Book Review Of ‘Railsong’: A Life On Wheels

• Railsong’ paints a detailed portrait of a vital Indian institution—Indian Railways

• Bhombalpur and Bombay come alive on the pages of the novel, and the large cast of characters that inhabits these places is fleshed out convincingly

• Railsong’s’ heroine, Charulata Chitol, is one of the most memorable characters in contemporary South Asian literature

 Charulata Chitol, the heroine of Rahul Bhattacharya’s epic novel ‘Railsong’, realises at a very young age that “the game of life was of daring and the daring was of the self”. Charu’s father Animesh Kumar Chattopadhyay is a railway employee who holds progressive views. Looking to undermine the caste system, he sheds his high-caste surname and coins one of his own: ‘Chitol’—modelled after the name of a popular Bengali fish. Naturally, this made-up surname triggers a lot of speculation. It’s not easy to tell which caste exactly Chitol belongs to! Much to his mother’s annoyance, he marries a woman outside his community and his caste.

The novel opens with the family’s move to the nascent railway township of Bhombalpur in 1961. The ninth general census, independent India’s second, is underway. As soon as the family lands in the town, they are counted. Chitol is filled with hope about the move to Bhombalpur. He feels that there is potential here, “promise in the future”.

Charu and her two brothers spend their childhood in Bhombalpur. She is curious about the world around her and longs for adventure. She has no interest in being confined to her home, playing the ‘woman of the house’ while her brothers run free. When Charu becomes “cognisant of the miracle of books”, discovering in them people she could laugh and cry with, people who had no expectations from her, yet were always there for her, “giving her so much of themselves she felt accountable towards them”. Bhombalpur is the home where Charu loses her mother when she is still a child, the roof under which her grandmother passes away, and the nest she leaves behind when she catches a crowded train to Bombay at 16, keen to forge a future for herself.

The narrative chugs along at an engaging pace. It covers the arc of Charu and her family’s life and also paints a detailed portrait of a vital Indian institution—the Indian Railways. Charu gets a job with the railways on compassionate grounds after her father’s death. As she works her way up the ladder, readers are offered a chance to decode the mysterious ways (to outsiders) in which the railways operate and the quirks of those who are part of its labyrinthine bureaucracy. Along with Charu, we marvel at its immense reach as she travels on trains that crisscross a vast and diverse landscape, "everywhere around her people, people, people, people like raindrops." When she earns a promotion as a Welfare Inspector, which involves a great deal of fieldwork and is largely a male preserve, she becomes an official problem solver of sorts, trying her best to address the grievances of railway employees and their dependents. Whenever she sets out on her beat, it is with an “intimation of discovery… Everything that happened in India happened also on the Indian Railways”. Bhattacharya’s well-crafted prose draws readers into the heart of Charu’s travels—from childhood to adulthood—as well as a nation’s journey across the decades.

Just as his previous novel, ‘The Sly Company of People Who Care’, ‘Railsong’ too, is seeped in a strong sense of place. Bhombalpur and Bombay come alive on the pages, and the large cast of characters that inhabits these places is fleshed out convincingly. Familial bonds, friendships, Charu’s brushes with desire and romance—the human drama plays out against the backdrop of national change. The third-person narrator is the all-seeing eye of the novel, but life’s ebb and flow is filtered through the characters’—most prominently Charu’s—experiences, which makes for immersive reading. The rhythms of Bhombalpur and Bombay’s big city buzz, humour and tenderness, tragedy and triumph, shadow and sunshine, love and lust and heartbreak—the novel’s tapestry is threaded through with it all.

Turning points in the nation’s history like the famine that scorched Bihar in 1966; the 1974 rail workers’ strike and the accompanying political churnings, are woven into the story. History is humanised here—a prerogative of the fiction writer—and its impact on individual lives highlighted. The descriptions of the struggle of Bhombalpur residents as famine grips the land are heartrending. “Grain withered on the stalk,” Bhattacharya writes. “Day by day, as fields cracked and dried, the grief of wasted labour gave on to the terror of starvation. That great despair made its way into the railway colony…” When the railway strike breaks out in 1974, Charu longs to join the protestors. Her father, worried about her safety, tries to stop her. “You don’t want me to see anything, do anything, be anything at all,” she complains, never the one to shy away from a challenged. Later, as the government cracks down on the strikers, the Chitol family is forced to go underground. Charu’s father’s name is on the list of suspected agitators. The government has unleashed a brutal crackdown on the striking workers and their sympathisers, branding them anti-national and anti-progress.

Bhattacharya has done an impressive amount of research on Indian history as well as on the Indian Railways. He steers clear of information dumps in the novel for the most part, careful
not to bog down the narrative. The narrative engine is Charu’s spirit of adventure, her drive and persistence, her appetite for life, her determination to break free of set definitions of womanhood. In Bombay, she enrolls in college (but doesn’t attend classes); works at a shoe store to earn a living; lives as a paying guest, putting up with a menagerie of landlords/ladies; moves into a working women’s hostel where she chafes against the rules, but finds comfort in community. Working women’s hostels have hefty rulebooks and so does marriage. When Charu becomes Smt. (Mrs.) Chitol, she looks for ways to rewrite the rules instead of tamely stepping into the traditional framework. Juggling her professional commitments and the demands placed on her in her in-laws’ house is not easy by any means. Like many Indian women of her time, she treasures her professional identity and doesn’t allow it to be subsumed by her personal life. Charulata Chitol is certainly one of the most memorable characters in contemporary South Asian literature. Her song, hopeful and resolute, lingers long after you finish reading ‘Railsong’.