‘Railsong’: Rahul Bhattacharya’s heartfelt ode to the India that was and the India that can be

Miss Charulata Chitol is the true daughter of the Indian Railways. Like the trains that map every corner of the country, Charu too encompasses an entire India within her. Born to a Bihari mother and Bengali father, growing up in Bhombalpur (a fictitious town in undivided Bihar), fleeing to Bombay in chase of freedom, marrying a Gujarati, and going on her own travels across the country as a railway employee, Charu chugs on, shimmying, shuddering, but never stopping.

But before Miss Charu there was AK Chitol – her father, Railways chargeman, a humanist who traded his coveted caste name Chattopadhyay for the uncategorisable Chitol. Adopted in protest and free of caste markers, the Chitol children, for the rest of their lives, were to be made to answer for and defend their father’s decision as the country deepens its divide along identity lines.

Enter Charu

Rahul Bhattacharya’s latest novel, Railsong, is a gorgeously crafted, compulsively readable, attention-demanding, nostalgia-steeped ode, tribute, and elegy to the Indian Railways, and to what Charu calls, and the reader realises, the “incomprehensibility” of India.

To enact a woman across 400 pages is not an easy task. But Bhattacharya is committed to this voice – the novel begins with Charu and ends with her; she’s the definite heroine. It’s a task he renders so successfully that the reader immediately knows they’ll never forget Charu – perhaps the second-most memorable Charulata after Madhabi Mukherjee’s in Satyajit Ray’s movie of the same name.

The opening and the final lines fuse into each other – a life so destined to come full circle that every travail and heartbreak that erupt in the meantime fade away as minor obstacles.

Charu’s childhood is defined by her motherlessness. Her untimely death creates a rupture in the Chitol family – the place of the mother is alternately occupied by a grandmother and grandaunt whose austerity and slavish devotion to the household terrify Charu. Her premature escape to Bombay – a seventy-hour train journey from Bhombalpur, accompanied by strikes, fever and hunger, and a broken toilet permanently seals her fate.

Her arrival in Bombay is a familiar if daunting saga of struggle and survival. At the tender age of 20, Charu learns of the critical necessity of financial independence, leading her to take up a job at a shoe store where on good days she is to entice customers to step into the shop and on bad days, slip their feet into new shoes as they contemplate their decision.

Small romances and big consequences force Charu out of her maternal uncle’s home in Bombay and thus begins the laborious cycle of hopping from one accommodation to another in search of a home in the vast city. Charu’s distress is compounded by relatives’ nagging about marriage and domesticity – the curse that Charu was desperate to escape refuses to leave her side, manifesting itself as advice, threats, pleas, and resignation.

So when AK Chitol dies in time before retirement, and her brothers declare their disinterest in the civil services, it is Charu who stands to inherit her father’s job. With Charu’s initiation begins the most remarkable tale of a woman’s – and an Indian’s – confrontation with the behemoth that is her nation. Described as proud and principled, Charu is not offended when she chances upon extraordinary corruption, nor is she surprised when she witnesses the humanist values that the Indian Railways embodies. Like many dualities that exist comfortably, and in many cases, thrive in India, so are the Railways a motif of the great potential and the steady decay of the nation-state.

The other unifying force besides the Indian Railways is the decennial census. They stand as important milestones in Charu’s life too, who, first as a child and later as an adult, is understandably fascinated by the multitude of the Indian identity – one that hides within itself strifes of caste, class, religion, language, sex, and more. The final number, which expands manyfold every decade, engulfs wide swathes of Indian peoples, consolidating them into one thrumming mass of data and figures, scrubbing them clean of the poverty, anger, and distress that are equally essential to the Indian existence.

The population must have galloped ahead of the last-estimated 1.4 billion, leaving behind the hungriest and its most vulnerable. As Charu understands, sometimes, being counted as an Indian is perhaps the most dignity that the poorest Indian can afford. With the census on hold, Railsong is a reminder of everything Indians stand to lose in the absence of this critical data.

The reader tails Charu for so long that it is easy to forget she’s a woman only in her thirties. She steadily climbs up posts, never once wavering in her sincerity towards her work. Her singular belief in the Indian Railways, its magnanimity, is so deeply moving that it is easy to envision the railway network as a great equaliser – affectionate, secular, and just to everyone who encounters it.

The inexhaustibility of India

Like the trains that bring terror and joy on their backs, so are the three decades of Charu’s life upheld by promises and premonitions of new developments in a new country. The most momentous – and insidious – of which is the reclamation of Ayodhya, a zealous march into the darkness that started long before 1992. Charu’s lifelong lessons on tolerance and secularism are put to the test when her Gujarati in-laws eagerly take up the task to restore the honour of their Hindu identity.

Even though Railsong is unabashedly in awe of its muse, Bhattacharya remains truthful about the railways’ impact on indigenous lands and how it undermined labour unity. The strikes of 1974 are recreated with stunning clarity, as are the decisions of various governments and prime ministers. AK Chitol, who was an enthusiastic participant in the strike, has to go underground with his family when the state begins to close in on him. Taken in by the Asurs, a tribal community, the Chitol children learn early lessons on fraternity and independence – which Charu all her life places above her own happiness.

The Indian Railways in this novel is made up of people of little consequence – linesmen, chargemen, inspectors, sweepers. When Charu travels to a distant village to hear the grievances of a recently deceased railway worker’s family, she is once again reminded of the innumerable small cogs that keep the railway wheels spinning. The lament, written in a feverish hum, draws to the fore the India that lies forgotten in the quest for a multi-billion-dollar economy, geopolitical gains, and historical revisions.

The march into the future also brings a new understanding of feminism and personal liberation – both intimately shaping Charu by offering her the means to choose the life she deems worthy of pursuing. This would have been impossible even for the generation of women before her, driving home the point that not just material conditions, but free and equitable civil services can revolutionise a nation’s social consciousness.

Railsong is a love song that defines a lyricist’s career, even changes it for the better. Bhattacharya is at his composed, elegant best as he belts out his gentle ode to the India that was and the India that can be – a nation that despites so many failures and tragedies, electrifies a billion and more dreams with kindness and unexpected sources of kinship.

Railsong, Rahul Bhattacharya, Bloomsbury India.