Trains of thought

The Railway Board has prescribed uplifting titles for platform bookshops. Anything special for bullet trains?

No more ghostwritten Harold Robbins for you. You shall have the Kamasutra instead. Trapped with it on long train journeys, you shall find it a soporific document dwelling overmuch on etiquette. But we exaggerate. All that the Railway Board’s commercial circular number 16 of 2017 states is that bookstalls in railway stations will have to stock “books pertaining to Indian tradition, culture, values, morals and history”. In short, the Manusmriti will be displayed right alongside India’s foremost explainer of life’s journey, Trains at a Glance.

No opinion has been expressed on the place of Harold Robbins in the scheme of things, but since shelf space is inelastic, the master’s spirit would feel a little crowded. So would the fortunes of the Hindi pulp writers who have traditionally dominated the shelves, with books bearing short, sharp titles like Ranjish and Gardish. They were the backbone of A.H. Wheeler’s monopoly of the platform book trade, which it held from the days of the Raj until the last decade. The network was so huge that it could operate like an informal lending library. You could buy a book at a stall in Asansol, read it overnight and sell it in another in Ambala for a bit off the cover price.

That freebooting spirit was curbed by commercial circular number four of 2004, which prohibited the sale of “scurrilous, smutty… or objectionable publications including pirated books”. It was goodbye to Midnight’s Children and Shame, but the subject of the circular was the law, not morality. The current circular tightens the grip, drawing travellers’ attention to prescribed subjects while entraining and detraining at railway stations, so that they can train themselves to be high-minded en route. Now, will platform stalls serving bullet trains be prescribed a slightly different reading list, headed by Atlas Shrugged?