Rahul Bhattacharya on his novel Railsong and creating powerful women in a man’s world

first draft railway song, Rahul Bhattacharya’s new novel (published by Bloomsbury) is entirely handwritten. “I remember reading in an interview with Toni Morrison that she would wake up early in the morning, at first light, and write in yellow notebooks with her 2B pens. I thought that’s exactly what I would do,” says the Delhi-based author, whose latest book is out. The Insidious Company of People Who Care, He won the 2012 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the 2011 Hindu Prize for Literature.

Bhattacharya believes that the “artisanal work” of sitting down and sharpening a pencil every few sentences allows him to enter the realm of creation. “I couldn’t delve into the fictional world using a computer,” he says. By the end of three years, he had a stack of legal notebooks full of doodles that he would repurpose and refine over the decade it took him to finish the book. “So much has changed: the rhythm of writing, the routines of writing, my understanding of the world, my consciousness as a person and as a writer,” he says. “But leaving that first draft was the most important thing.”

On reading women

railway song, Telling the story of entrepreneur Charu Chitol, a motherless child growing up in a small railway town, who runs away to Mumbai and becomes a railway woman, Bhattacharya would spend years sifting through books, notes, circulars and rule books to create his own fictional world, while also resorting to good old-fashioned errands and travel. Because the novel spans nearly four decades and there were so many changes in both the railway systems and the country during that period, the research ended up being mostly esoteric, he says. “I aimed for someone who worked on the railways between the 50s and the early 90s to be able to recognize the world in the novel in an authentic way.”

Creating Charu, a fully realized, complex female character who breaks free from the tropes of the male gaze, was not without its challenges. “I grew up and continue to live in a world where the male perspective is assumed to be the default,” says Bhattacharya, who actively researches and reads the work of women writers across geographies, languages, and genres, and seeks “to not only appreciate the depth and diversity of female expressions,” but also “to strive toward an understanding that gives me confidence in constructing Charu and the other women of the novel.” The process is rewarding, he adds. “So many things in the novel were a pain in the ass, but working on Charu was always fresh and exciting.”

Track recordings

The result is a narrative that rumbles amicably and gracefully as it journeys through life’s vicissitudes and the country’s shifting emotional and political landscape. Railroads serve as a recurring motif for our desire for connection and acceleration. Bhattacharya wrote a beautiful English novel in sharp prose; His sentences glistened like the steel of railroad tracks polished by rolling wheels.

railsong It not only expresses the railways as a network of people, but also offers a window into major historical turning points in the country, including “the industrial ambition of young Nehruvian India, famine in pre-Green Revolution India, the Emergency seen not through the Emergency itself but through the railway strike of 1974.” It also describes women’s slow but steady incorporation into the workforce: for Charu, work represents not just economic independence but also a broader interaction with the world and is “a crucial strand of tension in the novel.”

Rahul Bhattacharya. (Neville Sukhia) | Photo Credit: Neville Sukhia

passage to india

The Indian census is another vital aspect of the novel; it both marks the passage of time and expands the idea of ​​being one individual among the many that make up this country. Perhaps that is why, even though there are so many characters in the novel – “I think there must be over 100” – Bhattacharya crafts each character with care, trying to reveal the individual beneath the statistics, paying attention to details such as names, caste identities and occupational hierarchies. “I find the census very fascinating in the Indian context because it is a statistical counting of people and a compilation of parameters within which each person can be placed,” he elaborates.

railsong The cyclical narrative structure contributes to the overarching train metaphor, capturing the essence of a vibrant, paradoxical, pulsating nation where tragedy, triumph, spirituality, dynamism and turmoil constantly converge like railway junctions. “The novel ends at Bhombalpur, the railway station where it started, on the eve of the razing of the Babri Masjid on December 6, which is also the anniversary of Ambedkar’s death,” says Bhattacharya. “Literally, you return to the same place in the novel, but we have traveled a lot in between, haven’t we?”

It was published – 07 November 2025 14:42 IST