How should we tell history and who should we tell it for? How can we link it to the lived lives of those who will in any case get it from learning spaces, from everyday conversations and storytelling, and from other ways in which ‘knowledge’ circulates, whether we regard it as history or not? For whom shall we write—children, young adults, scholars and ordinary people not classified in the way outlined here? This book manages to tell its story to anyone who might come across and read it and go along the different paths it does, to tell the story of how the railways came to Bhopal and then tell it in a way that we come across the many layers of what happens to Bhopal as a city, traversed by its lifeline of communication over the decades that the stories take us through. From the time of the Nawabs of Bhopal, a line of illustrious women rulers with a remarkable capacity to govern their State as few rulers have done, until we reach the very present in which we are located.
Along the way we see how the railways carry people in peace time and in conflict, during Independence, Partition and migration, down to the time of the gas leaks which devastated the people who lived alongside the tracks and many acts of everyday humanity as the gas leak took its toll on the ravaged people of Bhopal.
Railway Chronicles of Bhopal is unusual because it takes the laying of a railway track as its starting point but then weaves its story to introduce us to the administrative skills of the Begums who were the then Nawabs of Bhopal. These women rulers released funds from their public and private estates for the laying of the tracks and argued for broad gauge and not narrow gauge because that would carry more people, what services should be available at the station, what women who travelled on the train might need. And going beyond the rulers, the book tells us about the labour that built the rail tracks, the special skills of the Oddas who were brought in from the south as they were known to be the best earth workers known to the experts at that time. But no one remembers because history records the ‘greatness’ of the rulers, with hardly anyone knowing about the special skills of those who labour, the family teams that perform the labour listing women and children who built the railway tracks, the challenges of laying the tracks across a hilly terrain excavating tunnels through the hills and building bridges across rivers.
Reading Railway Chronicles of Bhopal was something of a nostalgia trip for me as I was reminded of when I first went along the broad gauge tracks that the Nawabs of Bhopal wisely settled for, on the occasional summer vacation that my family managed to organize, of the stations that whizzed past, the tunnels that suddenly plunged us into darkness and so I was especially delighted to be told by this book that Bhopal was the centre of India, and that the Nawabs of Bhopal not only helped the restoration work in Sanchi but also wrote a book in Urdu on the monument, and wisely decided to support the railways in linking Bhopal to other parts of India. I remember the early morning sun as it rose over the Stupa at Sanchi as the railway carriage I was seated in went past it.
Railway Chronicles of Bhopal is beautifully written, wonderfully conceptualized and most creatively executed. From the original idea to its final form, the book takes you on a journey that tells you what history could be about if we dumped the storyline that we are constantly being told about, the good and the ‘bad’ rulers according to the political dispensations of the day. Here is a history that is marvellously crafted by Shivani Taneja, beautifully executed by Sharvari Deshpande and Maheen Mirza and is an interesting read. There is a wealth of historical material in the photographs used and the visuals tell their own stories. Oral history and interviews have been used to bring the experiences of ordinary people into the narrative.
The images are most creative, the historical material carefully assembled and simply stated. Three generations of my family have read it and enjoyed it and so will you too if you get hold of the book. Do that now and enjoy the read. And think about it too when the big debates on history are thrown at you and you are reduced to thinking about history in narrow and monolithic ways!