ABOUT BOOK

This book explores the impact of railways on colonial Indian society from the ~commencement of railway operations in the mid-nineteenth to the early decades ~of the twentieth century. ~The book represents a historiographical departure. Using new archival evidence ~as well as travelogues written by Indian railway travellers in Bengali and Hindi, ~this book suggests that the impact of railways on colonial Indian society were ~more heterogeneous and complex than anticipated either by India’s colonial ~railway builders or currently assumed by post-colonial scholars. ~At a related level, the book argues that this complex outcome of the impact of ~railways on colonial Indian society was a product of the interaction between the ~colonial context of technology transfer and the Indian railway passengers who ~mediated this process at an everyday level. In other words, this book claims ~that the colonised ‘natives’ were not bystanders in this process of imposition of ~an imperial technology from above. On the contrary, Indians, both as railway ~passengers and otherwise influenced the nature and the direction of the impact of ~an oft-celebrated ‘tool of Empire’. ~The historiographical departures suggested in the book are based on examining ~railway spaces as social spaces – a methodological index influenced by Henri ~Lefebvre’s idea of social spaces as means of control, domination and power.