On the Wonder that is India

By Tiki Rajwi

Published: 07th March 2015 06:00 AM

Last Updated: 07th March 2015 03:29 AM

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Once, there was a little girl in St Petersburg who wanted to escape to India in a suitcase. Not that she could have spotted the place on a map if she were asked to!
‘’I was just ten years old then, and USSR was behind the Iron Curtain. Life was very difficult. I wanted to escape to India – in a suitcase,’’ Victoria Dmitrieva - author, Indologist, traveller and entrepreneur – recalled with an impish smile. Her parents were blissfully unaware of their daughter’s grand travel plan, but they had little time for Indology, anyway.
Indian music and films on television and the presence of Indians on the wide streets of St Petersburg continued to fuel young Victoria’s imagination. But not even in her wildest dreams could the little Russian girl have known that one day she would travel to that distant country of her dreams, live there, savour its extraordinary fare and go on to write a book on it in her mother tongue.

PIC: Manu R Mavelil

‘India: Brodyachee Blazhenstva’ (India: Wandering Bliss), published last year, is 462 pages long, and is an account of Victoria’s life in India and of her spiritual quest. ‘’I wanted movement in my title. So, ‘Wandering Bliss.’ That’s how they describe the sadhus. I thought it would be a great title for my book,’’ said Victoria, who first came to India 19 years ago and now runs the travel agency ‘Anavrita’ in Thiruvananthapuram; the name being a tribute to her personal discoveries of India and her other love – Sanskrit.Back home, Victoria had taken her Masters in EnglishLanguage and Literature at the Leningrad University. What she’d really wanted to do was study Sanskrit at the university’s Faculty of Oriental Studies, but that department had been under the hawk-eyes of the KGB. ‘’Even entering there was a problem,’’ she recalled. Then everything changed. Forever. In the early 1990s, watched by a stunned world, the USSR disintegrated. Victoria emigrated to Canada, where she studied Sanskrit and Indian Philosophy at the McGill University.Her childhood dream at last came true in 1996, when she visited Delhi, though not in a suitcase! ‘’That was my first acquaintance with the country. I began coming every year, staying longer and longer each time.’’ Later, she came to Pune on the strength of a scholarship. The tortuous twists and turns of Sanskrit grammar proved surprisingly easy for the Russian owing to similarities with her mother tongue. ‘’There are so many similar words in Russian and Sanskrit. The case endings in both languages are also similar in many ways. And it’s not just Russian, the Lithuanian language is very close to Sanskrit,’’ she said.
Victoria’s first trip to Kerala, and Thiruvananthapuram, was in 2007, when she was bent on tracing an Ayurveda physician. In 2009, she settled in the state capital and opened ‘Anavrita.’ Egged on by friends who were wonder-struck by her traveller’s tales, she began writing ‘Wandering Bliss’ in 2010. “I did not travel for the sake of the book. The book came about as a part of the travels,’’ says Victoria. The wavy-haired, slender-built Russian hastens to correct A L Basham. ‘’He wrote ‘The Wonder That Was India’. I would say ‘The Wonder That Is India.’ Everything that’s in the world is here. India is like a sponge. Greece and Rome are like museums. Here it is alive. India never ceases to be a mystery. You never know what this country is going to offer next,’’ she said.
‘Wandering Bliss’ is also Victoria’s first ‘’proper book.’’ Before it, she had some translations and one book of poems in Russian to her name, but that was about it. The book is in five sections, detailing her travels from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, her conversations with Indian men and women and, of course, a liberal helping of history.
Victoria is reluctant to call ‘Wandering Bliss’ a travelogue, but ‘’It can be called a guide book, a personal story of my acquaintance with India or a story about how India came into my life, influenced my life and continues to influence it,’’ she said, adding that she plans to get the book translated into English. Victoria signed off with an interesting observation about India; ‘’I think the Mahabharatha is still unfolding in its never-ending story of love, war, death, life, freedom and immortality.’’