Our condolences and solidarity to those families and friends who lost their dear ones when the Kanchenjunga Express collided with a goods train near New Jalpaiguri, West Bengal. At least 15 have been reported to have died and 60 others injured, with rescue operations still in progress. With technological advancement, one would such expect errors to become less and accidents to be fewer. The regularity with which people lose their lives in train accidents in India is largely due to the mismanagement of the Indian railway ministry.
This accident of the Kanchenjunga Express should also make us think of travel in itself and trains as a very specific mode of transport with peculiar features and history. A train journey opens up a series of experiences, of which accidents are a tragic part. Train derailment and crashes remind us that both trains and journeys can be “demonic”.
The railway apparatus has been regarded, in “common-sensical” perception, as a symbol and harbinger of rational modernity; perhaps even of national integration. Yet the box of the compartment has been a site of anxiety ever since its inception: from the Victorian idea of the violent “railway madman”, spurred by the motion of the train automating the human body to travel at speeds unnatural to animal existence, to the incident on July 31, 2023, when a railway guard killed four people in the Jaipur-Mumbai Central Superfast Express.
Chetan Singh, a constable in India’s Railway Protection Force, opened fire on passengers, whose identity is central to the ostensible breakdown in rationality in the “contemporary railway lunatic” in India. Three were Muslim passengers killed by a man employed by the rational-secular nation-state to protect them. His assault is neither singular nor random. It is by design a part of the social world of hate, violence and prejudice that the Muslims in India face. Randomly choosing three Muslim passengers also heightens the power of the act and event. This ambiguity further advances the terror a passenger may feel or become a victim of.
The violence of the “railway madman” almost always involves a perpetrator from a dominant group inflicting violence on members of marginalised communities. In Victorian England, the victims of such episodes of “railway lunacy” were women. During the Indian partition, sexual molestation and abduction of women from trains were commonplace. In contemporary India, the victims have largely been members of minority communities. The violent “railway lunatic” is invariably a man, suffering a crisis of masculinity, when brought in contact with the ‘other’ in the new democratic public space of the compartment box.
There is a train in Kenya called the ‘Lunatic Express’, called so because of the hundreds of migrant labourers from British India who died during the hostile conditions of building the railway tracks. Trauma, the “wound” implicit in our experience of modernity, comes from travel and displacement – from the Biblical story of the “Fall” to the “Birth of the Nation” marked by the wound of partition, whose primary totem are photographs of the butchered refugees in trains from the freshly sliced nation-states of India and Pakistan. There is something about train travel that is amenable to unhinged irrationality, and the collapse of the rational symbolic order.
A 16-year-old Junaid Khan was stabbed to death in a moving train on June 22, 2017. Junaid’s mother, Saira’s testimony is enough to drive home our conclusions. She says, “My son was killed only because he was wearing a skullcap on his head. He was killed because he was a Muslim. If he wasn’t a Muslim or wasn’t wearing a skullcap, he could have been alive today.”
In between Junaid’s death and Singh’s killing of Muslims, India has become painfully hostile to its minorities. There is so much accumulated trauma with each passing day, yet this trauma that one experiences in their journey opens up a different world for the Muslims of India. How will they travel within India after Junaid and after Abdul Kadar, Asgar Abbas Ali, Syed Saifullah, and Ali? How can people travel with such terror imagined behind them? What Singh did was a display of collective assault on Muslim life which exposes the perils implicit in the case of minorities and travel.
In the book Tracking Modernity: India’s Railway and Culture of Mobility, Marian Aguiar argues that the train has “historically been the most pervasive symbol of terror”. Terror here refers to experiencing it both materially and culturally. Trains have always been the site of violence and trauma. Partition in South Asia is a robust example of such a history. Right after partition, on the fateful day of September 22, 1947, 3,000 Muslim refugees were killed on a train when a group of Sikhs armed with rifles, swords and spears attacked them. The ghost trains of partition that carried the bodies of the dead are a testimony to such trauma of the train and how it became a medium and messenger of madness from both sides of the border.
Trains overflowing with refugees, Punjab 1947. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Navdip Kaur provides the statistics of partition refugees that 673 trains carried between August and November 1947. The figure stood at 2,800,000 adding to the full reach of the “totemic image” that people hanging from trains presents of the Partition, which in fictional narratives presents the train as a symbol of dislocation and deranged humanity, writes Kaur.
Heather Woods’s now out-of-print book Third-Class Ticket shows the pitfalls of travel for the subaltern, when in 1969, a group of villagers from Bengal are forced to become tourists around the country in a train when a wealthy landowner bequeaths her wealth in a trust fund for the purpose. The results are disastrous for these involuntary tourists as they experience alienation, sickness, death, and madness. One of the villagers, hauntingly, loses her mind and squats on the railway track waiting for a moving train, and dies as she is crushed under the train.
Chetan Singh, as he alighted the train after the killings, reportedly kept shooting at the train. This modern ‘railway lunatic’ saw the train as an adversary to his crisis of masculinity. As if the train – the powerful symbol of rationality and modernity – had unlocked something in him, a murderous rage turned loose on the other, here, the Muslim.
These days we are often treated to visuals of overcrowded trains in India shared on social media. This is a stark image when compared to the mid-19th century image of the train in India which was seen as a “car of fire” which could shorten one’s life. As so many die due to accidents, we should ask, who travels in trains and who is to be held accountable for such accidents? Can people take moral responsibility for such accidents? If they don’t, what of them?
Historian Eric Hobsbawm once qualified railways as a synonym for ultra-modernity. Have they – because of years of official neglect and misplaced priorities – become an emblem for accidents in India, a “charnel-house”?
Abhishek Chatterjee and Suraj Gogoi teach literature and sociology respectively at RV University, Bangalore.
