The humble bicycle, a token of pride
Every year, June 3 is celebrated as ‘World Bicycle Day’ to promote wider use of the bicycle and highlight its health and environmental benefits.
Roughly a century ago though, the bicycle became a symbol of adventure and nationalistic pride for India when two young men set out on path-breaking journeys to cover the world on two wheels.
Bimal Mukherjee
The first of them was Bimal Mukherjee from Calcutta. In 1926, accompanied by three friends, he set out on a globe-trotting adventure on a bicycle.
Cycling through the northern Indian plains, the quartet arrived in Delhi from where they procured necessary permissions. Traversing the Thar desert, Mukherjee and his friends traveled to Karachi from where they sailed to Basra in Iraq.
From Basra, they cycled through the Arabian desert, Syria, Turkey, and entered Europe. The next leg of their journey took them through Bohemia (later Czechoslovakia), Greece, Italy, the Swiss Alps, Germany & France, finally reaching England.
Thereon, the quartet cycled through Scandinavia and the Soviet Baltic states before boarding a ship to the US and from there to South America. Cycling through Columbia, Peru, and Ecuador, they sailed for Japan via Hawaii.
In the final stretch of their journey, the young men cycled through China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Burma - finally arriving back home in 1937.
A big motivation for this incredible adventure was a strong sense of nationalism - to show the colonial masters that native Indians did not lack in courage or determination.
Ramnath Biswas
Another young Indian infused with this nationalistic fervor was Ramnath Biswas, who undertook a similar adventure and he did it not once but thrice!
Born in Sylhet in present day Bangladesh, Biswas had been part of the armed revolutionary movement in Bengal. In 1931, Biswas, then based in Malaysia, set out on a solo bike trip.
Cycling through Southeast and Far East Asia, he arrived in Japan from where he sailed to Canada where he was arrested there for illegal entry before returning to India.
In 1936, Biswas set off once again, this time westward - retracing the tyre marks of Mukherjee and his friends through Arabia, Asia Minor, Europe, eventually arriving in England. His effort to travel northwards towards Scotland was cut short due to poor health and he was forced to return to India.
In 1938, sufficiently recovered, Biswas traveled from Bombay to Mombasa in Kenya, and from thereon, cycled through the dense forests of East Africa before arriving in South Africa from where he sailed to the USA. After some more cycling adventures in the States, Biswas finally returned to India in 1940.
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