Traveller on the Silk Road: Rites and Routes of Passage in Rahul Sankrityayan’s Himalayan Wanderlust

Abstract

In his quest to travel further and to learn more, Rahul Sankrityayan assiduously collected and collated tomes of invaluable information in his many narratives landscaping the Himalayas. He travelled ubiquitously—his journeys taking him to different parts of India, including Ladakh, Kinnaur and Kashmir. The gaze of this inveterate traveller stretched to Nepal, Tibet, Sri Lanka, Persia, China and the Soviet Union. From his several trips to Tibet, sometimes in the guise of a Buddhist monk, he transported with him valuable manuscripts in Pali and Sanskrit, as also some cultural relics and paintings. According to accounts, Sankrityayan brought back 22 mule loads of books and paintings, from Tibet to India. Most of these were earlier housed in the libraries of Vikramshila and Nalanda Universities, but were taken to Tibet in the 12th century by fleeing Buddhist monks. The journeys that Sankrityayan made culminated in a variety of writings—travelogues, folklore, fiction, drama and essay. In a rare combination, he straddled a range of disciplines—anthropology, history, philosophy, Buddhism, Tibetology and politics. Weaving history as fiction, Sankrityayan created a world fashioned by his unique unusual command over various languages—Tibetan, Sanskrit, Pali, Hindi amongst others, in raconteurs reflecting the many radical departures of his eventful life.¹ In his lesser known work evocative of Kinnaur, ‘Kinnar Desh Mein’ (Sankrityayan 2010b), Sankrityayan weaves a narrative through the lens of history, ethnography, religion, culture and politics in this trans-Himalayan region, locating in 1948, a historical discourse integrating various strands of identity, culture and livelihood in this marginalized world. By invoking his ‘Treatise on Travelling/wandering/nomadism’ or ‘Ghumakkad Shastra’(Sankrityayan 2010a) as the methodology, in a trope bridging autobiography, social history and travelogue, Sankrityayan provides a multi-textured narrative of silk-routes crisscrossing the Hindustan–Tibet Road (Briggs as cited in Marshall 2004: 166),² instituting an entirely new genre of travel writing in the twentieth century Hindi world.