East India Railway Volunteers (Volunteer Force of India)

Following excerpts have been taken from a book titled Among the Railway Folks written by Rudyard Kipling in 1888 (See chapter one, pp 3-4).

The author while describing Jamalpur (a small township in the Indian state of Bihar) narrates about a part-time territorial unit stationed there. He vividly mentions how the unit was so important to the spirit of the town.

 

"In the hot weather it splashes in the swimming bath, or reads, for it has a library of several thousand books. One of the most flourishing lodges in the Bengal jurisdiction —‘St. George in the East’— lives at Jamalpur, and meets twice a month. Its members point out with justifiable pride that all the fittings were made by their own hands; and the lodge in its accoutrements and the energy of the craftsmen can compare with any in India. But the institute is the central gathering place, and its half-dozen tennis-courts and neatlylaid-out grounds seem to be always full. Here, if a stranger could judge, the greater part of the flirtation of Jamalpur is carried out, and here the dashing apprentice — the apprentices are the liveliest of all — learns that there are problems harder than any he studies at the night school, and that the heart of a maiden is more inscrutable than the mechanism of a locomotive. On Tuesdays and Fridays the volunteers parade. A and B Companies, 150 strong in all, of the E.I.R. Volunteers, are stationed here with the band. Their uniform, grey with red facings, is not lovely, but they know how to shoot and drill. They have to. The ‘Company’ makes it a condition of service that a man must be a volunteer; and volunteer in something more than name he must be, or someone will ask the reason why. Seeing that there are no regulars between Howrah and Dinapore, the ‘Company’ does well in exacting this toll. Some of the old soldiers are wearied of drill, some of the youngsters don’t like it, but — the way they entrain and detrain is worth seeing. They are as mobile a corps as can be desired, and perhaps ten or twelve years hence the Government may possibly be led to take a real interest in them and spend a few thousand rupees in providing them with real soldiers’ kits — not uniform and rifle merely. Their ranks include all sorts and conditions of men — heads of the ‘Loco.’ and ‘Traffic,’— the Company is no respecter of rank — clerks in the ‘audit,’ boys from mercantile firms at home, fighting with the intricacies of time, fare, and freight tables; guards who have grown grey in the service of the Company; mail and passenger drivers with nerves of cast-iron, who can shoot through a long afternoon without losing temper or flurrying; light-blue East Indians; Tyne-side men, slow of speech and uncommonly strong in the arm; lathy apprentices who have not yet ‘filled out’; fitters, turners, foremen, full, assistant, and sub-assistant station masters, and a host of others. In the hands of the younger men the regulation Martini-Henry naturally goes off the line occasionally on hunting expeditions.

There is a twelve hundred yards range running down one side of the station, and the condition of the grass by the firing butts tells its own tale. Scattered in the ranks of the volunteers are a fair number of old soldiers, for the Company has a weakness for recruiting from the Army for its guards who may, in time, become stationmasters. A good man from the Army, with his papers all correct and certificates from his commanding officer, can, after depositing twenty pounds to pay his home passage, in the event of his services being dispensed with, enter the Company’s service on something less than one hundred rupees a month and rise in time to four hundred as a stationmaster. A railway bungalow — and they are as substantially built as the engines — will cost him more than one-ninth of the pay of his grade, and the Provident Fund provides for his latter end."

Refer the link to know more about Rudyard Kipling:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudyard_Kipling

(Published by the team of TERRITORIALS)