From Mohandas Gandhi's nineteenth-century tour in a third-class compartment to the recent cinematic shenanigans of Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited, the railway has been one of India's most potent emblems of modern life. In the first in-depth analysis of representations of the Indian railway, Marian Aguiar interprets modernity through the legacy of this transformative technology. Since the colonial period in India, the railway has been idealized as a rational utopiaùa moving box in which racial and class differences might be amalgamated under a civic, secular, and public order. Aguiar char.