ABSTRACT
Shanta Devi, the elder of the two daughters of Ramananda Chattopadhyay and his wife Manaroma, was born on 29 August 1893. She visited several countries and wrote about her travels extensively. She and her sister wrote a novel, Udyanlata (The Garden Creeper) and translated a significant body of work, including Srishchandra Basu’s Folk Tales of Hindustan. The book was illustrated by Upendrakishore. She also wrote and published interesting travelogues about her visit to Japan and Kashmir. The idea of forming a federal Indian nation was one of the political possibilities that was ardently discussed starting in the early 1930s, and for Shanta Devi, the train journey was a way of expanding geographical consciousness. Her narrative also reveals her eagerness to observe the past in the present, searching through history to identify the markers of pasts civilisations that she encountered on the journey.
