Indian train carriages in the 60s and 70s carried the stamp of a certain kind of stodgy, sensible British design, a specific sub-genre that could well be labelled ‘20th Century British Colonial’. In this style, the aesthetics of British public works were tweaked to meet the needs of tropical and other sorts of non-Angrezi, sub-continental weather and other realities.
The Third and Second Class sleeper carriages were both basic, for example the berths were essentially wooden slats held together by metal, but even here some attention was given to detail — the corners of the berths were rounded so that they didn’t spear into a passenger’s knee or shoulder as the train changed tracks at speed.
First class joys
The non-AC First Class was what I saw most of those days, and those compartments were a thing of joy. When you entered, the lower berths welcomed you as two deep green sofas facing each other; the back and the seat were curved ergonomically; the little reading lights were angled so that they actually helped you read; the ceiling had a cluster of caged fans and lights, with the blue night-light presaging the round pods that today house CCTV cameras.
As sleeping time approached, the backs of the sofas could be unlocked and dropped, the curve of the backrest doing a yin-yang with the seat, and the flip side providing a flat surface on which you could unfold your bedroll or whatever.
For kids, the upper berths beckoned like adventure machans. These too were simply designed with a half railing that prevented you from falling off. These were accessed by what I always thought of as submarine ladders, basic metal things designed more for a seafaring or military purpose, or a kids’ playground, rather than for older people with creaking joints and leaking bladders. Things were basic, but the design was good, clean, well-finished.
On the rare occasions one got to look into an AC First Class compartment, everything was impossibly posher but also, it seemed, from an older time. There was lot of polished wood, crisp bed linen, wash-basins inside each compartment, not to mention unctuous staff who were completely absent in the other coaches.
Ghastly rexine
At some point in the early 70s, my travel axis changed from the two-night Calcutta-Bombay journey to the overnight Cal-Delhi one. I remember this was before the Rajdhani was properly established and our school group travelled in AC chair cars on the elite train of the time, the Deluxe.
It was here that the design and execution of the young nation first scraped up against the body. The chairs were covered in a ghastly grey-blue rexine that was unforgiving of sweat (whenever the dodgy aircon failed); each of the seats was manoeuvred by a gear that looked like it had time-travelled from the 1940s; the seats often didn’t recline properly; the windows of the doors to the loos and exit areas had a cheap, sharp aluminium framing for the glass that could cut you.
Talking about windows, the carriage windows quickly became scratched and grimy, clouding the view of the passing countryside. As a teenager it was always fun travelling on this train but, despite the air-conditioning, you couldn’t help feeling you had come down a notch from the luxury of the hot but well-appointed Nagpur Mail.
Design disaster
As I grew up and began travelling for work, air travel interfered with the great pleasure of train journeys. Among trains, the Rajdhani and other such trains became the ones I took most often, and I got to know the pleasures and pains of the rolling middle-class chawls that are the 2AC carriages of our times. Slowly, almost without realising it, the carriage design of the early post-Independence period faded.
That old sense of spaciousness, of properly tucked-in construction, of a sensible minimalism, came to be replaced with poor, sharp-edged, brittle, stingy-minded and impractical design, where surface show and glitter seemed to be the aim, no matter that in a hot, humid and dusty country like ours decorative hubris was always going to be short-lasting.
All this was driven home again when I recently took a Rajdhani from Delhi to Howrah. I travelled First AC, figuring my airplane-weary bones could use some off-time in a softly vibrating train.
I had taken a similar train last January, but to Sealdah, so when I entered the compartment the changes were a bit of a shock. The ladders to the upper berths, constant from 60 years ago, had gone, replaced by a flight of tiny steps that were nominally easier to use. The windows were bigger and sparkling clean — you could actually see what was outside and the glass looked like it wouldn’t scratch easily.
There was an unfortunate digital ticker-tape glaring down from the upper berth level that kept up a bright red-dot flicker, telling you the speed of the train and the time of arrival at the next station, but this could be switched off. The lights were bright operation-theatre illumination, possibly LED, and I missed the old warm yellow lighting.
New, and yet so old
Where the difference was most obvious was in the entrance/ exit areas and in the bathrooms. The toilets were festooned with new fittings, the old press-down taps gone, replaced by a ‘normal’ lever model, the flush was the same hard-to-press steel disc of the kind you imagine was the final button you pushed to launch a Soviet nuclear missile in the 1950s, the rolls of toilet paper were tender and fresh.
What was strange was a branded hand-tissue dispenser above the toilet. And a digital screen in the doorway area that had a constant image of a Himalayan peak, mirrored by a framed still photograph opposite of... yet another Himalayan peak.
What remained unchanged were the sharp metal corners that could stab you, the ill-finished edges that could slice open skin, the badly fitted bolts in the toilet doors.
Here you are, in the premier class of what is supposed to be the best train in the country. Some time between last January and this November you can tell someone has spent a lot of money re-doing these carriages, but they’ve clearly been highly parsimonious with thought and passion.
When you look at Indian craft, painting, weaving, pottery, bamboo work, lost-wax work, you see the love, inspiration and patience that has gone into it. In this refurbishment, you see the opposite — you see multiple encrustations of laziness, dead-minded bureaucracy and, possibly, corrupt tenderitis.
We needed to come up with a third way of design, one that neither strives to emulate the over-fancy, component-heavy design of the West nor the ugly, clunky sub-Soviet style. If there is a message, it’s that the design of things in the public space needs to take the best from our colonial past, from the much spat-upon post-47 modernity that Nehru & Co gave us, from international design processes, and from our own rich craft traditions.
The columnist and filmmaker is author of The Last Jet-Engine Laugh and Poriborton: An Election Diary .
