The tiny Baltic nation of Lithuania is connected to India not just through linguistic affinities with Sanskrit but also through the people who have set foot here.
Over four centuries, six intrepid Lithuanians have arrived in India, drawn by a zeal to preach, teach or travel, or by friendship or love. They came by sailboat, train and motorbike.
And now they are revisiting our shores together via a comic book, titled First Lithuanian Travelers in India.
“We are completing 10 years of renewed cultural ties, marking the time since a seminar exploring the links was held in Kolkata in 2013. Two of the six characters in the book — Schlomith Flaum and Antanas Poska — have links with Bengal. So we thought of bringing it here after the launch in Delhi yesterday,” Diana Mickeviciene, Lithuania’s ambassador to India, said at Arts Acre in New Town on Thursday.
The conference, she said, threw up interesting material on the intellectual exchanges between prominent figures from the two countries. Mahatma Gandhi and architect Hermann Kallenbach were friends in South Africa and stayed together at a Johannesberg farm.
Flaum, an associate of the educator Maria Montessori, met Rabindranath Tagore in New York and volunteered to teach at Visva-Bharati.
Poska studied Sanskrit and Esperanto, met both Gandhi and Tagore, did his bachelor’s in anthropology in Bombay and submitted his PhD thesis at Calcutta University.
But long before them, Andrius Rudamina, a Jesuit priest, reached Goa in 1625. The latest to arrive of the six was Luba Derczanska-Hamied, the mother of the head of the pharmaceutical company Cipla, Yusuf Hamied, who had given birth to her son in Lithuania in 1936 and later settled in India.
First came a compilation of essays in 2017, in which Mickeviciene wrote on Poska. “Then my predecessor Laimonas Talat-Kelpsa thought of telling their stories through comics,” she said.
Artist Migle Anusauskaite, who was present at the launch, took up the project. The book came out in Lithuanian in 2021 and has now been translated into English.