Mark Twain: The travelling philosopher

November is upon us, but I have chosen to linger in midsummer. This desire to dawdle instead of hurtling towards the end of 2021 has got nothing to do with the year. I have no affection for it, and am relieved that its Kafkaesque days will soon be over. 

Midsummer, however, has its moments, and I plan to enjoy those for as long as I can, if only in the chimeric topography of my imagination. For we have sailed, Mark Twain and I; we have embarked upon a voyage, a lecture trip across the British Empire. His travelogue, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World, published by him in 1897, chronicles this journey, which commences over a glistening summer sea towards Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa.

How thrilling, then, to be in the midst of the Pacific Ocean, to settle down in our deck chairs with our field glasses. But we won’t be comfortable for long — the Fates have marked us for upheavals, and to prove their point, the deck chairs collapse, causing a fair amount of embarrassment. An ominous occurrence, but I am not too perturbed, at least not yet. There are other distractions to buoy my spirits. The captain of the ship is young, dashing, and courteous. He isn’t prone to swearing or laughing loudly or chewing tobacco or making puns. And I agree wholeheartedly with Mark Twain’s opinion that there is a “…grace and finish about his manners which made whatever place he happened to be in seem for the moment a drawing room.”  

To read Following the Equator is to be privy to Mark Twain’s worldview: Wry observations, imperialist notions, quaint philosophies, moral and ethical perplexities. The travelogue was written after he filed for bankruptcy in 1894. He had invested unwisely in the Paige Compositor, an imprecise typesetting machine that left him in debt. He set out on the lecture trip in 1895, amidst financial difficulties and the torments of ill health. He was 60 years old, and suffered from carbuncles, a fact he mentions with characteristic irony at the outset of the book: “Two members of my family elected to go with me. Also a carbuncle. The dictionary says a carbuncle is a kind of jewel. Humor is out of place in a dictionary.” 

Humour isn’t out of place in Mark Twain’s journals, though. In fact, it ripples through his descriptions, creating traceries of light upon the grim landscapes of colonial rule. But he is wary of exuberance. The world is a cruel place, teeming with natives, aboriginals, colonisers, and missionaries. Their histories must be told, but to be lighthearted would mean that Mark Twain the curious traveller is an insensitive collector of anecdotes, and an indelicate, somewhat boisterous narrator. He isn’t. His wit is potent arsenal, deployed to expose unfairness and hypocrisy. Each chapter of Following the Equator has an epigraph from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.” The novel Pudd’nhead Wilson was published in 1894, and Mark Twain borrows its protagonist’s name to create a source for a collection of sardonic maxims. Chapter XVII, for instance, is headed with:

The English are mentioned in the Bible:

Blessed are the meek, for they shall 

inherit the earth. 

–Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar. 

While Mark Twain is critical of imperialist exploits and the proliferation of the British Empire’s legions, in India, his commentary often slips into Orientalist tropes and subversions. It is here, in the subcontinent, that Mark Twain the philosophical archivist becomes Mark Twain the sahib. India to him is “a barbaric gorgeousness”; Bombay is, “A bewitching place, a bewildering place, an enchanting place — the Arabian Nights come again!” Fascinated by the colours in the streets and bazaars, enthralled by the sound (and taste) of princely titles like the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Nabob of Jubbelpore, Mark Twain picks an unsettling name for his bearer: Satan. His descriptions of Indian villages, while more realistic than exotic, are laced with condescension: “There is nothing pretty about an Indian village — a mud one — and I do not remember that we saw any but mud ones on that long flight to Allahabad.” 

A disturbing smugness creeps into Mark Twain’s recollections. But I have chosen not to feel offended. I have decided, instead, to celebrate the American writer, publisher, lecturer, and reckless entrepreneur, whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, and who was born in the month of November — November 30, 1835, to be precise (and precision is vital to commemorating him). For who else would make a list of the names of quaint Australasian towns like Coomooroo or Toowoomba; who else would fret over the shape of the Southern Cross, “…a cross that is out of repair”; who else would ostensibly circumambulate the globe, only to journey within. 

The writer is the author of Stillborn Season, a novel set amidst the anti-Sikh riots of 1984