'To stop train pull chain': Writing histories of contemporary political practice

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'To stop train pull chain' : Writing histories of contemporary political practice

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‘To stop train pull chain’: Writing histories

of contemporary political practice

Lisa Mitchell

Department of South Asia Studies

University of Pennsylvania

Many political practices in India are today regarded as disruptive, extralegal, violent or

otherwise detrimental to India’s democratic record, yet at the same time they have functioned

in the past and continue to function as widespread forms of political communication. This

article argues that such practices—often associated with those in positions of structural

marginalisation—are as deserving of analysis and understanding as forms and sites of

communication more conventionally associated with the history of democracy, such as the

coffee houses and forms of print media associated with the bourgeois public sphere in Europe

or practices associated with elections. Using the very common practice of alarm chain pulling

to stop a train for political purposes as a specific example, the article also argues that it is

important to place contemporary forms of political practice into their longer historical

genealogies in order to fully understand their significance within the history and practice of

democracy in India today.

Keywords: democracy, public space, political practice, Indian railways, alarm chain, political

communication

The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 48, 4 (2011): 469–95

SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC

DOI: 10.1177/001946461104800401

Acknowledgement: The photograph of an emergency chain in an Indian railways bogie was taken

on 28 December 2006 by Nichalp and is licensed for free use under the Creative Commons

Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/

deed.en). Funding for this research was provided by fellowships from the American Institute of

Indian Studies, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Trustees’ Council of Penn

Women. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 39th Annual Conference on South

Asia, Madison, Wisconsin, 16 October 2010, and the Rutgers Annual Conference on South Asia,

New Brunswick, New Jersey, 25 March 2011. I am grateful to the audiences at each of these

events, and to Ritika Prasad, Leo Coleman, Daud Ali, Bhavani Raman, Sumit Guha, Ramnarayan

Rawat and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful responses.



470 / LISA MITCHELL


Democracy always develops around the chief means of communication.

(Indian Railway Traffic Service officer, Lucknow, 26 March 2009)

On the 23rd of December, 1916, D.V. Panvalkar, of Dhulia in northwestern

Maharashtra, addressed the following letter to the Secretary of the Railway Board,

Simla:

Sir, I remember to have read some time ago in newspapers that if any railway

compartment be overcrowded and the railway servant do not help to bring

down the number to the proscribed limit, it is not improper use of the alarm-

chain, if it be pulled under the above circumstances. It seems that there are

decided judicial cases to that effect. Will you therefore kindly let me know

whether my impression is right and oblige? I beg to remain, Sir, Your most

obedient servant.1

Rail travellers in India are familiar with the ubiquitous alarm or emergency chain

(or communication cord as the railways so aptly refer to it) that is present in each

bogie of an Indian train. When pulled, the alarm chain creates a break that results

in a loss of air pressure (or vacuum in the case of vacuum brakes), causing the

train’s brakes to be applied immediately. Although fines of up to ` 1,000 are

1 National Archives of India (NAI), New Delhi, Railway Traffic B, January 1917, 119-T/16/1-2.



Writing histories of contemporary political practice / 471


currently levied for use of alarm chains ‘without reasonable and sufficient cause’,

it is difficult for railway authorities to immediately locate the break and identify

the person who has pulled an alarm chain. Once pulled there is nothing that the

driver of a train can do to prevent a train from stopping, making this emergency

feature an ideal target for those seeking to halt a train for other reasons.2

Most people would have little problem considering D.V. Panvalkar’s procedural

query to the Railway Board a constructive form of civic engagement. It involves

no violence, it addresses itself to the highest government authority with jurisdiction

over the Indian railways, and it engages in a form of polite written discourse. He

writes as a private individual to clarify an interpretation of a point of law—a law

to which he is subject as a resident within the British colonial state. But what if

D.V. Panvalkar had taken the next logical step, as others did, and actually pulled

the alarm chain in an overcrowded third class bogie in an effort to draw the attention

of the railway authorities and compel them to relieve passengers in uncomfort-

able circumstances? Would this continue to be easily classifiable as a form of

constructive civic engagement? What if the alarm chain was pulled to draw the

attention of authorities to a social injustice not directly related to the railways, as

it began to be used by the 1930s and 1940s during the height of anti-colonial

nationalist movement? And what about when used to point out a failure on the

part of the state to deliver a promised public service, or to compel the state to act

in favour of a particular group, as has become increasingly common in post-

colonial India? At what point does the use of a particular form of political practice

to draw the attention of authorities to a perceived injustice or failure of governance

cease to be classifiable as a form of civic engagement and begin to be regarded as

a form of disruption or extralegal violation? And what is the relationship of these

various practices—treated not as homogenous but as a set of related practices—

to the history of Indian democracy?

In this article, I treat the foregoing types of alarm chain pulling as specific

examples of political practice and argue that we cannot understand the workings

of democracy in India without taking everyday practices like these seriously and

placing them within their longer historical genealogies. Contemporary repertoires

2 In 2009, a proposal was introduced to replace the existing alarm chain system with ‘a modern

communication system’ that would enable passengers to communicate directly with the driver and

give the driver the authority to decide whether or not to stop the train. The Passenger Amenities

Committee, which raised the proposal, has argued that this would eliminate the widespread abuse of

the system, with one member commenting that:

In most of the incidents, miscreants, robbers and dacoits use the system to make good their

escape from the train. After carrying out an act of robbery, they simply pull the chain and get

away. The system is also misused by common passengers and pranksters, who stop the train

whenever they feel like. The ` 1,000 fine has not been a deterrent because in most cases the

person is not found. (‘Alarm Chain-Pulling System in Trains Could be a Thing of the Past’,

Indian Express, 4 December 2009).



472 / LISA MITCHELL


of political action as they are routinely employed in the world’s largest democracy

are practices drawn from a long—but largely untheorised—history of similar prac-

tices in the Indian subcontinent, yet little attention has been devoted to under-

standing their historical formation or analysing how individuals choose to engage

in particular forms of political activity from among a wider range of potential

options. Existing histories of Indian democracy tend to begin with Indian inde-

pendence from Britain in 1947, or with the adoption of the Indian Constitution or

the first parliamentary elections, in 1950 and 1952 respectively. As Atul Kohli

has observed, ‘India’s “transition” to democracy in the 1940s is understudied and

ought to be further researched,’ pointing out that ‘[h]istorians have often left such

issues to political scientists, and the latter often do not concern themselves with

the “past,” the domain of historians.’3 There has therefore been little effort to con-

nect post-1947 political practices with their pre-independence precursors, or even

to acknowledge a relationship between the two. The little attention paid to pre-

independence democratic practices has focused almost exclusively on represen-

tative institutional bodies introduced under British colonial rule, said to ‘prefigure’

the ‘age of democracy in India’.4 The forms of practice that scholars of Indian

democracy—including historians, sociologists, anthropologists and political

scientists—have found most recognisable and worthy of attention have been

elections, with little analysis of the ongoing forms of communication between

citizens and their elected representatives that routinely occur in between electoral

events.5

If we think about the detailed history of practice offered by something like

Jürgen Habermas’s work on coffee houses and spheres of public debate and

opinion-making in the context of Europe, we can see that although some

practices—those that have been associated with particularly bourgeois engage-

ments with the public sphere—have been previously authorised as relevant to our

understandings of the development and spread of democracy, there are many

specific everyday practices that have failed to be taken up for analysis. Habermas

has rightly been critiqued for his exclusive interest in an idealised ‘bourgeois’

public sphere, and for his role in solidifying hegemonic liberal understandings of

acceptable forms of participatory democratic practice.6 Nancy Fraser, for example,

3 Kohli, ‘Introduction’, in Kohli, ed., The Success of India’s Democracy, p. 4.4 Jayal, Democracy in India, pp. 19–23. One notable exception is found in Chakrabarty, ‘“In the

Name of Politics”: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India’. Chakrabarty connects anti-

colonial actions of the 1940s with more contemporary forms of political protest in India. An earlier

version of this article appeared as Chakrabarty, ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Sovereignty, Democracy,

and the Multitude in India’.5 Even among anthropologists, recent ethnographic attention to Indian democracy, though revealing

in its own right, has made elections the central point of focus (cf. Michelutti, The Vernacularisation

of Democracy; Banerjee, ‘Democracy, Sacred and Everyday’).6 Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’.





has surveyed a wide range of scholarly research that offers substantial evidence

that competing publics have always contested the norms of this bourgeois public

sphere. These ‘subaltern counterpublics’, she argues, ‘function as bases and training

grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics’.7 Rather than

seeing the public sphere as a space defined by the norms of masculine bourgeois

society and reading the entrance of new and conflicting groups and interests as its

decline (a not uncommon refrain among some groups in contemporary India),

Fraser’s argument suggests that we may be better served by attending to the sites

where interactions of not only competing interests but also competing styles of

political participation occur. She writes, ‘Virtually from the beginning, counter-

publics contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public, elaborating

alternative styles of political behavior and alternative norms of public speech.’8

As a historian and anthropologist, I read this to mean that more careful genealogical

tracing of the everyday practices and spaces utilised by these counterpublics can

help to disrupt the ideological domination perpetuated by the segments of society

that have traditionally held the reins of power even under the sign of ‘democracy’.

Habermas’s explicit labelling of the sphere in which he’s interested as bourgeois

makes it clear that he recognises the existence of other kinds of public spheres,

most notably a ‘plebian’ public sphere, which he originally considered ‘a variant

[of the bourgeois public sphere] that in a sense was suppressed in the historical

process’.9 In his earlier work he showed little interest in these other publics, in the

relationships and interactions between multiple public spheres, or in their relation-

ships with the emergence and strength of democratic forms, something that he

has acknowledged after reading the finely grained attention to everyday practices

in works like E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class and

Bakhtin’s Rabelais and his World.10 He still suggests, however, that the relevance

of these other publics in relation to our theories of democracy is both relatively

recent and a product of technological transformations, arguing that it is only tele-

vision that has enabled these other publics to become a significant factor worth

examining. ‘In contrast to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,’ he writes,

‘the physical presence of the masses demonstrating in the squares and streets was

able to generate revolutionary power only to the degree to which television made

its presence ubiquitous.’11

The ethnographic and archival examples of halting trains through the practice

of alarm chain pulling that I offer in the following suggest that this is a too hasty

dismissal of pre-televised forms of mass political practice and their representa-

tions, however much television may indeed have produced qualitative changes in

7 Ibid., p. 68.8 Ibid., p. 61.9 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p. xviii.10 Habermas, ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere’, pp. 425–27.11 Ibid., p. 456.



474 / LISA MITCHELL


those representations. These examples prompt us to recognise ways in which other

mediums of communication—like the movement and blockage of people and

vehicles themselves—have been used to broadcast political messages and alter

spatial relations of power, even prior to the emergence of televisual forms. They

make clear that as a widespread medium of political communication, the stoppage

of trains in India today functions both via its performative effects as well as through

its control of communicative channels, sending political messages by preventing

and regulating the smooth flow of traffic.

More generally, the method of starting with practices on the ground and building

our theories of democracy out of the close analysis of practice is something that

has yet to be effectively accomplished for the context of South Asia. In bringing

ethnographic approaches to bear on the study of democracy, Julia Paley and her

collaborators have demonstrated how the methodologies offered by anthropology

can help to advance our theories of democracy by forcing us to account for practices

as they happen on the ground, placing together subjects of analysis that are other-

wise typically kept apart and bringing them into a single framework. By situating

‘powerful and non-powerful actors within the same frame’ and ‘examining how

they selectively choose and resignify elements of a globally circulating discourse’,

we are offered new insights that help us question the dominant representations of

how democracy works worldwide.12

Thomas Blom Hansen has similarly emphasised the importance of starting

with practices on the ground when he writes that ‘performances and spectacles in

public spaces—from the central squares to the street corner in the slum, from

speeches to images—must move to the centre of our attention’.13 Instead, what

dominate discussions of democracy in South Asia are comparisons with abstract

definitions and measures of democracy developed elsewhere in the world, com-

parisons which frequently portray Indian democracy as failing to ‘measure up’ to

‘real’ democracies elsewhere. Turning our attention to specific local forms of

political practice, of which alarm chain pulling is but one, can help us to better

understand where and how individuals come to engage with representatives of

the state, and the specific means and media through which they choose to commu-

nicate their concerns and opinions. It also helps us redress the fact that some

12 Paley, ‘Introduction’, in Paley, ed., Democracy: Anthropological Approaches, p. 6.13 Hansen, ‘Politics as Permanent Performance’, p. 24. Hansen’s characterisation of Indian politics

as permanent performance offers an extremely useful approach to the study of Indian democracy,

with significant implications for how we can understand democracy not just in India, but also elsewhere

in the world. At the same time, however, his focus on the Shiv Sena’s usage of particular forms of

political practice locates problems in the actual forms of practice/performance themselves, rather

than in the manner in which particular practices are utilised or the ends to which they are put. Tracing

genealogies of political practices among groups other than the Shiv Sena can help us better determine

whether practices that appear similar can be utilised in different contexts in ways both constructive

and destructive, or whether there is indeed a problem with the nature of specific performative practices.





methods of political communication, particularly those that involve print or other

forms of textual production (like letter writing or petitions), have been privileged—

both as legitimate forms of civic engagement and as objects of academic study—

while other forms (like public demonstrations, processions, strikes and stoppages)

have either been ignored or dismissed as signs of the ill-health of a democracy.

Such attention to these less-privileged forms of practice takes seriously Partha

Chatterjee’s argument that we need to look more closely at the forms of popular

political practice that make up what he calls ‘the politics of the governed’.14 How-

ever, in placing particular practices within longer historical genealogies, it also

disrupts the easy distinctions that have been made between the practices of ‘civil

society’ and those of ‘political society’, making it more difficult to draw clear

lines between the two. Chatterjee characterises ‘civil society’ as ‘the closed asso-

ciation of modern elite groups, sequestered from the wider popular life of the

communities, walled up within enclaves of civic freedom and rational law’.15

Members of civil society frame their demands in terms of ‘universal’ claims and

create hegemonic understandings of acceptable norms of participatory democratic

practice, while members of ‘political society’ are understood to utilise their pos-

itions within specific populations subject to governance to make particular demands

of the state, sometimes using tactics that are seen by civil society as outside the

bounds of acceptability.16 Close analysis of the historical trajectory of the political

practice of alarm chain pulling shows that although most commentators today

would consider it characteristic of political society, its roots as a form of political

practice lie squarely within Indian civil society of the early twentieth century.

Chatterjee’s intervention helps us begin to see all forms of political practice that

seek to communicate with the state, not just non-elite political practice, as the

politics of the governed, and raises the possibility that civil and political society

might not be as mutually exclusive as they are often portrayed.

Bringing Chatterjee into conversation with Nancy Fraser, I interpret his inter-

vention to mean that many of the limitations of both historical and contemporary

studies of democracy are due to the specific sites and channels of communication

that are privileged for study at the expense of others. Chatterjee writes that ‘it is

morally illegitimate to uphold the universalist ideals of nationalism without simul-

taneously demanding that the politics spawned by governmentality be recognised

as an equally legitimate part of the real time-space of the modern political life of

the nation.’17 Attention to the definitions of what constitute ‘universalist’ and ‘par-

ticularist’ ideals finds a parallel in Fraser’s treatment of the spatial distinctions

made between ‘public’ and ‘private’ interests. She writes:

14 Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed, p. 25.15 Ibid., p. 4.16 Ibid.17 Ibid., p. 25.



476 / LISA MITCHELL


In general, critical theory needs to take a harder, more critical look at the terms

‘private’ and ‘public’. These terms, after all, are not simply straightforward

designations of societal spheres; they are cultural classifications and rhetorical

labels. In political discourse, they are powerful terms that are frequently de-

ployed to delegitimate some interests, views, and topics and to valorize others.18

Indeed, I argue that one of the most effective ways to counter the hegemonic

influences of dominant universalist ideals is by learning to recognise and take

seriously the other sorts of spaces and communicative channels utilised for political

communication—not just those used and controlled by bourgeois groups or mem-

bers of what we recognise as civil society.

As an effort towards broadening our understanding of what constitutes political

communication, I argue that the types of alarm chaining pulling I examine in this

article can be read—indeed, in most cases have been intended—as forms of polit-

ical communication. And furthermore, I argue that these are forms that should be

taken every bit as seriously within our academic analysis as the activities that

have happened within coffee houses or literary public spheres. This argument

grows out of ethnographic and archival research on the social and cultural history

of the Indian railway station, with particular attention to the political uses to which

Indian railway spaces have been put. Research was conducted in Andhra Pradesh,

Uttar Pradesh and Delhi during the summer of 2007 and over 10 months in

2008–09, and builds on earlier fieldwork conducted in Andhra Pradesh in 1995–97,

1999–2000, 2002 and 2004. Archival collections in the National Archives of India

(Railway, Public Works Department and Home Political series), the Nehru

Memorial Museum and Library (All Indian Congress Committee collection), the

archival collection of the Indian Railway Museum in New Delhi, and Govern-

ment Railway Police and private archival collections in Nellore, Secunderabad,

Hyderabad and Lucknow provided foundations for extensive ethnographic

interviews with Government Railway Police, Railway Protection Force officers

and administrators, and Indian railway officials in Secunderabad, Nellore, Lucknow

and Delhi, as well as with social and political activists, party leaders, and members

and former members of student political groups.

The Indian railways offer a particularly important set of sites for tracing the

genealogies of everyday forms of political practice. First and foremost, the vast

size of the Indian railways gives them a central role within everyday life in India.

Not only do the Indian railways carry over 17 million passengers per day,19 they

18 Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, p. 73.19 According to the Indian railways, 6.219 billion passengers are transported annually, for an aver-

age of 17.04 million per day (Indian Railway Board, Indian Railways Year Book 2006–2007, p. 42).





have also been recognised as the single largest employer in the world.20 Historically,

the experience of railway travel was often one of the very first engagements that

many people had with the Indian state. Indeed, as the railways began to spread in

the second half of the nineteenth century, their significance not simply for trans-

portation, but even more importantly, for bringing remote locations ‘into...commu-

nication’ was widely recognised, ‘opening up the country by means of extensions

into hitherto isolated places’.21 It is therefore logical that railways should also

have been early sites of political engagement. The Disorders Committee Inquiry

of 1919–20 reported that:

[A]ttacks on communications were in many cases motivated by sheer anti-

Government feeling. The railway is considered, quite rightly, a Government

institution and railway damage is in these cases simply a part of the destruction

of Government property.... In the country districts the railway afforded almost

the only opportunity for destruction of property other than Indian-owned private

property, and the easiest and most tempting opportunity for loot. At night it

was also the most difficult, of all the forms of violence, to discover or prevent;

at the approach of an armoured train, the mobs could hide in the crops and

return when the train had left.22

Today the Indian railways continue to be seen by many as a political target of first

opportunity. The Chief Minister of Bengal and two-time Railway Minister, Mamata

Banerjee, has noted this, commenting that, ‘Railways is a soft target as it is very

visible. We lose substantial revenue due to frequent rail-rokos (stop the trains) on

various issues where there is no connection with the railways. If any local issue

happens, grievances find their outlet on railways.’23 Indeed, in its reach and

penetration into India’s hinterlands, the extreme visibility of the Indian railways

as a representative of the central government has historically made it one of the

most convenient political targets from its very earliest days. Ranajit Guha has

shown this to be true almost immediately following the construction of the very

first railway in India in 1853, even among those who directly benefitted from the

presence of the railways. He writes that:

There can be no doubt about the fact that the introduction of railways added

considerably to income and employment in the Santal country.... For the Santals

this provided an opportunity to extricate themselves from the state of land-

lessness, low wages and bonded labour into which they had fallen.... Yet when

20 Guinness World Records 2005, p. 93.21 Campbell, Glimpses of the Nizam’s Dominions, p. 144.22 Disorders Inquiry Committee, 1919–20, Report, p. 90.23 Indiaserver.com, ‘Mamata Banerjee Appeals to Public—Railway is “Your Own Service”’.



478 / LISA MITCHELL


violence [during the Santal rebellion] actually broke out in July 1855 the bene-

ficiaries seem to have had no hesitation about slaying the goose that laid the

golden eggs for them.... Railway works were among the very first and most

frequently destroyed objects mentioned in the reports received from the dis-

turbed areas within the first week of the uprising.24

And this targeting of the railways as a form of protest against the state continues

today.

In exploring the place of alarm chain pulling in the development and emergence

of new forms of political communication and democratic practice in India, I identify

three distinct phases. The first phase involves experimentation with a new form

of political practice. We see inquiries, tentative engagements in test cases and ex-

tensive circulation of the results of these tests within the popular newspapers of

the day. The overcrowding of third class railway bogies was a widespread com-

plaint among native subjects of colonial rule, and became an issue that Gandhi

took up as an early symbol of the unfair treatment of Indians by their British

rulers. Alarm chain pulling was eventually widely popularised as an effort to get

authorities to address the problem of overcrowding in third class carriages. During

the second phase the acceptance of the practice of alarm chain pulling in the con-

text of railway-specific complaints began to be expanded to other non-railway

specific concerns and became recognisable as a properly political tactic. In this

stage it expanded from a mechanism directed at alleviating the specific problem

of overcrowding, and began to be used to address wider nationalist agendas within

the larger anti-colonial programme by halting trains and causing general incon-

venience to the railways and therefore to the state. It is also during this phase that

alarm chain pulling activities were reframed by the colonial state as a political

rather than criminal problem, a shift that was to have far-reaching consequences

in subsequent decades. The third stage traces the use of alarm chain pulling in

independent India. Although political rule was transferred from Britain to India,

political activism after 1947 continued to draw from existing repertoires of practice.

Local political movements, particularly those that sought to communicate with

central government authorities in Delhi, continued to target the railways by halting

trains even after independence, a practice that continues to the present. In this last

section of the article I also examine alarm chain pulling by marginalised groups

and individuals to express more generalised disgruntlement and resistance, and

argue that the widespread availability and recognition of this specific form of

practice allows it to be taken up by groups and individuals in ways that may ex-

ceed what we might see as properly ‘political’.

24 Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, pp. 142–43.





Early Experimentation, 1915–30

Let the Railway Agents beware. If the aggrieved passengers, taking their cue

from this case, start pulling the chain, not only the trains but their administrations

will be brought to a standstill.

(The Tribune, Lahore, 9 August 1929)

Let us now return to D.V. Panvalkar, with whom our discussion opened, and his

1916 query to the Railway Board regarding the legitimate use of the alarm chain

to draw the attention of the railway authorities to the problem of overcrowding.

Receiving his letter on the 25th of December, it is clear from the archival record

that the members of the Railway Board found themselves reluctant to provide

him with a definitive answer. One of their internal notes suggests that ‘It is very

doubtful whether this office should be allowed to be treated as an enquiry office,’

and proposes instead that ‘He may be told that the Ry. Board regret that they can-

not supply the information asked for and that he should himself arrange to obtain

it from newspapers.’25 And indeed, in the end, the Assistant Secretary to the Railway

Board approved a reply dated 9 January 1917 stating, ‘Sir, With reference to your

letter dated the 23rd/25th December 1916, enquiring whether any judicial decision

has been given in regard to the right of passengers to resist overcrowding by re-

sorting to the communication cord, I am directed to state that the Ry. Board regret

that they are unable to supply you with the information asked for.’26

But the matter did not end there, for D.V. Panvalkar was not so easily put off

by the non-reply he received from the board. He wrote again to the Secretary of

the Railway Board in Simla:

Sir, I am in receipt of your letter No. 119-T-16, dated the 9th instt. and am

thankful for the same. Under Sec. 93 of the Indian Railways Act, the Company

is liable to a fine if it allows more than the prescribed number of passengers in

a compartment. As such if a railway servant refuses to take out the excess

number of passengers, he makes his master (the company) liable to the fine.

Therefore if a passenger pulls the cord under the circumstances, I believe it

will not be improper use of the cord. Please therefore let me know whether this

belief is right or wrong. The Railway Guide or any other authoritative book

does not exhaustively give a list of the circumstances under which the pulling

will be the proper use, and hence as the highest authority, I am referring this

matter to you. I, therefore, hope you will kindly satisfy my query and oblige.

I beg to remain your most obedient servant, D.V. Panvalkar.27

25 NAI, Railway Traffic B, January 1917, 119-T/16/1-2.26 Ibid. The letter was sent by D.V. Panvalkar on the 23rd and received by the Railway Board in

Simla on the 25th.27 NAI, Letter dated 26 January 1917, Railway Traffic B, February 1917, 119T-16/3-4.



480 / LISA MITCHELL


In the Railway Notes and Orders appended in the archives with the original

letter, a note reads, ‘The writer is evidently trying to inveigle the Board into giv-

ing a decision on a purely legal point. We may, perhaps, suggest his consulting

legal opinion in the matter,’ which indeed is the response that was ultimately ap-

proved and sent back to D.V. Panvalkar: ‘Sir, With reference to your letter of the

26-1-1917, on the subject of the right of passengers to prevent overcrowding by

resorting to the communication cord, I am directed to state that as the question

put by you raises legal issues the Ry. Bd. would suggest your consulting legal

opinion in the matter.’28

It is likely that an article the previous year in The Bombay Chronicle, reprinted

in a Pune newspaper, The Mahratta, had originally prompted D.V. Panvalkar’s

query. The newspaper report sent railway officials into a tizzy of correspondence

as they struggled to figure out whether and how to respond to this adverse publicity.

Titled ‘The Right to Resist Overcrowding’, the newspaper article described an

unnamed pleader who was reported to have resisted the entry of additional pas-

sengers into the bogie in which he was travelling, as their entry would have caused

the compartment to exceed the number of passengers permitted by law. The news

report goes on:

An altercation ensued between him and the extra passengers who ultimately

called the station master. The latter forcibly thrust them into the compartment,

despite the pleader’s protests. No sooner had the train started than the pleader

pulled the emergency chain, and brought the train to a dead stop. The guard

and the station-master hastened up to the compartment whereupon the pleader

told them that, unless the extra passengers were removed, he would not allow

the train to proceed. The astonished railway officials asserted that as there was

no room elsewhere, the overcrowding must continue and re-started the train.

But the pleader knew his rights too well to allow himself to be bullied as the

average third-class passenger does. He at once had another pull at the chain.

For the second time the train stopped.... The officials’ next move was to take

the name and address of the pleader, and after threatening him with prosecution

for delaying the train, once more gave the signal for starting. But the threat had

no effect. Our worthy friend pulled the chain the third time before the train

could clear the platform. This time the station-master and guard yielded to the

inevitable. The extra passengers were removed and escorted to another com-

partment. Then the pleader allowed the train to proceed.29

Several features of this report are quite striking when compared with more recent

reports of alarm chain pulling. First, a clear distinction is made between the class

28 Ibid.29 NAI, ‘The Right to Resist Overcrowding’, The Mahratta (Poona), 4 April 1915, Railway Traffic

B, March 1916, No. 119T/x.





and confidence of the unnamed pleader who had initiated the action, and ‘the

average third class passenger’. In other words, the pleader was not regarded as an

‘average’ passenger, implying that his educational background and occupational

position enabled an awareness of rights that the ordinary colonial subject did not

possess.

Second, the news article presents the story as an instructional one, from which

others may learn. The opening sentence reports that the incident ‘should prove

highly instructive to persons interested in exercising their right to resist over-

crowding’.30 The report then concludes with a more general piece of advice. Our

correspondent says:

The moral is clear. Work the emergency chain when your attempt to resist

overcrowding is not heeded. Work it again, if necessary. If the extra passengers

are still not taken out, don’t lose heart or get frightened by the threats of railway

servants. Make a fresh dash at your emergency chain, and yet once more, if

necessary. Remember the law is on your side and you must succeed.31

The incident is presented as an experimental success, capable of establishing a

precedent for others to successfully engage in similar actions. And it is clear from

reading the internal railway notes (those stamped not to be sent out of office or

printed) that the Railway Board’s reluctance to give D.V. Panvalkar a straight

answer, much less make any sort of public statement on this issue, stemmed pre-

cisely from their fear that such a practice could indeed be made into a precedent,

which, in the words of another railway official, ‘might be very embarrassing for

railways’.32

So vexing was the problem that it still had not been resolved almost a decade

and a half later. On the 9th of August, 1929, The Tribune, published in Lahore,

reported a similar effort to test the legality of such an action:

It is very rarely that men like Mr. Popatlal bring things to a head. He was

travelling from Calcutta to Bombay. At Bhusawal he found that his compartment

was congested. Failing all other methods, he pulled the chain five times to

bring the scandal to the notice of the authorities. He was prosecuted for refusing

to be suffocated. But the learned Magistrate held that Mr. Popatlal was within

his rights in ‘pulling the chain to remove overcrowding’. Let the Railway Agents

beware. If the aggrieved passengers, taking their cue from this case, start pulling

the chain, not only the trains but their administrations will be brought to a

standstill.33

30 Ibid.31 Ibid.32 Routine Notes (Not to be sent out of the Office or Printed.), 10 May 1915, Ibid.33 NAI, Railway Traffic A, May 1930, 614-T/17-78, p. 1.



482 / LISA MITCHELL


The widespread use of alarm chain pulling as a tactic for addressing the problem

of overcrowding had by this time spread to all corners of the country. We see the

recognition of the widespread use and effectiveness of alarm chain pulling reflected

in a question put to the Legislative Assembly on 24 September 1929, asking, ‘Are

Government aware that the Railway authorities had not paid any attention to

complaints regarding overcrowding till the passengers pulled the alarm chain?’34

On 14 July 1930, another question was raised in the Legislative Assembly

regarding alarm chain incidents in the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway.

N.G. Ranga Nayakulu asked the following:

(a) Has the Honourable the Commerce Member come to know that one Mr.

Srihari Rao was charged on a number of occasions at Rajahmundry under

the Railway Companies Act by the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway

authorities for continuously pulling the alarm chain in the mail and other

passenger trains to draw the attention of the Railway authorities to over-

crowding in the third class carriages?

(b) Is the Honourable the Commerce Member aware of the fact that strong

resentment prevails all along the Northern Circars against this action of

the Railway authorities? Is it a fact they have not tried, inspite of the agita-

tion carried on by Mr. Srihari Rao, to improve the conditions of the third

class travelling?

(c) Is he also aware that if in case no satisfactory action is taken by the Railway

authorities or by the Government of India to lessen the overcrowding in

third class carriages, there is a great likelihood of there being many more

Satyagraha demonstrations on the trains, imitating Mr. Sri Hari Rao? [This

paragraph is crossed out and the following letter ‘(d)’ is crossed out and

re-numbered ‘(c)’.]

(d) Will the Honourable the Commerce Member be pleased to state what action

he proposes to take to lessen the overcrowding in the third class carriages

of the Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway Company?35

So it should not come as a surprise that once well established, people began to

extend the practice of alarm chain pulling to other causes and concerns. The Lahore

Tribune’s report (quoted earlier) not only reflected the widespread use of this

agitational form against overcrowding, but also recognised that the communication

cord could be utilised to bring the administration to its knees. This sets the stage

for the second shift I want to consider—the acceptance of the more widespread

use of the practice of chain pulling for raising and advancing non-railway related

political concerns.

34 Ibid., p. 4.35 NAI, Railway Traffic B, August 1930, 614-T-I/1-4.





Alarm Chain Pulling as Satyagraha, 1930–47

Travelling without tickets and pulling railway chains should be popularised to

the utmost.

(inaugural issue of Free India, 10 August 1942)

By the 1930s, chain pulling had begun to be used for political purposes beyond

strictly railway-related demands, and the number of incidents had begun to rise.

What had thus far largely been restricted to protests against overcrowding in third

class carriages had began to be associated more broadly with a larger programme

of nationalist satyagraha. Following his return from South Africa in 1915, Gandhi

had quickly become an advocate for the relief of conditions in third class rail

carriages. We have evidence of his views on the issue from as early as September

1917, when he published a short essay on third class travel in the Indian railways,

announcing that ‘I think that the time has come when I should invite the press and

the public to join in a crusade against a grievance which has too long remained

unredressed.’36 Yet strikingly, the use of the alarm chain—either to relieve condi-

tions of third class rail travel or as more generalised protest against British rule—

was never on Gandhi’s agenda. In 1945–47, he went so far as to explicitly condemn

the practice of alarm chain pulling to halt trains, writing:

One vulgar and uncivilised practice must be given up. There is the chain on

every train to be used strictly in times of danger or accidents. Any other use of

it and the consequent stoppage of the train is not merely a punishable offence

but it is a vulgar, thoughtless and even dangerous misuse of an instrument

devised for great emergencies. Any such misuse is a social abuse which, if it

becomes a custom, must result in a great public nuisance. It is up to every

lover of his country to issue a stern warning against such wanton abuse of a

humanitarian device intended for public safety.37

Yet these objections were obviously voiced in response to the increasingly wide-

spread and uncontrollable engagement in precisely the practice Gandhi was

condemning.

As early as 1933 the railways had begun to view the practice as a serious

enough problem that they proposed introducing stiffer penalties for violations of

the rule that the chain should not be pulled except in emergencies.38 They sought

36 Gandhi, Third Class in Indian Railways, p. 1.37 Gandhi, ‘Statement to the Press’. He made two additional statements condemning the use of

alarm chains for any purpose except emergencies or accidents in December 1945 and October 1947

(Gandhi, ‘Speech at Prayer Meeting, Sodepur, 17 December 1945’ and ‘Speech at Prayer Meeting,

New Delhi, 28 October 1947’).38 NAI, Railway Traffic B, December 1935, 614-T/125-139.



484 / LISA MITCHELL


to add two years imprisonment to the already existing fine of ` 50 for those who

used the communication cord inappropriately. Although the move ultimately failed

to pass, it is clear from the Legislative Assembly debates surrounding the bill that

the stiffer penalties were being proposed in order to combat the rising use of

alarm chain pulling as a form of civil disobedience. An amendment introduced by

the Honourable Sir Brojendra Mitter captured the shift in the practice when he

suggested that penalties should be applied ‘If a passenger intentionally stops a

train by using any such means of communication, without reasonable and sufficient

cause and without any cause in relation to which the railway servants in change

of the train could properly afford assistance.’39 The debates were filled with concern

that alarm chain pulling was no longer simply being addressed towards railway

specific problems like overcrowding, but had expanded to include ‘an intensive

programme...of train stoppage as a variety of direct action’40 that had as its pur-

pose the new goal ‘of paralysing the train services’.41 Another speaker summed

up the problem when he stated that in these cases the only motive ‘was to stop the

traffic and to cause inconvenience to the travelling public and dislocate the trains’.42

No longer was the simple relief of overcrowding the goal of alarm chain pulling.

Now activists were utilising it to achieve the larger goal of freedom from British

colonial rule.

It was the railways’ inability to prevent the practice that caused it, along with

ticketless travel and the removal of rails to halt trains, to increasingly be seen as

part of an easily available repertoire of effective political strategies. By the early

1940s it had become even more formally institutionalised as an important form of

civil disobedience. A confidential letter sent by R.E. Marriott, of the East Indian

Railways in Calcutta, to Sir Guthrie Russell, the Chief Commissioner of the rail-

ways, reflected the privileged place of alarm chain pulling within anti-colonial

civil disobedience activities. Marriott, quoting from a report sent to him by the

Divisional Superintendent of Dinapore, wrote on 9 April 1940, ‘The Super-

intendent, Railway Police, Patna, informed me that there is a likelihood of Civil

Disobedience being started in the immediate future. Travelling without tickets

and pulling of Alarm Chains will be in the Programme.’43

39 ‘Notice of Amendments, The Indian Railways (Amendment) Bill (Amendment of Sections 108

and 131)’, 15 February 1933 (NAI, Railway Traffic B, December 1935, 614-T/125-139).40 C.P. Ramaswami Iyer, 13 July 1932, File No. 321/32 C. & G. Notes. Serial Nos. 1-6, ‘Proposed

Amendment of Section 108 of the Indian Railways Act—Not Proceeded With’, NAI, Railway Traffic

B, December 1935, 614-T/125-139.41 J.W. Bhore, ‘Statement of Objects and Reasons’, 22 November 1932, NAI, Railway Traffic B,

December 1935, 614-T/125-139.42 Mr Muhammad Yamin Khan (Agra Division: Muhammadan Rural), ‘Extract from the Legislative

Assembly Debates, Vol. I, No. 4’, in NAI, Railway Traffic B, December 1935, 614-T/125-139, Serial

No. 5, p. 4.43 NAI, Railway Traffic B, July 1943, 614-T/141-164.





During the height of the Quit India movement in 1942 and 1943, when Gandhi,

Nehru and most of the other leaders of the Indian National Congress had been im-

prisoned, the railways became a key target of anti-colonial protest. Virtually every

major railway line in the country saw repeated rokos (blockages), sabotage, destruc-

tion and shut downs, with damage and delays on some lines so great that it took

weeks or even months for service to re-open. Indeed, the colonial archive of this

period shows a particular preoccupation with the compromised state of railway

communication. A confidential circular, distributed by the Andhra Provincial

Congress Committee on 29 July 1942, issued instructions to all of its District

Congress Committees outlining six distinct stages of action to be implemented.

The Fifth Stage included the following suggested activities:

1. Stopping trains by pulling chains only.

2. Travel without tickets.

3. Cutting toddy yielding trees.

4. Cutting telegraph and telephone wires.44

A translation of another cyclostyled Telugu version of these, ‘Programme of Work

for the Attainment of Complete Independence’, included ‘Travelling in trains

without tickets and pulling the chains to stop trains’ among a list of 21 suggested

actions.45

In the following month on 10 August 1942, the first issue of the publication

Free India announced a 12-point programme for bringing Gandhi’s vision of a

free India into being. The eleventh point announced:

The most important part of the programme is paralysis of the war effort, chiefly

by paralysis of transport. This may be done by cutting telegraphic wires, by

disturbing railway communications. Travelling without tickets and pulling

railway chains of running trains should be popularised to the utmost. Strikes

amongst railway employees should be organised on as large a scale as possible.46

Disruption of traffic finally reached such heights and became such a regular chal-

lenge to authorities that the railways again proposed heightened penalties for

inappropriate use of the alarm chain. Unsuccessful a decade earlier in convincing

the Legislative Assembly to approve stiffer penalties, the heightened wartime

conditions provided a new opportunity for revisiting the possibility.

44 Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi, All India Congress Committee

Manuscript Collection, ‘Letter from Andhra Provincial Congress Committee’, Vol. G-37/1942,

pp. 119–21.45 NAI, Home Political (Internal), 1942, F. No. 3/42/42.46 NAI, ‘Mahatma Gandhi’s Message to Free India’, Home Political (Internal), 1942, F. No. 3/79/

42, p. 54.



486 / LISA MITCHELL


In July of 1942, with the Japanese approaching the Indo-Burmese border and

the Indian National Congress debating a resolution to demand complete freedom

from the British, a majority of the regional railway companies expressed their

concern over an increase (observed or expected) in the number of alarm chain

pulling incidents.47 The Railway Board was convinced that something urgently

needed to be done to circumvent the effects of this rampant practice.48 Unfor-

tunately, it was clear to everyone involved that their ability to enforce stiffer

penalties, assuming they could be passed, was not particularly strong. By 1942

there existed a long history of legal precedents that had established the rights of

passengers in overcrowded bogies to utilise the alarm chain.49 Since wartime had

placed additional burdens on railway transport, increasing rather than alleviating

the overcrowded conditions, particularly in third class carriages, it was clear that

it would be difficult if not impossible to enforce any legal recourse should a wide-

spread alarm chain pulling campaign be initiated.

Finally, on 10 August 1942, in the wake of the passage of the Quit India Reso-

lution at the Bombay session of the All India Congress Committee on 8 August

and the arrest of Gandhi and the rest of the Congress’ national leadership the fol-

lowing day, a new suggestion was appended to the debate circulating among the

members of the Railway Board—a suggestion with dramatic and perhaps unan-

ticipated consequences. The new suggestion included the following proposal:

In view of the present situation, it is for consideration whether this matter

should not be treated entirely on different lines, i.e., to forestall as far as possible

any organised attempts to dislocate traffic by a wide-spread campaign of inter-

fering with the communication cords in passenger trains.

Section 62 of the Railway Act requires us to provide and maintain in pas-

senger trains such efficient means of communication between the passengers

and the railway servants in charge of the train as the Safety Controlling Authority

has approved....

47 The East Indian, North Western Railway, and Madras and Southern Mahratta Railway all reported

having experienced an increase in alarm chain pulling cases—in some cases a considerable increase—

while the Great Indian Peninsula, Bombay Baroda & Central India, Bengal Nagpur, Nizam State and

South Indian railways all stated that although they had not yet noticed serious increases in alarm

chain pulling activity, they anticipated an increase in the near future. Only three railways—the Bengal

Assam, Jodhpur and Mysore railways—stated that they had neither seen an increase nor anticipated

an increase in the near future (‘Memorandum for Discussion by the Board’, NAI, Railway Traffic B,

July 1943, 614-T/141-164, p. 27).48 Ibid.49 Three relevant cases cited are A.I.R. 1922 Patna 8, Ishwar Das Varshni v. Emperor (Patna High

Court); A.I.R. 1930 Bombay 160, Popatlal Bhaichand Shah v. Emperor (Bombay High Court); and

Crown v. Sardar Surat Singh son of Sardar Hira Singh, Secretary, District Motor Union, Montgomery

and President of the Punjab Provincial Motor Union, 1941 (Montgomery District Court), ibid.,

pp. 8–10.





I suggest, therefore, the issue of the Defence of India Ordinance exempting

Railways from the provision of Section 62 of the Act for the period of the war

or such lesser time as may be determined.

It is a simple matter to render the communication chain inoperative on

individual carriages.... The Board may, therefore, please consider the desirabil-

ity of the issue of such an order which if it is to serve its purpose of preventing

any large scale dislocation of traffic should issue at once.50

Interestingly enough, the proposal to disable the alarm chains was not to be applied

universally, but instead only to the lower class carriages (those in which the

majority of Indians travelled). The appended proposal suggested that alarm chains

might be rendered inoperative either ‘on all 3rd and Inter carriages’, or, alternately,

‘On all 3rd and inter carriages which do not include a women’s compartment’.51

The final instructions did not, however, specify which compartments should be

subject to the disabling of their alarm chains, preferring to leave this decision to

local judgement.

On 26 August 1942, all Class I and Class II railways were issued the following

instructions:

In order to prevent excessive delays on this account and to forestall, as far as

possible, any organised attempts to dislocate traffic by a widespread campaign

of alarm signal chain pulling in passenger trains, it has been decided to pro-

mulgate a notification giving railway administrations the power to disconnect,

for the time being, the means of communication provided in all, or any of the

passenger carriages in any train.52

So powerful had organised alarm chain pulling campaigns become that the rail-

ways saw as their only recourse the disabling of the very safety mechanism that

allowed the practice in the first place. But the implications of this decision were

even more important than they might initially seem, for in shifting their focus

from a legal solution to the problem to a technological one, the Railway Board

was, in effect, conceding that their problem was one of a political nature rather

than a criminal one.

Alarm Chain Pulling in Post-colonial India

It only took four people. With four of us we could stop a whole train!

(former student activist, speaking about the 1950s, 16 October 2004)

50 Ibid., pp. 30–31.51 Ibid.52 NAI, Railway Traffic B, July 1943, 614-T/141-164, S. No. 156, p. 19.



488 / LISA MITCHELL


Once established as a political rather than a criminal act during the Quit India

movement, it became even easier to utilise alarm chain pulling for a wide range

of collective ends. Alarm chain pulling entered a repertoire of proven political

actions that included hunger strikes, various forms of passive resistance, dharnas

(demonstrations), hartals and bandhs (general strikes involving the closure of

businesses and stoppage of transport), yatras (processions or pilgrimages), rokos

(road or rail blockages to prevent the movement of traffic) and rallies. Most of

these practices had been popularised during the anti-colonial movement and, once

firmly established, continued to be regarded as part of the existing repertoire of

effective political tactics following independence. In the decades immediately

following independence, many of those who were engaged in political movements

of various sorts had first-hand experience of these widespread tactics, having per-

sonally used them in the anti-colonial struggle. It was natural, then, that they

would draw from their existing knowledge base when the need arose.

We can see this, for example, in the movement for a separate Telugu linguistic

province that culminated in the creation of Andhra state in 1953. Interviews con-

ducted between 1998 and 2004 with individuals from coastal Andhra who par-

ticipated in this movement in the early 1950s show that activists explicitly invoked

their experiences of the anti-colonial Quit India movement in their conceptual-

isations of the later Andhra movement. One former participant in both move-

ments found it difficult to even talk of the Andhra movement without comparing

it with the Quit India movement (during which there was a warrant out for his

arrest, he told me). He said with more than a little nostalgia that ‘in 1952 everyone

was reminded of the 1942 struggle. Nineteen fifty-two was a repetition on a small

scale of 1942. Nineteen forty-two was a real mass movement.’53

It is also clear that many of the same tactics were employed in both move-

ments. One of the signs read by many as evidence of the significance of the Andhra

movement was the fact that, as was the case during the Quit India movement, a

very large number of trains were halted. ‘For three days after Potti Sriramulu’s

death all trains were stopped,’ said one former participant in the final culminating

days of the Andhra movement that led to Jawaharlal Nehru’s declaration of the

new state.54 He went on to explain that ‘buses were very few in 1952, so stopping

trains was a big deal’.55 Another former student activist, now in his late 70s, also

53 Interview with male, b. late 1920s, Kavali, Andhra Pradesh, 12 August 1998.54 Interview, 12 August 1998. The death of Andhra state activist Potti Sriramulu on the 58th day of

his fast on 15 December 1952 and the surge of public outrage that followed prompted Jawaharlal

Nehru’s declaration of the new state just four days later, on 19 December. Police firings occurred in

four places in coastal Andhra—all railway stations—as authorities struggled to maintain order (see

Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India).55 Ibid.





recalled with great fondness one of his favourite methods of halting a train during

the 1952 movement. ‘It only took four people,’ he said, continuing:

With four of us we could stop a whole train! You see, if only one person pulled

the alarm chain, the location would quickly be identified and the train would

resume its journey. But with four people, you could spread out, with each per-

son in a different bogie. This way, by the time the authorities located all of the

bogies in which the alarm chain had been pulled, all of the passengers would

have gotten off the train, making it much more difficult to resume the journey.56

Others explained that once a bus or train was halted, activists would circulate,

passing out fliers, publicising future meetings and talking with members of the

public.57

The continuation after 1947 of many of the political practices that had been

most effective against the British was not without controversy. Dipesh Chakrabarty

has written of the difficulties that this continuity of practice posed for leaders of

the newly independent nation of India, and the many questions it raised regarding

the practices appropriate for its citizens.58 He cites, for example, Jawaharlal Nehru’s

conclusion that certain forms of political practice were appropriate ‘only in coun-

tries under foreign rule’ but could not be considered ‘the sign of a free nation’.59

Nehru conceded that some of the more non-violent political tactics utilised against

the British like hunger strikes and satyagraha ‘may be necessary sometimes’, but

argued that to utilise them over what he called ‘day-to-day problems’ only ‘weakens

us politically’.60 There was a somewhat general consensus among many of the

leaders at the highest level of government that the types of civil disobedience and

passive resistance that had been so effective in the anti-colonial struggle were no

longer appropriate in post-colonial India. However, this feeling was obviously

not shared by everyone, as almost all of the most popular and successful anti-

colonial tactics—processions, hunger strikes, rail blockades, alarm chain pulling,

bandhs, hartals and dharnas—continued to be used by existing political parties

and social movements in subsequent decades. They were also quickly adopted by

newly emerging movements and interest groups. Nehru’s position has continued

to be maintained by members of dominant classes in India during subsequent

56 Interview with male, b. 1932, 16 October 2004.57 Interview, President, Progressive Organisation of Women, Hyderabad, 23 April 2009.58 Chakrabarty, ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India’.59 Nehru, ‘Students and Discipline’, in Gopal, ed., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vol. 29,

p. 83, quoted in Chakrabarty, ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude

in India’, p. 37.60 Nehru, ‘Policy of India’, in Gopal, ed., Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vol. 29, pp. 22–23,

quoted in Chakrabarty, ‘“In the Name of Politics”: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in

India’, p. 37.



490 / LISA MITCHELL


generations, but it is worth asking whether the issues regarded by some as less

significant ‘day-to-day’ problems might be regarded by others as much more sig-

nificant ‘life-and-death’ problems. It would also be worthwhile exploring exactly

who is included in the ‘us’ that Nehru feared might be weakened politically by the

continuation of these political practices in independent India.

Many marginalised segments of the population have modelled their political

engagements on the practices used by the movements that preceded them. In many

cases this has meant that tactics that had previously been under the control of

educated and elite groups, or restricted to particular types of uses, have begun to

be seen as more widely available to all. Some have interpreted this expansion of

participation in political practices as a sign of the decline of Indian democracy; in

the eyes of many, these practices do not match their own ideals of civil society or

images of the way democracy is practiced in other parts of the world.61 One rail-

way official, for example, in talking about the nature of political practice in colo-

nial and post-colonial India explained to me that ‘before 1947 it was linked to

democracy, but today basically it is just demands, not major demands—local

demands’.62 Yet one person’s local demand may be another’s major demand. Indeed,

‘major’ and ‘local’ are another way of articulating the distinctions (often he-

gemonic) between ‘universal’ and ‘particular’ demands or between ‘public’ and

‘private’ interests, categories that Chatterjee and Fraser have urged us to examine

more carefully. For members of elite groups to dismiss particular forms of practice

as illegitimate simply because they have been taken up by other groups to which

they do not belong is yet another reason why our close attention to the longer

genealogies of individual forms of political practice is of utmost importance. As

with alarm chain pulling, genealogies of other popular forms of practice may

similarly show that their origins lie in elite and educated political strategies of an

earlier era.

The railway official’s distinction between ‘local’ and ‘major’ demands also

points to the ways in which alarm chain pulling and related actions such as rail

and rasta rokos challenge and reshape spatial relations of power, drawing attention

to neighbourhoods, regions, groups and problems that have previously been

ignored. Nancy Fraser captures this when she writes:

What will count as a matter of common concern will be decided precisely

through discursive contestation. It follows that no topics should be ruled off

limits in advance of such contestation. On the contrary, democratic publicity

61 See the challenge to this position posed by ‘a Dalit activist’ present at a lecture by Partha

Chatterjee in Delhi in 2000 regarding the rising pessimism held by ‘liberal and leftist intellectuals’ in

stark contrast to the optimism held by Dalits (and one might add, other formerly marginalised groups)

regarding the status and direction of Indian democracy, in Chatterjee, Politics of the Governed,

pp. 24–25.62 Interview with senior railway official, Lucknow, 27 March 2009.





requires positive guarantees of opportunities for minorities to convince others

that what in the past was not public in the sense of being a matter of common

concern should now become so.63

But evidence has shown that it often takes much greater effort on the part of mar-

ginalised groups for their voices and concerns to even be heard, much less con-

sidered. This frequently requires the use of escalating strategies to create spaces

of discursive contestation where marginalised interests can be raised and recogn-

ised enough to even be brought into public discussion.64

The railways as sites for political practice also function in another spatially

significant way. Using Henri Lefebvre’s ‘conception of the state as a “spatial

framework” of power’, Manu Goswami has written of the ways the railways helped

to consolidate the Indian state as a single conceptual and material space while at

the same time reconfiguring it within ‘a Britain-centered global economy’, pro-

ducing and reinforcing ‘internal differentiation and fragmentation’ and ‘spawn[ing]

a new uneven economic geography’.65 Precisely because railways were ‘crucial

instruments for the consolidation of political and military domination within

colonial India’,66 they quickly became targets for political resistance and protest

as well. By linking regions throughout India to a single network of communication,

the railways also made themselves available for the rapid communication of pol-

itical messages. Halting a train in one location enabled the broadcast of a message

up and down the entire length of a railway line and forced those from other regions

of India to pay attention to the cause of the delay. Grievances from one locality

could be broadcast and transmitted to new audiences and locations across a mobile

landscape. Such actions affected passengers from different regions who were pre-

sent within the train and non-passengers in far distant locations. They also general-

ised concerns that might otherwise have remained locally contained. From localised

immediate concerns over overcrowding in specific railway spaces, alarm chain

pulling was eventually popularised in ways that enabled the linking of many types

of specific local concerns into more generalised political movements such as the

anti-colonial movement and later regional movements.

63 Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere’, p. 71.64 Parallels can be drawn here with recent riots in the UK. A young man in Tottenham (one of the

neighbourhoods of London that saw some of the worst rioting) was quoted explaining precisely this

need for escalation within public spaces: ‘Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than

2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press.

Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.’ The reporter reflects, ‘Eavesdropping

from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing

the young men everywhere’ (Laura Penny, ‘Panic on the Streets of London’).65 Goswami, Producing India, pp. 32–33, 59; Lefebvre, The Production of Space.66 Ibid., p. 49.



492 / LISA MITCHELL


Despite the apparent continuity of practices before and after 1947, we can also

identify a number of significant shifts in the use and reception of alarm chain

pulling in the post-colonial period. The first obvious transition, one apparent as

early as 1942, has been the shift from surreptitious to more open forms of activity.

Anonymous halting of trains, either through chain pulling or through sabotage of

the tracks (including the placement of foreign objects on the tracks or removal of

rails or sleepers and often accompanied by the display of red flags to warn oncom-

ing trains of the danger ahead and prevent them from proceeding), has gradually

given way to more open blockage of traffic in the form of the rail or rasta roko.

Rokos, or blockades of a railway line or road, usually with human bodies, are now

routinely conducted in open daylight and reflect the growing confidence that

activists will not be prosecuted for what has increasingly been accepted as a

political rather than a criminal act. Rather than seeing this as the deterioration of

democratic politics, the argument I have been advancing is that we should read

this as a sign of Indian democracy’s success in recognising and incorporating par-

ticipation from beyond the bourgeois public sphere.

Second, not only did political groups draw from an existing repertoire of prac-

tices, they also expanded upon them, utilising new forms of transport and com-

munication and adapting existing practices to suit new media. We see, for example,

the extension of traffic blockading from the railways to important roadway inter-

sections, particularly in areas where buses are more important than trains. Because

state governments have often established the road transport corporations that run

bus lines, a bifurcation of political labour has also been apparent, with railways

targeted for central government issues, and buses for state level issues.67 Many

existing political practices have also taken on unique local forms. In Andhra

Pradesh, for example, the practice of gaali tiiyadam, or the removal of air from

bus tires to effectively block a major road intersection, has gained popularity as

bus travel has grown more important with the expansion and improvement of

roadways.68

A third significant feature of alarm chain pulling has been its widespread use

by students, often to create an unscheduled stop more convenient to their colleges.

An assistant security commissioner for one of the branches of the Indian rail-

ways explained: ‘Our biggest problems today with alarm chain pulling are places

like Saket College near Ayodhya. Students want to get down [from the train] just

in front of their college. When we try to take action, students do road rokos

[blockades].’69 Although it may appear difficult to label as political such applica-

tions of alarm chain pulling, a number of scholars have argued that we can read

67 Interview, senior railway official, Secunderabad, 2 January 2009.68 Interview, President, Progressive Organisation of Women, Hyderabad, 23 April 2009.69 Interview, 27 March 2009.





examples of collective youthful male assertion as ‘a form of empowerment which

expresses “the fact of powerlessness”’.70 Craig Jeffrey’s ethnographic research

among university students in Meerut, for example, illustrates not only the ways in

which colleges and universities today function as political training grounds, but

also the ways that they provide a place and identity for those who have been

unable to find employment and therefore a place of their own within the wider

society.71 Jefferey offers numerous examples of individuals who have returned to

universities to complete degree after degree in a perpetual state of waiting after

being repeatedly unsuccessful in competitions for jobs. In doing so, his ethnography

of the politics of waiting in India today suggests that we may well want to read

the defiant use of the alarm chain by college students within a much longer history

of political practice in the face of exclusion.

Conclusion

Successful political action works at a number of different levels. In the words of

one particularly astute railway official, ‘Democracy always develops around the

chief means of communication.... The railways are a major form of communication

and news creation, and also cadre development.’72 In this article I have traced

historically the ways alarm chain pulling has functioned as an effective medium

of political communication, both through its control of communicative channels

and through its performative qualities. In conclusion, I want to suggest that in

creating and sustaining democracy in India, such practices have also functioned

to mobilise and strengthen collective forms of identity—identities defined not

necessarily or always in relation to any ethnic, caste or linguistic foundation per

se, but rather in relation to a wider sense of structural marginalisation.73 Emerging

out of bourgeois Indian civil society in an era when educated elite Indians felt

marginalised by the British in their own country, the practice of alarm chain pulling

70 Gelder, ‘Introduction to Part Seven’, The Subcultures Reader, p. 375, quoted in Mazumdar,

Bombay Cinema, p. 99 and Jeffrey, Timepass, p. 93.71 Jeffrey, Timepass.72 Interview with Indian Railway Traffic Service officer, Lucknow, 26 March 2009.73 In my earlier work I have argued that those in positions of structural marginalisation take up

available recognisable foundations for collective identification and assertion, such as language,

ethnicity or region (Mitchell, Language, Emotion, and Politics in South India). This can be potentially

liberatory for those in positions of structural marginalisation, as in the case of the recent mobilisation

over regional identity in Telangana. However, an ever-present danger is that such assertions can

quickly be re-appropriated by dominant interests, evacuating the liberatory potential. This requires

that political movements be vigilant, that they recognise all voices and forms of political commu-

nication, not just those forms that movement leaders control directly. It also points to the fact that it

is not the form of protest itself that determines its liberatory potential, but rather the extent to which

a particular form enables the inclusion and consideration of marginalised voices.



494 / LISA MITCHELL


has spread to new groups who continue to feel that their concerns and anxieties

are not being heard or addressed. Is it any wonder, then, that a technological

device designed to facilitate communication would get used for precisely that.

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'To stop train pull chain': Writing histories of contemporary political practice

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