The word ‘Tram’ is a noun in English language and thoroughly lixicalised in Bengali. Tram tracks are deeply inscribed in the roots of Calcutta – at times it seemed that they converge or veered apart, or, in some sense, concerned with the ambiguity of time. Those tracks can carry us to the dissenting traditions of mobility and contradiction. Tramway system is, after all, performed on the streets. The fecund imagination of the tramway infrastructures is ingeniously referred through the literal imagination and public perception. Jibanananda Das employs a metaphor of a ‘broken tram’ and city life in his poem ‘Along the Tram Line’.
Tram has a premonition as to the historic specific moment that inflamed the memory and imagination – an endless variety of dreams articulated the poetic imagery is itself evidence of powerful subjective motivations, in the very texture of capitalist megalomania. In ‘On City Sidewalks’ Das has romanticised the netting of capitalism with the crisscrossing tram wires hovered overhead.
My narrativisation on tram goes far beyond the question of new techniques; the idea of first-moving passenger carrying vehicle came in front, because of a greater sense of time-thrift that weaved through the cultural, technological and aesthetic juxtapositions. Its rhetoric has become ubiquitous by two discourses, of the economic necessity, and of cultural exchange and intellectual understanding. Being gathered in a tram for a ‘middle-class people who could not afford cars and for whom taxis could be an occasional pleasure but who nevertheless had middle-class pretentions to civility, trams spoke of subtle distinctions of gentility and status and also of the undemocracy that usually went with such feelings.’ The tram carried a varied
Image 2 – Source: Internet.
section of people, mostly from the so-called lower or middle-class of society, and thus expressed some of social distinctions of colonial Calcutta. Recognition of and respect for socio-economic and cultural differences situated the physical architecture of a tram, which was consisted of two compartments, respectively as the first class and second class. Apart from the differences in fares in two parts of the compartments, class-based differences structurally shaped the outlook of the baramanush world – the English-educated middle-class Bengali literati. It was the pall of moral equivocation that the abhorrence of the improvidence, ignorance, and hatred towards the poor and the working-class people is bound to colour the record. Dipesh Chakraborty writes in his memoir: ‘I still can hear conductors in the first-class carriage telling of passengers who looked poor or working-class for attempting to go to first class. ‘Go to the car at the back,’ the conductor would yell, ‘this is first-class!’ We the middle-class people, on the other hand would avoid travelling in the second-class car.’
I treasure this diaspora of tram embodied as the object of modernity eventually results the impoverished vision of inequalities created by the unequal distribution of the colonial economy.
The real privilege to get in first-class was for its instrumental conditioning of pleasure and comfort, the seats were covered with cushions, and most importantly it had fans overhead, which helped to dry the sweaty-cloths and reduce odour that summer invariably produces. Tram increased the possibilities for making a social homogeneity mostly in the first-class and as the wheels of a tram screeched on metal tracks, the gentle and smooth pace thus indulged a space for socialisation and the leisure for recreating the threads of social fabric. The seat, just behind the driver’s cabin is the most favourable spot, where the body of the tram tapered off and provided the passenger a privilege of privacy went with sitting there. This exclusive right to privacy had twofold manifestations. First, this immediacy gave the rider to put her gaze outside the tram towards the complex assemblage of streets and neighbourhoods, along with the often-abrupt transitions between them. Secondly, this sense of privacy in public essentially became intense with the wind blow straight on face – a rare luxury in the hot summer days in Calcutta, and allows the traveller to get absorbed in her own world separated from the complete pandemonium of the crowd in the city’s public transport.
Racial discrimination/antagonism was the most sensible indicator of popular discontent in the colonial regime. Perhaps tram travel provided the only occasion when the ‘native’ male passengers (mainly office-goers) had an opportunity to share seats with the memshaibs, which inevitably allowed the licentious fascination in their mind. However, in contrast to this kind of cultural voyeurism, there were examples of gentleman’s respectability with a customary pattern of behaviour towards women when a grimy young man offered his seat to lady, who was jostling for her position to stand in a crowded tram.
In Calcutta public transport has always become an issue of mass protest and rioting. Tram and Tramwaymen’s politics have been strategically deployed in the milieu of popular culture mainly by the efforts of the Leftists – ‘Tram Zindabad!’ in Bengali is invariably linked with the noble cry ‘Inquilab Zindabad!’ (‘Long Live Revolution!’) thus bequeathed the legacy of Marxist thought and its category.
The ultimate provocation of my analysis is a humble attempt to understand critically the problems associated with tram travel and everyday commuters. It may be legitimately asked, who are the historic agents as experienced as the people of the past? Whatever we may decide, it follows that history cannot exist until the historian writes its obligatory form: Narrative. As the pro-narrative philosopher of history, Louis Mink said in the early 1960s: ‘Where scientists … … … note each other’s results, historians … … … read each other’s books.’
My narrative does not claim a genuine objectivised empiricist assumption. The question I pose: What is the future of Tram, can we actually save it? Or, will Tram lose in oblivion?
Feature image
Source: Calcutta Tramways Company (CTC) Archive.
আরও পড়ুন – Riot Days: An Account of Calcutta Tramwaymen and Religious Activism, 1946 – 47