Shankar's journey - the full map

The journey that Shankar completes in Chander Pahar is an epic one. Starting from Mombasa, in what is now Kenya, he travels through countries in Central Africa, South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and leaves for India from Beira, in what is now Mozambique.

There may have been longer and more difficult fictional journeys, but I can't recall them. In comparison, the Odyssey is but a short, albeit fraught trip, among the little islands in Greece.

Here's the full map (drawn by me, hence inaccurate and purely indicative) of this journey.

Beira was established in 1890 by the Portuguese and soon became the main port in the Portuguese-administered territory. The Portuguese built the port and a railway to Rhodesia, Portuguese families settled in the newly-founded locality and started to develop commercial activities. Before Mozambique's independence from Portugal, as a city of Portuguese Mozambique, Beira was noted for its well-equipped seaport, one of the major facilities of its kind in all East Africa, tourism, fishing and trade. The city prospered as a cosmopolitan port with different ethnic communities (Portuguese, Indian, Chinese, indigenous Africans) employed in administration, commerce, and industry. During the colonial era, a large English-speaking population was the result of being a favourite holiday destination for white Rhodesians.

I found this picture in Wikipedia - "View of Rua Conseleheira Ennes, Beira, Mozambique. Photograph of original postcard c1905, published by The Rhodesia Trading Co. Ltd., Beira", dated1905.

Perhaps Shankar travelled from Salisbury to Beira in this very train.

                  














(Both these pictures are taken from Wikipedia and rights belong to their various owners).
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Bankim Chandra's Rajsingha

During his travels in Africa, Shankar had only one book as a companion, the historical novel "Rajsingha" (also spelt "Rajsimha") by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay.

Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay is best known today as the composer of India’s national song Vande Mataram. Bankim Chandra wrote 13 novels and several ‘serious, serio-comic, satirical, scientific and critical treaties’ in Bengali. His works were widely translated into other regional languages of India as well as in English.

Bankim Chandra is widely regarded as a key figure in literary renaissance of Bengal as well as India. Some of his writings, including novels, essays and commentaries, were a breakaway from traditional verse-oriented Indian writings, and provided an inspiration for authors across India.

He wrote a number of historical novels, which were scarcely true historically, but were intended to arouse and promote Hindu patriotism and Hindu nationalism. The victories won by the Hindus in the different novels are won against Muslim forces, consisting either of Muslims alone, as in Rajsingha (1882) and Sitaram (1887), or of Muslims with British officers, as in Devi Chaudhurani and Anandamath. See here.

"Rajsingha" is set in Rajasthan, about a Mughal-Hindu conflict when Emperor Aurangzeb imposed the jiziya tax on Hindus. Rajsimha is an Indian prince who defends a princess and eventually marries her.

In an article titled "Jatiyo Itihaas vis-à-vis Manab Itihaas: Tagore theHistoriographer", Sajalkumar Bhattacharya, Ramakrishna Mission Residential College, India, has written:

"Tagore enjoys reading Rajsingha and for that matter, all historical novels, only because he discerns here, to his utter satisfaction, the successful discharge of the poet of the duty of a historian. The hitherto missing ‘their stories’ that supplement in this novel the official, recorded history, gives him considerable satisfaction, because he notes that here, at least, history has not hegemonised the common man and attempted to silence its polyphonic voice. Tagore who has always followed keenly the struggle between the ‘grand national history’ (brihat jatiyo itihaas) and the ‘intense human history’ (tibro manab itihaas) gives full marks to Rajsingha, only because, in this novel, this flow of human history has all along been kept vibrantly alive and protected from the hegemonic tendency of the official history of the nation. The character sketch of Jebunnisa is the example that strikes him. Tagore feels he cannot praise Bankim enough for he has been able to save Jebunnisa from being lost in the maze of ‘important’ historical events. Rather, Bankim has always been meticulously careful to record this ordinary, helpless woman’s pain and tears in conjunction with his narration of the great events of the Mughal history. Tagore locates the success of a poet precisely here – in his ability to see beyond an ordinary historian, and incorporate what the historian fails to do. So, it is Bankim, the novelist (who successfully records the rich manab itihaas), and not Bankim, the historian (who aspires to record the jatiyo itihaas), to whom Tagore likes to go back again and again."

Readers who are interested could do worse than read two other books about historical tales from Rajasthan - Abanindranath Tagore's "Rajkahini" (a wonderful collection of stories about the Ranas of Mewar starting with Bappaditya) and James Tod's wonderful two-volume collection "Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan." The latter may well have inspired the former.