military and administrative security and economic benefits were central. The interests of Indians were incidental although, as represented in the writings of Dalhousie and many Britons, the progressive consequences for India of the railroads was a self-evident truth: an assertion accepted then as later by many Indians even though Gandhi wrote in Hind Swaraj (1921) about the railroads’ contribution to the British control of India. Gandhi, in fact, went further. He denounced railroads as “evil” since “good travels at a snail’s pace.”
Gandhi was a central figure in the Indian struggle for independence from 1919 to his assassination in 1948. His views on railroads, however, were not widely accepted—and he himself used railroads to travel across India in the nationalist cause. Most nationalists’ denunciation of the railroads came to focus on the ways in which the system operated and on the British dominance of the upper echelons of the workforce: railroads per se and their progressive presence were not questioned. More typical of Indian views held in the 1870s (and in the 1970s) were those of Framjee Vicajee who published a forty-four page pamphlet titled Political and Social Effects of Railways in India (1875). The pamphlet praised the many interconnected, progressive changes railroads had set in motion across South Asia, “the great economical and social changes, due partly to railways and partly to other instruments of civilization” through which India was “silently passing.”
~~Engines Of Change: The Railroads That Made India -by- Ian J. Kerr
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