"The Indian Railways, as one character says, does not see religion, caste, language, state boundaries, summer, winter, rain. It doesn't see flesh and blood either. Charu symbolises that truly epochal change of modern India: a single woman leading a working life alone in the big city."
"Indian Railways has been a source of patriotic pride, controversy, endless cover-ups, labyrinthine bureaucracy and death on an industrial scale since its founding in 1951. Rahul Bhattacharya's Railsong explores its other major and fiercely contested impact on Indian society, as one of the country's foremost employers of women and sources of female empowerment, especially in rural areas."
"The tension between private and public, family hopes and societal devastations, record and reality as India's defining story is one the novel makes clear time and again—it's in the title, one half steel production, one half dreams. Similarly, Charu's peregrinatory personal life, and the setbacks, alienation, abuse and gut-wrenching tragedies she encounters in her professional one, must be subsumed come what may into thousands of miles of track."
Rahul Bhattacharya's novel Railsong examines Indian Railways' dual legacy as both a source of patriotic pride and institutional dysfunction since independence. The narrative follows Charu Chitol from her 1960s childhood in Bihar through her career in railways personnel, investigating pension claims and welfare issues. The novel explores the tension between private aspirations and public institutional demands, showing how Indian Railways operated indifferently to individual circumstances while serving as a transformative employer for women. Charu represents modern India's epochal change: an independent woman from an intercaste background navigating urban life and professional challenges. The railways' rigid systems—timetables, hierarchies, and bureaucratic structures—subsume personal tragedies and individual stories into vast institutional machinery that prioritizes operations over human welfare.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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