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THE VERNACULAR JOURNEY: RAILWAY TRAVELERS IN EARLY PAHLAVI IRAN, 1925–50

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2015

Mikiya Koyagi
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Abstract

Exploring how railway technology was incorporated into the everyday lives of Iranians during the second quarter of the 20th century, this article focuses on spatial discourses and practices around the Iranian railway. The first part investigates Iranian journalists' construction of the railway traveler prototype as the propagator of modernity prior to the completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway in 1938. The second part shows how in the 1940s the railway space became a microcosm of the heterogeneous Iranian nation, and explores how middle-class travelers experienced the railway space. I argue that the railway space, rather than creating a homogeneous experience of railway journeys, was conducive to fragmented experiences among its diverse occupants, who were divided by religion, socioeconomic status, cultural orientation, and ethnicity. The visibility of heterogeneity in the railway space compelled modern middle-class travelers to consolidate their class identity and distinguish themselves from the rest of Iranian society. Wanting to achieve a homogeneously Europeanized Iran, they also felt compelled to travel the country more extensively to create a national community connected through direct interaction.

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Articles
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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , November 2015, pp. 745 - 763
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

From its arrival in Iran in the early 19th century until the early 20th century, the horse-drawn carriage was considered among the most convenient and comfortable modes of transport. Yet to those who experienced the new modes of transport that superseded it, the carriage could not be associated with convenience and comfort. Abu al-Hasan Ibtihaj, the pioneer of economic planning in Iran, recalled his trip from Rasht to Tehran on a horse-drawn carriage during World War I as one of the worst agonies of his adolescence. Confined to a small space intended for a maximum of four people, travelers had to endure the constant bumps of traveling on a dirt road, intense heat when the carriage's windows were closed, and dust and flies when the windows were open. The slow journey broke every day at a roadside inn (mihmānkhānah).Footnote 1

Within a few decades of Ibtihaj's trip, while the carriage remained a popular mode of day-to-day transport within cities, intercity travel by carriage had become a distant memory. Najmeh Najafi, who grew up in a well-to-do clerical family in early Pahlavi Tehran before immigrating to the United States, detailed how she used to listen to her mother's recollections of travel by camel or carriage and to romanticize its uncertainties. Although she compared her mother's adventures favorably to her less exciting experience of traveling in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven foreign car, she was even more mesmerized by another mode of transportation: the railway.Footnote 2 Adults around her complained about the heavy taxes on tea and sugar intended to fund the construction of the Trans-Iranian Railway, which would connect the Caspian Sea with the Persian Gulf via Tehran. Yet the railway completely captured the little girl's imagination. Whether at school, at home, at the public bathhouse, or in the streets, every time she heard about the railway her wanderlust was reignited.Footnote 3 About a decade later, shortly after the end of World War II, her dream came true when she visited Mazandaran by train for vacation. During the train trip north, she was fascinated by the natural settings of her country, which recently had been freed from Allied occupation, and did not even converse with her family for fear of missing sight of the outside world visible through her window.Footnote 4

As David Arnold has proposed, the “everyday” in everyday technology can incorporate a variety of experiences, from actually using technology and learning about it in the mass media to narrating one's dreams and life stories around it.Footnote 5 In this sense, even before sections of the railway opened in the 1930s, the Trans-Iranian Railway impacted the everyday lives of various segments of Iranian society, including journalists, tribes, landowners, merchants, and schoolchildren, by sparking the imagination. After its opening, the railway transformed the experience of travel for vacationers, pilgrims, local villagers, and others.Footnote 6 For one, traveling became speedier. Between 1920 and 1950, the travel time from Tehran to Baghdad was shortened from approximately one month to about fifty hours. The kind of prolonged discomfort experienced by Ibtihaj in his horse-drawn carriage became a nostalgic past to be romanticized.Footnote 7 The coming of railways also meant the introduction of the railway space—a new public space comprising stations, platforms, railway cars, and tracks—into the everyday lives of ordinary Iranians, which had the effect of facilitating interactions among the different segments of Iranian society.Footnote 8

Scholars in various disciplines have examined how the meanings of modern urban space have been produced and reproduced not simply through grandiose Haussmannization projects but through the everyday use of its occupants, which often deviated from the intention of its creators. In the newly paved streets of late-imperial Chengdu in southwestern China, in government-built housing in postcolonial Cairo, and elsewhere, occupants of new spaces were not simply molded into the image of the modern promoted by those spaces' creators. While the spaces delineated possible courses of action, their occupants could create unintended uses and evade attempts at control and surveillance.Footnote 9 Thus, in response to state imposition of what Michel de Certeau called a “strategy” for control, ordinary occupants of urban space often responded with the de Certeauian “tactic,” an action taken by the weak to win temporary advantage in a space over which they have no control.Footnote 10

In line with these studies of spatial discourses and practices, this article extends the analysis of space to its occupants by examining the everyday “consumption” of railway technology. I attempt to understand the process through which a particular form of technology and the new space it created became incorporated into the lives of ordinary people. In this sense, this study contributes to recent Middle Eastern historiography on the ways ordinary people experienced state-initiated projects,Footnote 11 as well as on the social life of technology.Footnote 12

Since the advent of railway technology in the peripheries of the global technological order in the mid-19th century, questions such as what the railway space should represent, how the public should use it, and who should be included in it were contested because of its unmistakably European origin. These questions became inextricably linked to indigenous elites' struggles to carve out their position vis-à-vis both the metropole and the rest of the population in the peripheries. Thus, the discourses and practices of the railway space often consolidated modern middle-class subjectivities. In colonial India, which had one of the earliest railway spaces outside Europe, middle-class male colonial subjects, excluded from the first-class cars reserved for European passengers, demanded hierarchical differentiation among Indian passengers and the separation of respectable Indian women from the pubic gaze.Footnote 13 Late 19th-century Mexico saw the formation of a middle-class in a way comparable to early Pahlavi Iran due to such similar factors as a strong foreign presence, the absence of colonizers, and authoritarian modernization following a period of internal disorder. The middle-class in Porfirian Mexico used print media to proliferate an image of itself as the “vanguard of modern life” against the “backward” behavior of rural populations and the “unpleasantness” of Americans, thus consolidating an urban middle-class, nationalist identity.Footnote 14 In both cases, the middle-class attempted to assert its position in the railway space—and in the nation—by differentiating itself from other social groups, including foreigners and “ignorant masses.” To do so, they needed to intervene in defining the nature of the railway space.

Historians of Iran have tended to analyze materialized and unmaterialized railway projects from the perspectives of diplomatic history and business history to elucidate the politics of technological transfer.Footnote 15 Focused primarily on railway concessions and business schemes, they have shown how foreign statesmen and entrepreneurs attempted to protect their interests in the face of the nationalist Pahlavi state's growing desire to increase control over the nascent railway industry, which was frequently featured in the censored Iranian press as the symbol of the prestige and progress achieved by Reza Shah. Yet they do not tell us much about how ordinary Iranians experienced railway technology.

Iranian travelers had encountered railways in such places as India, Egypt, Russia, and Europe since the mid-19th century. With some exceptions, however, the Qajar bureaucratic elite only became interested in a trans-Iranian railway after the 1870 famine and the failure of the Reuter Concession of 1872, which authorized the British citizen Baron Julius de Reuter to construct railways in Iran.Footnote 16 With the cancellation of the concession, and particularly in the 1890s, those with diplomatic experience abroad began to write about the possibility of building a railway, sometimes with an endorsement from members of the ʿulamaʾ.Footnote 17 At the same time, they collaborated with merchants, albeit unsuccessfully, to collect the capital required to construct a trans-Iranian railway within Qajar dominion, which they saw as a way of countering Anglo-Russian railway schemes to connect the Qajar frontiers to either the British or Russian Empires.Footnote 18 The trans-Iranian railway was thus conceived as a countermeasure against imperial railway projects. It was expected to create a Tehran-centered national economy in Iran that fostered domestic circulation of commodities and international trade.Footnote 19 However, Nasir al-Din Shah's signing of an agreement with Russia in 1890 put a halt on railway construction. Fearing that the railway would allow European goods to enter northern Iran, where Russian goods were dominant, Russia had demanded a ban on railway construction in Iran for ten years, through it was later extended to 1910.Footnote 20 As the expiration of the ban approached, the British and the Russians, this time joined by the Germans, once again expressed interest in constructing a railway in Iran, but with the exception of short railways in Iran's borderlands the outbreak of World War I postponed their designs,.Footnote 21 As a result, despite a strong desire among both Iranian nationalists and imperial powers to construct a trans-Iranian railway, no major railway project materialized before the 1921 coup led by Reza Khan. In short, the absence of a major railway in Iran stemmed from Iran's geopolitical location as a buffer state between the Russian and British Empires, and the desire among the Qajar elite for a state-led trans-Iranian railway project emerged out of fear of foreign domination through imperial railway projects.

Once the Iranian railway project did emerge it was unusual for a number of reasons. Unlike in much of Asia and Africa, the first extensive railway was undertaken by the state, and it was completed only in 1938, much later than in neighboring countries.Footnote 22 In fact, by the time the Iranian parliament ratified the bill to approve railway construction in early 1927, railway technology was no longer the latest innovation symbolizing modernity. Opposition groups, citing the ongoing process of motorization both at home and abroad, argued for constructing highways instead of railways.

Moreover, whereas railway projects often occurred in the context of state-building, in Iran the process of expanding railway networks was interrupted by the collapse of Reza Shah's regime and the beginning of the Allied occupation in 1941. Only three years after the completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway, transportation routes were taken over by the Allied forces, resulting in restrictions on civilian traffic to meet wartime needs. While the control of transportation routes by occupiers in wartime is not uncommon, in the case of Iran it drastically increased the foreign presence in the country, including in the railway space. Ironically, the supposed symbol of the success of the nationalist state had facilitated the influx of foreign soldiers during the occupation. Given these peculiar circumstances, how did ordinary Iranians imagine the railway journey? How did they use the railway space? How did the railway space impact its occupants?

The first part of this article draws on the Iranian press to examine the discourse around the railway traveler prototype. It then analyzes the spatial politics of the railway after the completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway project in 1938, and how this new space impacted the various social groups who used it. I argue that unlike localized tramway space, railway space became a microcosm of the Iranian nation through its inclusion of societal elements that did not conform to the image of a Europeanized Iran. In other words, diverse segments of society used railway technology in different ways, often deviating from the modernizing intention of the Pahlavi state and its supporters. The visibility of such difference shaped modern middle-class understandings of self along both national and class lines, and made middle-class travelers aware of their socioeconomic and cultural distinctness vis-à-vis the rest of Iranian society. However, witnessing the heterogeneity of the Iranian nation also urged them to travel more extensively in Iran to increase direct interaction with the nation, through which they hoped to propagate modernity and create an interconnected national community.

CONSTRUCTING THE RAILWAY TRAVELER PROTOTYPE

Debates about a trans-Iranian railway resumed after the 1921 coup in the context of a shared desire among various strands of the Iranian nationalist movement to restore control in volatile provinces, rebuild the economy, and ultimately create a homogeneous nation. Former constitutionalists and the modern middle-class, who comprised the growing ranks of salaried urban professionals possessing a modern education, were fed up with weak central government and initially supported the rise of Reza Shah. In reaction to the perceived failure of constitutionalism, they considered authoritarian modernization the only way to implement the political, economic, and cultural reforms that they advocated.

Some debates over railway construction occurred in official venues such as parliament, where its economic impact was considered. Although representatives such as Muhammad Musaddiq and Arbab Kaykhusraw disagreed over the cost of construction and the priority of a railway project comparative to other industrialization projects,Footnote 23 they agreed on the power of the railway to bring economic development to Iran. In their view, the absence of transportation infrastructure was the fundamental problem hindering economic growth, and a trans-Iranian railway was the solution to this problem. As the minister of finance proclaimed, “the fundamental basis of productivity in the country should be and will be a railway.”Footnote 24 In February 1927 the parliament ratified the bill to build a trans-Iranian railway.

The state-censored Iranian press, which was dominated and consumed by the growing modern middle-class, also discussed the issue. A serial novel called “The True Dream” (Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah), published in the newspaper Khalq in the early Pahlavi period, provides one of the earliest examples.Footnote 25 Filled with the kind of enthusiasm that was widely shared among the modern middle-class during this time period, the serial takes the form of an imagined travelogue set ten years in the future that was written by an Iranian returning to his homeland after a decade in Europe. The story begins with a scene on the deck of a ship traveling from Baku to Bandar-i Pahlavi. The unnamed protagonist encounters young Iranian students dressed in European clothes and behaving graciously like European passengers. The sight of the youths reminds the protagonist of an experience he had a decade earlier when he left for Europe on the same ship. During that journey, he witnessed what to him was the ludicrous sight of Gilani and Mazandarani pilgrims with dyed beards, long hair, and sangria-colored fingertips. The pilgrims felt so at home on the deck that they even spread their sufrah, a piece of cloth set on the floor during meals and on which to place food, and started to eat lunch.Footnote 26 The contrast between these pilgrims of the 1920s and the students of the 1930s reassured the protagonist of Iran's progress during the first decade of Reza Shah's rule.

Throughout the novel, the narrative evokes an image of Iran as a prosperous Europeanized country, with symbols of industrialization such as factories, dams, and ports appearing in front of the protagonist's eyes as he tours cities by train and car. More than anything else, it was the railway that epitomized the progress of Iran, as its existence gave the protagonist the mobility to tour the country speedily and witness signs of progress. After visiting Gilan, the protagonist took the electric train from Rasht to Qazvin for sightseeing. He was impressed by the railway facilities, including magnificent railway stations, a sanitary restaurant, and food cars on the train.Footnote 27 Once the train departed Rasht Station, he enjoyed the panoramic views of the Iranian countryside, which used to be arid and uncultivated but was now marked by pasture and fertile farms where mechanized agriculture was practiced, two-story houses, and new roads connecting the villages to the railway line. Instead of donkeys, mules, and camels, carts and cars traveled the new roads to transport village products such as fruit and vegetables to railway stations, from which they were taken to food processing factories as well as both domestic and international centers of consumption.Footnote 28 Thus, the railway was portrayed as a crucial vehicle that connected the Iranian countryside to the national and global capitalist economies.

Even more impressive to the protagonist was the cultural transformation exemplified in the behavior of his compatriots. During his ten years outside Iran, Iranians had embraced European cultural institutions such as cafes, restaurants, cinemas, and theme parks, where men and women in European-style clothing spent their leisure time mingling.Footnote 29 The cultural transformation of Iranians manifested in particular in their behavior in the railway space. No one engaged in disorderly conduct or talked too loudly.Footnote 30 The orderliness of passengers was matched by that of child peddlers at Qazvin Station. Whereas naked child beggars used to be the only children at the station, now children dressed in clean uniforms surrounded the train cars in order to sell souvenirs such as textiles as well as food and drinks.Footnote 31 Thus, in this fictional account of Iran's near future, it was only the souvenirs that reflected Iranian local customs. The transformed Iranian cultural milieu and the railway journey that took place within it reproduced what the writer imagined to be the European experience of a railway journey in first-class railway cars. In this fantasy, undisrupted orderliness governed the railway space, epitomizing what Michel de Certeau called “a perfect actualization of the rational utopia.”Footnote 32

The serial novel encapsulated the desire shared by the modern middle-class to transform Iranian society, which it believed to be in need of a radical break from its immediate past. Contrary to the Iranian press' emphasis that the 1921 coup initiated a radical transformation, the process of change was gradual, straddling the late Qajar and early Pahlavi periods.Footnote 33 Of particular relevance to the issue of railway construction was the emergence of new public spaces. As the serial novel depicts, such spaces, including those giving access primarily to paying customers such as cinemas and cafes, were becoming an integral part of the urban landscape.Footnote 34 At the same time, the spatial structure of Iranian cities was changing. New paved streets flanked by tree-lined sidewalks such as Pahlavi Street, which connected the city with Tehran Railway Station in the southern outskirts, extended from new squares that gradually replaced old city gates.Footnote 35

Yet the modern middle-class believed that spatial change in urban centers did not suffice to transform the nation. More fundamental for them was the need to inculcate in the Iranian population an understanding of proper behavior in public space. In some regards, more and more Iranians started to act in accordance with Europeanized cultural expectations. For instance, in the late Qajar period, some men started to sit with their unveiled wives in horse-drawn carriages even at the risk of being fined. This cultural practice had become accepted by the police force by the late 1920s, as gender desegregation occurred in such other modes of transport as buses.Footnote 36

Nevertheless, the modern middle-class feared that most Iranians remained ignorant in the use of public space, evidence of which included chaos they saw on new paved streets meant to provide order. This chaos was due not only to pedestrians’ difficulty accustoming themselves to new modes of transport such as cars, trucks, and buses, but also to the persistent presence of donkeys, horse-drawn carriages, and unauthorized peddlers who spread their merchandise in the streets for display.Footnote 37 Likewise, while the modern middle-class valued the cinema for its capacity to educate the general population, they were frustrated with the behavior of Iranian audiences, particularly when fights occurred or small children were in attendance.Footnote 38 The result of these frustrations was a press campaign led by journalists to educate the population about proper male and female behavior in different public spaces. They instructed readers on how, for example, to walk down the street, ride a bus, and travel.Footnote 39

In this broad context of middle-class frustration with the “unruly” populace in public spaces, Iranian journalists expressed their anxieties about the nature of the future railway space based on what they witnessed in the horse-drawn and locomotive tramways in Tehran. The orderliness of the railway space was particularly important compared to other public spaces because of the Trans-Iranian Railway project's status for the new state as the symbol of progress achieved by Reza Shah. When the Pahlavi Dynasty was established in 1925, the only public transportation in Tehran that was akin to the railway was the tramway system. Tehran had an eight-kilometer steam tramway line to the shrine of Shah ʿAbd al-ʿAzim and four horse-drawn tramway lines, both of which were opened by a Belgian company in the late 1880s. Since the steam tramway's opening, despite frequent accidents and the occasional protests they triggered, it garnered much excitement among the population,Footnote 40 and “traveling on it was considered one of the most popular recreations.”Footnote 41

Similar to other public spaces, however, by the early Pahlavi period the ubiquity of improper behavior in and around steam and horse-drawn tramway facilities frustrated writers in the press and their readers, the latter of whom occasionally expressed their frustration in letters to newspapers. In one such letter, an expatriate Iranian even claimed that the horse-drawn tramway had replaced “the clothes and hats and the varicolored turbans” as the most serious harm to Iran's prestige in Europe.Footnote 42 Iranian behavior around tramway facilities greatly deviated from the idealized image depicted in “The True Dream.” As in Indian colonial discourse, middle-class modernists feared the masses' display of religiosity and domesticity in public space, which subverted orderliness.Footnote 43 In contrast to the imagined railway passengers in European attire, most tramway passengers were pilgrims—men with long beards and women completely veiled—a fact that led the author of one Nahid article to deplore, “God forbid! We get on the railway car with clothes for sitting in a palanquin, donkey, or mule!”Footnote 44 When these passengers arrived at the tramway station, they adhered not to the fantasy of desegregation in “The True Dream,” but to the gender segregation of station facilities that had separate waiting rooms for men and women. While they waited for the tram, they listened to female dervishes, who attracted large audiences of local youths by reciting eulogies in praise of ʿAli and Husayn.Footnote 45 The tramway space itself was occupied by a swarm of beggars, including the blind, the crippled, and the deaf, unauthorized water sellers, dry-fruit sellers, and all sorts of peddlers who crammed the station.Footnote 46 The ritualized wailing and begging of the poor became the audiovisual evidence of chaos in the Tehran tramway. If this crowd bore any resemblance to anything European, as one writer put it to describe the chaotic situation, it was to “a tribe of strikers in London.”Footnote 47

Chaos reigned inside the tramcars as well. Rather than bags and packages, tramway passengers carried onboard commodities that reflected their domestic life, such as samovars, water pitchers (āftābah), earthen jars, and the sufrah, making Tehran tramcars visibly dissimilar to European ones.Footnote 48 Instead of sitting comfortably, Iranian passengers, even those with first-class tickets, were crammed into a crowded car, where they either had to stand on the running board and hug the pole firmly to avoid falling off the train, or to sit on top of a seated passenger.Footnote 49 When passengers finally managed to find seats after several stations, they would eat seeds and spit out their shells on the floor, creating a carpet of seed shells.Footnote 50 Then, each time the train stopped, whether at a station or due to one of the frequent derailing incidents, new passengers jostled for a seat as they boarded, resuming the chaotic process of settling down in the tramway cars.Footnote 51

Local youths further exacerbated the chaotic situation. Whenever the tram departed the station, groups of young men would climb up the windows and hang on to the tramcar, occasionally resulting in fatal accidents. They would then enter the tram disguised as passengers and use the tramway space as their playground, sometimes crawling between other passengers' legs and under women's chadors in a game of tag.Footnote 52 In view of such behavior, Iranian journalists saw no resemblance between tram travel in Tehran and what they imagined European railway travel to be.

Their conundrum lay in the expectation that these populations would enter the railway space once the Trans-Iranian Railway opened. Unlike the local tramways, the new railway was expected to enhance Iran's prestige by allowing it to join the ranks of nations that had constructed their own long-haul railway systems. The railway was supposed to foster travel and propagate modernity, including national consciousness, thus giving rise to a homogeneous nation. In theory, the entry of more Iranians as traveling citizens should have been welcome. But the increased mobility of the “ignorant” masses and their entry into the railway space was believed to jeopardize its ideal orderliness. Without reforming and regulating the masses of future passengers, the Trans-Iranian Railway would fail to fulfill its promise.

The solution to this corrundrum was the railway traveler prototype, which could serve as a source of emulation to potential railway travelers. The prototype was constructed in the Iranian press, which dramatically increased circulation in the early Pahlavi period as modern education expanded and raised the literacy rate.Footnote 53 However, it was not intended to reach its stated target of reform—the masses—directly. Rather, the prototype was meant to ignite fear among the emerging modern middle-class, who comprised the majority of Iranian newspaper readers, in order to convince them to take action—that is, to travel in order to propagate national consciousness and set an example of proper behavior for the masses. Thus, the values embedded in the railway traveler prototype, including the proper behavioral code in the railway space, functioned for the Iranian modern middle-class as a marker of difference between themselves and the “ignorant masses.”Footnote 54

In the early Pahlavi period, journalists such as Nahid's Ibrahim Nahid and Ittilaʿat's ʿAbbas Masʿudi enjoyed the privilege of traveling, often as part of the royal retinue, on the new portions of the railway and highways before inauguration, in order to witness, record, and propagate the supposed progress achieved by Reza Shah. The frequency with which travel experiences were printed increased during the 1930s, when the Trans-Iranian Railway, along with new highways, was opened portion by portion from both the northern and southern termini, which would eventually connect in central Iran. When combined with the travel accounts presumably sent by readers, so many accounts of railway journeys appeared in the press that it was as if the 19th-century trend of writing travelogues (safarnāmah) had been revived.Footnote 55 In this sense, through newspapers, along with official events celebrating the progress of railway construction and the railway facilities themselves,Footnote 56 imagining a railway journey became embedded in the everyday life of a broad segment of Iranian society.

In addition to specifying proper behavior in the railway space, and thus defining the de Certeauian strategy that should be adopted by the future Iranian State Railway, these journalistic accounts had a pedantic goal of explaining to Iranians why they needed to travel. The railway traveler prototype was not a pilgrim, but rather a tourist who traveled around his homeland. As one journalist noted, “when the Shah does not sit behind the curtain, princes, ministers, prominent political and military figures, journalists, and even ordinary citizens should not sit behind the curtain. They should learn closely with their open eyes and ears about the present and past conditions of the country. Namely, they should go to see all the places in the country.”Footnote 57 Traveling would also allow Iranians to mix and blend (ikhtilāt va āmīzish).Footnote 58 They would mingle with fellow Iranians from other provinces and familiarize themselves with ways of life elsewhere in Iran and with different regions and customs. Such interactions would benefit “both individuals and the country” and would have a positive impact on “commerce, industry, agriculture, ethics, and public behavior.”Footnote 59 Thus, journalistic travel accounts did not simply introduce their readers to conditions in and customs of faraway provinces. By allowing them to experience the provinces vicariously, they were meant to inspire readers to travel around the country by train. Moreover, they encouraged them to prepare for their own journeys and foster national consciousness through direct interactions with their compatriots in the regions to which they traveled. In turn, local populations in these destinations would be exposed to the ideas and customs of their urban compatriots. In other words, the railway traveler prototype was a missionary of what journalists called the “new civilization” (tamaddun-i jadīd), spreading “civilized” customs in the railway space and inculcating national consciousness across Iran.

THE VERNACULAR JOURNEY

Within a decade of the 1938 completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway, additional lines intended to connect Tehran with Tabriz in the west and with Mashhad in the east had started to operate in limited sections. Another line meant to connect Tehran to Yazd was also under construction.Footnote 60 As the railway network expanded, the railway space came to intersect with the lives of a larger number of Iranians. While many landowners resented the damage to or, even worse, confiscation of their agricultural lands that resulted from this expansion, local villagers took advantage of the economic opportunities it introduced by flocking to new stations to sell their products or by opening inns nearby.Footnote 61 For many other Iranians, the railway became a fundamental means for intercity travel, be it as a part of their daily routine or as a special occasion such as pilgrimage or vacation. As discussed below, the Allied occupation that started three years after the completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway hindered the growth of civilian motor traffic, forcing the population to rely on railway travel to an even greater extent.

When the Allied forces invaded Iran in 1941, they took control of transportation routes from the Persian Gulf to the Soviet Union, including the Trans-Iranian Railway, which they put under the operation of Indian, British, and later American foreign workers in order to transport war materials to the Soviet Union. As a result, the presence of foreigners on railway routes drastically increased during the occupation, which lasted for the next four years and greatly disrupted Iran's economic life—contributing to inflation and food crises—as war needs for the Allies were prioritized.Footnote 62 Railway construction was also interrupted, and with it payment of wages to construction workers and railway guards, who were turned into rural bandits.Footnote 63

During the occupation, the civilian use of highways and railways became restricted. Before the war, for instance, the south line from Tehran to Ahvaz operated four trains per week in each direction, with a capacity of 320 individuals per train. Once the occupation started, 140 seats on each train were allocated to Allied passengers, and two additional trains were introduced specifically for Allied military personnel.Footnote 64 Thus, capacity for railway passenger traffic was reduced almost by half, and this at a time when motor transport became unaffordable. The gradual depletion of tires and other parts necessary to maintain roadworthiness caused a decline in drivable motorized vehicles in Iran and, consequently, the rapid skyrocketing of the fare for motor transport at a time when the railway fare remained relatively stable.Footnote 65

Motor transport's unavailability contributed to the congestion of railway passenger traffic, a point borne out by available statistics. In the summer of 1945, the south line had the capacity to carry 3,840 passengers per week, including Allied soldiers as well as Iranian officials and military personnel, but excluding passengers in fourth-class roofed freight cars, which were unequipped with such basic amenities as lights, heat, proper ventilation, and water.Footnote 66 Thus, in theory, the line could carry 200,229 passengers annually. During the year 1944–45, the south line carried 197,026 passengers, excluding fourth-class passengers.Footnote 67 Railway traffic had become a crucial means for ordinary Iranians to maintain mobility during the Allied occupation.

Although the pace of motorization accelerated after the end of the occupation, rail travel continued to offer travelers a distinct experience through its evocation of national belonging, as the Iranian communist ʿAla al-Din Mirmirani recalled in his memoir. In 1948, Mirmirani came to Tehran Station with the intention of abandoning Iran to join his comrades in the Soviet Union. Before getting onboard, he asked himself: “Where are you going? Aren't you one of these people? Didn't you grow up among these people? Why do you want to abandon all of your love of Iran?”Footnote 68 As he witnessed his compatriots saying farewell to each other on the platform in a familiar manner, and as he shared a compartment with his fellow Iranians who chatted with him and offered him food (taʿāruf), he felt he was leaving the familiar world for an unknown utopia. Despite his determination to join his comrades in the Soviet Union, the railway space reminded Mirmirani of the national community in which he imagined himself belonging.

For occupants of the railway space such as Mirmirani, being in the space evoked a sense of national belonging because it was a microcosm of the nation. The nation that it represented was not, however, the homogeneous Iran envisaged by journalists, but rather a heterogeneous polity with various divisions and hierarchies reflected in early-Pahlavi nationalist discourse. For instance, while third-class passengers included both local villagers and pilgrims, and occasionally tourists who could not secure seats in first- or second-class cars, most fourth-class passengers were pilgrims flocking to the Shiʿi shrine cities of Qum and the ʿAtabat in Iraq. The Iraqi shrine cities were accessible by combining automobile and rail trips from the Trans-Iranian Railway's Ahvaz Station in southwestern Iran. Similar to other railways in Asia and the Middle East, the Trans-Iranian Railway enabled mass pilgrimage,Footnote 69 indicated by the fact that third- and fourth-class passengers made up about 95 percent of railway passengers.Footnote 70 Despite the journalistic imagination of the railway space, which was seen to exemplify the Europeanized Iranian nation without any trace of the Islamic past, most occupants of the space were either villagers in local attire or pilgrims in religious garments. The prominence of Shiʿi pilgrims in particular was reflected in the frequency of service, with special trains departing Qum for Tehran every Friday in addition to regular service. Modern middle-class travelers often noticed the visibility of religious garments in the railway space. As one Tehrani noted about the train to Ahvaz: “Passengers of this train are classified into three groups. There were many poverty-stricken, hungry people in shabby clothes going on a pilgrimage to Karbala. The second group was Hajjis and the wealthy on business trips under the pretext of pilgrimage. Others were government officials.”Footnote 71 Thus, the railway space enabled its occupants to perceive visually that pious Shiʿa in third- and fourth-class cars comprised the majority of the national community.

Non-passengers were also organized hierarchically within the railway space. Potentially disruptive elements such as communist-newspaper sellers were prohibited by the gendarmerie in major railway stations such as that in Tehran.Footnote 72 In unpatrolled rural stations, beggars, whose numbers increased after the start of the occupation, were excluded from the trains and occupied a marginalized position outside train windows. Yet, due to their presence on the platform, they remained a highly visible group in the railway space. While traveling to northwestern Iran in the late 1940s for a ski trip, Najmeh Najafi witnessed beggars, mostly children, who “descended upon the platform like a swarm of locusts” at every station until her destination.Footnote 73 Likewise, in the southwestern province of Luristan, which was hit hard economically after the end of railway construction, another traveler noticed “barefooted people with their children on both sides of the train” collecting the food that passengers threw out of the window onto the platform.Footnote 74 Similar to the new boulevards in Haussmannized Paris discussed by David Harvey, the railway space of mid-20th-century Iran was very porous.Footnote 75 While train interiors were theoretically reserved for paying passengers, on the often-unpatrolled platforms outside, destitute beggars waited for passenger trains, making themselves highly visible to riders.

Moreover, many local populations along the train route were excluded due to the unavailability of tickets for civilian passengers.Footnote 76 Railway stations had a policy of opening the sale of fourth-class tickets, the most sought after tickets among the poor, only one day prior to departure, causing disorder at ticket offices. Travelers felt frustrated with not only the competition to get to the ticket counter, but also the limited number of available tickets.Footnote 77 The restriction on ticket sales became particularly obvious to pilgrims who used the Iraqi railway to travel from Basra to ʿAtabat via Baghdad. Since the Iraqi railway did not restrict ticket sales, they demanded that the Iranian State Railway do the same. Otherwise, they would be forced to continue to rely on the black market for tickets.Footnote 78

One example of a complaint about the unavailability of tickets and, consequentially, the impossibility of travel came from the residents of Firuzkuh, a county between Tehran and the Caspian Sea. In 1945 they filed a petition to the general manager of the Iranian State Railway protesting the imposition of a hefty fine for fare evasion, which was quadruple the original fare for a ticket.Footnote 79 The petitioners attributed this petty crime to the unavailability of train tickets in the area, pointing out that whereas Firuzkuh Station should sell at least twenty tickets daily—for in addition to visitors, 30,000 residents in Firuzkuh's forty-six villages needed to travel—only four tickets were allocated to the station, and for some unexplained reason, even those four tickets occasionally were not sold.Footnote 80 Riding without a ticket was a de Certeauian tactic that the weak used because they had no control over the rules governing the railway space. Actions such as swarming ticket offices and petitioning exposed the exclusion of many ordinary civilians from the mobility promised by the railway.

The Iranian State Railway was deeply concerned about the behavior of passengers in the railway space, including petty crimes such as freeloading and other violations of regulations.Footnote 81 The concern itself was not new, for, as discussed earlier, journalists had been criticizing disorderly behavior in the tramway space since the beginning of the Pahlavi period. In the late 1930s, however, the Iranian State Railway and its publications—reflecting the expansion of state power—started to play a larger role in enforcing the de Certeauian strategy through codified regulations, implementing modernists' earlier demands. The repeated appearance of these regulations in various publications and the existence of witness accounts of disorderly behavior and petty crimes indicate not only the failure of the Iranian State Railway to regulate the space but also the heightened anxiety shared among the modern middle-class about the nature of the national community that it embodied.

For instance, in 1940 the gazette of the Iranian State Railway printed an article entitled “Duties of Railway Travelers” (Vazifah-i Musafirin-i Rah Ahan) in which it urged passengers to use railway facilities properly. In addition to blaming passengers for malfunctioning equipment due to improper use, the article criticized them for bringing prohibited items into passenger cars rather than checking them, despite luggage regulations. The author cited one example of a passenger who hid headless geese, which were prohibited in the regulations, in his box, an approved kind of luggage, and put it on the luggage rack above his seat. Shortly after departure, blood started to drip over other passengers and onto the floor, where it formed a red carpet. Likewise, Mazandarani passengers came onboard with baskets of lettuce and oranges rather than checking these items as required by the regulations.Footnote 82 Assuming the corruptibility of railway employees, passengers who were caught freeloading or carrying prohibited items on board often tried to haggle with or even bribe them to avoid penalty fees. The article argued for the proper use of the railway space by likening the national railway to one's house: just as Iranians owned and cared for their houses, they owned and should care for the railway that the state built with their money. It concluded by urging those who considered themselves civilized to set an example for other passengers and make themselves, and Iran, worthy of railways.Footnote 83 By stressing the high visibility of disorderly conduct and the value of the railway as a national asset, the article reminded its modern middle-class readers of the need to continue the civilizing mission as railway travelers and to reform the railway space, the embodiment of the nation.

The visibility of undesirable elements in the railway space also affected individual modern middle-class travelers, usually tourists and vacationers, as the case of Mahmud Danishvar, a former office worker from Tehran, illustrates. In late 1945, Danishvar started his two-year journey across Iran by catching a southbound train from Tehran. In the railway space, he had numerous encounters that ultimately advanced the goal of his journey to get to know his “dear compatriots” (hammīhanān-i ʿazīz).Footnote 84 When he first got on the train, he immediately spotted a womanizer who slyly blocked the seats around him so that he could offer them only to well-dressed women. Then Danishvar saw a freeloader who was hiding in the bathroom to avoid ticket inspection. When the freeloader was caught, he bribed the police. In the compartment Danishvar found traces of theft in missing lamps, knobs, and drawers, which made him uneasy due to the damage such a scene would cause to Iran's reputation among foreign visitors. When he witnessed beggars on the platforms, he unsympathetically compared them to monkeys in India that were fed by railway passengers. At Andimishk Station in the southwestern province of Khuzistan, Danishvar got off the train and talked to a porter who asked him whether he was a northerner. The question dumbfounded him since such words as “northerner” and “southerner” meant nothing to one who only identified himself as an Iranian.Footnote 85

Such encounters in the railway space frustrated Danishvar because he saw them as evidence of Iranians' failure to use the space properly and to embrace Iranian national identity. At the same time, the encounters strengthened his sense of national duty and convinced him of the urgent need to complete his mission of traveling around Iran and propagating modernity. Of course, not all travelers reacted the same way. Disgusted with a wealthy female tourist's negative reaction to beggars, Najmeh Najafi compassionately gave them coins when she saw them on the platform and repeatedly visited impoverished Turkish-speaking villages in the northwest to learn about their way of life and language.Footnote 86 Yet despite such differentiation among modern middle-class railway travelers, their journeys reinforced their sense of national belonging while making them acutely aware of their economic and cultural differences from other segments of Iranian society.

Over the next two years, traveling at his own expense, Danishvar visited not only areas accessible by train but also areas that required a car, donkey, or camel. Motivated by the zeal to inform his fellow Iranians of the historical heritage of their glorious homeland, he meticulously recorded what he saw along the way, from historical sites to natural surroundings, local customs, and even overwhelming poverty in the city and countryside alike. In addition to recording his journey in writing, he tried to convince locals that they were Iranians rather than Dizfulis or Arabs, planted the Iranian tricolor flag at the apexes of such remote mountains as Kuh-i Taftan in Baluchistan and Sabalan in Azarbayjan, and left graffiti on the walls of such caves as Darband in Simnan.Footnote 87 With the example of Danishvar in mind, the visibility of divisions within the national microcosm of the railway space had a dual effect on modern middle-class travelers: it caused them to identify with other occupants of the space as compatriot Iranians and to differentiate themselves from the rest of the national community, which needed civilizing guidance from them. The creation of the railway traveler prototype prior to the Trans-Iranian Railway's completion gave rise to travelers such as Danishvar, who came to embody that prototype in the 1940s. In turn, for these new railway travelers, the presence of heterogeneous groups of Iranians within the confined railway space concretized the object of the civilizing mission and enabled the praxis of that mission.

As a microcosm of the nation, the railway space also made the presence of foreigners visible to its occupants, particularly during the Allied occupation. In fact, Iranian railway travelers sometimes even developed their sense of belonging through their encounters with foreigners. In 1945 Muhammad Arjumand, the former personal telegraphist to Reza Shah, traveled from Tehran to Iraq mainly by train. During his railway journey, he had the pleasant experience of getting to know other Iranian and Iraqi passengers.Footnote 88 Yet his trip was not entirely pleasant, for he also encountered the aloof attitude of British passengers, both military and civilian, who “did not speak a word” to him and other Iranian and Iraqi passengers in the railway compartment and while sharing a taxi.Footnote 89 British passengers may have been orderly like the imagined European first-class passengers, but this alone did not impress Arjumand. He expected passengers to chat and share food during the journey, as did the Iranian passengers around him. Encounters with foreign passengers—who were resented as occupiers—in the railway space thus allowed modern middle-class Iranians to articulate their differences from them, to create a vernacular behavioral code in the railway space, and to reaffirm their Iranian modern middle-class sensibilities.

CONCLUSION

Rather than embodying a homogeneous nation, occupants of the railway space in mid-20th-century Iran made the nation's fault lines visible. Various groups divided along cultural, ethnic, and socioeconomic lines made different use of the railway space. The visibility of difference was conducive to the dual processes of homogenization and heterogenization among modern middle-class travelers, who constructed their self-understandings as members of an Iranian nation comprised of numerous fragments. Feeling their vision of a homogeneous Iran threatened, modern middle-class travelers intensified their interaction with the rest of society, be it to propagate modernity or to deepen their knowledge of the diversity of the nation, as proposed in the discourse prior to the completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway.

Differences were often produced through experiences in the railway space. For instance, Arjumand found it necessary to note repeatedly his difference from British passengers, while Najafi stressed her difference from another Iranian tourist. Similar to how print technology produced “multiple reading publics” rather than a unified “national reading public” in early Pahlavi Iran,Footnote 90 railway technology created not only a new public space that enabled interaction within Iran's social whole but also multiple traveling publics in the contested railway space.

This same dual process of homogenization and heterogenization in the railway space took place in other geographical contexts as well.Footnote 91 Nonetheless, the case of semicolonial Iran was made peculiar by the belated arrival of the railway, and more importantly, by the Allied occupation. The occupation foreclosed the possibility of motor travel and forced all sorts of civilian passengers to travel by train, including those who would normally have traveled by chauffeur-driven cars, making the railway space a microcosm of the nation that incorporated even “undesirable” elements in its periphery. It also restricted the mobility of civilians through a forced reduction in ticket sales, causing local populations to either freeload or make demands through petitioning. Furthermore, the occupation increased the presence of resented foreigners—most of them British—in the railway space, and made their difference from Iranian passengers visible, allowing Iranians to construct a vernacular code of behavior. Thus, the Allied occupation created a heterogeneous railway space in which difference was negotiated on socioeconomic, cultural, ethnic, and national levels.

Iranian, and Middle Eastern, encounters with transport technology can be studied further, because each transport technology raised a different yet related set of questions about the promises and perils of mobility in public space. For instance, while air travel remained beyond the reach of most in this period, the airplane also generated imaginations of technological modernity.Footnote 92 Examining how new transport technologies were incorporated into everyday lives of Iranians will elucidate the ways a society divided by such factors as socioeconomic status, cultural orientation, political belief, and religious creed translated foreign-born technologies in multiple ways and constructed notions of self around them.

Footnotes

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.

References

NOTES

Author's note: I thank Kamran S. Aghaie, Yoav Di-Capua, Cyrus Schayegh, and Lior Sternfeld for their comments. I am also grateful to the anonymous IJMES reviewers, Akram Khater, and Jeffrey Culang for helping me improve this article.

1 Ibtihaj, Abu al-Hasan, Khatirat-i Abu al-Hasan Ibtihaj (Tehran: ʿIlmi, 1996), 7–8.Google Scholar

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3 Ibid.

4 Ibid., 103–4.

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20 Kazemzadeh, Russia and Britain in Persia, 231–35. See also Foreign Office, The National Archives, United Kingdom (hereafter FO) 881/9290, “Memorandum Respecting Persian Undertakings as to British Railway Construction in Persia.”

21 These lines included the Julfa-Tabriz Railway, the Nushki-Duzdab Railway, and the Bushihr-Burazjan Railway.

22 A similar case was Thailand, a buffer state between British Burma and French Indochina. The French and the British attempted to construct a railway through Thailand to benefit their respective imperial transportation systems. However, the Thai state completed its first railway only in 1900, nearly four decades after the first railway opened in Java. See Kakizaki, Ichiro, Tai Keizai to Tetsudo, 1885–1935 (Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Hyoronsha, 2000), 106–30.Google Scholar

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24 Ibid., 19.

25 The newspaper Khalq was published under such different names as Aflak, Nahid, and Sitarah-i Subh. After its start in 1921, it quickly became a popular newspaper known for its caricatures. See the official yearbook Salnamah-i Pars (1927–28), 64–65.

26 “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 1,” Khalq, 16 December 1925.

27 “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 9,” Khalq, 12 January 1926; “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 14,” Khalq, 16 February 1926.

28 “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 8,” Khalq, 9 January 1926; “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 9,” Khalq, 12 January 1926; “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 10,” Khalq, 16 January 1926; “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 11,” Khalq, 31 January 1926; and “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 12,” Khalq, 2 February 1926.

29 “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 4,” Khalq, 22 December 1925; “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 7,” Khalq, 5 January 1926.

30 “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 9.”

31 “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 14.”

32 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 111.

33 For instance, in the late Qajar period, before the 1927 imposition of the Pahlavi hat and the 1936 decree of forced unveiling, some Iranian men started to adopt European sartorial culture, while their female counterparts started to wear thinner chadors. See Chehabi, Houchang, “Staging the Emperor's New Clothes: Dress Codes and Nation-Building under Reza Shah,” Iranian Studies 26 (1993): 210;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Chehabi, “The Banning of the Veil and its Consequences,” in The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921–1941, ed. Stephanie Cronin (London: Curzon, 2003), 194–95.

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37 As an example of this chaos, a British botanist who visited Rasht in the 1930s noted that a policeman had stood on a platform in the middle of the street to direct traffic, which included “camels, donkeys, buses and lorries, as well as worried pedestrians.” Fullerton, Alice, To Persia for Flowers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 21.Google Scholar Cyrus Schayegh has discussed some new modes of transport in the context of the promises and perils of technological modernity. See Schayegh, Cyrus, Who is Knowledgeable is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society, 1900–1950 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2009), 95–103.Google Scholar

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40 Poets expressed this excitement through a poem in which women demanded their husbands purchase tramway tickets for them rather than such luxurious commodities as shiny scarves and sequined shoes. Aryanpur, Yahya, Az Saba ta Nima: Tarikh-i 150 Sal-i Adab-i Farsi, vol. 2 (Tehran: Shirkat-i Sahami-yi Kitabha-yi Jibi, 1973), 156.Google Scholar

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43 Aguiar, Tracking Modernity, 31–32.

44 “Ma ba Chih Libas Mashin Savari Mikunim?” Nahid, 1 March 1927.

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47 “Musafirat-i Chand Saʿatah,” Khalq, 22 May 1926.

48 “Musafirat-i Chand Saʿatah”; “Ma ba Chih Libas Mashin Savari Mikunim?.”

49 “Yik Musafirat bih Vasilah-i Tirin.”

50 “The True Dream” mentioned creating “a carpet of seed shells” as one of the deplorable customs maintained by Iranians in public space. See “Ruʾya-yi Sadiqah: Pas az Dah Sal, 9.”

51 “Yik Musafirat bih Vasilah-i Tirin”; “Musafirat-i Chand Saʿatah.”

52 Shahri, Tihran-i Qadim, Jild-i Avval, 325–36; Jaʿfari, Dar Justiju-yi Subh, 101–2.

53 In his recent article on print culture in early 20th-century Iran, Afshin Marashi mentions an estimate that 30 to 40 percent of Tehran's population “had some degree of literacy” by the 1940s. Marashi, Afshin, “Print Culture and Its Publics: A Social History of Bookstores in Tehran, 1900–1950,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47 (2015): 101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 For a similar process in relation to sports, see Schayegh, Cyrus, “Sport, Health, and the Iranian Modern Middle Class in the 1920s and 1930s,” Iranian Studies 35 (2002): 341–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the ambivalent feelings among leftist intellectuals toward the masses, see Vejdani, Farzin, “Appropriating the Masses: Folklore Studies, Ethnography, and Interwar Iranian Nationalism,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 (2012): 507–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55 For examples of such travelogues, see a series of Ittilaʿat articles published in 1937–38 along the railway route from Tehran, Qum, Salihabad (Andimishk), and Ahvaz. “Dar Rah-i Qum,” Ittilaʿat, 22 October 1936; “Dar ʿAraq,” Ittilaʿat, 2 November 1936; “Dar Ahvaz,” Ittilaʿat, 25 December 1936; “Dar Salihabad,” Ittilaʿat, 27 December 1936; and “Dar Ahvaz,” Ittilaʿat, 6 January 1937. The official yearbook Salnamah-i Pars also ran long articles. For example, see “Rah Ahan,” Salnamah-i Pars (1935–1936), 223–34; and “Mazandaran va Gilan ya Zarristan-i Iran,” Salnamah-i Pars (1936–1937), 13–102.

56 For instance, residents of Sari flocked to the new station to see the bathrooms of the first-class carriage. India Office Records (hereafter IOR) L/PS/12/3409, “Persia: Memorandum of the Commercial Secretary on the Northern Section of the Trans-Persian Railway, May 16, 1931.” For press coverage of the celebrations, see “Jashn-i Vusul-i Rah Ahan bih Varamin,” Ittilaʿat, 31 December 1936; “Jashn-i Rah Ahan dar Hazrat-i ʿAbd al-ʿAzim,” Ittilaʿat, 30 January 1937; and “Guzarish-i Jashn-i Gushayish-i Rah Ahan-i Shumal,” Ittilaʿat, 20 February 1937. Schoolchildren and civil servants were often asked to participate. Najafi, Persia Is My Heart, 52–53; Judith McComb, “Annual Report of Nurbakhsh School, 1938–1939,” Presbyterian Historical Society, RG91/20/12.

57 “Mazandaran 10,” Ittilaʿat, 23 August 1933.

58 “Yik Haftah dar Kinar-i Darya 2,” Ittilaʿat, 1 July 1933; “Musafirat-i Mazandaran,” Ittilaʿat, 10 August 1933.

59 “Musafirat-i Mazandaran.”

60 The Tehran-Miyanah Line in the northwest and the Tehran-Shahrud Line in the northeast opened in 1942. Malakuti, Rah Ahan-i Iran, 160.

61 For land disputes, see Majlis Library, Tehran (hereafter ML), 10/175/25/1/47; 11/205/11/1/8; 12/28/3/1/10; and 13/147/15/1/190. On opportunities for locals, see Mirmirani, ʿAla al-Din, Kurah Rahi dar Ghubar: Khatirat-i Safar-i Yiki az Aʿza-yi Hizb-i Tudah bih Shawravi (Tehran: Intisharat-i Nida-yi Farhang, 1998), 8–9;Google Scholar and Danishvar, Mahmud, Didaniha va Shinidaniha-yi Iran (Tehran: Dunya-yi Kitab, 2009), 15–17.Google Scholar

62 On the occupation period, see Jumhuri, Markaz-i Pazhuhish va Asnad-i Riyasat-i, Asnadi az Ishghal-i Iran dar Jang-i Jahani-yi Duvvum (Tehran: Khanah-i Kitab, 2010).Google Scholar

63 ML 12/84/42/1/28.

64 “Sanihah-i Istgah-i Markaz-i Garm: Shayiʿat-i Ighraqamiz Haqiqat Nadarad,” Mardan-i Ruz, 4 July 1945. An advertisement in Mardan-i Ruz six months before noted only one military train to Ahvaz per week. “Agahi az Taraf-i Bungah-i Rah Ahan-i Dawlati-yi Iran,” Mardan-i Ruz, 31 January 1945. The northern line from Tehran to Bandar-i Shah had three passenger services and three mixed services for both military personnel and civilian passengers per week. Both the west line from Tehran to Zanjan and the east line from Tehran to Shahrud operated three services per week. “Agahi: Barnamah-i Vurud va Khuruj.”

65 Rah Ahan-i Dawlati-yi Iran, Amar-i Sal-i 1322–1323, 28–29. Nonetheless, though not as frequently as motorized vehicle fare, railway fare occasionally increased to meet the rapid inflation. For instance, the fare was doubled in September 1943. See Dawlati-yi Iran, Bungah-i Rah Ahan-i, Guzarish-i Natayij-i Mali-yi Hamkari-yi Bungah-i Rah Ahan-i Dawlati-yi Iran ba Muttafiqin Marbut bih Dawrah-i Jang (Tehran: Chapkhanah-i Bungah-i Rah Ahan, 1946), 10.Google Scholar

66 “Sanihah-i Istgah-i Markaz-i Garm”; “Agahi az Taraf-i Bungah-i Rah Ahan”; IOR/L/PS/12/3400/PZ4332, Khuzistan Diaries, no. 3, March 1937. As in India, traveling in freight cars was common in Iran. For instance, in the year 1945, to handle Iranian pilgrims returning from Iraq, two freight cars were added to the weekly service. By March they had carried about 2,000 passengers. “Khabarha-yi Rah Ahan: Murajiʿat-i Zuvvari ke barayi Ziyarat ʿAtabat Raftah Budand,” Mardan-i Ruz, 7 March 1945.

67 Rah Ahan-i Dawlati-yi Iran, Amar-i Sal-i 1322–1323, 31.

68 Mirmirani, Kurah Rahi, 6.

69 In the case of Iran, pilgrimage to the ʿAtabat was largely seasonal because of the summer heat in Iraq; additional fourth-class cars were required during peak seasons. In other Asian and Middle Eastern contexts, too, pilgrimage traffic attracted a large number of passengers. On India, see Aguiar, Tracking Modernity, 19. On Egypt, see Barak, On Time, 87. On Japan, see Uda, Tadashi, Tetsudo Nippon Bunkashiko (Kyoto: Shibunkaku Shuppan, 2007), 191–97.Google Scholar On the hajj by train from across Asia, see Green, Nile, “The Rail Hajjis: The Trans-Siberian Railway and the Long Way to Mecca,” in The Hajj: Collected Essays, ed. Porter, Venetia and Saif, Liana (London: British Museum, 2013), 100–7.Google Scholar

70 Vizarat-i Turuq, Rah Ahan-i Sarasar-i Iran, 1306–1317, 100. The percentage is based on Rah Ahan-i Dawlati-yi Iran, Amar-i Sal-i 1322–1323, 31.

71 Danishvar, Didaniha, 14–15.

72 The gendarmerie patrolled Tehran Station in search of newspaper sellers who sold Tudah-Party publications such as Rahbar and Zafar. Once found, these sellers were expelled. “Jilawgiri az Furush-i Ruznamahha-yi Azadikhah,” Zafar, 1 March 1946.

73 Najafi, Persia Is My Heart, 143.

74 Danishvar, Didaniha, 13.

75 Harvey, David, “The Political Economy of Public Space,” in The Politics of Public Space, ed. Low, Setha and Smith, Neil (London: Routledge, 2006), 17–34.Google Scholar

76 The difficulties faced by Iranian passengers to get tickets is noted in “Dushvariha-yi Bungah-i Rah Ahan,” Mardan-i Ruz, 10 January 1945; and “Agahi az Taraf-i Bungah-i Rah Ahan.”

77 “Agahi,” Mardan-i Ruz, 21 March 1945.

78 “Rah Ahan ra Bayad barayi Riqabatha-yi Iqtisadi-yi Zaman-i Sulh Amadah Kard,” Mardan-i Ruz, 20 May 1945; Rah Ahan-i Dawlati-yi Iran, Amar-i Sal-i 1322–1323, 29.

79 Studies on petitioning in Iran often focus on the Qajar period, but petitioning seems to have remained a weapon of ordinary people in the Pahlavi period, particularly after the fear of retaliation diminished with the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941. On petitioning in Turkey during the same period, see Yilmaz, Becoming Turkish, 127–37.

80 ML14/176/18/1/263.

81 “Agahi: Jarimah-i Musafirin-i bidun-i Bilit,” Mardan-i Ruz, 31 January 1945; “Tafsil-i Hadisah-i Asafnak-i Rah Ahan,” Ittilaʿat, 21 June 1945.

82 “Vazifah-i Musafirin-i Rah Ahan,” Namah-i Rah, May 1940, 27.

83 Ibid., 29.

84 Danishvar, Didaniha, 8.

85 Ibid., 11–16.

86 Najafi, Persia Is My Heart, 148–57.

87 Danishvar, Didaniha, 9, 20.

88 Arjumand, Shish Sal, 261.

89 Ibid., 262, 266. Similarly, in the context of increasing American presence, Mexican railway passengers often complained that American travelers and workers were rude. Matthews, The Civilizing Machine, 78–79.

90 Marashi, “Print Culture and Its Publics,” 103.

91 On India, see Goswami, Producing India, 104; and Aguiar, Marian, “Making Modernity: Inside the Technological Space of the Railway,” Cultural Critique 68 (2008), 74.Google Scholar For a case in which the railway became symbolic of ethnic boundaries, see Thiranagama, Sharika, “‘A Railway to the Moon’: The Post-Histories of a Sri Lankan Railway Line,” Modern Asian Studies 46 (2012): 221–48.Google Scholar

92 Within one month of its establishment in 1939, the Iranian Airplane Club had 945 paying members in Khurramabad, a provincial city in Luristan. Farid Qasimi, Sayyid, ed., Asnad-i Khurramabad: ʿArizahha, Intikhabat, Gunagun (Tehran: Kitabkhanah, Muzah, va Markaz-i Asnad-i Majlis-i Shura-yi Islami, 2011), 62.Google Scholar