Smoke and mirrors: railway travel and women in colonial India

Abstract

Tracing the history of accommodation for female passengers on Indian railways, this article explores the anxieties and imperatives that regulated the presence of women in railway spaces in colonial India. Examining the entry of women into the public space of the railway, it emphasizes how an axiomatic relationship between female seclusion, respectability and mobility became pivotal to the conversation about women passengers from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. This correlation both cemented a masculine affinity across racial boundaries and became, simultaneously, a discursive frame for arguing colonial difference. The article argues that even as railway spaces were meant to be moulded to the strict norms of female seclusion, the demands of profitability ensured that – in practice – most Indian women travelled in accommodation similar to that provided for women in other parts of the world. This disjunction between theory and practice did not dim the discursive correlation between female seclusion in railways and respectability. Neither did it undercut a masculine logic that used the security of Indian women passengers to negotiate racial politics in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century India. Thus, while women became increasingly visible as railway passengers in colonial India, they remained virtually invisible as interlocutors, even when the conversation about their safety and security during railway travel increasingly occupied the public domain.