Book review: ‘Railsong’ captures the soul of India through a railway woman's journey

With a gripping memoir by Arundhati Roy, followed by a riveting novel by Kiran Desai, 2025 has turned out to be a year of comebacks for some of the best writers from India who have kept their admirers guessing their next move for a long time. To this list we must add the name of Rahul Bhattacharya, acclaimed journalist and novelist, who returns after 14 years with a lyrical new work of fiction, Railsong.

In the early 2000s, Bhattacharya earned legions of fans among sports lovers for his stellar work as a sports reporter. His first book, Pundits from Pakistan (2005), was an account of the Indian cricket team’s historic tour of its neighbouring nation in 2003-04. The warm, tender and acute observations, coupled with the young writer’s distinctive voice (Bhattacharya was in his early 20s at the time), introduced to readers a talent to watch out for.

That early promise blossomed into The Sly Company of People Who Care (2011), an inspired cross between a travelogue and a novel that revealed a sharp ear and eye for the peculiarities of people and places. Set in Guyana, a country filled with wily seductions, Bhattacharya’s plot had a slick coolness that made the book an instant cult favourite. The story was funny, edgy and unruly, in the best sense of the word, defying grammar, logic and expectations at whim, while bristling with innumerable possibilities. It was undoubtedly an act of chutzpah that only a carefree young writer could dare to pull off.

Railsong, in comparison, is a very grown-up book, but not without traces of Bhattacharya’s signature style. If it has gravitas and heft, it also has a steady undercurrent of humour, a constant patter of jokes and Bambaiya Hindi that never stops to amuse and entertain. The reader may, however, take some time to find their footing in the narrative. This isn’t the world of puns and in-jokes of Sly Company. Rather, Railsong can feel a bit wordy in the early pages, before the prose finds its cadence. And once it does, the novel remains a page-turner till the very end.

From the poetic compound word of its title to its self-willed protagonist Charulata Chitol, Railsong signals its affinity with a heavier and more world-weary consciousness. It is a story about the weight of the years and the vagaries of connection, the progress of civilisation and the regress of humanity. Dark and light notes come together to create the eponymous song that plays like a background score to the individual and national tragedies that make up its plot.

The Chitol family, at the heart of the novel, is an anomaly from its very origins. Animesh Kumar Chattopadhyay, an employee with the Indian Railways, renounces his surname, a marker of his Kulin Brahmin caste, when he “unaccountably married a woman outside community, caste and colour.” Jigyasa, his Bihari wife, would playfully call him Mr. Chitol, alluding to his fondness for an oily fish, much loved by Bengalis. Her rebel husband embraces it as a moniker for himself and their children, who live with the implications of their father’s choice in an India that gets increasingly fractured along caste and religious lines as they grow older.

Animesh’s decision is inspired as much by love as his humanist values, one of the reasons why he remains devoted to his job as a foreman with the railways in his relatively short life. “Indian Railways does not see religion, caste, language, state boundaries, summer, winter, rain,” as one character tells Charulata, or Charu, later on, as she goes on to work with the personnel department of the same institution. “We (that is, the railway employees) have to meet the challenges because without Indian Railways this country will not be India.”

If there is more than a grain of truth in this grandiose sentiment, there is also a generous a pinch of salt in it. As Charu realises, through the ups and downs of her career, the railways are as much a force for good, unifying the country and providing jobs to even the most wretched of the earth, as they are also a minefield of corruption and divisiveness. Bhattacharya brings alive the workers’ strike of 1974, when the Indian Railways stopped for three weeks, bringing the country to a standstill and the government to its knees. During this tumultuous time, Animesh, who lobbies for better pay and working conditions, is accused of being “an anti-national element” and his family forced to flee their home in the township where he is posted.

The Chitols take refuge at a nearby hamlet inhabited by Asurs, a tribal community, where entrenched dynamics of power and privilege are radically recalibrated. The family’s stint, though brief, becomes a formative moment in Charu’s sentimental education, which takes her away from home, to the city of Bombay (now Mumbai), where she eventually acquires a lifelong taste of independence, often at the peril of her personal happiness. Railsong is also a hymn to this great city, a melting pot for the physically homeless and spiritually unhomed.

In revisiting the political and social history of modern India through the shifting fates of the Chitol family, Bhattacharya sets a benchmark for storytelling, distilling his extensive research into a form that turns even bureaucratic trivia into absorbing plot points. Charu’s professional peregrinations across India—to investigate fraudulent applicants, missing and dead workers, families seeking employment on compassionate grounds and other questionable beneficiaries of the railways—open new vistas of experience for her as well as the reader.

Bhattacharya braids into his circuitous plot layers of truth that historians can never fully recover. These emerge from the inner turbulences of the “small” people—sweepers, linesmen, stationmasters, and a veritable army of workers—who keep the wheels of the nation turning, and can only be reimagined through a novelist’s eye.

To add further credence to Bhattacharya’s gift as a fiction writer, his protagonist, Miss Chitol, will be remembered as one of the most convincingly real female characters written by a male writer. Except for one chapter (where Bhattacharya, inexplicably, switches from the third-person omniscient voice to speak as Miss Chitol), he captures the pulse of her experiences—especially some exclusively female moments of terrors and triumphs—with empathy and grace.

Beyond focusing on individual trials, Railsong keeps a steady hum of political and social upheavals alive in the background. The song, in the title, isn’t just a hymn of nostalgia and melancholy; it also a reminder of the discordant notes of communal disharmony, the embers of casual Islamophobia, which begin to flare up in the body politic of India from the late 1980s, leading up to the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in 1992.

Bhattacharya brings none of these momentous events to the forefront of his narrative, and yet he keeps score of the million insidious mutinies that devastate the minds of his characters. Lives are upturned, spouses and families break up, public service becomes riddled with fear. Concurrently, feminist movements begin to rise through the 1980s and 90s, making it possible for Miss Chitol to have a life that most of her predecessors and peers wouldn’t dream of.

A fictional saga like Railsong demands not only imaginative daring, but also dogged discipline. Bhattacharya delivers on both counts abundantly. It has been well worth the wait for him to arrive at this sublime, clear-eyed vision of India—a nation that continues to be held together, as well as torn apart, by acts of unexpected kindness and cruelty.