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Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2011 3:22 AM
Subject: H-ASIA: H-Net Review Publication: 'Power, Identity, and Moral Order
in the Indian Railway'
> H-ASIA
> March 21, 2011
>
> Book Review (orig pub. H-Travel) by David Campion on Laura Bear. _Lines of
> the Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate
> Historical Self_
>
> (x-post H-Review)
> ************************************************************************
> From: H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
>
> Laura Bear. Lines of the Nation: Indian Railway Workers,
> Bureaucracy, and the Intimate Historical Self. The Culture of
> History Series. New York Columbia University Press, 2007. 360 pp.
> $49.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-231-14002-7.
>
> Reviewed by David A. Campion (Lewis & Clark College)
> Published on H-Travel (March, 2011)
> Commissioned by Patrick R. Young
>
> Power, Identity, and Moral Order in the Indian Railway
>
> "There is something very interesting in a first railway journey in
> Bengal," wrote a young G. O. Trevelyan in 1864. "Never was I so
> impressed with the triumphs of progress ... those two thin strips of
> iron, representing as they do the mightiest and the most fruitful
> conquest of science, stretch hundreds of miles across the boundless
> Eastern plains--rich, indeed, but tilled by a race far below the most
> barbarous Europeans in all the qualities that give good hope for the
> future of a nation."[1] Trevelyan's observations capture succinctly
> the paradoxical nature of the railway in colonial India as understood
> by both the British and Indians. To the former, it was first and
> foremost a technological wonder--indeed, appearing all the more
> wondrous in contrast to what they perceived to be the benighted and
> static country across which it moved. As an instrument of progress
> and a testament to the transformative power and universal benefit of
> Western "modernity," the railway served to justify British political
> and economic control over the subcontinent as much as it enabled it.
> For the latter, however, the railway often stood as the most physical
> symbol of Indian subordination to their colonial masters while
> curiously also remaining the Achilles' heel of the British Raj. From
> Mahatma Gandhi's famous antimodern polemic against the railways in
> _Hind Swaraj_ (1909) to the later train bombings by Indian
> revolutionaries, the railways served as an arena in which
> relationships of power were defined, obeyed, resisted, and redefined
> during the apex of the colonial regime through its demise and into
> the decades following independence.
>
> Laura Bear's _Lines of the Nation_ makes a rich and sophisticated
> contribution to the growing scholarship on the Indian railways. Her
> ethnohistorical study focuses on the Eastern Railway that spanned
> Bengal and Bihar, the oldest line in India and one of its most
> heavily traveled. The labor force of this railway, like those of
> other rail networks in India, was staffed disproportionately by
> Anglo-Indians (Eurasians of British and South Asian descent). These
> people, Bear argues, became a specially created "caste" within Indian
> society, one that straddled uneasily the division between the rulers
> and the ruled and that was explicitly and inescapably tied to the
> colonial enterprise and embedded in its bureaucracy. Apart from
> being mere cogs in the machinery of the colonial state, Anglo-Indian
> railways workers and their families lived in separate special
> "railway colonies" and came to be defined in the most intimate and
> lasting ways by colonial concepts of racial, social, and occupational
> pedigree and class stratification. These combined with their own
> evolving self-definitions, both as individuals and as a community,
> based on notions of _jati_ (caste, broadly conceived), kinship, and
> lineage, as well as on their role within the railway bureaucracy and
> their relationship with its management elite. Underpinning Bear's
> approach to her subject is a persuasive challenge to the longstanding
> historiography of the Indian railway that has presented this
> institution primarily as the chief means of introducing India to the
> forces of industrial capitalism and creating its first modern labor
> force. Instead, her focus is on the more fluid and dynamic "moral
> universe" of the railways beyond its institutional, economic, or
> political dimensions.
>
> The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 draws mainly on archival
> sources and presents a detailed historical narrative of the
> development of India's railway from its origins in the tense decade
> before the Revolt of 1857 through the heady first years after
> independence. Richly descriptive chapters recreate the world of the
> Indian railway by examining such details as station design, train
> compartmentalization, segregation policies, security measures,
> medical screening of employees, company bureaucracy, and patterns of
> labor unrest or acquiescence. Beyond the public sphere of the
> stations, train sheds, and track lines, Bear also explores the
> domestic side of railway communities: how they worshipped, schooled
> themselves, created their own hierarchies, spent their leisure time,
> and reacted to the rising nationalism throughout India in the early
> decades of the twentieth century. These illuminating facets are
> meticulously pieced together into a larger mosaic that reveals the
> complexity of this organization so central to the survival and
> success of both the colonial state and the Indian nation.
>
> Part 2 shifts to a more anthropological approach drawn largely from
> fieldwork among present-day Anglo-Indian railway families in the
> company town of Kharagpur in West Bengal. The postcolonial legacy of
> the railway colony has been most keenly felt by the Anglo-Indians.
> Of mixed race and almost entirely Christian, their occupational,
> social, and cultural status in India (which was never truly secure to
> begin with) became even more precarious in the years after
> independence. As a "railway caste," neither British nor Indian,
> their rootless identity had been a quality valued by the colonial
> rulers in an occupation that demanded constant mobility. Likewise,
> their natural alienation from Indian society was perceived as an
> asset rather than a liability when it came to entrusting a segment of
> population with operating and maintaining the most valuable machinery
> of the state. Of course Anglo-Indians were not the only group that
> formed the Eastern Railway labor force. Domiciled Europeans and
> Bengali Hindus also staffed the railway in large numbers, with the
> former virtually disappearing as the British prepared to depart and
> the latter increasing after independence. Yet the Anglo-Indians bear
> special attention. After independence, this community struggled to
> find a place for itself in postcolonial India since it had been so
> heavily associated with the colonial regime, its very existence owing
> to encounters of the most intimate sort between the rulers and the
> ruled. Bear's engaging and sympathetic portrait of these people and
> of the long shadow that the colonial past continues to cast over
> their present circumstances is perhaps the most original and
> compelling contribution of the book.
>
> The most intriguing part of the book is the fifth chapter, which
> draws primarily from petitions filed by individual workers lodging
> complaints or seeking restitution from senior railway executives.
> These documents provide intimate and often heartfelt details of
> physical and psychological abuse, humiliation, wrongful termination,
> and insult to personal or family honor. Bear distinguishes these
> records from the more prosaic and tedious official files of meeting
> minutes, policy and procedural statements, wages and allowances,
> tariff rates, and the volumes of statistics of every sort. Clearly
> these petitions stand out as a voice from below, one that employs the
> "moral language of violence, tyranny, suffering, and despair" in
> opposition to the detached and often sanitized official view of the
> bureaucrats at the top (p. 108). Their voice is central to the
> argument of the book. The records of all branches of the colonial
> government contain volumes of petitions, and while these documents
> (and the responses they received) serve to expose the inner workings
> of railway discipline and morality, they require both caution and
> skepticism in their handling. By their nature, they reflect
> manipulation through half-truths, and their self-serving ends are no
> less significant than those contained in the less intimate "official"
> records of the colonial power structure. Bear's enthusiasm for this
> type of document is evident, and, at times, the individual petitions
> themselves can seem overanalyzed and infused with deeper significance
> than is obvious to the reader based on the excerpted passages.
> Nevertheless, taken together the petitions are illustrative of larger
> patterns of community identity, notions of morality, and the
> intricate relationship between the colonial state and the labor force
> on which it relied.
>
> As an interdisciplinary study in history and anthropology, _Lines of
> the Nation_ succeeds by following in a tradition of South Asian
> scholarship established by Bernard Cohn, Nicholas Dirks, and Laura
> Ann Stoler. Indeed Stoler's well-known critique of the colonial
> archive is applied with satisfying effect in this study. As a work
> of historical scholarship, it is widely and meticulously researched,
> drawing on an impressive array of archives and published sources. As
> an anthropological study, it is equally impressive. Indeed, the two
> parts of the book complement each other well and, as a whole, the
> methodologies and arguments are compelling and original. _Lines of
> the Nation_ is a substantial contribution to the study of the railway
> in South Asian history and society. Beyond that, it offers much that
> can inform larger debates about the nature of identity at the
> individual, community, and national levels and about the complex
> dynamics and contradictions of "morality" in colonized societies. As
> Bear rightly concludes, "moralizing bureaucracies do not produce
> moral orders, but instead create ethical dilemmas for bureaucrats and
> clients alike" (p. 295).
>
> Note
>
> [1]. G. O. Trevelyan, _The Competition Wallah_, 2nd ed. (London:
> Macmillan & Co., 1866), 22.
>
> Citation: David A. Campion. Review of Bear, Laura, _Lines of the
> Nation: Indian Railway Workers, Bureaucracy, and the Intimate
> Historical Self_. H-Travel, H-Net Reviews. March, 2011.
> URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=15724
>
> This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
> Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
> License.
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