The first draft of Railsong, Rahul Bhattacharya’s new novel (published by Bloomsbury), was written entirely in longhand. “I remember reading in a Toni Morrison interview that she would wake early in the morning, when the first light was coming in, and write on yellow legal pads with 2B pencils. I thought I’d do exactly that,” says the Delhi-based writer, whose last book, The Sly Company of People Who Care, won the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and The Hindu Literary Prize 2011.
Bhattacharya believes that the “artisanal work” of sitting and sharpening a pencil every few sentences allowed him to enter the space of creation. “I could not descend into the fictional world using a computer,” he says. By the end of three years, he had a stack of legal pads filled with scrawls that he would redraft and hone over the decade it took him to finish the book. “A lot changed: the writing rhythm, the writing routines, my understanding of the world, my consciousness as a person and writer,” he says. “But putting down that first draft was the most important thing.”
On reading women
Railsong, which tells the story of the enterprising Charu Chitol, a motherless child growing up in a small railway town who runs away to Mumbai and becomes a railway woman, would have Bhattacharya spending years trawling through books, memos, circulars, and rulebooks, as well as resorting to old-fashioned legwork and travel, to create his fictional world. Since the novel spans nearly four decades, with much changing in both the railway systems and the country during that period, the research often ended up being esoteric, he says. “I intended that if somebody was working in the railways between the ’50s and the early ’90s, he or she should be able to recognise the world in the novel as authentic.”
Creating Charu — a fully realised, complex female character who escapes being tinctured by tropes of the male gaze — was not without its challenges, either. “I grew up in and continue to live in a world where the male viewpoint is considered the default,” says Bhattacharya, who actively sought and read the work of women writers across geographies, languages and genres “not merely to appreciate the depth and the variety of female articulation,” but to “strive towards an understanding that gave me the confidence to build Charu and the other women of the novel.” The process, he adds, was rewarding. “A lot of things in the novel were a complete headache, but working on Charu always felt fresh and exciting.”
The track records
The result is a narrative that rumbles amiably and elegantly as it journeys through the vicissitudes of life and the shifting emotional and political landscape of the country. The railways serve as a recurring motif for our desire for connection and momentum. Bhattacharya has written a fine English novel in chiselled prose, his sentences gleaming like the steel of railway tracks burnished by rolling wheels.
Railsong doesn’t just articulate the railways as a human network, but also offers a window into significant historical milestones in the country, including “the industrial ambition of a young Nehruvian India, a famine in pre-Green Revolution India, the Emergency seen not through the Emergency itself but through the railway strike of 1974”. It also chronicles the slow but steady dribble of women into the workforce: work, for Charu, doesn’t just represent economic independence but a fuller engagement with the world, and “is a very significant strand of tension in the novel.”
Rahul Bhattacharya. (Neville Sukhia)
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Neville Sukhia
A passage to India
The Indian census is yet another vital aspect of the novel, both marking the passage of time and expanding on the idea of being an individual among the many who make up this country. This is perhaps why, despite the novel having so many characters — “I think there must be well over 100” — Bhattacharya has attempted to tease out the individual beneath the statistics, crafting every character with care, paying attention to details such as names, caste identities, and occupational hierarchies. “I find the census very fascinating in the Indian context, since it is the statistical counting of people and a collection of parameters every human being can be slotted into,” he elaborates.
Railsong’s cyclical narrative structure adds to the overarching train metaphor, capturing the essence of a heaving, paradoxical, pulsating nation, where tragedy, triumph, spirituality, dynamism, and tumult constantly converge, like railway junctions. “The novel ends at the same railway station where it began, Bhombalpur, on the eve of the razing of the Babri Masjid on December 6, which is also the anniversary of Ambedkar’s death,” says Bhattacharya, adding,“In literal terms, you come back to the same place in the novel, but we’ve journeyed quite a bit, in between, haven’t we?”