Railsong
A Novel
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for The Kalinga Literary Festival Book Prize in Fiction
"Magnificent . . . I would follow Miss Chitol to the ends of the earth." -Kamila Shamsie
"Profoundly tender [and] vigorously alive to the currents of national change." -Megha Majumdar
A breathtaking novel about a woman forging a life for herself on the railways, Railsong is the heartwarming story of an individual coming of age amid the social and political upheavals of twentieth-century India.
In a newly independent India charged with national vigour, Charu, the motherless daughter of a railway worker, pines for freedom from the shackles of her impoverishment and meagre prospects. As diesel engines replace steam and the calamitous churn of drought, famine, and a great strike engulfs her town, Charu dares to imagine a different future for herself. She boards a train and flees westwards, leaving behind the oppressive domesticity of her childhood for the alluring modernity, and apparent opportunities, of Bombay.
Unfazed by the everyday discriminations around her she becomes an unlikely hero: a railway woman and census enumerator who keeps her heart open-sometimes guilelessly-to her nation's vast possibility. Sweeping, elegiac, and at times wonderfully comic, Railsong is a powerful portrait of grit, optimism, and the force of character that enables one remarkable woman to live on her own terms in a country full of contradictions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bhattacharya (The Sly Company of People Who Care) serves up an illuminating tale about a woman fighting for her agency in India. The daughter of a railway worker in the township of Bhombalpur, Charu Chitol is five in the 1960s when her mother dies from a fever. As the only sister to two boys, Charu is burdened by domestic chores during the ensuing years of famine, drought, and workers' strikes against inflation. At 16, she runs away from home, boarding a train to Bombay with aspirations of making something of her life by enrolling in college. She moves in with her maternal uncle and takes a job as a saleswoman, which she keeps secret because her family looks down on working women. When her uncle finds out, he and the rest of her family pressures her to get married, but Charu stands firm and moves into a women's hostel. Eventually, she becomes a welfare inspector and learns how those belonging to lower castes are exploited and mistreated. Through Charu's experiences, Bhattacharya provides a wide-angle view of India's inequality and patriarchal gender roles, all while depicting in intimate detail how his protagonist struggles to live on her own terms. This satisfies.
