With Durgacharan Rakshit’s “Journeys Across India,” you may journey back in time to late 19th-century India

India has no history of travel literature, in contrast to many western nations or even some non-western ones like China or Morocco (see Hieun Tsang or Ibn Batuta). Only in the 19th century did we learn it from the British, but judging by Durgacharan Rakshit’s “Journeys Across India,” we picked it up quickly and rather well.

This book, “Bharat Pradakshin,” which was first published in Bengali in 1903 and has just recently been translated into English, is a literary gem. It transports the reader to almost every region of India during the last quarter of the 1800s and is a treasure trove of historical pleasures.

During that period, the country was still administered by the British, with Kolkata (Calcutta) serving as the capital instead of Delhi, and its frontiers extending beyond Peshawar to the west and Chittagong (Chattogram) to the east. At that time, motorized transportation had not yet reached India, and electricity had not yet started, making travel far more difficult, costly, and time-consuming than it is now.

Rakshit was a ghee merchant from Kolkata who undertook a series of journeys throughout India over an eighteen-year period between 1875 and 1900. His descendants, two of whom have written Forewords to the book, claim that he wrote about these trips, first as feature stories in magazines like Nabyabharat and Janmabhoomi and then compiling them into this book.

He traveled by train, which appears to have been fairly well established by that point (Rakshit devotes an engaging paragraph to how this had revolutionized Indian life); he also traveled by horse and buggy, by ship, steamer, sailing boat, and raft, on foot, and on horseback; once in Kashmir, he traveled in a “litter,” a sort of palanquin, after becoming completely exhausted. He endured torrential rain, tumbling boulders, choppy waves, and small, filthy rooms (hotels were rare outside of major towns),, yet downplays his physical hardships.

His journey starts with excursions into adjacent states, such as Cuttack, Bhubaneswar, and Puri in Odisha. He then moves to Varanasi and takes a boat down the Ganga to Calcutta, stopping at all the important places en route. He continues on to Shillong and Guwahati, passing close to the border of Nagaland, before arriving at Darjeeling. He soon becomes more daring, and in the second part, he describes his journey from Rawalpindi to Srinagar and beyond, passing via Murree en route. After that, he returns to Punjab and heads east, this time to Lahore, Amritsar, and Ludhiana. His itinerary then includes Haridwar and Rishikesh, Delhi, Kanpur, Lucknow, and Allahabad.

Rakshit is in Jaipur and Ajmer in the third leg. From there, he goes south to Ahmedabad, Vadodara, and Surat before heading east to Mumbai and Pune. He travels across portions of central India after leaving Maharashtra and arriving in Jabalpur. The last and longest stretch covers the south, where he travels via Kochi to Thiruvananthapuram and Rameshwaram before returning to Chennai and sailing to Kolkata.

Everywhere he visits, Rakshit not only takes meticulous notes on the environment, including the trees, mountains, and rivers, but also on the clothing, dialects, and traditions of the locals. He also gives a brief overview of the region’s history. He was obviously a very knowledgeable guy who had done a great deal of research on each of these locations before visiting. (However, several of his historical, social, and anthropological claims are clearly dubious and shouldn’t be accepted at face value.)

Being very spiritual, he has a special interest in temples and visits each significant one along the route, giving detailed descriptions of its design, background, and mythical importance.

In between these particulars are humorous anecdotes from the author’s own life. For example, while observing a yagya in Varanasi, where alcohol is offered to the deity, the author notes that the priests are also occasionally seen taking sips, leading him to surmise that if this was the prescribed ritual, the “ancient priests” must have been “confirmed drunkards.” After traveling through the stunning Kashmiri landscape, he arrives at Srinagar and finds the city’s wooden homes and winding lanes “very repulsive” and the music of the region “not at all pleasant.” After seeing solely Sikh troops in Kolkata, he is shocked to learn that his prior idea of Punjabis being tall and well-built was “totally unfounded” when he arrives in Amritsar.

Having traveled from Kolkata, he is unimpressed by Mumbai, saying, “I had been hearing a lot about the beauty of Bombay but today I found it to be a city of thatched huts.” Concrete homes are uncommon. Toilet cleaners carry the night dirt in open cans, and the highway is lined with toilets. There isn’t the same drainage system as in Calcutta. Although there are a few water taps scattered around, the water is not treated. Although there are gaslights on the streets, they are not sufficiently bright.

However, he concedes that women in western India had much more freedom than in Bengal — “the unrestricted mingling among men and women startled us… Gujarati women also don’t give much thought to the guys in this place. He is thrilled to see female actresses on stage while seeing a play in Pune since Indian film has not yet made it there. He says, “Since they do not maintain purdah here, it is not dishonorable for respectable females to participate on stage… Male actors doing female parts in Calcutta seem really ugly.

Over the last 20 years, there has been a significant improvement in the English translations of regional Indian literature. This one, written by novelist and English professor Sarbani Putatunda of Kolkata, satisfies the highest requirements. Since Bengali was still developing in the late 19th century and some of the terms used by Rakshit are no longer present in Bengali or Sanskrit dictionaries, as she points out in her Introduction, it required a lot of effort.

A few abnormalities, nevertheless, are confusing. The passage “Our car reached Surat in the wee hours of the morning” appears on page 170. Given that the first motorized cars are said to have arrived in India in 1897, how was it ever possible? On page 195, Rakshit describes how the train he was riding on “looked like an airplane” as it soars above the Western Ghats. Considering that the aircraft was created in 1902, how could he know?