Chapter 8 - The Wheels of Change

Summary

In our final chapter we set out to examine the role of railways in the larger matrix of communication policy and the effects they cast, in particular, on trading and commercial patterns. Clearly, the unity of empire and the steady flow of external trade were twin functions closely associated with the railways. Not surprisingly then, some scholars have therefore described the Indian railways as a crucial project of colonial rule. Politically, the Punjab wars in the 1840s reinforced the need for speedy means of communication. Simultaneously, the needs of industrializing Britain were pressing hard to ‘open up the interiors’, both for the supply of raw materials from the colony and for the sale of British-manufactured finished goods. For these reasons, the railways became the site of a fierce contestation between groups of different ideological pursuits. For a majority of colonial officers and policymakers the railways remained a tool of development, but for many others, especially Indian nationalist critics, they symbolized an instrument of economic exploitation and the draining of wealth. This divide resonates in several works on the economic history of nineteenth-century India.

The core of this chapter aims at addressing a few of the issues outlined above. It is difficult to discard our common-sense understanding that railways as the ‘wheels of change’ formed an inseparable part of the colonial project of rule, but any discussion of the relationship between railways and late nineteenth-century India within the framework of communication and circulation does need to address certain basic issues.