by Paul Theroux
In the schoolroom and factory and in the long dark line of coalminers waiting to be paid, the faces stare out helplessly, trapped by circumstances, and we feel judged, because we have never been gazed at in quite that way, so immediately, across time. Moments before many of these pictures were taken, the last words spoken were "Hold still!" We can see the effect of that command in the small boy's shoulders or the man's grip on the chairback. Everyone here is holding his breath, as if for a hundred-year leap to the present. And you want to weep after seeing some of these faces, or the conditions that are so obviously suffered. We have seen bare feet before—bare feet, as I said earlier, are the cliché emblem of the peasant. But look at the Russian peasants and much more than that is revealed, for we can almost be indifferent to bare feet, but cannot but be moved by those feet in the mud of a wet mushy road. They are deeply physical, and this is the beginning of understanding, for they not only arouse simple concern, but compassion as well. We know, from this perspective, what happened to these people, why they revolted, how they fought or submitted, and how they died.
Photographic archives are full of pictures of beheadings. They were as sought-after and widely-prized as movies or stills of modern executions. When a prisoner is electrocuted or shot today the first frantic rapping on the door of thé execution chamber is sure to be that of photographers or men with TV cameras. I have seen a number of photographs taken in the last century, usually in China, of beheadings. Invariably the sword is shown poised over the neck (sometimes the head has been struck off and it lies severed on the ground).
But this beheading in China is electrifying. We see more than the sword and the head. The man has been hit with the blade several times, and the executioner is tensed to take another stroke. The condemned man, clearly bleeding—that is blood, not hair, coursing from his twisted face—is a goner. But look at the faces of the men who are holding his ropes and supporting his gibbet. This is hardly the routine event we have been taught took place in Imperial China. These men are as close as we are (and we are seeing something the witnesses in the background are missing) and they wear expressions of terror and disbelief. The whole affair is as shocking to them as it is—one hopes—to us. This is the opposite of anonymity, and after the experience of this photograph one cannot think of such an execution as something taken for granted, a ritual which we can regard as conventional and commonplace. It is almost cathartic, for those wincing men are expressing our own shock.
Some of these photographs are fixed in time—the Panama Canal, Mark Twain at his billiard table, George Bernard Shaw hugely enjoying a cruise—but others are much older than their dates suggest. They give us access to the past. The Ainus, the Bedouin, the Irish peat-carriers, the Wa-Kikuyu and American Indians—these might have been taken in the 'eighties or 'nineties of the last century, or even more recently, but we may be assured that for the preceding century, and perhaps for many centuries before, the people looked exactly like this. Our glimpse is not of people caught on a given year, but of an image carried away from a much remoter past, and a few decades before they were to change out of all recognition. And the photographic method, the revealing glass negative and the bulky efficient camera let us see something of their surroundings, too, the hut, the foliage, the pioneer woman in the poke bonnet, the whole of the Grand Canyon.
The art in some of these photographs is indisputable, and this is appropriate, because by the time we turn the last page we believe we have recaptured the past, and in a distinctly Proustian way. In Proust's masterpiece, photographs are repeatedly used to verify an event or nail down a memory. Proust mentions stereoscopes as well, in speaking of how a passionate memory can be re-examined clearly much later, "as though one had placed it behind the glasses of a stereoscope."
That perception occurs in The Guermantes Way. A bit later in that same volume, and in one of his most powerful pieces of hyperbole, Proust speaks of kissing Albertine. This embrace takes several lushly written pages. The kiss is practically incomparable, but he risks one comparison. A kiss evokes so many things in such a new dimension, he says, that there is almost nothing to liken it to, "apart from the most recent applications of the art of photography". Photography like a kiss: it is a pretty conceit.
Railways of the Raj
[1980]
The Raj had no shortage of symbols, but the railway was the greatest of them (even today that spinning wheel on India's flag could be the wheel of a locomotive and mean as much). It was the imperial vision on a grand scale; it tested the ideas and inventions of engineers. India was the proving ground for the Victorian imagination: the railway builders sewed together the entire subcontinent with a stitching of track.
It was self-serving, of course; it was, from the beginning, a commercial enterprise, and after the Mutiny the railway with its fortified stations and tunnels was part of the military might of the Raj—the long march and the relief column were supplanted by the troop train. But it had a humane side. It was not, as in East Africa, only an expedient for moving minerals and farm produce to market. The railway was the blood-stream of the Raj, and it affected nearly everyone. It linked the centers of population; and the cities, which until then had been identified with their temples and forts, became identified with their railway stations, Howrah with Calcutta, Victoria with Bombay, Egmore and Madras Central with Madras. It involved millions of people, it required immense paperwork, the clipboard, the manifests in triplicate, the endless chain-of-command from Director to Sweeper—so it suited the complexity of Indian life, and it was an institution of limitless subtlety. Aesthetically, it was pleasing.
Very quickly, the railway became part of Indian legend and a source of romance. Here is an opening paragraph from one of the greatest tales of the Raj:
The beginning of everything was in a railway train upon the road to Mhow from Ajmir. There had been a deficit in the Budget, which necessitated travelling, not Second-class, which is only half as dear as First-class, but by Intermediate, which is very awful indeed. There are no cushions in the Intermediate class, and the population are either Intermediate, which is Eurasian, or native, which for a long night journey is nasty, or Loafer, which is amusing though intoxicated. Intermediaries do not patronize refreshment-rooms. They carry their food in bundles and pots, and buy sweets from the native sweetmeat-sellers, and drink the roadside water. That is why in the hot weather Intermediates are taken out of the carriages dead, and in all weathers are most properly looked down upon.
This is vintage Kipling, in The Man Who Would Be King, and it is interesting not merely because it describes the conditions in which the narrator is about to meet two men who will conquer Kafiristan, but because its seedy effects were patiently collected by the author a year before on the railway, in the Rajput states of the Indian desert. And when it was printed in 1888, it appeared as the fifth volume in Wheeler's Railway Series. These pamphlet-sized books with line drawings on their covers were sold at railway bookstalls all over the Raj. This adventure story, researched on a railway, describing a fateful railway journey, and sold on railway platforms, helped to make Kipling's reputation and create the first Kipling boom. Where, one wonders, would Kipling have been without the train?
Eight years after Rudyard Kipling toured the dusty provinces with his notebook on his lap, avowedly in search of material for stories for The Week's News and the Pioneer Mail, another traveler boarded the Raj railways and, characteristically, introduced a note of comedy. This was Sam Clemens, looking for something to fill Mark Twain's cracker barrel. He had had a success with Innocents Abroad and Roughing It; he was between books, and he needed money to go on financing the development of the type-setting machine which very nearly bankrupted him. He had also started a publishing company. He needed a selling title. His idea was to circle the globe, giving lectures on the way, and to write a book about it. The book became Following the Equator, a bright sprawling travelogue of Hawaii, South Africa, Australia, Ceylon and India. It is very funny, casually learned, and extrem
ely intrepid. It is hard to say why this book has never been reissued. But there is nothing in it for the English Department, no fodder for the graduate student; perhaps that is the reason.
In A Little Town in India (1913), R. Palmer reported: "Every train (except mails) stops at every station a quarter of an hour for purposes of gossip, and at all large stations half an hour or an hour." Sam Clemens, on various branch lines from Calcutta to Lucknow, wrote about this peculiarly neighborly use of the railway, but typically he was more expansive:
This train stopped at every village; for no purpose connected with business apparently. We put out nothing, we took nothing aboard. The train hands stepped ashore and gossiped with friends a quarter of an hour, then pulled out and repeated this at succeeding villages. We had thirty-five miles to go and six hours to do it in, but it was plain that we were not going to make it. It was then that the English officers said it was now necessary to turn this gravel train into an express. So they gave the engine driver a rupee and told him to fly. It was a simple remedy. After that we made ninety miles an hour.
Clemens was full of praise for Indian railways, and he was impressed by the fact that they were exclusively manned by Indians of an especially solicitous nature. One day, on his way to Allahabad, he got down at a platform and was so transfixed by the whirl of activity on the platform ("that perennially ravishing show") he did not notice the train starting. But an Indian with a green flag in his hand saw him about to sit down to wait for another train; he approached the American.
"Don't you belong in the train, sir?"
"Yes," I said.
He waved his flag and the train came back! And he put me aboard with as much ceremony as if I had been the General Superintendent.
Nothing escaped Mr Clemens' notice as he travelled throughout India on the trains, and it was clear to him that the Indians had made the railways their own. They had a knack for inhabiting the stations, washing and sleeping on the platforms, cooking near the shunting engines, arriving days early for a journey and setting up camp in the booking hall. He devotes pages to the crowds and he describes how Hindu caste and railway class produce excruciating ironies: "Yes, a Brahmin who didn't own a rupee and couldn't borrow one, might have to touch elbows with a rich hereditary lord of inferior caste, inheritor of an ancient title a couple of yards long, and he would just have to stand for it; for if either of the two was allowed to go in the cars where the sacred white people were, it probably wouldn't be the august poor Brahmin." As for the carriages, "No car in any country is quite its equal for comfort (and privacy) I think." Best of all, he said, the most notable feature on the railways of the Raj was their cosiness.
Once they were established, the railways of India blended with the country; they seemed as ancient and everlasting, and the stations as grand and as foolish-seeming and marvelously vain as any maharajah's palace. In South America and in Africa, you look at the railway and see how it has been imposed on the landscape: it sticks out, it doesn't belong, it is a rusty, linear interruption of snoozing greenery, and where are the passengers?
But in India the railway seems to have grown out of the culture, accommodating everyone and everything. There were no obstacles that were not surmounted—the widest river was bridged, the steepest mountainside climbed, the harshest desert crossed. The railway possessed India and made her hugeness graspable. Now, any Bengali with the fare could make his yatra from Calcutta to the Kali shrine in distant Simla, the pilgrim could visit the remote and holy hamlet of Rameswaram. The trader could trade, the salesman could sell, and workers on the railway soon numbered in the millions. Indians were no longer marooned by work: they could go home.
There is a seclusion about railway carriages. For an English civil servant who suffered an intense conspicuousness in his post, this seclusion was a relief. We have the word of George Orwell on this. In an unlikely place for such a reminiscence, The Road to Wigan Pier, he says,
I remember a night I spent on the train with a man in the Educational Service, a stranger to myself whose name I never discovered. It was too hot to sleep and we spent the night in talking. Half an hour's cautious questioning decided each of us that the other was 'safe'; and then for hours, while the train jolted slowly through the pitch-black night, sitting up in our bunks with bottles of beer handy, we damned the British Empire—damned it from the inside, intelligently and intimately. It did us both good. But we had been speaking forbidden things, and in the haggard morning light when the train crawled into Mandalay, we parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple.
It is hard to imagine this episode taking place anywhere but in a railway carriage. It is ironic, though, too. Orwell (who was a policeman at the time) and the stranger did not realize that if it had not been for the Empire they would not have had the safe solitude of the railway in which to damn it.
The railway had few detractors, and it has endured—not as a feeble relic, but as a vital institution. Indeed, it has grown. India is still building locomotives and coaches, and extending the lines.
Today, the flavor of the Raj is less in the rolling-stock than in the timetables, with their complex rules and prohibitions and their curious locutions. Under its twenty-one "Rules for Passengers," Pakistan Western Railway includes "Awakening Passengers at Night," "Ladies Travelling Alone at Night," "Servants' Tickets" and "Servants in sole charge of children." Notes for the Guidance of Public describes in detail the uniforms of the catering staff ("Refreshment-room contractors: Plain white chapkan and white pyjamas, with green kamarband, 4 inches wide, green turban band 2. inches wide and badges"—and so on, six uniforms). There are pages of "Catering Arrangements" in today's Indian Railway timetable, and these too have that formal exhaustiveness one associates with the Raj, together with some of the Victorian phraseology: "On prior intimation Chota hazari and evening tiffin will be served in trains at stations where Vegetarian Refreshment Rooms are working..."
In an important sense, the railways of the Raj still exist. The great viaduct still spans the Gokteik Gorge in Upper Burma, Victoria Terminus has not been pulled down to make room for a dual-carriageway, the train from Kalka is still the best way to Simla, and there are steam locomotives huffing and puffing all over India. This artifact of the past is carrying India into the future. I have had the luck to travel the subcontinent on these same rails. "With typical Victorian loyalty," Satow and Desmond remark, "streets were named according to the custom of the age: Church Road, King's Road, Queen's Road ... Steam Road..." I was once in Lucknow and was talking idly with an Indian man. Where did he live? I asked. "Just down the road," he said, "in Railway Bazaar." I made a note of that, and I remember thinking what a marvelous title that would make for a travel book.
Subterranean Gothic
[1981]
New Yorkers say some terrible things about the subway—that they hate it, or are scared stiff of it, or that it deserves to go broke. For tourists it seems just another dangerous aspect of New York, though most don't know it exists. "I haven't been down there in years," is a common enough remark from a city dweller. Even people who ride it seem to agree that there is more Original Sin among subway passengers. And more desperation, too, making you think of choruses of "O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark..."
"Subway" is not its name, because strictly-speaking more than half of it is elevated. But which person who has ridden it lately is going to call it by its right name, "The Rapid Transit"? You can wait a long time for some trains and, as in the section of T. S. Eliot's "East Coker" I quoted above, often
... an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about...
It is also frightful-looking. It has paint and signatures all over its aged face. People who don't take it, who never ride the subway and have no use for it, say that these junky pictures are folk-art, a protest against the metropolitan grayn
ess, and what a wonderful sense of color these scribblers have—which is complete nonsense. The graffiti are bad, violent and destructive, and the people who praise them are either malicious or lazy-minded. The graffiti are so extensive and so dreadful it is hard to believe that the perpetrators are not the recipients of some enormous foundation grant. The subway has been vandalized from end to end. It smells so hideous you want to put a clothespin on your nose, and it is so noisy the sound actually hurts. Is it dangerous? Ask anyone and he will tell you there are about two murders a day on the subway. It really is the pits, people say.
You have to ride it for a while to find out what it is and who takes it and who gets killed on it.
It is full of surprises. Three and a half million fares a day pass through it, and in 1981 the total number of murder victims on the subway amounted to thirteen. This baker's dozen does not include suicides (one a week), "Man-Under" incidents (one a day), or "Space-Cases"—people who quite often get themselves jammed between the train and the platform. Certainly the subway is very ugly and extremely noisy, but it only looks like a death-trap. People ride it looking stunned and holding their breath. It's not at all like the BART system in San Francisco, where people are constantly chattering, saying, "I'm going to my father's wedding" or "I'm looking after my Mom's children" or "I've got a date with my fiancee's boyfriend." In New York, the subway is a serious matter—the rackety train, the silent passengers, the occasional scream.