Indian railways, as a social microcosm of the country, have long figured in reflections and commentary on India. They find their way into literary narratives of many kinds, and into screen portrayals too. In these tellings, the train carries a cross-section: class, region, habit, speech, and silence, held together in shared space.

Amitava Kumar’s The Social Life of Indian Trains: A Journey is built on a familiar trope: the Indian train as social theatre, and the coach as a cross-section of the republic. It is, in effect, a long essay assembled from travel notes. 

The most recent journey – Jammu Tawi to Kanyakumari on the Himsagar Express – forms its centrepiece, even as the book draws on travel notes from earlier visits and journeys going back decades. But this trope, when approached too consciously, also sets a trap. The railway becomes less a lived, routine world than an episodic instrument – returned to now and then – to gather impressions, scenes, and voices.

The book never quite sheds the air of an exercise. Kumar boards trains not to get somewhere, but to use the journey as material, an organised attempt to watch, record, and assemble. Observation comes across as a task, not something incidental. It is cultivated, deliberate, almost programmatic – an assignment the author sets himself. In such writing, the world does not quite arrive on its own terms; it is approached as material instead.

Less like a world opening up

The book is anchored in a practice Kumar has recently foregrounded in his writing. He has been keeping travel notes for years, and The Social Life of Indian Trains draws on jottings from train journeys going back to the mid-1990s, along with older, undocumented memories from earlier phases of life. In some ways, the book stems from the author’s insistence – made explicit in his last work, The Green Book: An Observer’s Notebook (Harper Collins India, 2024) – that note-making itself can be treated as the centre of literary labour. This book draws on that idea to produce an account of observed trips. It also borrows a narrative cue from the 1967 documentary I Am 20, where one of the respondents imagines travelling “top to bottom” through India, meeting people along the way. Taken together, these prompts help explain why the book so often feels less like a world opening up and more like a method being carried out.

In the process, what is lost is an important ingredient of observation: randomness. Observations guided by a conscious act of seeing tend to resemble a survey, a kind of study. But everyday acts of unforced viewing aren’t systematic. At the same time, any form of observation as an activity misses a crucial point: cultivated watching is another form of memory, and therefore selective. One detail imprints; ten vanish. That distortion is intrinsic. At best, it is a kind of corrupted memory – not corrupt in the moral sense, but in the sense that the mind cannot preserve everything equally.

A planned observer, however, does not remember that way. He collects.

Kumar’s latest journey on the Himsagar Express mirrors this limitation. A journey undertaken to talk to strangers is not the same as a journey undertaken to go somewhere. It becomes a literary-sociological project in which co-passengers are burdened with representativeness. They are not merely people.

This is where the episodic traveller meets his limits. Kumar is a US-based writer who returns periodically; he is not a routine inhabitant of this railway world. For a book claiming the “social life” of trains, this matters more than it might seem. The deepest social life of trains lies in everyday negotiations, not in emblematic conversations.

The book has many moments

Despite these serious limitations, the book has its moments. Kumar has a practised literary sensibility. He can render a scene quickly, move from anecdote to association with ease. He also weaves together references from literature and cinema, building a lattice of history and culture around the railway.

The book sketches the historical significance of Indian railways – from the first passenger train in 1853 to the rapid expansion of the rail network in the colonial era. In the process, there are fleeting references to the critiques railways attracted, which at times became critiques of modern civilisation itself, as in Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj. Gandhi appears as both traveller and critic, concerned with class, cleanliness, and the moral meaning of modern infrastructure.

Kumar also shows trains as part of India’s imaginative landscape. He invokes Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali and its iconic train sighting in rural Bengal, as well as Bollywood’s repeated use of trains for suspense, tension, disaster, and romantic aesthetics. Partition literature enters naturally: trains as vehicles not just of travel but of migration, fear, and rupture. This cultural stitching allows railways to unfold as a narrative anchored in national memory.

Yet one is left with the feeling that the book’s references are confined to a familiar canon, missing more recent notes. The railway imagination here is recognisably well-known and high-cultural: Ray; canonical Partition writing such as Khushwant Singh and Bhisham Sahni; and once refers to established travel writing like that of Paul Theroux. This does not register the current hinterland heart of train life – especially the regional migrant imagination, where trains are not metaphors but seasonal fate. 

Bhojpuri popular culture, for instance, has made trains a key theme of longing: the waiting wife, the migrant husband returning during Holi or Chhath in overcrowded coaches, the platform as theatre, and the “special train” as both hope and humiliation.

A long cultural shift escapes notice here. In earlier Bidesiya traditions, ships, seas, and rivers carried the metaphor of separation; in modern migration culture, the train replaces the ship. That shift tells the story of the migrant traveller in contemporary India, hummed in regional music today. The book does not take note of this, which is disappointing – particularly because the author is from the region. A book that claims the “social life” of trains might be expected to turn its gaze to the specific trains that populate migrant imagination: trains that live in song, resentment, erotic longing, and the anxiety of waiting and return.

Kumar does speak of toilets, class divisions, discomfort, and stoic acceptance of travel hardships. This is ably done, and in a few words he captures something so obvious that it risks invisibility. On the lighter side, however, he misses a large slice of train sociology: the dread of social exchange.

Many Indian travellers, for instance, do not experience train life as social warmth. They experience it as vulnerability. Some want privacy and fear forced intimacy. The challenge lies in how one negotiates interaction, avoids it, and is still pulled into it. One wishes the author had reflected on the simplest, most universal example: the social drama around the lower berth. Getting a lower berth feels like winning a lottery. Keeping it becomes a moral struggle. Requests arrive wrapped as rights; guilt is deployed as a weapon; refusal makes you “inhuman”; agreement makes you resentful. This is train life at its most Indian – coercion masked as politeness. A routine traveller knows this theatre intimately. The episodic observer often does not see it, or sees it without its full weight.

Another thinness comes from narrowing “social life” largely to in-coach encounters. Railway stations in India are entire dramas. The hierarchy of send-offs – who comes, who performs affection, who carries luggage, who gives advice at the door, who cries and who does not – contains mini-plots by the dozen. Stations are where class and intimacy become visible in compressed form. The book largely bypasses this theatre.

Then there is the most obvious missing social world: railways as employment. Indian Railways is not merely a transport system; it is a colossal labour institution with its own hierarchies, cultures of transfer, quarters, unions, and aspirations. Its employees – station masters, guards, vendors, cleaners, technicians, RPF and GRP personnel – create a parallel society, while many technical workers remain out of sight altogether. This once led a commentator to quip that Indian Railways seemed like an employment system that also happened to run trains. A book about the social life of trains should have entered this dimension with far more particularity.

Kumar’s linking of trains to national history is also uneven. At moments he is powerful, especially when he evokes trains as sites of communal violence, such as memories of the 1946 Bihar killings. But when one uses trains as vessels of riot-memory, the arc could also have included earlier railway horrors, the violence following the Direct Action Day call in Bengal in August 1946, and the haunting imagery of trains arriving with corpses instead of passengers.

The Social Life of Indian Trains is not without merit. It is readable, brisk, and contains fleeting moments of literary radiance. But it is ultimately weakened by its purposefulness. The writer’s gaze becomes too visible as the assignment of observation wears down the natural flow of experience. In a genre already saturated with “train-as-microcosm” writing, such visibility of method becomes a flaw.

For readers curious about Indian Railways beyond essayistic observation, two books make useful companions: Rajendra B Aklekar’s A Short History of Indian Railways, and Bibek Debroy et al’s Indian Railways: The Weaving of a National Tapestry. Though not literary works, they are more ambitious in retelling history and piecing together the strands of continuity and change in the remarkable journey of India’s rail network.

A few years after the swanky Delhi Metro began reshaping the capital’s urban landscape, V S Naipaul perceptively remarked that travellers were imitating the Metro in their conduct. That practice has little use on trains running across a gigantic, centuries-old rail network. Most Indians have cast the railways in their own image, rather than the other way around. This produces varied social worlds within Indian trains, something Kumar attempts to piece together on a limited canvas. In trying to mirror the social life of Indian trains, the book ends up showing something narrower: the social life of trains as seen through a purposeful observer. Such an observer sometimes watches too carefully, and therefore misses what routine life reveals without asking. That is perhaps the pitfall of seeing as an assignment – work one sets oneself to do.

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