The English Track Record

THE INTRODUCTION OF railways into India lagged considerably behind Britain for a number of reasons. While the first passenger and freight journey between Liverpool and Manchester had taken place in 1830, it was not until 1853 that the first passenger train ran between Bombay and Thane. The primary reason was again financial. It cost an extraordinary amount of money to build a railway in England: a pair of double rails alone was estimated at £5,000 per mile, and the 30-mile line between Liverpool and Manchester was estimated at £25,000 per mile. It was not just the rails and the trains that were so costly, but the price of the land itself over which the railway was to run, which included the fencing, embankments, cuttings, viaducts and bridges, as well as the parliamentary and law proceedings necessary to secure the sites.

It was argued in a series of Parliamentary Papers that the difficulties of such work in India:

would not be greater than those that have been met with in England, and that they are not such as the Natives under European superintendence (or without it, if the nature of the works was explained to them), could not overcome, [it] is perfectly evident from the vast embankments, irrigating canals etc. which have been executed both before and since the Europeans have established themselves in the country.

It was again the engineer Macdonald Stephenson whose persistence led to the construction of the first railway line in eastern India, from Howrah to the coalfields at Raniganj. He had been secretary of the East India Steam Navigation Company, the organisation that planned steamship journeys between England and India, but, having failed to obtain a royal charter, he decided instead to concentrate on railway development in the subcontinent.

Stephenson travelled to India in 1843 and in the following year published his Report Upon the Practicability and Advantages of the Introduction of Railways into British India, a seventyseven- page booklet which included ‘full statistical data on existing trade’. He wrote to everyone who might support his cause, including Dwarkanath Tagore and other Indian businessmen, as well as British engineers, surveyors, civil architects, merchant houses and the Military Board. He obtained statistics on roads, animal transport, the cost of excavation, the salt trade, the coal trade, the sugar trade, customs duties, timber specimens and public works. For a snapshot of traffic and trade in Eastern India in the early 1840s, there is no better compilation.

During one winter month alone, the British-built military road between Calcutta and Benares saw nearly 2,000 bullock carts, 84 wheeled carriages, 118 palanquins carrying passengers and about 780 people on foot. Troops, elephants and horses added to the traffic. On the river, huge quantities of merchandise were shipped down the Hooghly to Calcutta, the bulk being saltpetre (34 per cent) followed by sugar (29 per cent), cotton (24 per cent) and smaller quantities of indigo and rock salt. The annual number of river passengers was over 26,000. Macdonald Stephenson travelled back and forth to India, setting up a joint-stock company in England, the East Indian Railway Company (EIR), whose board of directors included bankers, engineers, and shipping managers. A portion of shares was allocated in India through the EIR Bengal local committee. It took time for Macdonald Stephenson to negotiate details with the East India Company, and at one point he had to appeal directly to the liberal Prime Minister Lord John Russell, whose intervention secured an agreement. The East India Company conceded that it would guarantee a limited rate of interest to shareholders for a period of 20 years. Much of the initial outlay by the railway company was expended in England on the rails, the fabric for bridges and girders and the rolling stock (that is, the trains themselves and the steam engines). Nearly everything that furnished the first Indian railways was imported from Britain, with little or no attempt to engage local manufactories.

A similar move was taking place in western India, where the Great India Peninsular Railway Company (GIPR) had formed an alliance with the East India Company and had begun building the 21-mile line from Bombay’s Bori Bunder station to Thane. The inaugural rail journey saw fourteen carriages hauled by three steam locomotives from the site of today’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus). Lord Dalhousie, the governor general who took up his post in 1848, had previously been president at the Board of Trade in England when ‘railway mania’ was at its height, and he arrived in India both knowledgeable and enthusiastic about railways. It was Dalhousie who ordered that the meter gauge of 5 feet 6 inches be used throughout India (with certain exceptions), and this ruling enabled single lines to be joined up with others to create a rail network. By 1860, eight railway companies including the EIR and the GIPR had been established, covering Bengal, the Madras Presidency, Bombay to Baroda and Central India.

A civil servant, Charles Lushington, was appointed Railway Commissioner in Bengal to oversee the acquisition of land for the EIR line from Howrah to Raniganj. His chief duty, he was told by the financial department of the East India Company, was to prevent ‘extortion and jobbing’ on the part of the zamindars whose land would be taken up for the line. It all seemed quite clear at first. The surveyors drew up the plan showing where the line would run and Lushington worked out the amount of compensation for the landholders. Then he drew up bills of exchange from the treasury and the government purchased the land. There would be objections, as there had been from landlords in England where land had been compulsorily purchased, but Lushington thought that the surveyors’ plans would be as accurate as those in England and ‘that that the boundaries of each holding, however small, would be clearly and distinctly defined’.‘With such plans,’ he wrote, ‘and a list of the proprietors before me, there could be no difficulty in determining the claims, either by private bargain or by arbitration in the usual course of law.’

It was not that simple, of course. Nothing in India to do with land and property ever is. Lushington found himself having to explain the delay to the Bengal Government officials, comfortably housed in Writers’ Building:

I suggest a walk through any of the thick plantations in the immediate neighbourhood of Calcutta…they will then be able to appreciate the difficulties that had to be encountered. They will see huts, houses, bamboos, and trees of every description mixed up together, without any boundaries to mark the division of the properties or anything of any description, beyond proximity to huts or houses to give a clue to the parties to whom the trees may belong.

The Court of Directors in London had argued that ‘wherever railways have been introduced, they had added greatly to the value of the land through which they pass not only by offering great facilities for its improvement and cultivation but also by affording an easy and cheap access to market for the produce’, and so compensation should be on ‘much more moderate terms’ than that suggested by the government of Bengal. But persuading Bengali villagers of these advantages by taking away their land, their huts and houses and their trees was not easy, and it was agreed that ‘full compensation’ had to be paid. It was also ordered that only 100 yards, on both sides, measured from the centre of the proposed line, was to be taken for earthworks, bunds, viaducts and bridges.

In fact, the Railway Company was so keen for work to start that it began without permission from the chief engineer, cutting down trees and throwing up earthworks. The Grand Trunk Road had to be crossed and bridged with help and advice from the Military Board. It was the first time in the Company’s history that land had been sequestered on this scale. Previously, the compulsory purchase of land had been ‘confined to small tracts in the neighbourhood of Towns or Stations for the reception of buildings, or the construction of Docks’, so this was something new and potentially unsettling, although there were no reports of physical opposition. Surveying work had begun at the start of the cold season in 1850, and by the following May, 33 miles had been wrested from the countryside and its inhabitants. But there were still nearly 90 more miles to Raniganj, which took another 2 seasons to reach.

Dalhousie was actively involved in siting the rail terminus at Howrah, on the west bank of the Hooghly, directly opposite the hub of Calcutta. Because the river could not at the time be bridged, this was the only practical site for the line that followed the river north through Barrackpore and Serampore before branching west to Raniganj. The west bank included the great Botanical Garden, the Seamen’s Hospital and Dispensary and a number of English-owned bungalows situated in large gardens. There was also an extensive range of valuable light industrial buildings, including mills and a cotton screw (for compressing bales of cotton before shipment), so it was the bungalows that were compulsorily purchased, eleven in all and a number of huts. The first terminus was a modest affair: a singlestorey, brick-built long shed, with a corrugated tin roof and a single platform.

The station needed both a river frontage with a ghat (landing stage) and a wide road running parallel leading to the small town of Howrah. There were few, if any, facilities for passengers, because the bulk of traffic on the line was to be coal, brought down to Calcutta to feed the hungry steamboats.

Although the introduction of railways into India is today considered one of Britain’s notable achievements, its initial importance was by no means obvious in the early 1850s. There was a strong lobby that argued railways could not compete with road or river traffic, which is why the EIR line from Calcutta was initially regarded as merely a supplier of steamboat coal, rather than a new mode of transport in its own right. The line was originally planned to go from Calcutta to Delhi, but because of ‘clamour’ from opponents—including Colonel Arthur Cotton, the canal engineer—it was stopped at Raniganj.

However, there were more positive voices, including that of the influential Spectator magazine, which emphasised the importance of developing main lines throughout the country so that linking branch lines could reach iron and coal mines. This, it was said, would lead to the improvement of specific areas and:

to calling forth those enterprises in agriculture and mining which will render the district a source of wealth to the shareholders of the company, to the native population, to the Indian Government and we may say to all connected with India. It is most desirable, therefore, that while following the strict economy necessary in the present depressed state of Indian resources, the construction of the railway should be carried out with the utmost speed…

As news of the Uprising reached Britain, The Times with the benefit of hindsight wrote on 7 July 1857:

Had the East Indian Railway been complete from Calcutta to Delhi, as it ought to have been, instead of halting halfway, the late disastrous events at Meerut and Delhi would never have occurred, or within twenty hours troops would have been conveyed there, whereas it will now take about eighty days to march.

BY 1856, ABOUT 4,000 miles had been surveyed across the country for the main lines, but building lagged behind. The engineer and economist Henry Hyde Clark, author of Colonisation, Defence and Railways in Our Indian Empire (1857), argued that ‘the guarantee of the [British] Government has been very dearly purchased at the cost of Government interference in the control and management of these great undertakings’. He continued:

it is now eleven years since the two great lines in the Presidencies of Bengal and Bombay [the EIR and the GIPR] were set on foot and thanks to the paralysing influence of Government protection and interference, neither is yet completed but each ‘like a wounded snake drags its slow length along’.

The problem was mainly financial. Hyde Clark believed the British government’s commitment to a guaranteed 5 per cent of profit to British shareholders was itself flawed and that profit, rather than the completion of the railway lines, was its main objective.

Despite the ‘wounded snake’ analogy, one thing no British commentator had foreseen was the eagerness with which Indians took to the railway. This simply had not been expected, which is why little provision for passengers had been factored in. At the Howrah terminus, for example, passengers had to buy their tickets at a booth set up at Armenian Ghat (on the east bank), then take the ferry across the Hooghly to the station. (The fare for the ferry ride was included in the ticket.) It demonstrated a complete lack of understanding on the part of the British of the Indian ambition to move forward, both literally and metaphorically. A close relationship doesn’t necessarily mean a friendly one, but half a century earlier both nationalities had had a better understanding of what the other was thinking and feeling and could react appropriately. It was this severance of empathy that led to the British being taken by complete surprise at the Uprising of 1857. Had the Company held a more nuanced view of the introduction of railways, informed by the kind of detailed research that Macdonald Stephenson had carried out, it would not have been surprised at the enthusiasm ordinary Indians had for speedier travel, nor would it have scoffed at the idea that the railway would not attract poorer people too.

Figures are dry things that one falls back on to support an argument, but the information contained in the British government’s Statistical Abstract Relating to British India is staggering. The first EIR train from Howrah station to the old Portuguese capital of Hughli ran on 15 August 1854. The following year saw 383,744 people travelling on the trains. This brought in a passenger revenue of £24,000, while the freight traffic only generated £8,000. There were running costs, of course, but even taking these into account there was a healthy profit of over £20,000 during a single year. Three years later, over a million passengers were annually travelling the 121 miles to Raniganj and back. And this was not something peculiar to Bengal. In the Bombay Presidency, nearly half a million people travelled the 35 miles from Bombay to Thane in 1855, generating an equally large profit.

Why did Indians take so enthusiastically to rail travel? It was not a particularly comfortable way to move across country, although certainly speedier than a buffalo cart on a dodgy road. From the outset, trains were divided into three classes, following the British pattern: first class, second class and third class. The majority of passengers chose the last option; in fact, almost 86 per cent of travellers travelled in third class on the EIR in 1855. There were no facilities, no lavatories, no food and often no seats. Passengers stood in open carriages like cattle. But the fares were kept deliberately low to attract passengers: a quarter of an anna per mile for third class and 2 annas per mile for first class. Luggage, apart from a small carpet bag, was also charged for. As the number of passengers increased, the EIR did not raise fares, but they did cram more travellers into smaller spaces.

The reasons why they were prepared to endure hours of moderate discomfort cannot be fully known. Some certainly found it convenient and cheaper to move goods by train rather than road, but the disparity between the number of passengers and the comparatively small amount of freight being moved would argue this was not the main object of travel. It was suggested that pilgrimages to holy sites and participation in religious festivals like Durga Puja were their motivation, and this is certainly plausible. Even so, this still leaves a large number of people who may simply have been travelling by train for the sheer novelty of being able to do so. And the novelty didn’t wear off as the increasing number of passengers year on year shows. British advocates of railways in India made grandiose claims: it would break down the caste system by forcing people of different castes into close proximity, and it would act as ‘the most persuasive missionary that ever preached in the East’ as Indians were forced to re-evaluate the dynamic Christian beliefs of their rulers against the ancient wisdom of their own gods. But Edwin Arnold, whose missionary zeal had got the better of him, also thought (more accurately) that ‘railways may do for India what dynasties have never done… they may make India a nation’.

(This is an edited excerpt from Empire Building: The Construction of
British India, 1690-1860 by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones)

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