Ian J. Kerr. Engines of Change. The Railroads That Made India. (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007. 210 pp. ISBN 0-275-98564-4.
Engines of Change provides a readable, compact, up-to-date history of India's railroads, 1850-2001. The book places the railroads within their evolving historical contexts in an attempt to show how the railroads shaped the making of modern India, and also were affected by other forces involved in that same making, most notably colonialism and nationalism.
Ian J. Kerr, editor. 27 Down. New Departures in Indian Railway Studies. Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007. lxxii + 375 pp., plus an enclosed CD ROM. ISBN 81-250-3063-8
The work includes articles by Marian Aguiar, Damien Bailey, Harriet Bury, John Hurd, Ian J.Kerr, Joanna Kirkpatrick, John McGuire, Prabhjot Parmar, and Dennis Wettering.
The ten contributors to 27 Down explore hitherto neglected areas in the study of India's railroads, past and present. Topics examined range from the vastly global, i.e., "Railways, Exchange Banks and the World Economy: Capitalist Development in India, 1850-1873", to a micro-study of porters at a Mumbai station in the early 21st century; and from cultural studies such as an examination of the representations of railways in feature films dealing with the Partition or Bangladeshi riksha art, to a statistics- intensive examination of why the railways did not contribute more to India's economic development, 1884-1939. The book showcases new research and also serves to contribute to future research through extensive bibliographies, new or reproduced statistical data, and visual material thanks to the possibilities created by the presence of the CD ROM The latter includes the long out-of-print, substantial time series, 1853-1947, data set (100 plus pages in the original) published in 1975 by Morris David Morris and Clyde B. Dudley, as well as an extensive new body of statistical material prepared by John Hurd. The CD includes a consolidated bibliography from the contributed articles. The CD ROM also has a 30 minute video of one of the last, scheduled steam train runs in India: "Veiled in Vapour" by Gilbert Loreaux and Mukul Mangalik.
More information about the two books can be found at the publishers' websites:
Praeger: [url]http://www.greenwood.com/catalog/C8564.aspx[/url]
Orient Longman: [url]http://www.orientlongman.com/view_books.asp?categoryID=14[/url]