ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with railway spaces such as trains, platforms and junctions, as sites of encounters that disturb the bulwarks of modernity unevenly experienced and articulated across the subcontinent by drawing on the manifold intersections between cultures and regions primarily through a body of literature. It attempts an alternative way of retelling the railway memories that connect the nation through an array of subversive imaginaries in the tales of supernatural-haunting, crimes, rumours of contagion in mobile carriages, to catastrophic communal. The persistence of railway-time associated with speed and concomitant productivity, thwarted or delegitimised the other expressions of premodern-time in favour of a “single”, “standardised” temporality, unifying the differences across the colonies in the imperial chain. The chapter explores how this coerced model of uniformity wrought by the railways in radically different and far-flung places further problematises the troubled legacy of modernity in South Asia.
