A train chugs through it | Rahul Bhattacharya's 'Railsong'
Rahul Bhattacharya's Railsong is the coming-of-age story of a woman and a nation, interwoven with the world of Indian Railways
Before he began work on his second novel, Rahul Bhattacharya knew this much: it would feature an individual, and that individual would be located in a “vast enterprise that gestured at Indian complexity and scale.” “But I didn't have anything beyond that,” he says on a video call. “I didn't have a time period, I didn't have a tone. I didn't even have the enterprise I would be looking at. And most crucially, I didn't have the character. That process of discovery became the entire novel.”
Before he began work on his second novel, Rahul Bhattacharya knew this much: it would feature an individual, and that individual would be located in a “vast enterprise that gestured at Indian complexity and scale.” “But I didn't have anything beyond that,” he says on a video call. “I didn't have a time period, I didn't have a tone. I didn't even have the enterprise I would be looking at. And most crucially, I didn't have the character. That process of discovery became the entire novel.”
That novel, Railsong (Bloomsbury; Rs 799) out this month, is writer and editor Bhattacharya’s third book after his cricket tour non-fiction debut Pundits from Pakistan;and the award-winning novel The Sly Company of People Who Care.
The novel is anchored by Charulata Chitol, a motherless woman who grows up in a railway township in the 1960s before making a life in Bombay. The enterprise is the Indian Railways, a behemoth that becomes the staging ground for this bildungsroman. “I find the railways fascinating, both as something to travel by, and as a bureaucratic entity and a labour force,” says Bhattacharya. “With its employees drawn from all classes, all castes and all regions it gives us a pretty representative idea of Indian life.”
It’s a neat metaphor and a perfect vessel to examine the unfolding social history of India in the background; from Nehruvian socialism to the Emergency to the advent of Hindutva politics. Ms Chitol herself is sui generis; the daughter of a railwayman turned teenage runaway who tastes freedom in 1970s Bombay, drops out of college, rotates through a string of dalliances before returning to a job in the mothership: the Indian Railways. She navigates working women’s hostels and everyday sexism, her first period and life in a joint family. “I didn't have any anxiety at the start about writing a female character. I was just following my instincts,” says Bhattacharya. “But as I went deeper I had to familiarise myself with experiences that are not natural to me as a man. I did a lot more committed reading around various things, various genres of literature, from various parts of the world to give myself the confidence to undertake female articulation.”
Bhattacharya’s novel is a feat of both research and imagination—the arc of an individual, her family life and professional pursuits emerge from a very specific universe. For instance, we hear about the well-known 1974 railway strike, but also about union politics, workplace hierarchies, station codes and byzantine regulations about employee pay scales and family benefits. “I felt that I needed the scaffolding of the actual world, because it is a realist novel,” he says. Bhattacharya spent a decade poring through circulars, government documents, maps and also undertaking train journeys and speaking to former employees. “One thing is trying to be on top of the material, the other hard part is to then let that material evaporate off this block of information into something that permeates the world of the novel, so that the granular detail becomes part of the text rather than something that sits on top of it.”
The book chugs through history and geography, traversing four decades, personal milestones and far-flung corners of the country. Across 400 pages, and dozens of minor characters with walk-on parts (“I lost count at one point”), Bhattacharya sutures together a riveting portrait of an emerging republic often cleaved by caste and religion. Another great Indian enterprise also emerges as a recurring motif: the decennial census.
The act of writing, which Bhattacharya undertook in longhand, was both fraught and freeing. “I remember having the feeling of ‘where I am taking this’?” he says. “There is a sense of suspenseful energy. You don't know what comes next, you're clearing the forest, building the path.”
The novel ends in 1992, as one phase of Ms Chitol’s life draws to a close. “That was the right moment to pause the story,” he says. “It ends on the eve of the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which is also the time of economic liberalisation. These two events steadily and quite significantly altered Indian life—how we relate to the material world, our idea of spending, our idea of jobs and the start of the entrenchment of a new politics.”
In many places the dialogue sparkles in its brevity and the world of bureaucracy offers many moments of absurdity. “What can I say?” he says. “India is a funny place, life is funny.”