Amitava Kumar Chronicles India's Moving Republic in ‘The Social Life of Indian Trains’

Amitava Kumar's The Social Life of Indian Trains arrives as a hybrid experiment, part reportage, part memoir, part cultural archaeology. At just 152 pages, this volume in Aleph's Essential India series traces how trains have "seeped into the national psyche" through extended journeys across the subcontinent. The structural centrepiece is Kumar's 72-hour voyage on the Himsagar Express, traversing 2,335 miles from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, supplemented by reflections from the Darjeeling toy train and decades of accumulated notebook entries.

Kumar's methodology borrows explicitly from S.N.S. Sasseya's 1967 documentary I Am 20, wherein a young man declares his desire to traverse India "with a notebook in hand". The author acknowledges this romantic impulse, "It seemed possible, even easy, to hop on a train, talk to people, and take notes." Yet reality proves far messier. His first meal order is cancelled, fellow passengers blast television shows at full volume through their phones, and the conversations he'd envisioned remain frustratingly elusive. This gap between aspiration and actuality becomes, paradoxically, one of the book's most honest offerings, a reminder that India resists easy narratives.

As we talk to Kumar he explains in our interview, when asked about the genesis of the method, "It needn't always be a train journey. Journeys by themselves offer so much to storytellers. It's all about newness... you can be alone in a car or on a bike but you are always a part of a crowd on a train. This allows you to stick your needle into the collective vein." The train becomes both literal vehicle and narrative device, a structural device and a narrative device that presents a sense, however illusory, of unity or wholeness.

Memory as Method, Trains as Archive

The book's greatest strength lies in Kumar's deft interweaving of personal memory with collective history. His notebooks, spanning from 1996 onwards, serve as archaeological sites where individual experience intersects with India's transformations. Kumar uses trains as a medium to understand social realities, culture and the moral weather of society, all of this as an insider-outsider. His position, a Bihar-born academic based at Vassar College, affords him unique observational distance.

On the Himsagar Express, he encounters Rajwar, a migrant labourer from Jharkhand bound for construction work in Vijayawada, phone numbers scribbled on his palm in a ballpoint pen. Such encounters reveal India's vast internal migrations, where workers from poorer states "flood into other parts of the country" in pursuit of daily wages. The Railways becomes a moving portrait of those who built India whilst constantly being in motion themselves. A ticket examiner tells Kumar that "the railways had been making fools of poor customers", who are "packed in like people fleeing some devastating catastrophe", whilst the middle and upper classes enjoy air-conditioned compartments with assigned berths.

Kumar's treatment of memory extends beyond mere documentation. He treats travel as "a form of instigating or inciting memory", as he explains, "in the present, I'm on a train and I see something or something happens to me that reminds me of an event or a person in the past. Memory is in fragments, there is no continuity or strict linearity; my movement along that linear thing called the railway line is a way of stitching together the past and the present."

The book's engagement with cinema proves particularly revealing. His excavation of Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali sketches, where Apu and Durga glimpse a train for the first time, shows how literature and cinema have consecrated the railway as a site of wonder, modernity's entry into the rural. The sociologist Ashis Nandy observed that "Satyajit Ray's village is the cinema's first Indian village", and Kumar extends this insight to show how trains have shaped our cultural imagination.

What Remains Unsaid

For all its observational acuity, the book's brevity becomes a liability. At just 150 pages, this might disappoint readers looking for an in-depth account of the history and socio-economic or even socio-cultural aspects of Indian Railways. Kumar gestures towards the railways' colonial origins, how British-built networks upended subsistence farming and used trains to transport grain away from starving populations during famines, but rarely dwells long enough to excavate these histories fully, something one might expect out of a writer as reputed as Kumar, with a career in social writing much illustrious and celebrated.

The promised conversations with fellow travellers yield disappointingly thin material. Beyond Rajwar and scattered vignettes, the "social life" advertised by the title feels underpopulated. When we asked Kumar about potential understatement in addressing contemporary tensions, he responded, "Let me ask you in the friendliest way possible if you are accusing me of silence or understatement. If yes, then I should clarify that I'm not conscious of being silent on any matter. (I might be guilty a little bit of understatement: I prefer irony over a rant.)" Yet irony without sustained engagement can read as evasion, particularly when addressing such a politically fraught moment.

Kumar himself acknowledges limitations of the tourist's gaze, noting, "Members of the English-speaking class who are going read my book would be better off reading it not as tourist lit. but as a meaningful account of a journey they might not themselves make." This candid admission highlights the class dynamics at work, train travel mediated for those who now fly.

The question of audience becomes particularly pointed when considering how air travel has supplanted trains for India's middle and upper classes. When asked how the book addresses "the tussle between the efficiency of air travel and the evocative experience of railway travel which the book celebrates," Kumar offers a telling response, "I don't think there is that sense of leisure informing notions of train travel in India. All the A.H. Wheeler bookstores of my childhood, stretching across the railway stations in India's towns and cities, have disappeared. They are now selling biscuits and Bisleri."

This observation cuts to the heart of the book's dilemma—train travel in India today is less about leisure than necessity. "The poor daily-wage workers on the train taking them to some other part of India for employment are too desperate, often also unlettered, to want to snuggle up with a good piece of literary fiction," Kumar notes. The romance of rail travel exists primarily for those who no longer depend on it, creating an uncomfortable distance between observer and observed.

What Endures on the Platform

Despite these shortcomings, Kumar succeeds in capturing something essential about the railways' hold on Indian consciousness. The book's finest passages emerge when he trusts his essayistic instincts. Reflecting on Gandhi's 1916 BHU speech about "indescribable filth in railway compartments", Kumar updates this observation with characteristic wryness, watching cleaners sweep rubbish directly into the countryside, he notes that "more than a century later one can say that that opportunity is still being lost, and needless to say, the Mahatma's message too."

The book concludes by framing railways as a social contract, "The railway is part of the public wealth, perhaps among our most shared precious resource, and when we are travelling on trains, we are not just passengers but also fellow members of the republic." It's a moving sentiment, and Kumar's strength lies in making us feel this truth even whilst acknowledging its complications.

Kumar tells us in the interview that he is "narrating the nation—whilst simultaneously exposing the fissures in that narration." The Social Life of Indian Trains gestures eloquently towards both projects without fully committing to either. What remains is an elegant, if incomplete, meditation on movement and memory, a book less concerned with comprehensive documentation than with honouring the simple but deeply grounding experience of watching India unfold through a train window, notebook in hand.