Internationales Asienforum, Vol. 38 (2007), No. 3–4, pp. 329–352 The Railways and the Water Regime of the Eastern Bengal Delta, c1845–1943 IFTEKHAR IQBAL The railways in India drew considerable attention from two of the most influential thinkers of modern times, Karl Marx and Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1850s, Marx was a distant but passionate observer of the emergence of the railways in India and he was convinced that the new transport system would prepare the ground for a bourgeois civilization, precursor to socialist revolution, in India. Apparently informed by the nineteenth-century spirit of ‘improvement’, Marx linked the railways to industrialization, communi- cation and formative intercourses among inhabitants of disparate villages, communities and castes across India. He also envisioned that the railways would lower the intensity of famine by mitigating the problem of means of exchange; and that the digging of tanks or borrow-pits for embanking the railways would lead to an extensive irrigation system which would contribute to agricultural development as well. 1 About half a century later, Mahatma Gandhi had a completely different view of the railways in India. He not only denounced the railway for its role in promoting British imperial penetration, but also for the transmission of plague germs and bringing of famine by draining local foodstuff in the hinterland of India. Gandhi also complained that the sanctity of holy places, which had hitherto been visited only by enduring real devotees, was lost due to the visits by rogues because of easy railway transportation. 2 The apparently contradictory approaches of Marx and Gandhi towards the railways seem to have been informed by their different views of moder- nity. For Marx, modernization was imperative for India’s dialectical ad- vance towards materialistic progress; for Gandhi, modernity, or the ‘disease’ _______________ 1 Karl Marx, ‘The Future Results of British Rule in India’, reprinted in Ian J. Kerr (ed.), Themes in Indian History. Railways in Modern India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 62–67. 2 M.K. Gandhi, ‘The Condition of India: Railways’, reprinted in Ian J. Kerr (ed.), op. cit., pp. 77–80.