Of myriad travels

Across the Seven Seas
Anuradha Kumar
Hachette
2015, pp 170, Rs 250

If you like to pick up and perfunctorily examine oddball characters and incidents from history, then Across the Seven Seas by Anuradha Kumar is worth a look.

Her book is a collection of 14 Indian travelogues from the 18th and 19th centuries, who draw your attention for hurtling through tumultuous journeys through the past four centuries and myriad countries. The book chronicles some interesting anecdotes and descriptions, rather than three-dimensional journeys, moving you not only through geographies, but also through time-scapes, cultures and shifts in characters.

Yet the accounts are not remarkable or memorable, but just too sketchy and banal. It’s a bare bones chronicle of mini biographies — brief outlines, many details and incidents, hardly loaded with the cultural, economic and political baggage of tumultuous and transforming eras.

Those were the times of shifting sands and people who were pinned into their comfort zones by invisible steel hoops. There are chronicles of 14 Indians who sailed through smooth and stormy oceans into England, Italy, Turkey, Russia, America, China, Africa and many more lands. It all happened when a technological and cultural revolution was churning the world, yet were rarely touched or commented upon by Indians then.

Hence, their own accounts and records, from which the author has selected and written her book, would have been priceless perspectives seen through baffled, wondering prisms. Yet, the book does not make them come alive, but just inexorably piles on the details. The author’s approach is pedantic and does not enrich as it informs, and is rather like a school textbook. For instance, she describes Behramji Malabari thus: “Malabari was born in Baroday, now a city in Gujarat…He was proficient in both Gujarati and English. His second book of poems, written in Englilsh, following the first written in Gujarati, won considerable acclaim when it was published in 1877.”

Still, in a way that could be called the strength of the book — the unusual subject and patchwork collection of information that is not likely to be too available today. If you can accept its flaws, you can get through each journey’s facts and points of view.

They work on the reader in two ways- — sometimes they are surprising due to the unusualness, while at other times they tend to amuse, as the modern reader is familiar with them, but recognises that they were bemusing to the past traveller.

For instance: “I’tsesamuddin mentioned the shepherds who slept out in the open, spreading half their cloak on the ground, while covering themselves with the other half. When the snow collected on the cloak, they would jump up, give the cloak a shake, before lying down to rest again.”

In China, Indumadhab Mallick observed: “The streets with row houses made of bricks on either side, were extremely narrow and filthy. Large pots were placed just by the roadside for people to spit and even relieve themselves right there, and this left a terrible odour all over the place. However, human waste was used as manure.”

It is also interesting to view the manner in which the Indians looked at characters in those days: “The English, (I’tsesamuddin) wrote, avoided self-praise. If someone was praised highly, it was considered appropriate to look bashful, even embarrassed. Flattery too was something that was frowned on.”

Swami Vivekananda is the most famous among the travellers, but not all are known so well today. Some names ring more bells than others, such as Pandita Ramabai, the feisty feminist, Toru Dutt, the romantic writer, Ardaseer Cursetjee, the ship-builder, Indumadhab Mallick, the innovator and traveller to China — they all evoke interest.

While the collection reflects her hard work and cherry pickings from life, and her expressions of surprise and wonderment, Anuradha’s book does not rivet or engross beyond a point. By the end of the book, therefore, there might not be too much that remains in the casual reader’s mind from the maze of details. To the intrepid reader, however, a stubborn re-read would perhaps help.