Defenders of empire like to point out that the British bequeathed an elaborate and sophisticated rail network to India. They cite it as if it were a barometer of progress, a symbol of civilisation and a benevolent gift all at once. What they fail to realise is that this was built by Indian labour and material, and, the fact that one can embrace modernity and innovation without the inequality of colonialism.  

Whatever the case, it is incontestable that India today is criss-crossed by trains. The train here is not simply a mode of transport, but also a place of reflection and socialising. It is peopled and not simply with passengers traveling from one place to another, but with workers as well. There are coffee wallahs, conductors, food vendors, trinket and gift sellers, beggars and performers. There are also the people who work at stations and the economies that thrive on the travel and freight that is possible because of trains.   

In Kochi, cashews, coir, timber was brought by rail to port before being shipped all over the world. Like karri from the south-west of Western Australia or rubber from Indonesia, these raw materials were often sent back to London, back to the metropolitan cities where value added industries thrived and people grew rich off the natural assets of distant places. Today, the economy here has changed and the arts, technology and service sectors are thriving. Lorries and planes have also become important in a way that makes our era different from previous ones. But trains still matter. People and goods still travel all over Kerala by train. 

Railway stations are one of the few places where you can change old currency for new. Speaking with a rail clerk, Divya, about demonetisation, I am struck by how she paints the scene. Her shifts have routinely involved overtime and the government has extended the hours during which people can swap currency. It is as busy as she has ever seen it. People will bring old 1000 rupee notes and buy the cheapest tickets just to get legible change, expecting 993 rupees back in useable currency. But the station often runs out of legal tender even with new instalments every hour. The lack of cash is starting to have consequences she can see. Divya says: 

People sleep at the railway station. They buy a ticket for a train in the morning and sleep overnight on the platform. There are about 10 to 20 regulars who live this way. They get ready for work in the railway toilets and off they go, every day. Because if you do this, if you get a ticket, you can sleep here, but the police will kick you if you are on the street, or you have to bribe them.  

For 7 rupees (8 cents) you can have a relatively quiet and legal place to rest your head. They might be chai wallahs or vadai makers. They might sell pots or plants. They might be day labourers. These are people who are already on the margins, but the number of people here has increased since the currency crisis. It is too early to say if this is because of demonetisation or if the informal economy is coming apart at the seams and the railway station is becoming a new home for those squeezed. Only time will tell given so much of India relies on the cash economy. 

Money does make the world go round, but in the messy, everyday interactions like buying a train ticket, this story helps us make sense of economics, politics and society. When you go to buy train tickets in Kochi, like everywhere else in India, you buy them from a person, you buy them from Divya, or Rahul or Rukmini or Sunil. This is not always the case and the Internet has changed commerce, but for the most part this exchange is in cash and face-to-face. There is a haphazard order to queuing, and the ticket sellers, all government employees, are friendly and efficient, but the pace is not hurried. If one is rushed, it is not uncommon to simply push in and get on with it.  

But this feeling of a permanent ‘go-slow’ seems against a brutal ethos of efficiency, profit, growth. This might be due to the ‘large country town’ atmosphere of Kochi, or the political inclinations, which have a tendency to use strikes as a tactic against the productivity focused ‘bossman’. People, rail clerks included, take their time, which suggests they have other priorities. It seems that Kochi people work to live not the other way around. This attitude, so at odds with rootless capital, suggests there is more to the story than the trains that ply the Kerala west coast, a story larger than India itself, and something that extends right across the ocean if not to the world as a whole. It is a lesson in how to be and not simply as inheritors of a colonial infrastructure that extends into the mind as well.