Follow him to his own home in some remote Deccan or Concan village, and you will find the railway labourer has carried to his own village not only new modes of working, new wants, and a new feeling of self-respect and independence, but new ideas of what Government and the laws intend to secure to him; and he is, I believe, a better and more loyal subject, as he is certainly a more useful labourer.*
Let us add to this effect on the labouring population the inevitable and irresistible tendency of railways to break the bonds of caste and to destroy the isolation in which the various classes and races of natives have hitherto lived,* and you have an aggregate of moral results such as may well be the subject of grave thought to those who are interested in the future of India, and more particularly to us, wbo have seen in our own time and in our own Continent the vast effects for good or for evil which must follow any great change in the habits of life and of feeling of large masses of the people.
abridged
Charles Henfrey (1818-1891) made similar remarks at the opening of the Meerut and Umballa section of the Delhi Railway on November 14th, 1868. “How greatly the working classes of this country have profited by the construction of railways may be judged by the fact, that out of the seventy-five, or eighty millions sterling expended to the present time on Indian railways, nearly two-thirds, or between forty and fifty millions, must have passed, I cannot say into the pockets, but into the hands of the working classes.”
Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), India’s first prime Minister, lamented the destructive impact of railways on the local economies and crafts of Indian villages, but on the contribution of railways to fostering a broader outlook he was compelled to agree with Frere. “The railway and the steamship and the electric telegraph and the motor-car changed the world completely” he wrote in 1934. “The world shrank, and its inhabitants grew nearer to each other, and could see much more of each other, and, with mutual knowledge, many barriers, born of ignorance, went down.”