In his new book, Amitava Kumar writes about how train journeys made him rediscover India

My first notebook from my travels in India is from the year 1996.

Ten years earlier, in 1986, I had left India and gone to the United States for graduate school. In the years that followed, I returned home several times and wrote reports for Indian newspapers and magazines. There were terrible riots in Bhagalpur in late 1989. In the summer of 1990, I went by train from Patna to Bhagalpur. My companion was a woman, a medical student, whom I was very much in love with.

I have a memory from that train journey. The sun was about to set and the western sky was bright with light. The sight of a row of gulmohar trees in bloom at a small mofussil station put me in a new mood. The train car was crowded but I wrote down words, words full of desire, in my notebook and passed it up to my lover who, in a bid to escape the press of strangers, had chosen to sit on the upper berth. She would express her amusement on the page and hand my notebook back to me. Then, I would write a new line and pass the notebook up.

Those pages are no longer to be found. I have accepted that I have lost that notebook, all traces of that journey having vanished like that long-ago love.

We arrived in Bhagalpur, and then it was all work. The horror of the riots. In a village near the town, cauliflowers were now growing in the muddy fields where the bodies of those who had been killed had been secretly buried.

I have my news-cuttings from the reports I published but I grieve that the notebook from that journey doesn’t seem to have survived. At times, that woman I had gone to Bhagalpur with, appears in my dreams.

In the earliest travel notebook that I can find, the one from 1996, there is a description of a train journey to Ayodhya where four years earlier the 16th-century Babri mosque had been demolished. From my entries, I can see that my eye was taking in everything as the train made its way to Lucknow from where I was to hire a taxi to Ayodhya. The passing sight of the temples in Kashi reminded me of Satyajit Ray’s Aparajito. In the unreserved compartment, passengers were packed into the toilets. I spotted a small brick building in the middle of a field with a painted sign in Hindi saying “Imperial Academy”. I purchased snacks on the train. A hundred grams of peanuts cost Rs 4 and one cup of tea cost Rs 3. (Prices were to more than double since then.)

Until I opened my notebook this morning, I had no memory of what I had recounted above. Thirty years later, the words I found in the notebook returned to me what the mind has stored only as brief, fleeting fragments. And yet, I’m aware that when I was writing down all that I saw, I was trying to grasp what was only on the surface but was nevertheless dense with meaning. This was the society in which I had been born and grown up, and when I look at these pages in the notebook now, I’m struck not only by how many more changes have since then come to India (further upward revision of prices, for instance) but also how, in these forgotten observations, I can find the seeds of what has grown and come to dominate India today.

From my notebook: I recorded that in Ayodhya, a man told me that the ABVP in his college had a slogan “Mao–Chou kehte ho, Bharat mein kyon rehte ho (Your leaders are Mao and Chou, why do you live in India now?)” This critique of the Left, of having roots outside India, is now mainstream; it has become routine to dismiss any criticism of the government as inspired by the West or anti-national. Another page reveals that the huge piece of graffiti on a wall next to the demolished mosque, with the rubble behind 12-foot gates and armed guards, said “Mandir ka nirmaan karenge (We will build a temple)”. On the disputed site where the mosque had been razed, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a Hindu temple in January 2024. The temple’s ground floor had been hurriedly completed and opened to the public in time for the campaign build-up in the general elections in a country where, as we all know, around 80 per cent of the voters are Hindu. But my purpose in these pages is to talk about the railways.

Can I address a history that is more innocent? I have in my notebooks a page torn from an Indian magazine. The page shows some of Satyajit Ray’s storyboard sketches when he was making his first film, Pather Panchali. The sketches are for the scene in which Apu and his sister Durga catch sight of a train for the first time. It is a scene celebrated in the history of cinema. It is like most of Ray’s work, where simple scenes, elegantly framed, produce a cumulative emotional effect that is shattering. Nothing in my notebook indicates why I have cut this out from the magazine. It is possible I was thinking of some sort of collage. I suspect I was thinking more of ordinary life being transformed into art. Not just in the film but in the sketches too. Ray’s drawings are like calligraphy, awash with movement, a subtle suggestion blowing through them like an invisible breeze.

The sociologist Ashis Nandy has written that “Satyajit Ray’s village is the cinema’s first Indian village”. For Nandy, it is significant that Ray had no experience of village life until he started making the film; Nandy’s argument is that the imagination of the village was not dead inside Ray or his audience. This imagination could be summoned when Ray entered the village environs. How would Ray have imagined the arrival of the train in the village? It is important that in his film the train’s magical arrival is witnessed by children. We are in a space of innocence: as a result, the feeling that is excited, instantly, is one of wonder. The arrival of the train, a creature of metal and machinery, signals the arrival of modernity. Or, more simply, the entry of the city into the country. When the train leaves, it has claimed the innocence of the village-dweller.

For me, the train is a part of the imagination. Moving within set lines, it is a creative force bringing newness. My first novel ends with the protagonist contemplating the lines in a book of life:

Binod turned a page. In his dream, the dark line was a train cutting across the broad heart of the plains. The whole landscape appeared white in the bright sunlight. He must have been seated close to the engine because it was very hot. They passed a boat tilted on its side in a field. A woman sitting away from him in the train compartment was putting a piece of an orange into her mouth. But he remembered that he himself had just eaten: kheer, the rice and the sweetened milk scented with seeds of cardamom; he could still taste it on his tongue. The wind riffled the pages of the book he was holding, and passed its long fingers through his hair. The sky was cloudless but he thought for a moment that he could smell coming rain.

The train as a dream-image. That is what was at the heart of the scene in my novel. A dream that represents the drama of movement and writing. When I read those lines now, I wonder how trains came to occupy that place in my life.

Excerpted with permission from The Social Life of Indian Trains: A Journey, Amitava Kumar, Aleph Book Company.