British colonization of India through railroad expansion

The Railroad in India
Introduction
If there is one thing the painting by Turner—Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway (1844)—signifies, it is the advancing Industrial Age, big, hulking, heavy and speeding straight ahead into the hurly-burly. It arrives like a sleek monster out of nowhere and hurls itself forward like a machine with a life of its own, mindful only of the track, laid by men, whose names would go by and large unknown by the history books. The train, however, would make history, and the British would transport the railway system of its advanced, Industrialized civilization halfway round the world to an old world society—India—where a cluster of disjointed, disconnected communities throughout the region were separated by language, culture, lifestyle, class and religion. India has always been a diverse country, consisting of Thomas Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. When India introduced the symbol of the Industrial Age—the railroad—into India, it created a nation that had never existed before: a nation that was unified by technology rather than by people; a nation that was there to serve the interests of the British colonizers. This paper will discuss the role of the railroads in the British colonization of India and show how the locomotive was used to spread Britain’s industrial civilization.
The Meaning of the Railroad
As Edward Said (1979) noted, the culture of the West was the culture of hegemony: “an indispensible concept for any understanding of cultural life in the industrial West” (p. 7). Britain was synonymous with Industry. In India, it was reshaping the Orient in its image and likeness, using the railway system to spread iron arteries and veins throughout the land for the purposes of shipping and receiving goods for the good people back home. The railway transformed India—but it was not for the Indians themselves. It was a transportation set up and maintained for British commerce: and, yet, following India’s push for independence, the railway has been maintained and has become part of Indian life—a treasured link to the past that was once used by the colonizers to assist them in their trade, now used by the Indians for passenger travel—though not always safely or wisely.
Davidson (1868) writing in the 19th century observed it well when he wrote, “Thirty years ago India was practically stationary” (p. 1). The country had no transportation system—it was not even really a country or unified nation but a collection of various states, each with its own unique language and identity. There was no inter-state commerce or trade of the kind that the West had become masters of: the arrival of the British in India was a turning point—and the catalyst was the railway. It would take the static, stationary India of the early 19th century (a true representative of the old world) and turn it into a hustling, bustling, industrious nation, connected by steel, running goods to and fro, and humming along to the tune of the British colonizers’ watches. By the implementation of the rail system, India became British.
The railroad was seen by the British as the means of transporting British culture to India. British manners, British men, British ideas, and British customs—that was essentially what the English newspaper The Economist said would soon be sprawling across India thanks to the railroad there: “the railway in India, it was believed, would at once strengthen British industry, tighten the military grip on the subcontinent, and spur the process of cultural transformation” (Carens, 2005, p. 56). India was Britain’s by the 19th century, and Britain was committed to making Indians into Englishmen. The 1835 Resolution of Governor-General Lord William Bentinck was proof enough of that: it called for the “promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India” (Adas, 1990, p. 275). It was the aim of the British to transform India from what it saw as a superstitious, old world culture into a modern arm of the British Empire. Education would be key—and the railroad would serve as the instrumental pivot of a new Indian infrastructure. At the end of the day, it was all about business. The Board of Trade in Calcutta and the Directors of the East India Company needed the railroad and having an educated Indian populace would help to further their agendas. However, the railway itself required a great deal of supporting infrastructure—and that meant it required an industrialized power to sustain it. As the satirist G. O. Trevelyan noted in his sketches of the English experience in India, the “railway was a key agent of Europe’s civilizing mssion…[but] in India all signs of civilization disappeared beyond one hundred yards on either side of the railway track” (Adas,1990, p. 228). In other words, the railway was said by the English to be a civilizing force; what it really was was a support for British business interests in India. The railroad did nothing to advance or change the culture of the Indian people, who were far too diverse and distinct from English ways to really be impacted by the civilizing mission. The railroad was for them a foreign intrusion that they would watch and later embrace as their own, once the colonizers were gone.
Industrialization at Home
The British saw the railroad as a great achievement, a crown of their civilization, the glory of their industrial innovative genius. Turner’s painting was viewed as a proclamation that the English had “devised a machine that allows them to challenge the elements themselves” (Adas, 1990, p. 223). The locomotive produced a great exuberance of excitement: it revolutionized travel, and while it may seem quaint today, its usage in the 19th century was quite significant and advance. The railway at home in Britain was a symbol of industrial superiority—and in India, it was a symbol of India’s ability to transport that superiority and take it with it wherever it went. Nothing was off limits anymore as far as the mainstream, popular opinion in England went. It saw India as the proof of that: if the British people could put the railway in India, a truly eclectic, antiquated society without any industrial purposes or plans whatsoever, the English were truly masters of the world. The only problem, as G. O. Trevelyan pointed out, was that the railway in England was one thing: it was quite something else in India. The fact was that India was not British and never would be. Though the people would accept and adopt many British customs—such as tea, cricket, the trains, the practice of the English language—it would remain Indian to its core.
The shift to industrialization at home in England had made it seem to many British that the whole world could be industrialized and shaped to fit the aims and agenda of the New Imperialists. The railroad was viewed as essential to the plans of the New Imperialists as ships or guns—and not only for its ability to ship and receive goods, but also for its ability to speed communications: “Railroads would provide full intelligence of any event to be transmitted to Government at five times the speed now possible,” said Lord Dalhousie, governor-general of India, in a memo to the “Court of Directors” in 1853 (Baber, p. 208). Of course, the railroad would also have its military uses, too, which Dalhousie also pointed out: if it could move goods and communications at five times the prior expected speed, it could also move soldiers just as quickly and have British fighters out in the field in no time flat (Baber, 1996, p. 208). Thus, in the English mind the railroad was predominantly linked with power—English power.
Yet for historians like Edward Said and Michael Adas, the English trust in their railroad as a symbol of their unquestionable superiority was obviously misplaced. The Indians eventually rejected the superiority of the British and won their independence from the Crown. Had the British perhaps showed a little more humanity towards the Indian people instead of using the railway for naked political and economic ambitions (such as for the establishment of military outposts to protect trade), the tension between the Indians and the British that eventually led to their separation may never have occurred.
The 1857 Rebellion was just more reason for the British to implement the railway in India. The rail system would enable the British, so they believed, to exert more control over the Indian people. The rail system was English to the max: it was secure, strong, safe and built like a fortress—one reason it has lasted so long. Its tracks carried soldiers, communications, and goods and facilitated British enterprise. The Indian people themselves really had no part in it and benefited in no substantial way from its introduction, in spite of the high-minded symbolism that the English of the 19th century attached to the project. The railway would not lead to the civilization of the English people. Industrialization was a Western phenomenon that really indicated the decline of civilization in the West: it would allow for the concentration of wealth and for the expansion of the ruling classes, using new technology to pursue monopolistic aims. The qualities of Western civilization that had carried through by way of inertia following the Reformation would finally be blasted out of existence by the 20th century. Industry was synonymous with civilization only in the English mind of the 19th century.
The Pioneering Spirit
The railroad pioneer Rowland Macdonald Stephenson designed the line from Calcutta to Allahabad and took it even further. Others followed suit. Laying the track was the difficulty—but English ingenuity and Indian labor (just like the Americans used Asian labor to lay their track out West) helped to see the job through. The fact that the Orientals were viewed as a source of labor for this project and as little more shows the extent to which the West otherized the Orientals, while simultaneously standing in aw of their ways. Edward Said makes this point in his book Orientalism—noting that the people of the West have long had a love-contempt relationship with Orientalism: they love its exotic aspects but have no problem enslaving Orientals when it suits their purposes or exploiting them for cheap labor so that they can then profit from the production.
The pioneering spirit in India by the English was similar to the pioneering spirit that the British brought to the New World centuries earlier: the objective was the same—to conquer and to control. The railways opened markets throughout India, but they were never meant to provide the Indians with the opportunity for growth as a civilization itself. The Indians were meant to be subsumed into the British Empire and only as second-tier citizens at that.