When the first train left Bombay in 1853, it would have been unlikely anyone in a position to know could have imagined that the British colonial railway system created for profit would one day be a sprawling network of resistance and togetherness as Indians fought for their independence from colonial rule. The Indian Railways were established as a tool of exploitation to remove the raw materials of India to ports and support the British economy, but it slowly transitioned into a tool of ideological political awakening, mass mobilization, and revolutionary circulation of words and ideas. As time lapsed, that which was meant to divide and control became one of the strongest forces of togetherness binding Indians whether distance, language, or culture.
The railway lines joined faraway territories that until that point had had only a weak attachment to the concept of a larger entity called India. Villages and towns, once separated by the distance involved in geography, were now linked by trains that transported products, conversations, newspapers, and citizens who had a political identity. It was in the crowded compartments and waiting platforms that conversations around politics developed, leaflets were distributed, and knowledge of political movements occurring in other geographic areas spread like wildfire. This web of connection was helping to simulate the idea of a common destiny, making the idea of physical unity more real to a public.
The British aimed for the railways to consolidate their power. In a twist of fate, however, it was precisely the railways that allowed Indians to begin to unravel it. Leaders of the independence movement saw that railways would help circulate their ideas and could convert them into movements. Critically oriented newspapers on colonial rule were transported by trains to towns that dissenting audiences could converge. Leaders like Gandhi, Tilak, and Subhas Chandra Bose were given more access to mass audiences because reports, pamphlets, and other messaging could be disseminated far faster than ever before or in previous centuries. Gandhi’s “non-cooperation” movement, call to boycott British goods, and later the Quit India movement were powerfully amplified in both their reach and ease of circulation because of rail. The platform of the railway station thus became both a literal and symbolic venue for freedom.
Railways also facilitated organized mass protest. The Swadeshi movement mobilized students and workers in groups along railway lines to attend meetings and demonstrations, while the Salt March saw trainloads of people joining Gandhi’s protests at different points along the march. Railway workers strikes were acts of defiance, shaking the colonial administration where it hurt most. The Indian railway men’s strike in 1947 represented one of the largest labor uprisings in Indian history, shaped not only by the economic power of this workforce, but also by its political authority. Workers who once served colonialism’s machinery of exploitation and brutal violence, now turned this machinery against their former masters, stopping trains and halting supply lines.
Revolutionaries were also direct in their use of the railways. One prominent example would be the Hindustan Socialist Republic Association, who not only committed train robberies to fund their activities, but to promote the idea of a bold defiance of colonial authority. These extraordinary acts captured the national imagination of wherever the common Indian would witness the use of the railways, once an instrument of colonial rule, being used against their rulers. Even small acts of defiance, such as passing out seditious pamphlets or painting anti-colonial slogans on the walls of trains, intensified the feeling of rebellion in everyday life.
Workers on Britain’s railways are often neglected in conventional accounts of the movement. A number of railway men including signalmen and ticket agents secretly backed revolutionary forces, delayed troop trains, or allowed rebel leaders to pass safely through. This quiet defiance contributed to the broader pattern of resistance and more importantly, made the colonial government fret about loyalty from employees in its own institutions. Resistance was not only from leaders and intellectuals; thousands of anonymous workers defied the colonial forces by risking their livelihoods and their lives.
For Gandhi, the paradox of modernity was represented by the railways. While he frequently condemned the railways for spreading diseases and facilitating exploitation, he used them frequently in pursuit of his objectives over the entire subcontinent. Therefore, his third-class journeys were instrumental, not only symbolic, as they allowed him to inhabit the everyday lives of the people, to understand their realities, to bind their struggles to the idea of independence. Trains served as a dynamic backdrop of speeches, conjoined prayers, and determined collectivism which intertwined the ethos of India’s freedom movement.
When independence came in 1947, Indian Railways had established itself as a sign of collective struggle. It was no longer a mechanism of colonial resource extraction, but a public national asset that had borne the burdens of sacrifice, insurrection, and unity. The railway map of India was, in a sense, the resistance map, as each junction, each stop and each platform comprised a part of the greater resistance to freedom.
When, we travel today across the immense breadth of India by train, it is easy to see them either as practical wonders of engineering or as conveyers of people or goods. Yet beneath the sound of wheels and the call of whistles is a history one that describes how iron tracks laid for colonial purposes became the veins of liberation. The Indian Railways connected cities and towns, but it also connected hearts and minds and spawned one of the largest mass movements the world has ever witnessed. In its own fashion, the Indian Railways helped free this country and illustrates on its own that any instrument of control can also become the arteries of liberation.