Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (25 page)

Map of the Indian Railways in 1868
(source
: Development of Indian Railways
by Nalinaksha Sanyal)

Given the available technology and the
difficult terrain of central India, this was an impressive achievement. Yet, the
pace of expansion accelerated in the 1870s with an average 468 miles (749 km) being
added per year compared to 250 miles (400 km) in the previous period.
¹⁵
In 1878, 900 miles (1440 km) were added in a single year. This is incredible by
any standard. By 1882, the country had a network that connected almost all major
cities, and the Victorian engineers were feeling confident enough to build into the
steep Himalayan hillsides in order to connect hill stations like Darjeeling and
Simla.

Nonetheless, do not think of this as a
seamless and integrated network. It was built in a hurry by different companies,
agencies and princely states, using different standards and gauges, and with
different objectives. This caused all kinds of operational inefficiencies that have
not been entirely ironed out even in the twenty-first century. Still, the railway
network dramatically re-ordered the economic geography of the country. Agricultural
commodities could now be exported out from the hinterland while manufactured imports
could be brought in cheaply. In many places, the traditional artisan economy
suffered a major shock even as the old caravan routes became redundant. The Marwari
merchants of Rajasthan, for instance, were forced to leave their homes and look for
opportunities in the new world. Many would make their way to Calcutta where their
descendants would become very successful businessmen. Their semi-abandoned but
beautifully frescoed ancestral homes can still be seen in towns
like Mandawa and Jhunjhunu in the Shekhawati region of Rajasthan.

Meanwhile, new towns sprouted along the
railway routes even as some communities took advantage of their rapid expansion. One
such group was the racially mixed Anglo-Indian (i.e. Eurasian) community that joined
the railways in large numbers. They created a colourful sub-culture that has faded
away in recent decades. I remember how, when I was growing up in the early 1980s,
there was still a strong Anglo-Indian community in Kolkata, with its distinctive
cuisine, its love of music and sport, and somewhat idiosyncratic use of the English
language. Today, a few pockets remain but the Anglo-Indians are increasingly
indistinguishable from the wider Indian Christian population. There is a sizeable
diaspora in Australia and Canada, where too it has increasingly integrated with the
wider society. Nevertheless, the memory of the old Anglo-Indian community remains
alive in novels and films such as John Masters’s
Bhowani
Junction
. Writer Carl Muller’s trilogy about the Burghers of Sri
Lanka is a humorous account of the lives and attitudes of this disappearing world.
¹⁶

As a linkage technology, the railway
system was the Internet or mobile network of its time. As it carried people and
goods across the country, it allowed a new form of interaction between different
parts of the subcontinent. The social reformer and religious leader Swami
Vivekananda used trains to criss-cross the country in the last decade of the
nineteenth century. Mahatma Gandhi would do the same as he tried to re-acquaint
himself with India after his return from South Africa. By 1924, 576 million
passenger trips were being made per year. Of course, this does not mean that train
journeys
were always enjoyable, especially for the second- and
third-class passengers. A report listed out the following complaints of third-class
passengers in 1903:

• Overcrowding of carriages and
  insufficiency of trains
  
• Use of cattle trucks and goods wagons for
  pilgrims
  
• Absence of latrines in the coaches and their
  extremely unsuitable character
  
• Absence of arrangements for meals and
  insufficient drinking water
  
• Absence of waiting halls and their extremely
  uncomfortable nature when available
  
• Inadequate booking facilities
  
• Harassment at checking and examination of
  tickets
  
• Bribery and exactions at stations, platforms
  and in the train
  
• Want of courtesy and sympathetic treatment
  of passengers by railway staff
  

A century later, many of these
complaints still ring true. Thankfully, cattle trucks are no longer used for
passengers but the resentment still remains. An innocuous comment about
‘cattle class’ by Shashi Tharoor (then a minister) in 2009 would
lead to an uproar.

The period between the Revolt of 1857
and the First World War was the high noon of the British Empire. Nowhere was this
more evident than in Calcutta (now Kolkata), the empire’s eastern capital.
Extravagant buildings embodying Victorian confidence were constructed by the
government, banks, companies and wealthy individuals. A surprisingly large
number of them have survived into the twenty-first century,
hidden behind billboards and other debris of later times. One of the positive
consequences of its economic decline in the second half of the twentieth century is
that Kolkata is home to the finest collection of nineteenth-century buildings that
have survived anywhere in the world. The best way to see it is to wander around the
financial district around Lal Dighi on a Sunday morning when the chaotic traffic and
the crowds will not distract from the beauty of the old streetscape.

The area used to be called Dalhousie
Square but has since been renamed after three Indian revolutionaries Binoy, Badal
and Dinesh. Be sure to see the High Court, the Writers’ Building, the
Chartered Bank Building, the General Post Office and Guillander House. The area is
also home to the exceptionally ugly Telephone Bhavan built in the twentieth century.
Lal Dighi itself is half-hidden by car parks and a tram depot, sad and neglected,
waiting for someone to rescue it. You may also peek from the gate at the Raj Bhavan,
once the palace of the Governor General, now home to the Governor of West Bengal.
However, be careful about taking photographs too close to public buildings. As I
discovered, in these terrorist-plagued times, one runs the risk of being asked a lot
of questions by the police!

Even as Calcutta was basking in the high
noon of Empire, a rival was emerging in the western coast—Bombay (now
Mumbai). It was not a new settlement. The area had been home to a major port in
ancient times; the seventh-century cave temples of Elephanta Island are a testimony
to those times. Nonetheless, the origins of the modern city go back to the
Portuguese occupation of the area in the sixteenth century.
At
this stage, Bombay was an archipelago of several marshy islands. The names of some
of the islands have survived as the names of neighbourhoods—Colaba, Mahim,
Parel, Worli, Mazagaon. The islands passed into British hands in 1662 as part of the
dowry received by King Charles II on his marriage to Catherine of Braganza. In turn,
it was then leased to the East India Company for ten pounds a year.

Initially, the settlement was not a big
success because the aggressive Marathas prevented the British from expanding into
the mainland. However, by the late eighteenth century, the British position was
secure enough to allow the growth of a significant port and trading hub. This
encouraged the British governor to initiate a series of civil engineering works,
loosely dubbed the Hornby Vellard project, to connect the various islands by
landfills and causeways. By 1838, the seven southern islands had been combined into
one Bombay Island. By 1845, the Mahim causeway had connected Mahim to Bandra on the
island of Salsette. Although all the main islands have been consolidated, the
process of building linkages continues to this day. The latest is the
Bandra–Worli Sealink opened in 2009 to link South Mumbai to the
‘suburbs’.

One of the first to take advantage of
the emerging city were the Parsis, descendants of Zoroastrian refugees from Iran who
had settled along the Gujarat coast. They first moved to Bombay to work for the
British as shipbuilders but, by the 1830s, became very wealthy by engaging in the
opium trade with China. Nonetheless, in the mid-nineteenth century, the city was
still much smaller than Calcutta or Madras. Two factors dramatically changed its
fortunes in the 1860s—the American Civil War and the opening of the Suez
Canal. When
the blockade by the American North of the ports of
the American South suddenly deprived the mills of Lancashire of raw cotton, they
switched to the cotton fields of western India. The newly built railway network
transported cotton directly from the fields to Bombay port. New cotton mills began
to be built in Bombay itself. The opium trade with China also boomed at the same
time, with 37,000 chests being shipped out every year.

With all this new money, both the
government and the wealthy merchants of the city embarked on an orgy of new
construction—the more extravagant the better. There was a speculative boom
in cotton, land and in ambitious ventures like the Back Bay Reclamation Company.
Trading was furious at the informal stock-market that had appeared under a tree in
front of the Town Hall (according to legend, it was a banyan tree in what is now
Horniman Circle). Migrants moved in by the tens of thousands and congested slums
proliferated. A contemporary would comment, ‘To ride home to Malabar Hill
along the sands of Back Bay was to encounter sights and odours too horrible to
describe … To travel by rail from Bori Bunder to Byculla, or to go to Mody
Bay, was to see in the foreshore the latrine of the whole population of Native
Town.’
¹⁷
The locations of the slums have changed over the last one-and-a-half centuries,
but anyone who has travelled in Mumbai’s suburban trains will know what
the above comment means.

In 1865, the American Civil War ended
and the prices of shares and cotton crashed in Bombay. By 1866, several of the
city’s banks and real estate companies had failed, and many previously
wealthy individuals were left bankrupt. The city
was strewn with
half-built projects that were no longer viable. Nonetheless, the boom years had
given Bombay a new status and a speculative spirit that remains very much alive to
this day. Strike up a conversation with the street vendors of Nariman Point or the
Fort, and you are likely to be given stock-market tips aplenty (although I would be
somewhat wary of investing on the basis of this advice).

By the 1860s, the British surveyors had
an accurate map of the subcontinent and were beginning to wonder what lay beyond the
Himalayas. This was no idle curiosity; it was driven by Russian inroads into Central
Asia. The ‘Great Game’ had begun. The problem was that the
Tibetan authorities were not keen to let in Europeans inside their
borders—a few who had tried had been tortured and killed. The Survey of
India decided to use Indian spies disguised as traders and pilgrims. The first and
most famous of these was a young schoolteacher from the Kumaon hills, Nain Singh. In
1865, he crossed from Nepal into Tibet along with a party of traders. A few days
after the crossing, the traders slipped away one night with most of Nain
Singh’s money and left him stranded in a strange land.

Fortunately, they had left behind his
most valuable possessions, concealed in a box with a false bottom—a
sextant, a thermometer, a chronometer, a compass and a container of mercury. He also
had a Buddhist rosary, except it had 100 beads instead of the usual 108. Nain Singh
planned to measure distance by slipping one bead for every 100 paces walked. He
also had a prayer wheel that concealed slips of paper on which
he recorded compass bearings and distances
¹⁸
.

Nain Singh somehow begged his way across
the cold and desolate landscape. In January 1865, he finally entered the forbidden
city of Lhasa. He took care to behave in a manner appropriate for a pilgrim,
including making a brief visit to the Dalai Lama of that time. Meanwhile, he
supported himself by teaching local merchants the Indian system of keeping accounts.
His position, however, was very precarious. This was brought home when he witnessed
the beheading of a Chinese man who had arrived in Lhasa without permission. After
this incident, Nain Singh seldom appeared in public. At night, he would climb out
quietly from the window onto the roof of the small inn where he stayed. Then, he
would use his sextant to determine latitude by measuring the angular altitude of the
stars. He also used his thermometer to record the boiling point of water as the
higher the altitude, the lower the boiling point. Using this method, he estimated
that Lhasa was at an altitude of 3420 metres above sea level. This is very close to
the modern measurement of 3540 metres.

Nain Singh left Lhasa in April along
with a Ladakhi caravan and headed west for 800 km along the River Tsangpo. All along
he kept taking readings in secret. After two months with the caravan he slipped away
on his own and made his way back to India via the sacred Mansarovar Lake. He arrived
back at the Survey of India headquarters on 27 October 1866. During his
twenty-one-month adventure, he had surveyed thousands of kilometres, taken
thirty-one latitude fixes, and determined elevation in thirty-three places and the
first accurate position of the Tibetan capital. Nain Singh would
return to Tibet in 1873–75 to explore a more northerly route from Leh in
Ladakh to Lhasa. Some of his family members would join the dangerous profession and
work for the Survey of India.