Eshan Sharma at The Wire:
Amitava Kumar has long occupied a distinctive place in contemporary English writing. His work resists easy classification, blurring the boundaries between fiction, memoir, reportage, history and critique.
With its stark white cover and a painting of a train in blue, perhaps suggestive of an accumulation of all the colours, lives and histories that animate his earlier work, he is now out with The Social Life of Indian Trains. This new book deals with something that we have come to take for granted: the railways.
Trains have been an inseparable part of our lives. Since childhood, I have travelled in bogies of every kind – unreserved, sleeper, second AC, first AC. If anything binds this subcontinental country together, it’s the railways, far more than cricket and films. Many lives depend on it: from those who work, to those who travel long distances to get to work. For some, it’s routine, for others, it’s a lifeline, and for many, still, it’s a wonder they’ve never experienced. More than being a part of our claimed identity, the history of trains has been a strange reminder of colonialism, a time we fantasise about erasing from our collective memory.
Given how integral the railways are to a nation’s life, they naturally find their way into popular culture, from literature to cinema.
More here.
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