“This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.” ― W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn.Amitava Kumar has long occupied a distinctive place in contemporary English writing. His work resists easy classification, blurring the boundaries between fiction, memoir, reportage, history and critique. With its stark white cover and a painting of a train in blue, perhaps suggestive of an accumulation of all the colours, lives and histories that animate his earlier work, he is now out with The Social Life of Indian Trains. This new book deals with something that we have come to take for granted: the railways. Trains have been an inseparable part of our lives. Since childhood, I have travelled in bogies of every kind – unreserved, sleeper, second AC, first AC. If anything binds this subcontinental country together, it’s the railways, far more than cricket and films. Many lives depend on it: from those who work, to those who travel long distances to get to work. For some, it’s routine, for others, it’s a lifeline, and for many, still, it’s a wonder they’ve never experienced. More than being a part of our claimed identity, the history of trains has been a strange reminder of colonialism, a time we fantasise about erasing from our collective memory. Given how integral the railways are to a nation’s life, they naturally find their way into popular culture, from literature to cinema. Every generation has its favourite train moment. My grandfather loved and used to sing, ‘Basti Basti Parvat Parvat’ from the film Railway Platform (1955). My parents most probably grooved on ‘Mere Sapnon ki Rani’ from Aradhana (1969). My generation grew up copying Shah Rukh Khan’s iconic dance moves atop the train in Chaiyya Chaiyya from Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se (1998). The railways may have begun as a colonial project, but over the decades we have claimed them so completely that our films alone can serve as a cultural archive of that ownership. From Apu and Durga chasing the train in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, to the haunting trains in Ritwik Ghatak’s Partition trilogy, to Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light, Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound, and even the kinetic violence of Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill, filmmakers have used trains to express everything from longing to upheaval. Amitava engages with this lineage, particularly when he reflects on the iconic chase sequence in Pather Panchali.As for literature, my earliest memories of railways are connected with Chacha Choudhary comics. It is safe to say that for a long time the comic industry in India would have drawn great revenues from the A.H. Wheeler stores on the railway platforms. Those shops not only had a range of comics but also contributed to Urdu, Hindi, and other language pulp fiction significantly. Today, children and parents alike are glued to their mobile screens, heralding a sad decline of the reading culture.Harking back to The Social Life of Indian Trains, this short book does many things at once. It’s part reportage, part memoir, part history, and part satire. Amitava comes up with the romantic idea of covering India in one fell swoop by travelling the Himsagar Express from up north to Kanyakumari, covering approximately 3,800 km through 12 states. In doing this, his attempt is to write the history of the everyday, against the Hegelian understanding of history. As historian Gyanendra Pandey put it recently, “every day is real history”. I also thought of Svetlana Alexievich’s lines from War’s Unwomanly Face: “I believe that in each of us there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together, we write the book of time. We each call out our own truth. The nightmare of nuances.”The Social Life of Indian Trains is not a linear history but a kind of reportage that takes into account memories, encounters, archives of the past and present, and a rich landscape upon which this literary train takes its ride. Amitava is using trains as a medium to understand the social realities, politics, culture and the moral weather of the society, all of this as an insider-outsider. But what helps him most in conducting a fascinating study of Indians in trains is his outsider self. A person who lives through the everydayness of India, could hardly have asked the questions that Amitava does. Amitava lets us drift into conversations with strangers: people on the neighbouring berths, in crowded corridors, those waiting and sleeping near the toilets. He reflects on the idea of privacy (or the lack of it) in Indian travel and a certain kind of historical imagination that railways have produced. This mix of people consists of middle-class families, labourers, young boys and the ordinary people who make up the citizenry, travelling for days. In a sense, you witness India in motion. Amitava writes about being inspired by Gandhi’s travels in the train, when he came back to India, immortalised by Attenborough in his film on Gandhi. The railways that made colonialism work, also proved to be a bulwark against it; it made Gandhi, who unmade the Empire. He arrived at Champaran to lead his first satyagrah in the train, and after his death, his remains were taken for submersion to Allahabad (now Prayagraj) by train. These drifts in the narrative are what, in many ways, make Amitava’s writings so fascinating. His prose reads like the strokes of Hussain’s paintbrush on his larger-than-life canvases; easy to grasp, but with depth and colour of a master. It is difficult to place Amitava in any one tradition of prose writing; he refuses to stay in one literary room. At once, you are reminded of W.G. Sebald, and also may find James Baldwin and Svetlana Alexievich knocking on the doors of your mind.Reading the book feels as if you are talking to him across a berth: sometimes the book reads like a narrative, sometimes like field notes from an ethnographer, and sometimes like sneaking into someone’s personal diary with rants, observations and fragments of the past. The Social Life of Indian Trains is a light read; simple but never shallow, and always cleverly observant.If I have one complaint with the book, it is that political commentary occasionally feels lighter than the material warrants. In a travelogue, one can glide past the political without meaning to, but given Amitava’s sharp awareness of contemporary India, the passing references to politics and violence could have been pursued with more deliberation. He notes the Samjhauta Express blast, Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus during 26/11, the burning of the train during the Godhra riots – each opens a door to a larger, darker history: stampedes, the last trains that left the stations during COVID-19, the Partition trains that were hearses for the living and the dead. One wishes he had lingered on those subjects; however, I also recognise that understatement, and even silence, can itself be a political statement.While reading the book, I kept thinking of all the small human moments I have seen on trains since childhood: sharing food with strangers, exchanging stories or newspapers, or that strange intimacy of travel where you meet someone for a few hours and never forget them. This book brings all of that alive again.The last chapter on the Darjeeling toy train brings its own charm: meeting young Bihari travellers in the hills, capturing their laughter and worries, which works so well as the ending of this little book on one of the largest networks of transportation in the world.I was reading this as the chaos of IndiGo Airlines was unfolding, and my train to Kanpur was delayed. In an age when flying has become the new thing for a certain class, trains have become a site of nostalgia. This book reminds you that, unlike aeroplanes, the Indian Railways is not just another form of transport, but it is a moving archive of the country’s hope, anxieties and contradictions. It’s a book that travels with you even after you get off the train.Eshan Sharma is a history researcher, documentary filmmaker and the founder of Karwaan: The Heritage Exploration Initiative.