Travelling Through India on the Himsagar Express
This was not a luxury train, but even here, as in Indian society as a whole, the distinctions between the haves and the have-nots were clear.
By March 8, 2025
Illustration by Tara Anand
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The train car was crammed with people sitting on the lower and upper berths, squatting in the aisles, and crowding the vestibule leading to the toilets, and this might have been the reason that Ganesh Rajwar was sitting in the open doorway, his feet on the metal stairs. The train was moving fast through the state of Maharashtra with a rocking motion, but Rajwar was sitting easily. A colorful cotton gamchha—part scarf, part towel—was wrapped around his neck, and the wind made the length of cloth tug and fly.
I wanted to ask Rajwar a few questions, like “How much progress has India made?” “What problems still plague India?” “What does freedom mean to you?” “What is the significance of India in your imagination?” But, before answering any questions, Rajwar wanted me to take a photograph of his left hand. On his palm, faintly visible, were two sets of phone numbers scribbled with a ballpoint pen. He had got on the train in Nagpur, in the Deccan Plateau, at the heart of the subcontinent. He had arrived there the previous day after a long journey by another train from his home in Jharkhand, in eastern India, and was now on his way south to Vijayawada, in the state of Andhra Pradesh, about eight hundred miles away, to find work in construction. The phone numbers on his palm had been written by a contractor back in his home town. Upon reaching Vijayawada, Rajwar would call the numbers on his palm and tell whoever picked up that he was waiting on platform No. 1.
By the time I met Rajwar, around nine on a Wednesday morning in early August, I had been on the train for roughly forty hours. The Himsagar Express runs from the Himalayan foothills, in Kashmir, where I had boarded the train, to Kanyakumari, at the southernmost tip of India, a distance of 2,355 miles. I would be on it for its full length—a journey of three days.
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Rajwar said that he would be gone for several months, at least. He would earn four hundred rupees (less than five dollars) for eight hours of work, plus an additional two hundred rupees, because he would put in an extra four hours every day. The money would support his wife, their two small sons, and his mother. Laborers from poorer regions of India, like Jharkhand and the adjoining states of Odisha and Bihar—my home state—flood into other parts of the country, particularly the metropolises, to work in the service industries and also a variety of menial jobs. Rajwar was eking out a living—and I felt that I couldn’t ask him a grandiose question like “How has India changed over the past twenty years?” Instead, I asked him, in our local dialect, to explain what would happen if someone like him couldn’t go elsewhere to work. If there was a pause in the migration of people from places like Bihar, he said, the country would come to a stop.
The questions I’d planned to ask Rajwar were inspired by a black-and-white documentary from 1967—in fact, they were taken from it. The movie is titled “I Am 20,” and it was made for the Films Division of India, by S. N. S. Sastry, twenty years after the country gained its independence. In the documentary, not quite nineteen minutes, a group of twenty-year-olds is asked a series of questions. I watched it for the first time about ten years ago and thought it fascinating: I found the idea of talking to people across the country both curious and alluring, and also seductive.
“I Am 20” begins on a moving train. At the end of the first minute, after a collage of passing homes, bridges, and fields, we encounter an articulate young man sitting with a physical-chemistry textbook in front of him. He announces, “One thing I’d like to do very much is to go through this country, top to bottom, take a little bit of money, and a pad and paper, a tape recorder and a camera.” He says that he would like to know what he is a part of, and what is a part of him. I think it was that phrase about travelling the country “top to bottom” that planted in my head the mad idea of taking the Himsagar Express. I was nostalgic for the time that the film represented, when freedom felt new and exciting, and I wanted to meet fellow-Indians who would talk honestly about their hopes and fears.
A new country and its youth speak with such innocence, not least because they don’t know what we who are living so many years later know. The young people in the documentary have a stirring sense of idealism, even when much of what they are doing is complaining about the surrounding poverty and wretchedness. Fifty-eight years later, when the idea of a new India is aggressively promoted in India and abroad, I wanted to find out if the old answers, and maybe even the old questions, were still valid. Today, news reports from the country of my birth cover everything from its scientists landing a spacecraft on the moon and victories in cricket to cow vigilantes lynching Muslim men on suspicion of eating beef and horrific accounts of violence to women. And so the question arises: in what ways has the country changed? The rise to power, in 2014, of the Bharatiya Janata Party—the B.J.P.—under Narendra Modi has meant that India is increasingly projected as a Hindu nation. Is this sense of Hindu identity also really a part of the dreams of the common people? Modi had come to power with the promise “Achhe din aane waale hain” (Happy days are on their way). Had those days now arrived?
On the Himsagar Express, Rajwar took a battered flip phone from his pocket. His charger had stopped working, and the phone was dead. But, when he arrived in Vijayawada, he was going to beg one of the other migrant workers to lend him a charger for five minutes so that he could call his contacts. Rajwar said that he also used his mobile phone to stay in touch with his wife back in his village, and I understood that the village had come closer to the city.
During my student days in Delhi, in the early eighties, I went to a call booth when I needed to talk to my parents in Patna. The calls were expensive: a three-minute conversation, even in the evening, when rates were reduced, cost more than a couple of bun-anda—bun-and-egg—sandwiches, tea, and a cigarette. If I talked for a minute or two longer, I would have spent what a monthly bus pass cost. In 1986, I left India for graduate school in the United States, and within a few decades India emerged as one of the world’s largest markets for cellphones. The number of phone subscribers in the country increased from just under twelve million, in 1995, when cellphones were first introduced, to 1.2 billion in 2018.
Rajwar had benefitted from the extensive expansion in infrastructure and connectivity. His only complaint was that the cost of his data plan had recently gone up by twenty-five per cent. The cause of this, he believed, was the wedding of the son of Mukesh Ambani, which had taken place over several days in July, in front of some two thousand celebrity guests (an earlier pre-wedding celebration had included a thousand members of the international élite), and had reportedly cost as much as six hundred million dollars. Ambani is the owner of the largest telecom company in India, and Rajwar felt that it was the hapless public that was now paying for the wedding. Opinion in India is often divided, and indeed polarized, but almost everyone I spoke to condemned the ostentation displayed by the Ambanis in their months-long celebrations. As a driver in Delhi put it to me, the wedding felt like a slap in the face to India’s poor.
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Also headed to Vijayawada was a group of laboring youths from Khagaria, in Bihar. They planned to take up jobs transferring sacks of chickpeas from a warehouse to trucks waiting outside. Even though they were poor, several of them owned smartphones, and they showed me videos of the warehouse, which was huge and dimly lit, filled with steep metal stairs. Each sack could weigh a hundred and fifty pounds, and they would work for eight or nine hours, seven days a week. They would be paid ten rupees, about twelve cents, a sack. I asked if any of them had voted in the most recent election, that spring. Yes, a man named Pankaj Kumar told me. He had voted for the ruling B.J.P. The Party has risen to power by consolidating the Hindu vote across caste and class lines, embracing majoritarianism, and casting minority ethnicities as national enemies. Had he bought that bit of propaganda? It turned out that Kumar had swallowed a different piece of fiction. Everyone had said that the B.J.P. was going to sweep the elections, he told me, and he didn’t want his vote to be wasted. (In the end, the B.J.P. fell short even of a parliamentary majority. It was only with the help of allied parties that the Party was able to form a government and continue in power.)
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These young men had very little education. With some difficulty, Kumar, who was twenty-six, could write in Hindi his name and a brief description of the work that he did. In the years preceding independence, while in a British jail in Ahmednagar Fort, the future Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had bemoaned in his magisterial “The Discovery of India” that “of our millions how few get any education at all.” He added this hopeful note: “If life opened its gates to them and offered them food and healthy conditions of living and education and opportunities of growth, how many among these millions would be eminent scientists, educationists, technicians, industrialists, writers and artists, helping to build a new India and a new world?” That desirable future hasn’t come to pass. The “haves” get educated and also find opportunities abroad as doctors, engineers, scientists; a large section of the “have-nots,” on the other hand, often remain trapped in virtual illiteracy. More than half of India’s population is under the age of thirty, but, according to a report by the International Labour Organization, the group accounts for almost eighty-three per cent of the unemployed.
And yet, and yet. The smartphones of the Khagaria youths also had apps, like Paytm, that allowed them to make quick online payments and send money home. In 1969—and again in 1980—India’s commercial banks were nationalized, which forced the banking sector to cater to previously ignored sections of society. Mobile banking has ushered in an unprecedented level of access to the monetary system. The new India is, of course, a digital India; this has made it easier for young people to participate in the gig economy. It has also made them more likely to be recruited for cons. Job scams are increasingly common in cities like Delhi, where armies of desperate workers employed at call centers cheat people out of their money by offering them fake jobs. Other young people are lured with offers of employment in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, where their passports are taken away and they’re ordered to work defrauding people online.
I was an eager, if somewhat nervous, participant in the digital economy. My ticket for the Himsagar Express had been purchased online. I ordered my first meal on the train using an app, and was disappointed when my lunch was not delivered. When I e-mailed a complaint that afternoon, I received a response within hours, in a departure from the slow conventions of Indian bureaucracy: order number 1751705140 had been delivered, the message stated flatly, and disputes were “subject to the jurisdiction of the Delhi courts.” So much has changed, I thought, and yet not much has changed at all. But the next day there was a fresh message. I was offered an apology and, the day after that, while I was still on the train, I was given a full refund.
The Himsagar Express is not a luxury train like the Vande Bharat Express, a new service that is fully air-conditioned and caters to affluent passengers travelling middle distances. But even on ordinary trains like the Himsagar, as in Indian society as a whole, the distinctions between the haves and the have-nots were clear: I was in an air-conditioned car, with an assigned sleeping berth, suffering only from filthy toilets and close intimacy with loud passengers; travellers like Ganesh Rajwar and Pankaj Kumar were in the unreserved compartment, packed in like people fleeing some devastating catastrophe. They sat on, or near, small bundles and other belongings, sometimes even pressed into the overhead luggage racks. The garbage can was overflowing and the sink above it was filled with empty plastic bottles. The path to the toilets was clogged with passengers sitting or sleeping on the floor, and that gave me an excuse to cease any further investigation into the space that I could smell but could not see.
I paid four thousand rupees, a little less than fifty dollars, for my ticket. I hadn’t considered the fact that I wouldn’t be able to take a shower for nearly four days. I also made the error of searching online for reviews of the train. The reviews were consistently negative. After mentioning the “nasty service,” one customer had noted stoically, “All of us know this review is not going to improve the quality of the service. I am writing for the sake of common man.”
For the sake of the common man! I decided to adopt this phrase as a credo for everything in my life!
Before my trip, I had stopped at a bookstore in Delhi owned by a friend. When I told her about my travel plans, she advised me to take only one small suitcase, and to always keep my valuables with me. Following these warnings, I abandoned my large suitcase at the bookstore. While there, I bought a memoir by Sudha Bharadwaj, a spirited activist and trade unionist who was imprisoned by the B.J.P. government, in 2018, on the basis of scant and questionable evidence. “From Phansi Yard” is a lively account of her incarceration and describes the lives of women behind bars in an unjust patriarchal legal system.
I was reading an important testimony, but I was flooded with self-pity. Faced with the squalid claustrophobia of the air-conditioned compartment of the Himsagar Express, I began to identify with the feelings of the entrapped prisoner. Worse, I read with fascination—and, yes, with increasing identification—the stories that Bharadwaj was telling about the blocked, stinking toilets in the jails.
Let’s go back for a moment to Sastry’s film. One of the questions asked in “I Am 20” is about the most significant changes in the country in the previous two decades. Had India changed its sanitary practices? In February, 1916, in a speech at the Banaras Hindu University, Mahatma Gandhi chided his audience for not knowing “the elementary laws of cleanliness” when travelling on trains. The result, Gandhi said, was that there is “indescribable filth in the compartment.” That was more than three decades before independence. During my boyhood, more than three decades after independence, the toilets in trains opened onto the tracks. As a boy, I looked on these with fear, and, even when I was a bit older, as I saw railroad ties and gravel ballast passing in a blur, I made sure that my watch was strapped securely to my wrist.
On the door of the toilets on the Himsagar Express, there was a sign, green letters on white, saying “Fitted with Bio Toilet.” This was a part of the new India. The toilet used bacteria to convert human waste into water and gases. The opening in the floor was gone, but the stink remained. The fittings in the toilets for toilet paper and a soap dispenser were all broken and empty.
There had been another change since the journeys of my youth: a cleaning staff. One cleaner, wearing a deep-blue uniform, came by at least once or twice daily with a brush and passed it over the floor of the toilets. The water on the floor was gritty and black, and the man moved the filth around. Even the walls of the tiny bathroom were covered with a wash of black. There was also a second cleaner, who swept away the plastic bottles, wrappers, empty juice containers, plates of food, and other garbage that the passengers tossed on the floor. I appreciated the man’s work, but, on my second or third evening on the train, as we were passing verdant fields, I saw him collect all the trash at the end of the train car and then, opening the door, sweep the whole pile smoothly into the emptiness outside.
Ihad started my journey a little after midnight in Jammu Tawi, Kashmir, the beginning of the line. My phone wasn’t working because there are restrictions on mobile phones in Kashmir—India’s only Muslim-majority state, where civil unrest and demands for secession have been in the air for decades. Often when there is violence, at the hands of the Indian Army or separatist militants, the government restricts phone use and imposes a ban on internet use in Kashmir; even in more normal times, it is almost impossible to use either prepaid phones or phones that haven’t been registered locally. Two and a half hours into the journey, I woke up a little before three in the morning, when the train stopped at a station. A man in an ascetic’s orange garb was sitting on the platform floor eating a green apple. Unoccupied steel benches nearby gleamed in the night. A young Sikh policeman, flashlight in hand, came through the train. He stopped by my berth and asked me to put my cellphone and bag under my head. He said they would be safe that way. When we started moving again, the sound of snoring from different berths around me reminded me of the croaking of frogs, as if in a relay, in a village pond during the monsoon rains.
An hour or two later I was woken up again. Close by there was a boy shouting, “Papa, Papa.” He, too, had a flashlight. He belonged to a family of four. They were the Modis—husband, wife, daughter, and son. Lights were switched on, and everyone’s bedding was laid out on the berths close to mine. We had crossed into Punjab, and my phone was working again. So was Mrs. Modi’s phone. She was interested, despite the hour, in watching videos on her phone. The videos had a syncopated, asthmatic laugh track. This was annoying, and then it became funny. Instead of composing essays in my head about the degradation of public and private spaces, I sent a message to my elder sister, who I was sure must be blissfully asleep in Patna. She understood the suffering of travel on Indian trains. When I was in college in Delhi, she was attending medical school in Jamshedpur, a town in eastern India. When she visited me, she would arrive twenty-four hours (or more than thirty, if there were delays) after boarding the train, her face strained, her lips dry and dark. She didn’t drink water during those trips because she didn’t want to risk needing to pee, nor did she want to endanger herself, a lone woman, in a dark passageway of the train or, heaven forbid, the toilet.
Early in the morning, Mrs. Modi’s phone rang. Her ringtone was a parrot’s call. She answered all her phone calls on speaker. She asked her brother in Delhi to get a kilo of fresh vegetables; he could hand them over when the train stopped there in the afternoon. Already various people in the train car were becoming familiar to me from their insistent ringtones. Soon, the Modi daughter was up. She started watching a show on her phone. I could hear the lines delivered at a high emotional pitch: “Do you not know who I am? I am the same girl who you were madly in love with four years ago.” The next time the train stopped, I saw a man sitting cross-legged under a tree, drinking tea. Noise inside, quiet outside.
That was the day that my lunch didn’t arrive. But I was unfazed. At the next station, I bought bananas and peanuts on the platform. Also newspapers. A dictatorship had been toppled in Bangladesh. There was a photograph from Dhaka with the caption “People take away a duck and an electric bulb from the PM’s residence.” The Indian men’s hockey team was in contention for a medal at the Olympics. My horoscope began, “Your mind will remain unsettled.” The Modi family’s devotion to watching shows on their phones, each at a high volume, began to weaken me. I watched a cockroach crawling in the aisle. I had hoped to talk to people—I wanted to ask someone on the train, “How is your life different from how your mother had lived at your age?”—but now I withdrew. I wanted solitude.
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Turning away from my neighbors, lying on the berth, I quietly read the prison memoir I had brought with me. I Googled “How many times does a normal person pee in a day?” The previous night, at Jammu Tawi station, I had seen the cars of a train completely covered on one side with decals advertising a brand of diapers. Advertising on a train in India was new to me, but I was haunted by a detail from an essay I had read by Joy Williams: a disposable diaper, which is all plastic and wood pulp, will take about four centuries to degrade. At Delhi station, where we stopped for twenty-five minutes, Mrs. Modi’s brother came bearing gifts. He sat on my berth with his bags; I had to keep my legs drawn up close to my chest, but I didn’t protest.
In the evening, I saw that the ticket examiner, an older man with a flowing gray beard, was sitting alone on an empty berth at one end of the train car. I greeted him and sat opposite. Ramesh Kumar had joined the railways in 1984. I asked him about the overcrowding in the general coaches, and he said that the railways had been making fools of poor customers. Although all of them had paid for a ticket, they weren’t assured of a seat. He added that, a few weeks back, the government had decided to increase the number of ordinary sleeper cars and, in some cases, reduce the number of air-conditioned cars. The situation was dire. There were once twelve sleeper cars on this train, he said, but now there were only four. Kumar also told me that he grows his hair and beard all year round and then, each October, makes a ritual offering at the temple in Tirupati, farther south, in Andhra Pradesh. He shared a great deal about his spiritual practices and beliefs. And then he advised me on healthy food habits. But I had been waiting to ask him something. Fortunately, Kumar, a kind and solicitous man, asked me if I needed anything. I found myself complaining about the Modis watching their loud shows on their phones. Could something be done? This was against the law, he said, and he promised to stop by and speak to them.
But he never did.
The corn and sugarcane fields of Punjab and Haryana had given way, by the second day, to fields of millet and soybean and lines of orange trees. The train was now crossing Maharashtra on its eastern edge, where Ganesh Rajwar would join the train; a few hundred miles to the west, on the coast, was the state’s glittering capital, Mumbai. Everyone in my car was busy with their phones—except for one older couple, who were playing cards. They were the Gadges, from Amravati, in Maharashtra. The husband, Gajanan, had retired from a job as a technician in the telecom industry, and the wife, Archana, a graduate in Sanskrit literature, worked at home. Gajanan Gadge said that he was opposed to the use of cellphones. He was skeptical of television news, too, so he meticulously read two regional newspapers. The Gadges were returning from a vacation, and I found them pleasant to talk to. However, they soon began to speak in exalted terms about the greatness of the ultra-right politician Vinayak Savarkar, who died in 1966 but whose reputation has found a resurgence under the B.J.P.’s regime. It is Savarkar who propounded the idea of Hindutva—the belief that India is the land of Hindus—and the amiable Mr. Gadge began telling me how Gandhi’s ideal of nonviolence was never going to work. (Savarkar was charged as a co-conspirator in the assassination of Gandhi, in 1948, but was acquitted because of a lack of evidence.)
I did not point out to Mr. Gadge that exactly a year ago, on another train that was crossing Maharashtra, a railway constable had shot a sub-inspector and had singled out and killed three Muslim men. While standing over the last man he had killed, the constable had asked the passengers on the train to record a video on their phones in which he hailed Prime Minister Modi and ranted against Muslims. The director of “I Am 20” hadn’t argued with his subjects, and I didn’t argue with the elderly Gadges, but it was also true that none of Sastry’s subjects seemed preoccupied with the presence of a demonic other in their midst. The film contains no railing against ethnic minorities. Bidding goodbye to the Gadges, I fled to the unreserved car, where I spent the morning with Rajwar and the other migrant workers.
By afternoon, the train had reached the southern state of Telangana. Orange trees had been replaced by red earth and hills. Tall chimneys on the horizon gave off smoke, and we passed trains with uncovered cars carrying coal from the open-cast mines in the Godavari Valley. Soon, we would reach Andhra Pradesh, where a twenty-six-year-old I had met would depart the train; he was a Hindu pilgrim returning from a visit to the Vaishno Devi temple, in Kashmir. This man worked as a software engineer at Infosys in Andhra Pradesh, but he dreamed of opening a restaurant. Four hours later, I knew, the Modis were going to disembark. I felt I should talk to them and find out a bit about their lives. After all, for the past two days, they had shared this small space with me.
Even though I had heard Mr. Modi speaking Telugu, the main language of Andhra Pradesh, I picked up on a familiar accent when he spoke Hindi. As I suspected, when we finally conversed I learned that he—Lalandeo Modi—was from my home state, Bihar. His wife, Soni Kumari, was from Bhagalpur, a town I used to visit often in my boyhood. They were returning from Jalandhar, where they had deposited their oldest child, a son, at a nearby engineering college called Lovely Professional University. This was the boy that Mrs. Modi had been FaceTiming at every meal: she would order him meals online and then inquire about the quality of the food. The Modis had been living in Andhra Pradesh since 2003, and this explained why they spoke fluent Telugu. Mr. Modi’s father had been a mechanic in Bihar, but Mr. Modi had risen in life: he had received a degree from a polytechnic institute and got a job supervising maintenance work on the railway tracks in the south. Now he wanted his son to rise even higher and become an engineer. I couldn’t begrudge him that, even if his family’s obsession with their phones had molested my sleep.
Mrs. Modi smiled when I asked her what she liked to watch on her phone. She was fond of two current TV serials, “Anupamaa” and “Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai.” Both portrayed struggles within families and among different generations. Her husband added his own commentary on the theme of the two shows: “Everybody wants freedom.”
The next day, my final one on the train, filled me with elation. My journey was going to come to an end. Was that it? No. The Modis were now gone. Was that it? No, not entirely. Instead, it was the view from my window. Tall palm trees and bamboo and beyond them high misty mountains covered with vegetation of a deep monsoon green. The train had entered Kerala, the state with India’s highest literacy rate—was that why people from this state found jobs in other countries and sent back a staggering amount in remittances, while men lacking formal education from poor parts of the country struggled to earn a pittance in Indian cities far from home? That morning, I had met Debin Thomas, a nineteen-year-old who was returning from a college in Delhi to his family home in Kottayam, in Kerala. He was enrolled in a nursing course and planned to find employment in Europe, perhaps in Finland. He had not seen his mother for ten years but spoke to her daily on video calls; she supported the family by working as a nurse in a hospital in Rome.
Kerala’s affluence was also apparent in the countryside that the train was now crossing. Visible on both sides of the tracks were houses with sloping roofs, sometimes covered in corrugated iron but other times in pretty clay tiles. The homes had gardens filled with all manner of trees—papaya, mango, almond, rubber, jackfruit, and my beloved neem, which also grew outside my grandparents’ home in my ancestral village. An inspector from the Border Security Force had also caught the train in Kashmir; he had travelled the farthest with me. He was going home, with his boxes of apples and walnuts from the north. He was a stern man, and I had noticed scars on his arms and a missing big toe on his left foot. He had been suspicious of my questions. I explained to him that, though I had left the country in the late nineteen-eighties, I made it a point to travel in India each year, because there was the danger of becoming a complete outsider. He nodded. I liked him because he told me that India needed a revolution. The country should build schools and toilets. What was the need, he wanted to know, for building more temples or mosques? When we were ten minutes from Kottayam, he began to hum loudly while bending to look out of the window. It was a sweet sound, conveying in its rising notes a barely suppressed excitement.
The end was near. The train car soon emptied out. A new examiner came to inspect my ticket. He said that I was the last passenger in the train car; he was going to get off at the next station. I would be the only one going all the way to Kanyakumari.
Near dusk, the train slid into an empty station called Varkala Sivagiri. No one got off the train. The only person I could see on the platform was a white woman sitting on a stone bench. It looked like she was in a painting by Edward Hopper. I wanted to shout: What is your story? This is what I had intended to say to each one of my fellow-travellers, but it had been difficult. The conditions had been tough, even oppressive, and I hadn’t dealt with them well.
I reached Kanyakumari about seventy-four hours after I had boarded the train in Kashmir. It was past midnight. The hotel was a five-minute walk away. The next morning, I walked to the beach. The sea! The sea! ♦
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Amitava Kumar teaches at Vassar College. His latest book is the novel “My Beloved Life.”
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