About the Talk –
This lecture advances a Jungian framework for interpreting India’s railway iconography, proposing that clusters of some of the most iconic railway representations of our times function as collective‐unconscious symbols that prefigure social and historical trajectories. Building on Carl Jung’s notion of archetypes—“primordial images” or common inherited patterns of emotional and mental behavior—it argues that railway motifs (e.g., the “Aristocratic Club” or “Imperial Bioscope” or “Swadeshi Theatre”) can be read much like dream symbols, revealing latent cultural yearnings and anxieties. Drawing on Wolfgang Schivelbusch’s insight that the railroad inaugurated “the annihilation of space and time” by habituating new perceptual habits, this lecture interrogates shifts in collective psyche across four fifty‐year phases: the colonial “Imperial Bioscope” (1840s–1900), the anticolonial “Theatre” (1900–1950), the post‐liberal “Tourist Guide” (1950s–1999), and the emergent “Social Reformer” (2000–2021) archetypes in the history of the Great Indian Railways.

This talk will be moderated by Dr Aashique Ahmed Iqbal, Assistant Professor of History, SIAS, Krea University.

About the Speaker-

Arup K. Chatterjee is Professor at OP Jindal Global University. He has held fellowships in the
UK and Denmark, founded the journal Coldnoon: International Journal of Travel Writing & Travelling Cultures, and authored acclaimed books on Indian railways and the Indian diaspora, besides publishing widely on literature, history, and culture, and the concept that he has coined and developed as gastromythology.