Railsong: India story through the twin melting pots of the Railways and Bombay

This is typical of the wit and keen — and not altogether unsympathetic — observation of bureaucratic absurdity that runs the length of Bhattacharya’s novel. But Charulata herself (variously Charu, Miss Chitol and Smt Chitol as she progresses through life), fascinated by rules though she may be, is never one to be railroaded into following the inevitable path. On one level, this is a story, told in often lyrical prose, of her defiance of norms and expectations as she strives to make something of herself, become something and ends up finding meaning in something telegraphed at the very beginning of the book. On another, it’s about India in the second half of the 20th century, from Nehruvian optimism and its fading to liberalisation, from the great 1974 railway strike to the Emergency and Indira Gandhi’s assassination to the destruction of the Babri Masjid, with politics, religion and caste frequently coming to the fore. Above all, it’s a kind of anthropological work, full of observations about the country and its diverse people, through the twin melting pots of the Indian Railways and the metropolis of Bombay.

Take Charulata’s father, Animesh Kumar Chitol — a Chattopadhyay who chose to become a Chitol to signal his disavowal of caste, with deeper reasons that are revealed later, who married outside his region and caste, who believes in the modernity and progress embodied by the railway colony of Bhombalpur, who privately has quite a high opinion of his own literary talents. He is a figure who could only have been shaped by the certainties of the Nehruvian era, some of which his daughter inherits and is later forced to confront. He looms large and largely sympathetically over the early part of the novel, yet is never larger than life, always fragile — never an Atticus Finch, despite the book’s references to To Kill a Mockingbird. Or, take this succinct summation of one of the umpteen people Charulata observes: “How could I forget retd c.p.o. Harsharan Singh Bedi! — khatri Sikh, born Multan, present-day Pakistan, beard in net, toothaches addressed by cloves, legaches by midgets”.

The Census of India, held like clockwork every year ending in “1” — another vanished certainty of yesteryear — is one of the threads that ties the narrative together. Charulata, who has always wanted to count people, is fascinated by it, sees its value to the country but also learns to be wary of putting human beings in mutually exclusive boxes. Her encounters with people from all walks of life begin to engender an awareness in her of caste and communal faultlines and her own relative privilege. When, stung by the implication that she may have been involved in a discriminatory act, she seeks vindication from a Dalit colleague, his dignified response leaves her red-faced; BR Ambedkar and the Ambedkarite movement are invoked a few times in this regard.

This understanding of caste, where the mere jettisoning of a surname is clearly depicted as tokenism hiding blindness, reveals a contemporary sensibility that punctures, once again, old progressive certainties. By the same token, contemporary politics, whether it’s the question of counting caste in the census or the rise of Hindutva, frequently surfaces in the novel, sometimes quite baldly, as in the depiction of some families in Bombay as the Ram Janmabhoomi movement reaches a crescendo. The latter is what the political narrative in the background builds up to, and where it ends.

But Charulata’s engagement with this politics is in fits and spurts — it is not her central concern. Its significance, perhaps, can be seen more when juxtaposed with her personal development, of ever-broader understanding and attendant empathy. And also in its epochal nature, book-ending the era of Indian history that Bhattacharya narrates.

Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, much lampooned in recent years, was published in 1992; in a different sense, did the history of the old India end on December 6 that year, or is that too a dominant understanding that needs to be deconstructed?