Transport and communications set the pace of a country, forming its natural heartbeat. In the West, fibre optics and satellite links define the characteristic speed of the nations; the speed of light. With a telephone system so unreliable as to be unusable for long-distance calls, it is transportation which provides the pulse for India's national clock. As a result, the country becomes one defined by voyages.
Paradoxically, the larger distances are closer together in time. The Indian airline system is relatively efficient, and allows you to travel quickly between most major cities. Getting a ticket is another matter; and in any case, the cost for the majority of the population would represent an impossibly high proportion of their annual income. It is as if air travellers moved in a world of their own, untouched by the realities of India. The sealed compartment of the aeroplane voyaging high above the dusty earth is its own metaphor.
At the next level, there are the trains. They form the backbone of the country's transportation system. Indeed, without the extensive railway network, modern India would probably not continue to exist at all. The infrastructure created by the railways is a vital economic resource; without it, the country would slip back into the dark ages. For the network to function even half-way efficiently, it must be managed centrally. Which in its turn requires some form of nationwide organisation, and the existence of a nation. The railways act as the string which holds together the bursting parcel of India.
Trains serve the major cities and towns. Outlying villages rely on buses. Just as the plane is alien to the vast bulk of the population, so the bus is very much of the people. The battered juddering hulks which lumber along dusty roads are the mobile analogues of the ramshackle stalls in the markets, and the patched and poor houses. Like so much at this end of the economic spectrum, buses seem to be held together more by faith than by structural design.
Buses are also found within towns and cities themselves; but as the cities get bigger, the buses become less efficient. Like stranded dinosaurs, they can only look on helplessly as the smaller and more agile beasts weave in and out among them. The new urban mammals take many forms, from familiar ones like taxis, to the stranger centaur-like bicycle rickshaws.
The bulbous-bodied taxis, looking like something out of Britain in the 1950s - which they are - occupy the same place within the city as planes between them. They are relatively luxurious, fast, and prohibitively expensive for most people. The rickshaws are the trains, widely used and ideal for everyday purposes. At the top of the range are the yellow and black moped rickshaws with their reckless drivers and constantly bleating horns, followed by the human-driven bicycle version. And it is the solo bicycle which forms perhaps the commonest method of mechanical transport in India. Everywhere there are numberless shoals of them, swooping in and out of the traffic like minnows. If a symbol of India's modernisation were needed, it would be not the atom bomb but the bike.
A Partial India A to Z
The best way to experience India is to travel by train. It is not the fastest: in 20 hours, an express may cover only 500 km. But the leisurely and continual journeying gives you an idea of the scale of India. It also allows you plenty of time to look out of the window, to see India in all its slow rolling details. This is true travelling in a landscape.
Trains are not only a vital element in modern Indian life, they are splendid cultural artefacts, living dinosaurs of the Raj. Steam rather than diesel or electricity powers the thousands of locomotives on the network. In part this reflects the country's limited resources; but it is also of a piece with much else in India today. Whether it is in transport, language or bureaucracy, the country preserves, as if in amber, the rhythm and rituals of fifty years ago. To step onto a platform as a battered hissing train arrives, is to step back in time,
With a resource as complex a railway network, the Indians are able to indulge their love of paperwork to the full. Buying a ticket, reserving a berth - anything to do with the railways - involves queues, forms and interactions with countless species of clerks, most of whose responsibilities are so carefully circumscribed that an ordinary enquiry is likely to involve a platoon of them. Along the bustling station platforms, a small forest of signs hanging above offices maps out the hierarchy of this station world.
Fine distinctions extend to the trains themselves. As well as the express, mail and passenger trains, there are a variety of track gauges: broad, narrow, and narrower. On board, the railway has its own caste system, though less stringent than the Hindu scheme. At the top is the first class air-conditioned car, followed by ordinary first class. Then there is second class reserved and second class unreserved at the bottom.
First-class, like express, is a word used loosely on the Indian railways; first-class sleepers feature hard seats which turn into harder bunks. Most Indians bring their own sleeping-bags. Food and drink, on the other hand, are readily available on the journey. At every station stop – and there are always many - the air is full of the reedy mournful diphthongs of the chaiwallahs as they hawk their small thermos flasks of hot tea. Around mealtimes, men with trays of food pass through the train,
For the westerner, the stations and the trains are like something out of an old film-set, with the hub-bub of the milling crowds, people jumping on moving trains, the steam and the screaming whistles. Indians harbour no such romantic illusions. For them, they are often simply the only way to get to work in the towns. In the early morning, the seats in the already overflowing passenger compartments are supplemented by people crowded into freight wagons hitched behind; some even sit on the roof, or stand on the links between carriages. The builders of the railways, the red-faced, moustachio'ed Victorians, would probably have approved. For all their sentimentality, they too were hard-headed about trains. They knew that, like the roads for the Romans, railways were instruments of empire. And they remain today as the British Empire's most valuable legacy to India.
A Partial India A to Z
For the visitor, India offers a rich spectacle. The land is a seamless backdrop for the entrances and exits of massive Moghul forts, holy mosques, and towns which hover between the twentieth and the twelfth century. Around these impassive architectural displays, the Indian people swarm like a distracting cloud. If they are seen at all, it is only when they stumble into the picturesque: the wizened old man guarding shoes at a mosque; the bent forms of the women gleaning in the fields, swathed in coloured saris; naked nut-brown children playing by the river; the Sikh hotel doorman with his turban, moustache and thin-lipped salute. There are beggars and hawkers too, but they seem just another component of the bustling tourist scene. The abiding poverty of India, which lies behind all these images, too often remains invisible.
That poverty lives in the spaces between the sights on the tourists agenda. The planes fly above it, the air-con coaches ride round it. Only the riders of trains and rickshaws discover it.
Stations act as magnets to poverty. Enter them, and you find rows and rows of bodies lying on the ground, quite still, as if lined up to an attractive magnetic pole. But it is only the poor, camping out on the platforms. Elsewhere, the ground is littered with people hunkered down beside their few belongings. Like the porters balancing impossibly huge and precarious loads on their heads, everyone seems undernourished, their skin leathery.
But these are simply the relatively poor. Some may even be waiting for trains. To see real poverty you must take a rickshaw. In the tourist area of Delhi from Connaught Place, down Janpath to India Gate, there are only taxis and moped rickshaws. Further north, as New Delhi gives way to Old, the bicycle rickshaws begin to appear. In outlying cities and towns they are the norm. For a journey among India's real poor, a rickshaw is the only proper vehicle,
You begin to learn something of poverty and its impotence even as you climb into the bicycle rickshaw. In front of you is a tiny stick-man, his blue-black hair shining, his shirt greasy and frayed. He moves his almost muscleless legs with difficulty, rising high in the pedals. Throughout the journey you stare at his thin body as it sways with exertion you have bought. He will pedal all day, waiting patiently wherever you stop, not eating until you have done; for this he may be paid a couple of pounds. The poverty of India begins to rise in you from the pit of your stomach.
And yet the rickshaw driver is not poor. To find poverty you must travel further into Old Delhi. There the streets are lined with poor people; this is where they live. Around them are their few possessions: a pot, a blanket. They eat, sleep and die on this street. They wash at the public standpipes, their only privacy a cloth held up around them. And yet they seem strangely oblivious of the outside world, It is as if they had reached an accommodation with their poverty, having worn it so long. They are not abject or bitter. And this is disturbing. Angry poverty in the face of wealth would be reasonable, and could be coped with, This lack of reproach reproaches the visitor with the worst meanness of all: of spirit.
A Partial India A to Z
Maps are designed to deceive, not to describe. They must allow you to grasp whatever they represent. Because the paper on which they are printed has a certain physical size, you scale your perception to the map, not to its matter. Hence, whether you are looking at a plan of Cambridge or California, Surrey or Siberia, you reduce them all to the same level; the absolute sense of size is lost, and the constant mismatch of scale between expectation and experience is always shocking.
It is the same with India. For the westerner, it is an exotic triangle nestling against the underbelly of a vast and vague Asia. Most people would be unable to place it in a hierarchy of size. To travel in India is to stretch the mind.
Several factors conspire to magnify this effect. Much of India is flat and featureless; without landmarks, you immediately lose scale. Flying over north-west India is like passing over endless graph paper with no co-ordinates. The fields are ruthlessly square; the occasional town is the same identical fungal growth at the intersection of two straight roads. The parched earth is light brown, the ultimate average colour.
The towns themselves possess this same invariance. Wander along any street in any city, and the landscape will not change for half an hour on end. Every part of a street could stand for the whole; and that whole for the city. This is largely a matter of arithmetic; a population of 750 million, together with a labour-intensive economy, means that every function is endlessly duplicated, every variant of activity and design universally replicated. And it all has to be put somewhere.
Distance is also a function of time. Since Concorde, the Atlantic is only a Mozart opera wide. In India, trains and buses use clocks which run at half-speed. Distances are measured in fractions of a month. It is the same in the towns. Everything has been scaled to match the culture; travel pegs itself to the level of rickshaws, bikes and cows. The chaos of Indian rush-hours clogs the roads yet further. Traffic congeals as if in a slow-motion film; the roads lengthen in proportion. Crossing Delhi, you spend half a day watching a pageant of its history and people.
It should be even worse for Indians. Most of them lack that magic ointment, money, which makes ragged distances heal up neatly. Instead, they must verify the continent's dimensions by personally walking them. The fact that they have not revolted, or demanded a smaller India, is probably a matter of expectations. They have never known the joy of little countries like Britain, or how helicopters can take you anywhere,
In fact, they seem to revel in the largeness of India; so much so, that they exaggerate it by growing up a good head shorter than most westerners. For Indians, the soaring dome of the Taj Mahal, the mighty walls of the Moghul forts - everything - becomes all the more impressive with this assumption of physical humility. As uncomprehending tourists confronted by the vastness of India, perhaps westerners too should try to become small, that the land and its spirit might grow for them yet larger.
A Partial India A to Z
