The Great Travelers: Part One- Rahul Sankritayan

"The best thing in life is to be a globetrotter. Nothing can be more beneficial to an individual and the society."
Rahul Sankritayan

I am starting a new 20 part series on the 20 great travelers of the world… they have been a source of inspiration and awe for me, ever since I knew about them. They include luminaries like Ibn Batuta and Sir Richard Francis Burton… to lesser known Pundit Nain Singh and Rahul Sankritayan. I will begin with a lesser known person called Rahul Sankritayan.

Before I begin… I would like to state that a lot of information on these people is from internet and readings… I don’t have any primary information on these great people, but I have punctuated this information with my thoughts on the achievements of the individuals in question. The idea was to present the scattered information in place.

I have a lot of ideological differences with my father. Not that his ideologies in life are wrong… I think his ideologies are warped by time. He used to be a leftist in his initial years… gradually turned rightist- around the same time I toyed with a lot of ideas… was much influenced with Marx… then with Ambedkar… but today I believe that only Gandhi has solutions for the ills of entire humanity.

Despite the differences… I owe to my father… an initiation into the world of intellectual enquiry… of reading and forming opinions… of questioning the written words and deriving new theories.

More than that, I owe him an introduction to the microcosm of wanderers.

The very first wanderer that I read about (upon his initiation) - was Rahul Sankritayan. And though I had read about Ibn Batuta, Magellan, Columbus, Vasco Da Gama et al… in my school text books, they failed to entice me. Reading about Rahul Sankritayan and his journeys was an eye opener. I was mesmerized by Volga se Ganga Tak… learning the basics of wandering from his book "Ghummakad Shastra" (The Science of Wandering).

It’s a pity that today nobody knows about this great man. He was the person who not only initiated me into Traveling but also into the greatness of Communism as a socio-political philosophy… and Buddhism as a spiritual philosophy. Much of what I am today is due to this great man.

I take the liberty of reproducing parts of an essay written by Hiren Bose (www.hirenbose.blogspot.com) on this great wanderer. I couldn’t have produced anything better.

“Rahul Sankritayan was India's greatest traveler and a nomad. After traveling on the Earth, he went on a voyage to the other world, I am confident there too he will not rest in peace,” wrote his friend, photographer Phani Mukherjee, paying tribute to Rahul Sankritayan.

Rahul Sankritayan visited Tibet, crossing the mountains on a horse and on a foot, at a time when there were no flights and the forbidden land was inaccessible. An inveterate traveler and a globetrotter, this incessant gypsy visited Tibet, France, Germany, Finland, China, Korea, Manchuria and Russia between 1907 and 1963. He said of globetrotting: "the best thing in life is to be a globetrotter. Nothing can be more beneficial to an individual and the society."

He never attended college and yet was invited to teach Buddhist philosophy in Soviet Russia's Leningrad University. That was Rahul Sankritayan-litterateur, linguist, philosopher, historian, theologist, lexicographer, Gandhian, Buddhist monk and Marxist. A renaissance man, though proficient in 16 languages, he preferred to write in Hindi, as "it is the language of the masses." Russian academist F E Schebrosky who invited him to Leningrad University said about Rahul, “He is the only man in the world who entered Tibet surreptitiously, a place barred to outsiders. Stayed in a Buddhist muth, learnt the language and had the courage to bring back to India manuscripts which the country had lost.”

Born on April 9, 1893 at Pandha village in Azamgarh district of Uttar Pradesh, Rahul was sent to a local madrasa where he familiarized himself with Urdu, Sanskrit, Nepali and Marathi. Married at the tender age of 11, he fled to Calcutta when 14 with an urge to see the world. Though bitter experiences made him return home, two years later he went back to Calcutta. From here he walked all the way to Ayodhaya to study the Vedas.

His quest to see different places took him to Haridwar, Deoprayag, Tehri, Jamnotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath and the southern States. In 1912 he reached Benaras and became the disciple of a mahant. After accepting mudra and the mantra, he became Sadhu Damodardas. This phase of his life did not last long. Disillusioned with the life of a sadhu, he shed the saffron robes to become an Arya Samaji. He was not happy with this role either for long. In 1927, during his trip to Sri Lanka, he became a Buddhist monk and assumed the name, which stuck to him till his death--Rahul Sankritayan.

He was unable to recognize his ‘childhood wife’ when he came back home some 34 years later. In fact, he had never accepted his alliance since he considered it as a child marriage. While in Russia he married a Mongol intellectual lady, Yelena Novretona- Kozroboskya in December 1937. Within months he had to leave Soviet Russia as his visa expired and returned to India. It was in 1947 that Rahul got the opportunity to meet Yelena and his son, Igor when he visited Russia. After a stay of couple of months he had return to his homeland as India was going through cataclysmic phase, the country in the process of achieving freedom from two century of British rule. That was last he could set his eye on his wife and son. Repeated attempts by Yelena to visit her husband in India were frustrated by the Soviet authorities. Writes Rahul’s son, Igor, whose memoir originally published in Russia and translated for Hans (July 2003), “Mother appealed to the authorities that she be allowed to write letters to father but was rewarded with meaningless official replies. My father through his friends in Leningrad University and those who visited Soviet Russia tried to contact my mother but she was kept engaged in her chores day and night and not allowed to meet anyone. This ended in 1953 by when no one was trying to trace us.” At the age of 51, Rahul married Dr Kamla and remained a householder until his death in 1963.

Born in an orthodox Hindu family, Rahul went on to become an Arya Samajist, Buddhist and a Communist, accepting scientific humanism as his creed.

His autobiography, his collection of stories ‘Volga Se Ganga Tak’, his research oriented works like ‘Darshan-Digdrashan’, ‘Buddha Charya’ and ‘Dohakosh’; ‘Sashan Sabdakosh’, the 16,000 word English-Hindi dictionary; ‘Madhya Asia Ka Itihas’, a historical work in two volumes; his work on the Hindi dialectics like Bhojpuri, Maithili and Maghi; and collection and compilation of folk literature is a seminal contribution which is unlikely to be excelled by others in the near future. For his seminal work ‘Madhya Asia Ka Itihas’ (History of Central Asia) on which he worked for 18 long years, including the two years he spent in Leningrad University was, awarded the Sahitya Akademi award.

His greatest contribution was in the field of travel writing, a totally different genre, which stands unexcelled even today, at least in Hindi. Like travelers of yore (Marco Polo, Huen Tsang, Fa Hien and others), Rahul used transport only when necessary and made it a point to travel on foot. Like a social scientist, he searched the genesis of customs, questioned the traditions and causes, and all along providing answers to the intriguing readers.

He tried his hand in every genre of writing-biography, profile, history, archaeology, theology, sociology, political propaganda, logistics, literary criticism, research of ancient texts, lexicography, journalism and even translation. He translated from Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Prakrit, English, Urdu and Russian rendering them into Hindi. He left some 138 books and many of his manuscripts still remain unpublished. Sadly, most Indians remain unaware of the vast repository of Rahul’s works. Only handful of his books has been rendered in Bangla and Malayalam.

Recognition from the country came very late. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan, when his mental powers had deteriorated to the extent that he had completely lost his memory, and remained in this state till the last years of his life. Reminisced journalist Prabhakar Machwe: “He spent the last four years of his life in great pain, for he had lost his memory. The man who accumulated so much treasure of knowledge in the last years of his life he could neither write his name nor read. A strange curse a progressive individual and a creator of new paths of knowledge had to bear.”