The miracle of India’s railways
From our UK edition
'Because it is the Indian Railways that makes India.' When I have a loquacious personnel officer declare this in my novel, Railsong, I am tapping into an idea as old as the railways in India. To be clear, there was no entity called the Indian Railways back in the mid-nineteenth century. But the British could envisage all too well the possibilities of this revolutionary infrastructure to extract the most from this productive colony. Gandhi argued that the railways aided not only the consolidation of British rule, but famine, plague and unholiness Raw material, such as cotton, destined for the mills of Manchester, could be conveniently chugged off to the docks. Goods manufactured in Britain could just as conveniently be circulated for profit in India.
