There is no denying the hold that the railways have had on the literary and cultural imagination of India. “Much of Indian culture, literature, cinema, its postage stamps, numerous advertisements, telly serials, and love stories would not have happened without the railways”, writes Arup K Chatterjee in his comprehensive “cultural biography”, The Great Indian Railways (2017). One has only to recall the poignance of the train punctuating the background score of Ritwik Ghatak’s Subarnarekha or the head-banging energy of Shah Rukh dancing to AR Rahman’s “Chaiyya Chaiyya” atop a goods train, or the haunting imagery of Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan to see the truth of Chatterjee’s assertion and recognise that images of the railways have always resided in our collective consciousness.
Coterminous with the advent of modernity in colonised South Asia, the railways connected disparate geographies, aiding the process of the formation of a national identity, while also becoming a colonial tool of exploitation of natural resources and labour. This complexity of the railways, the constant push and pull between opportunity and oppression, gentle, old-fashioned romance juxtaposed with jarring violence, is what V Shinilal captures in The Wanderer.
A three-day journey
Translated from the Malayalam Sambarkkakranthi (2019) by Nandakumar K, The Wanderer tells the story of a three-day journey from Thiruvanathapuram to New Delhi aboard the Sampark Kranti Express. The Sampark Kranti trains are a series of high-speed trains that connect multiple states to the national capital. The Kerala Sampark Kranti that runs the exact route as the train in the novel covers, possibly, the longest distance of all, moving through diverse geographies, showcasing the trope of a unified diversity. With much postmodernist play, Shinilal uses the material, political, and social history of India as the scaffolding on which he builds his narrative, writing fiction that is closely aligned with fact, even as it breaks conventional narrative structures with its multiple narrative voices, its layering of stories with dreams and its skilled use of magic realism.
The train in the novel, as Shinilal’s faceless, professorial, commentating narrator tells us, is “a mini-India. In other words, India is a humongous train. Here, despite being swaddled in centuries of growth, a collection of humans – whose base, animal instincts have not left them – travel on the train.” This mélange of the human animal, categorised as “territorial”, “herd”, and “subversive” by the author, lives inside the pages of The Wanderer. In its three-day journey, the Sampark Kranti carries with it a steam engine, meant to be taken to Delhi for display in an exhibition of heritage engines on Republic Day. This engine, the Wanderer, relic of an era gone by, becomes the silent witness to the journey, as also to the multiple temporalities the narrative walks the reader through.
Shinilal’s protagonist (inasmuch as a novel with an expansive cast of characters, with divergent arcs and points of view can be said to have a protagonist) is 39-year-old Karamchand, identified only by this first name, unusual, as he points out, for a Malayali. Each of the three sections of the novel begins with Karamchand’s Facebook posts, social commentaries that have “likes” and “comments” and “shares” in thousands, cementing his reputation as a public figure, a social media “influencer”, even whose words have a wide outreach. Describing himself as a “traveller” and an iterant, Karamchand avers that his travels “are not flights from my own home or a nostalgic retour. I travel to travel. An itinerant has his feet planted in at least two eras. In the present and in the past eras of the place he is in.”
Like the trains he travels in, Karamchand also becomes an observer of the process of history, albeit one who is able to critically engage with the events unfolding around him. He is the writer-seer whose dreams and visions connect him to the lives and stories of the people and the places he encounters. Early in the novel, Karamchand “sees” the evolution of humankind from hominids to possessors of fire who travel through time and space to set up civilisations. In other visions, centered more in informed historicity than esoteric revelations, he sees wars fought by the Nair militia of Valluvannad, the Portuguese explorer Francisco de Almeida’s inroads into the Indian coastline, and alternate timelines in which he witnesses the life of a boy born on the train, evicted from history, and growing up in the multiple conflicts that continue to shape the narratives of the nation. He also travels in memory- his own and that of his co-passengers- re-visiting a romantic yearning at Miraj railway station that segues into a story of class conflict, an eerily erotic experience of meditation at the Elephanta Caves, and re-constructing the history of food and game that forms the packaged meal of an elderly couple travelling with him. Karamchand is a witness, critic, and chronicler, reading the people on the train as a cross-section of the complex nation they belong to.
The volatility of our world
At the heart of The Wanderer is its commitment to social commentary. The passengers of the Samapark Kranti confront prejudices about caste, pushing the reader to acknowledge that caste oppression thrives in modern-day India as much as it did in the past. One of the train’s passengers is Lekha Nampoothiri whose story begins at a Kozhikode magistrate court, in the middle of a rape trial. The author intersects Lekha’s narrative with that of Kuriyedath Thathri, a Namboodiri woman at the centre of a caste-based adultery trial in early 20th-century Kerala, to show how systemic gender violence continues to be perpetrated within political and societal structures.
With a fable-like quality, the text details the execution of an old man, a teacher, in an unnamed, post-riot city. The chargesheet against him might sound alarmingly familiar to some. It reads: “You claimed that the history created now for our city, that it has an illustrious heritage, is bunkum. Our highly imaginative historians have turned out these books after toiling for countless days and nights. (…) you spread the calumny that the current mayor, when he was your student, was a dolt and a brute… this is sufficient reason for you to be given capital punishment (…) You have stated that this city is a black dwarf star hurtling towards the primitive ages.” The resonance with contemporary administrative and governmental structures is unmissable. The city allows no critical thinking, no criticism, no appeals for accountability. The train too, in the last leg of its journey, transforms into a tightly controlled regime, run by an authoritarian leader who ascribes an entire mythos to himself and knows that only way to control people is through fear and instability. The politics of control and subversion are rendered transparent as tension escalates in the novel.
In all the ways that matter, The Wanderer is a novel of ideas. It studies human behaviour, contextualising it within socio-cultural politics. It never lets the reader forget the immediacy of the stories it is telling, reminding us of the volatility of the world we inhabit. With a deft hand, Shinilal weaves in references to mythology, contemporary fiction and poetry, folklore, and folk songs. He writes account after witness account, ranging from the experiences of loss of a young Tibetan man, to the revulsion of a woman who is left unsettled by smutty graffiti on toilet walls, the unsatiated hunger of a man who has left home to support his family, and the haunting memories of a loco pilot who has seen one too many suicides on his watch.
Almost like a thought experiment, the author nudges the reader into a multiplicity of what-ifs. What if you found yourself a part of a mob? What if you were a hapless victim? What if you were the aggressor? While the novel poses these difficult questions, it also accomplishes its outward obvious goal- the structuring of the story of a people through the structuring of the story of a train. “A train is an abundant memory”, Karamchand pronounces. Shinilal’s Sampark Kranti carries within it the abundant memories of the people who travel inside it, those they leave behind, as also those whose stories are told inside its corridors.
The Wanderer, V Shinilal, translated from the Malayalam by Nandakumar K, Westland.
