Monisha Rajesh: The Railway Writer Who Turned Trains Into a Way of Seeing the World

Some travelers chase the farthest point on the map.

Monisha Rajesh chases the next platform.

She is a British-Indian travel writer and journalist best known for making long-distance railway travel the center of her literary life. Her books — Around India in 80 Trains, Around the World in 80 Trains, and Moonlight Express — do not treat trains as background transport. They treat the train as the journey itself: a moving room, a social experiment, a border-crossing machine, a memory chamber, a climate-conscious alternative, and one of the last public spaces where strangers still talk to one another. Her official biography records that her work has appeared in major publications including Time, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, and The Sunday Telegraph, and that she wrote a monthly column about traveling the world by train.

This makes her very different from the older travelers in this series.

She is not a monk crossing continents like Xuanzang or Vivekananda.
She is not a merchant witness like Afanasy Nikitin or Peter Mundy.
She is not a Mughal-era court observer like Bernier or Manucci.
She is not a colonial munshi-intelligence traveler like Mohan Lal Kashmiri.
She is not a reformer crossing oceans like Pandita Ramabai.
She is not a poet building a world-university like Rabindranath Tagore.

Monisha Rajesh belongs to the age of railway maps, border controls, online bookings, sleeper berths, carbon anxiety, mass tourism, airport fatigue, and identity split between ancestral homeland and country of birth.

Her work asks a modern question:

What happens when we slow down enough to meet the world carriage by carriage?

A British-Indian Railway Imagination

Monisha Rajesh was born in Norfolk, England, and grew up mostly in Britain, with a period of childhood in Madras, now Chennai. Google Books’ publisher description for Around India in 80 Trains says that in 1991 her family moved from Sheffield to Madras hoping to make India their home, and that two decades later she returned to Indian Railways in an attempt to understand a country that had become strange to her.

That background matters.

Rajesh does not approach India simply as a foreign tourist, nor simply as a returning native. Her position is more complicated: British-born, Indian-origin, partly formed by a childhood move to India, then distanced from India by years in Britain. That gives her first major railway book its emotional tension.

She is not only traveling around India.

She is traveling around an inheritance.

The train becomes a way to ask: what is India to someone whose parents came from there, who lived there as a child, who then returned to Britain, and who later came back not fully insider, not fully outsider?

This is why Around India in 80 Trains matters beyond railway enthusiasm. It is a diasporic travel book. The journey is geographic, but also personal.

Around India in 80 Trains

Around India in 80 Trains began with a bold and almost playful structure: take Jules Verne’s famous “80” idea and apply it to Indian Railways. The publisher description says that Rajesh turned to the map of Indian Railways and embarked on a journey around India in 80 train journeys, covering about 40,000 kilometres — roughly the circumference of the Earth.

That number is important, but the deeper idea is better.

India’s railways are not just transport. They are social infrastructure. They carry pilgrims, soldiers, students, migrant workers, honeymooners, traders, bureaucrats, tourists, families, vendors, railway staff, thieves, monks, schoolchildren, and almost every kind of Indian conversation. To travel by train across India is to pass through class, caste, language, religion, food, discomfort, generosity, heat, waiting, noise, and intimacy.

A plane reduces India to departure and arrival.

A train forces India to unfold.

Rajesh’s first book therefore enters a long Indian railway tradition: the railway as colonial technology, national connector, family memory, migrant corridor, cinematic setting, and democratic theatre. But she brings a British-Indian woman’s voice to it, which changes the angle. She is not writing as an old colonial officer amazed by the “native crowd.” She is not writing as an elite Indian reformer looking at Europe. She is watching India through a returnee’s mixed familiarity and estrangement.

The train becomes her method for re-entering India.

The Railway Carriage as a Social Room

Rajesh’s strength lies in treating trains as human spaces.

The publisher page for Around the World in 80 Trains describes the book as full of friendships, stories swapped with fellow passengers, and travelers encountered on board, while celebrating the glory of train travel. This is the heart of her style.

She is not only interested in the engineering of railways.

She is interested in the people railways gather.

A train compartment is one of the few spaces where strangers still share time without immediately escaping. On a train, people eat beside strangers, sleep near strangers, complain with strangers, watch landscapes with strangers, tell stories to strangers, and sometimes reveal more than they intended. Unlike the airplane, where speed and security compress experience, the train allows duration.

Duration is narrative.

This is why train writing works so well as literature. The train gives the writer a ready-made structure: departure, compartment, fellow passengers, stations, border crossings, delays, night, morning, arrival. But inside that structure, the human unpredictable always appears.

Rajesh’s travel writing lives in that unpredictability.

Around the World in 80 Trains

After India came the world.

Around the World in 80 Trains: A 45,000-Mile Adventure expanded Rajesh’s railway method globally. Bloomsbury describes the book as a 45,000-mile route, almost twice the circumference of the Earth, taking her from London’s St Pancras to Russia, Mongolia, North Korea, Canada, Kazakhstan, and beyond, including routes such as Tibet’s Qinghai railway and the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express.

This is a classic travel premise, but updated for a climate-conscious and post-tourist age.

A world journey by train is no longer only nostalgic. It feels newly urgent. Air travel has made the world fast, cheap, abstract, and environmentally costly. Rail travel restores friction. It makes the traveler feel distance. It makes borders visible. It turns geography back into lived experience.

A train journey from London into Europe, across Russia, into Asia, through North America, or across high-altitude Tibet is not just a route. It is a lesson in scale.

The traveler sees how the world is joined.

Not by airports alone.

By tracks, treaties, timetables, gauges, bureaucracies, old empires, new states, station food, sleeper compartments, railway workers, and the stubborn human desire to move.

The 45,000-Mile Argument

The subtitle of Around the World in 80 Trains — “A 45,000-Mile Adventure” — sounds like a travel boast, but it is also an argument.

The argument is that slowness can reveal what speed hides.

Bloomsbury’s description emphasizes that the journey moves from Tibet’s Qinghai railway to the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express and across countries including Russia, Mongolia, North Korea, Canada, and Kazakhstan. These are not just destinations. They are radically different political, ecological, cultural, and railway worlds.

A railway journey across such places lets a writer see transitions.

The landscape changes slowly.
Languages enter and fade.
Faces change gradually.
Borders interrupt continuity.
Stations reveal states.
Compartments reveal class.
Food reveals geography.
Delays reveal infrastructure.

This is why the train is not merely transport in Rajesh’s work.

It is a reading device.

Recognition and the Return of Train Writing

Around the World in 80 Trains won the National Geographic Traveller Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. This is confirmed both by Rajesh’s official biography and Bloomsbury’s author page.

That recognition matters because train travel writing might easily have seemed old-fashioned.

The railway book belongs to a long tradition: Paul Theroux, Eric Newby, Graham Greene, Jan Morris, and many others wrote about railway journeys. But Rajesh’s success shows that the genre still has life when handled from a new position.

Her position is important:

British-Indian,
female,
journalist,
postcolonial,
globally mobile,
climate-aware,
not writing from imperial privilege in the old mode,
and often writing with humor rather than heroic self-importance.

That combination refreshes the form.

The old railway traveler often sounded like a solitary man looking out from a compartment at the world.

Rajesh’s trains are more crowded, more conversational, more self-aware, and more modern.

Moonlight Express

Rajesh’s railway project continued with Moonlight Express: Around the World By Night Train.

Bloomsbury lists Moonlight Express as a 2025 book and describes it as a journey aboard night trains, from Austria’s Nightjet to the Caledonian Sleeper and the Santa Claus Express, celebrating moonlit landscapes, compartments, and the strange romance of sleeper trains.

This is a natural next step in her work.

Day trains show landscapes.

Night trains reveal trust.

To sleep on a train is to surrender control. You put your body inside a moving machine with strangers, borders, darkness, announcements, curtains, locked doors, shared toilets, midnight knocks, and dawn arrivals in cities where you are not yet fully awake. Night trains contain romance, but also vulnerability.

In a world of airport hotels and instant flights, the night train feels almost magical because it preserves transition. You do not simply teleport from one place to another. You go to sleep in one country and wake in another. The journey enters dreams.

By writing about night trains, Rajesh enters one of the most literary forms of travel: the nocturnal corridor between departure and arrival.

Why Night Trains Matter Now

The renewed interest in sleeper trains is not only nostalgic.

It belongs to the age of climate concern, overtourism, and exhaustion with air travel. Bloomsbury’s Moonlight Express page places Rajesh’s new journey within the continuing magic of railways after her books on India and global train travel.

Night trains matter because they solve several problems at once.

They save a hotel night.
They reduce short-haul flight dependency.
They make distance meaningful.
They turn travel time into rest time.
They revive regional connections.
They preserve the romance of departure.

But Rajesh is not naive. Her work often acknowledges inconvenience, discomfort, odd passengers, delays, bathrooms, ticketing chaos, borders, and the gulf between railway romance and railway reality. That honesty is crucial.

Train travel writing fails when it becomes pure nostalgia.

Rajesh’s strength is that she loves trains without pretending they are always easy.

A Modern Slow Traveler

Rajesh’s work belongs to the larger slow travel movement.

Slow travel is not simply moving slowly. It is a different ethics of attention. It values process over checklist, encounters over consumption, and routes over destinations. In railway travel, the journey cannot be hidden. The traveler must pass through the world rather than fly over it.

This makes Rajesh very different from social-media travel culture.

Many modern travel images erase waiting, fatigue, failed connections, ordinary people, and long transitions. Rajesh’s train books return all of that to the story. She writes about the between-space. The platform. The berth. The stranger. The smell. The meal. The view that lasts too long. The conversation that begins because there is nowhere else to go.

That is why her books matter to travel writing.

They remind us that travel is not only the destination’s photogenic surface.

Travel is the time spent getting there.

The British-Indian Question

Rajesh’s first book is especially important because it involves a return to India.

The publisher description says her family moved from Sheffield to Madras in 1991 hoping to make India home, and that she later turned to Indian Railways to lift the veil on a country that had become a stranger to her. This makes Around India in 80 Trains part of a long literature of return.

For diaspora writers, the ancestral homeland is never simple.

It can feel intimate and alien at once. Family stories claim it. Childhood memories complicate it. British life distances it. Visits compress it. Relatives translate it. Language, class, religion, gender, food, heat, bureaucracy, and belonging all become charged.

Rajesh’s choice of Indian Railways is therefore brilliant.

The railway refuses a single India. It gives her many Indias: metropolitan, rural, religious, secular, rich, poor, comic, hostile, kind, exhausting, generous, absurd, beautiful.

No one train can explain India.

Eighty trains cannot fully explain it either.

But eighty trains can break the illusion that India is one simple inheritance.

The Woman Traveler on Trains

Rajesh’s gender matters.

Travel writing has long been dominated by men who treat mobility as natural. Women travelers often have to think more carefully about safety, visibility, harassment, solitude, clothing, compartments, bathrooms, night journeys, and social judgment. Rajesh’s work belongs to the tradition of women who move through public space and write that movement into authority.

This places her in conversation with Krishnabhabini Das and Pandita Ramabai, though the contexts are radically different.

Krishnabhabini Das had to publish anonymously as “A Bengali Lady” in 1885 because female authorship and sea travel were socially dangerous in Bengal. Pandita Ramabai traveled to England and America as a widow-scholar and reformer, turning travel into an institutional campaign for women. Rajesh travels in a much later world, but the gendered dimension of travel has not disappeared.

A woman on a train is still read by others.

A woman travel writer still has to claim the authority to look.

Rajesh’s railway books do that without turning the journey into a constant declaration of danger. She normalizes the woman traveler as observer, participant, critic, and storyteller.

Humor as Method

One of Rajesh’s tools is humor.

Publisher descriptions repeatedly describe Around the World in 80 Trains as witty and irreverent. This matters because railway travel can easily become solemn: the grand route, the epic journey, the lonely traveler, the philosophical landscape.

Rajesh often punctures that grandeur.

Trains are not only sublime. They are messy, smelly, bureaucratic, cramped, loud, comic, irritating, and socially awkward. Someone snores. Someone eats something pungent. Someone talks too much. Someone helps unexpectedly. Someone behaves badly. A booking collapses. A toilet fails. A border guard appears. A beautiful view is interrupted by exhaustion.

Humor keeps travel writing honest.

It prevents the writer from becoming a hero.

Rajesh’s comic eye is part of her ethics. She sees travel as magnificent, but also ridiculous. That balance makes her more trustworthy.

The Railway as Anti-Airport

Rajesh’s books gain force because they appear in an age dominated by air travel.

The airplane has made travel faster, but also thinner. Airports are controlled spaces of security, retail, queues, announcements, and sameness. They erase the land between places. A person sleeps badly in one country and wakes in another without having felt the distance.

Trains do the opposite.

They preserve continuity.

A train shows the suburbs after the city. The fields after the suburbs. The industrial zone. The river. The border town. The mountains. The tunnel. The language shift in station signs. The food change at the platform. The weather moving across glass.

Rajesh’s work is not anti-modern. It is not a fantasy of returning to a pure past. It is an argument for a form of modern movement that still lets the traveler experience the world’s connectedness.

Railways are modern.

But they are human-scale modernity.

Compared With Paul Theroux

Any modern railway writer inevitably stands near Paul Theroux.

Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar made the long train journey one of the great modern travel-writing forms. But Rajesh’s work is not a copy of Theroux. Her voice, position, and era are different.

Theroux often writes with sharp solitude, irony, irritation, and masculine distance. Rajesh writes with wit too, but her books are more openly social, diasporic, and contemporary. She is less interested in being the solitary difficult man on the train and more interested in the human ecology of the compartment.

Theroux’s world is the late twentieth-century railway as literary endurance.

Rajesh’s world is the twenty-first-century railway as rediscovered intimacy and lower-carbon possibility.

Both understand that trains create narrative.

But Rajesh brings the genre into a new century.

Compared With Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore traveled the world as poet, educator, critic of nationalism, and founder of Visva-Bharati.

Rajesh travels the world by train as a journalist and literary travel writer.

Their purposes differ enormously, but one connection matters: both use travel to think beyond narrow identity. Tagore’s motto for Visva-Bharati imagined the world making home in a single nest. Rajesh’s trains enact a smaller, everyday version of that idea: strangers from different countries share compartments, stories, food, and hours.

Tagore sought civilizational dialogue.

Rajesh finds human dialogue at carriage level.

Tagore traveled by ship, train, and lecture circuit to imagine world-humanism.

Rajesh travels by rail to show how the world is still physically and socially connected.

One is philosophical.

The other is observational.

But both resist closed borders of the mind.

Compared With Swami Vivekananda

Vivekananda traveled across India as a monk, then to America and Europe as a spiritual teacher.

Rajesh travels as a secular railway writer.

Yet both show that travel changes the traveler’s relationship with India. Vivekananda’s wandering across India transformed his spiritual mission by confronting him with poverty and social reality. Rajesh’s railway journey through India transformed a diasporic distance into renewed, complicated contact.

Vivekananda’s India was a spiritual and social field.

Rajesh’s India is a railway field: platforms, berths, vendors, compartments, families, pilgrims, and strangers.

Vivekananda turned travel into service.

Rajesh turns travel into attention.

Compared With Pandita Ramabai

Pandita Ramabai traveled through India, England, and America to build support for women’s education and widow welfare.

Rajesh is not a reformer in that institutional sense, but both women use travel to read social structures. Ramabai looked at women’s education, institutions, religious networks, and public life. Rajesh looks at railways, passengers, borders, class, identity, and infrastructure.

Ramabai’s travel asked: how can women be educated and protected?

Rajesh’s travel asks: what do trains reveal about societies and selves?

Both are women whose mobility produces knowledge.

That continuity matters.

Compared With Krishnabhabini Das

Krishnabhabini Das went to England in the 1880s and wrote Englande Bangamahila, using English women’s lives to critique Bengali patriarchy.

Rajesh writes in a much later world, but she also belongs to the lineage of women who claim authority through travel.

Krishnabhabini’s journey began with opening the veil.

Rajesh’s journey begins with boarding the train.

The historical stakes are not the same. Krishnabhabini risked social scandal in a world where women’s travel and authorship were deeply restricted. Rajesh writes in a world where women travel writers are visible, published, reviewed, and celebrated.

But the deeper continuity remains:

women move, women observe, women write, and public space becomes literary space.

Compared With Mohan Lal Kashmiri

Mohan Lal Kashmiri traveled through Afghanistan, Central Asia, Britain, and Germany as a munshi, intelligence worker, and Great Game figure.

Rajesh’s world is almost the opposite of Mohan Lal’s.

Mohan Lal traveled for strategic knowledge in an age of empire.

Rajesh travels for literary knowledge in an age of global mobility.

Mohan Lal’s routes were tied to secrecy, diplomacy, war, and imperial intelligence.

Rajesh’s routes are tied to passenger networks, public railways, personal curiosity, and published storytelling.

Yet both remind us that movement produces information.

The difference is moral and historical: Mohan Lal’s information served empire; Rajesh’s observations serve readers trying to understand the lived texture of travel.

Compared With Lutfullah Khan

Lutfullah Khan wrote one of the earliest Indian English autobiographies, turning his mobile life across India and England into a self-narrative.

Rajesh also writes from between India and Britain, but in a modern diasporic register.

Lutfullah used English to present an Indian Muslim gentleman’s life to Victorian readers.

Rajesh uses English to explore how a British-Indian traveler negotiates India, the world, and the railway carriage as a shared human space.

Lutfullah’s travel was shaped by patronage, service, and colonial hierarchy.

Rajesh’s travel is shaped by publishing, journalism, global rail systems, and chosen itineraries.

Both show how English-language travel writing can be used by South Asian and South Asian-origin writers to claim narrative authority.

Compared With Yusuf Khan Kambalposh

Yusuf Khan Kambalposh saw Europe as Ajaibaat-e-Farang — the wonders of Europe — and wrote one of the earliest major Urdu travelogues.

Rajesh’s books also retain wonder, but her wonder is less about the foreignness of Europe and more about the persistence of railway life in a supposedly hypermodern world.

Yusuf’s Europe is theatre, fairyland, spectacle, and early Victorian astonishment.

Rajesh’s world is timetables, sleepers, platforms, bureaucracies, fellow passengers, landscapes, and the comedy of long journeys.

Yusuf writes at the beginning of Indian vernacular modern travel writing.

Rajesh writes in a global publishing market where travel writing must justify itself in an age of climate crisis and digital saturation.

Both turn movement into literary spectacle.

But Rajesh’s spectacle is slower and more democratic: a berth, a window, a corridor, a stranger’s story.

The Ethics of Slowness

Rajesh’s work speaks to a world facing climate anxiety.

Train travel is not automatically pure or simple, but it is often lower-carbon than flying, especially over routes where rail networks are strong. More importantly for literature, trains change the traveler’s sense of responsibility. They make movement visible. They show that distance has cost, time, and geography.

This is one reason her books feel timely.

They arrive after decades of cheap-flight culture made travel feel almost weightless. The train restores weight. It asks the traveler to spend time, share space, and accept inconvenience. It makes travel less consumptive and more relational.

Slow travel is not only about speed.

It is about humility.

Rajesh’s books do not preach this heavily. They demonstrate it. The reader feels time passing. That is the point.

The New Railway Canon

Monisha Rajesh has become part of a renewed railway travel-writing canon.

Her books stand alongside classic rail narratives but speak to new readers: people tired of airports, interested in lower-carbon travel, curious about sleeper trains, nostalgic for rail romance, or seeking a more grounded way to experience the world.

Her official site lists Around the World in 80 Trains, and Bloomsbury confirms her latest railway work Moonlight Express as a 2025 book on night trains. Travel + Leisure lists her core train-related books as Around India in 80 Trains, Around the World in 80 Trains, Epic Train Journeys, and Moonlight Express.

This body of work matters because it is coherent.

Many travel writers move from subject to subject. Rajesh has built a recognizable literary territory: the railway as world. India, the globe, night trains, epic routes — each book returns to the same central insight from a different angle.

The train is not her gimmick.

It is her lens.

What Monisha Rajesh Sees Clearly

Rajesh sees that trains make society visible.

Class is visible in train categories.
State power is visible at borders.
Infrastructure is visible in delays.
Hospitality is visible in shared food.
Loneliness is visible in night compartments.
Climate choices are visible in transport decisions.
Identity is visible in who feels at home and who does not.

She also sees that travel writing does not need to pretend the traveler is heroic. The best travel scenes often happen when plans fail, strangers interrupt, bodies get tired, tickets confuse, and the traveler is forced to listen.

Her books are strongest when the train becomes a stage for ordinary people.

Not kings.
Not saints.
Not explorers planting flags.
Passengers.

That is a democratic vision of travel.

What Her Work Is Not

Rajesh should not be forced into the old “great explorer” category.

She is not claiming to discover countries. She is not mapping unknown lands. She is not writing from imperial authority. She is not presenting herself as a lone conqueror of routes.

Her work is modern travel literature: reflective, comic, social, observational, and self-aware. It belongs to an age when travel writing must answer difficult questions about privilege, climate, representation, and why anyone should still read a traveler’s account of places already photographed millions of times.

Rajesh’s answer is the train.

Because the train is not only about the place.

It is about the passage.

Why Monisha Rajesh Still Matters

Monisha Rajesh matters because she has made the railway journey newly literary for the twenty-first century.

Her books restore the value of slowness in an impatient age. They show that a country cannot be understood only through airports, hotels, and monuments. They show that identity can be explored through routes, compartments, and chance meetings. They show that travel writing can still work when it gives up the fantasy of discovery and focuses instead on attention.

Her place in this long series of travelers is modern but meaningful.

Older travelers crossed deserts, seas, courts, empires, pilgrim routes, and mountain passes. Rajesh crosses platforms, borders, sleeper berths, and railway maps. Her terrain is not empty wilderness but connected world: India’s vast rail network, the Trans-Siberian imagination, Tibet’s high-altitude rails, North Korean trains, Canadian distances, Kazakhstan’s expanses, European night services, and the intimate theatre of shared compartments.

In the long history of travelers, Monisha Rajesh stands as the railway writer of slow modernity: a British-Indian traveler who turned trains into a way of reading India, the world, and herself — one carriage, one stranger, one night journey, and one window at a time.