By Bhogtoram Mawroh
When I was doing my PhD, every winter I would travel to different parts of the country to attend seminars and workshops organised by universities and research centres. It was an excellent opportunity to learn about the advances taking place in the discipline and to visit fresh places—places I would not have usually gone to on my own. In this way, I saw a lot of the country. Air travel was quite expensive back then, and I would take the train since there were some concessions in fares for students and those belonging to the ST community. Except for one time when I took the Rajdhani, I always travelled in the sleeper class, and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
For me, train journeys are the best way to go from one place to another. You meet a lot of different people, and there’s no better way to experience the landscape one is travelling through than on a train. Air travel is about speed, and after a point in time, every airport looks and feels the same. The security checks can sometimes be quite stressful, and if the people at the ticket counter want to make your life miserable, there is nothing you can do about it. This will never happen on a train journey. You can buy your ticket and then enter your compartment with no aggravation. Later, a ticket collector (TC) will come, check your name and move on. It is a very convenient process with no hassle.
The thing that people don’t like about train journeys is the time factor. One can reach Delhi within a few hours if one takes a flight, but it takes almost two days on a train. The one time I took the train to travel to Surat in Gujarat, it took me almost three days. For some, the time taken can feel like a burden, but for others (like me) it was a pleasant experience. You meet different people, and even if you don’t make friends, just watching others and listening to what they are talking about can help one appreciate a lot about their lives.
During one such train journey to Delhi, I remember meeting an old man from Bihar who had come to Delhi for his court case. He was working at the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), but was unjustly removed. The old man filed a case, and for almost a decade he made regular trips to Delhi for the hearings. His clothes were simple, and he wore only slippers. Whenever people entered the compartment, he would look down at the floor, avoiding eye contact. Gentle and soft-spoken, I enjoyed talking to him, and when he departed, I wished him good luck in getting his job back. There were many other people, whose stories were less tragic, whom I met during my train journey, and it was a pleasure talking to all of them.
The one thing I enjoyed the most during the train journey was drinking tea the whole day. After every few minutes, a vendor would enter the compartment shouting ‘chai, chai’. Most of them were older men, but once I came across a transgender person selling tea. Sipping tea near the window and watching the landscape change is the most memorable experience of a train journey. One could see mustard fields stretching for miles into the horizon. Then at night, an orange glow would tell us if we were arriving at a town. And by observing the script on the signboards, one could tell when one left North India and entered South India. A sign of entering the southern states was the cleanliness and the noise. People in the South are very gentle and do not make a lot of noise. They also show respect and are more reserved. One can observe all these intricacies only when travelling by train. A flight is too short to notice all of this. A train journey can also be a good time to read or write something. You can either carry your own book or buy it at the station. When I was doing my PhD, I had read of a famous Indian historian who would take the train to go to work. And it was during such trips that he would read and write his books. Inspired, I wrote one of my weekly op-eds during a recent train journey from Dimapur to Guwahati. This is something I would love to do much more.
I love train journeys, but railways are being opposed in Meghalaya for fear that it would lead to large-scale immigration. With Mizoram also getting a railhead, Meghalaya is now the only state in the country that does not have a regular train service (I am ignoring Mendipathar because it is not a major railway line). While I was waiting at the Dimapur station for my train, my colleague from Nagaland told me that railway lines are being laid to take the train all the way to Zubza, which is a village close to Kohima in the hills. I asked him whether he was worried about immigration. He calmly told me that whoever comes through the train will have to get down at the station and the local community knows who is a local or an outsider.
This very simple logic somehow fails to impress many in Meghalaya. Migrants entering the state have to take up residence somewhere, and it is here that laws regarding land protection become very important. Even now in some places, local landowners are not selling land to outsiders, even though they may belong to the Khasi community. This also applies to couples in mixed marriages. The second is a type of racial profiling and is illegal, but it shows the high vigilance the local community follows to prevent the entry of outsiders into their area. There is even a place in West Khasi Hills where the local community verifies the character of the person who wants to buy land in their village. The vigilance of the local community and the laws on land are powerful deterrents to migrants from settling down.
The case of Nagaland is very similar to Meghalaya as the ST population in both the states has increased from the past. The ST population in Nagaland and Meghalaya was 83.99% and 80.58% in 1980. Today it is 86.48% and 86.15% respectively. Despite not having ILP, the ST population in Meghalaya has grown much faster than in Nagaland, which is accompanied by the out-migration of the non-ST or non-indigenous population from the state. Large-scale migration, legal or illegal, from the mainland or across the border is not happening, unless the Registrar General and Census Commissioner of India have hatched a conspiracy against Meghalaya and Nagaland to hide the real numbers.
Recently, the Assam taxi drivers retaliated against the attempts of certain taxi drivers from Meghalaya to stop their vehicles from going to the tourist destinations. In the last couple of weeks, I was travelling to Guwahati almost weekly, and it was fortunate that the agitation started after my return. Otherwise, I would have lost money that I had already spent on purchasing the tickets for my trip to Nagaland. It is difficult to see the Assam taxi drivers relenting when they are fighting for trips among themselves. The long-term solution has to be the introduction of railways that can drop tourists inside the territory of Meghalaya, where our taxis can have a monopoly over the trips. There will also be less extortion on the highway, and prices of commodities will reduce, benefiting everyone in the state. The recent fracas with the local taxis agitating against the Assam vehicles ferrying passengers into Meghalaya is an excellent opportunity to cut our dependence on Assam and make ourselves more independent.
For purely selfish reasons, I look forward to the time when we can travel the length and breadth of our state, sitting inside a train compartment. Kongs would come in with tea and jingbam every couple of hours. We could then sip our tea and watch the landscape change as it moves from one station to another. I hope that day arrives soon—when we can all fall in love with train journeys, just as I have.
(The views expressed in the article are those of the author and do not reflect in any way his affiliation to any organisation or institution)
