‘Railsong’: Rahul Bhattacharya’s heartfelt ode to the India that was and the India that can be

Miss Charulata Chitol is the true daughter of the Indian Railways. Like the trains that map every corner of the country, Charu too encompasses an entire India within her. Born to a Bihari mother and Bengali father, growing up in Bhombalpur (a fictitious town in undivided Bihar), fleeing to Bombay in chase of freedom, marrying a Gujarati, and going on her own travels across the country as a railway employee, Charu chugs on, shimmying, shuddering, but never stopping.

But before Miss Charu there was AK Chitol – her father, Railways chargeman, a humanist who traded his coveted caste name Chattopadhyay for the uncategorisable Chitol. Adopted in protest and free of caste markers, the Chitol children, for the rest of their lives, were to be made to answer for and defend their father’s decision as the country deepens its divide along identity lines.

Enter Charu

Rahul Bhattacharya’s latest novel, Railsong, is a gorgeously crafted, compulsively readable, attention-demanding, nostalgia-steeped ode, tribute, and elegy to the Indian Railways, and to what Charu calls, and the reader realises, the “incomprehensibility” of India.

To enact a woman across 400 pages is not an easy task. But Bhattacharya is committed to this voice – the novel begins with Charu and ends with her; she’s the...

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