The Gandhi Circuit Trains

The Gandhi Circuit Trains By Ravi Valluri Do we recall the iconic blockbuster film Gandhi? The movie was a biopic on the Mahatma and went on to win several Oscars. The movie was dexterously canned by the eminent film maker Sir Richard Attenborough. There is a sequence in the movie, perhaps etched forever in the alcoves of cine goers’ minds – the ejection of Gandhiji from a train in South Africa. The year was May 1893, when Mohan Das Karamchand Gandhi was travelling to Pretoria with a high-priced first-class coach ticket in hand. An enraged white man objected to the presence of a dark-skinned coolie in the first-class carriage. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was recompensed for this stoutly act of defiance and was evicted from the train at Pietermaritzburg. This epoch-making incident became the bedrock of his unique version of resistance through non-violence, what came to be known as Satyagraha. Gopal Krishna Gokhale realized the inherent potential of Gandhiji and believed this short statured man had the requisite fire in his belly to liberate the country from the clutches of colonialism. He advised him to ‘discover the authentic India’ by traversing the length and breadth of the country travelling third class by train, rather than pursuing a career in the legal arena. As a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign against the British, Indian Railways planned a series of consequential and unfading train journeys. A train was flagged off from Chandigarh on April 9, 2015 called the Mahatma Gandhi Circuit Train, which took tourists on board to see various places associated with the life and times of Mahatma Gandhi. The train traversed through important junction points such as Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Porbander, Bhavnagar and Surat in his home state of Gujarat. These places became the bedrock of Ahimsa and Satyagraha. The 8 days and 9 nights journey attracted widespread coverage among historians, Gandhian’s and those nostalgic about India’s freedom struggle. To fuel further interest in the life and times of Gandhiji, Indian Railways authorized IRCTC to operate tourist packages from Jabalpur and Madurai along the Gandhi circuit, in 2015. The grand design of this portentous wanderlust was to mark 100 years of the return of Mahatma Gandhi to India from South Africa. Sabarmati was chosen as the starting point for the Gandhi Special tourist train. The train was flagged off on 17 June, 2017 to commemorate the centenary day of the Sabarmati Ashram. The train touched many important destinations such as Wardha, Motihari, Bettiah, Gaya, Varanasi, and Allahabad. The Indian Railways is the life line of the nation and the engine of growth on nation’s march towards balanced development. Simultaneously it plays a pivotal role in promoting tourism in the country, recalling several iconic figures. Special trains have been run periodically to spread the message of Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, and Saint Teresa. Any interested person can easily obtain information and keep up to date by checking out the website of the Indian Railways (www.indianrailways.gov.in) and IRCTC (www.irctc.co.in). Not only would visitors to these websites be surprised by the range of activities, interested persons could also tie up for new and fruitful ventures in the future. As noted, American author Marianne Wiggins says, “What thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection with unseen places.”