The journey Zeeshan Khan documents in his book Right to Passage saw its tentative first draft when Khan was just 20. He remembers the driving forces fuelling his tentative plan. “When you are young, it’s all about the thrill of adventure, and my main goal was to travel as much as I could, as cheaply and quickly as I could.” Khan’s notions of distance and travel were expanding at that time.
“While studying in Canada, people casually talked of travelling 6,000 kilometres. I’m from Bangladesh, where distances are measured in hundreds.” With a map in front of him, Khan charted out a journey that would take him from Dhaka to Europe, through India, Pakistan, Iran and Turkey. But it took 15 years for his plan to take shape.
In 2011, Khan, by then a journalist, left Dhaka for India on the first leg of his journey. From there, he would go to Pakistan and Iran before reaching Europe. The journey would result in two books, the first part, now published as Right to Passage would document his travels through India, Pakistan and Iran. The second would concentrate on the European leg.
After the first flights to Kolkata and Patna, Khan chose buses, trains and cars. “I remembered hearing stories when growing up of people who did what was called the hippie trail, travelling from Europe to Kathmandu, India and Afghanistan. I had an uncle who did the trail from London to Karachi, and a cousin’s nana who had driven from Bangladesh to Afghanistan in a Morris Minor.”
Khan’s idea was to focus on a spiritual historical exploration of the places on his route. “I could have chosen an easier route, but my aim was to visit the places that were connected to each other and to me.” That he also wanted to write a book meant that the kind of story he wanted to tell helped determine the route he’d take. “It was to be a story of connections and seamlessness.”
Right to Passage , written in the first person, is dense with both candid stories and careful research. It weaves in snapshots of the many cities Khan visited and insights into the lives of people he meets along the way. Steeped in historical, cultural and religious references, the book, Right to Passage Khan says, “is primarily written for a South Asian audience”.
Both consciously and subconsciously, the two tropes of religion and language across South Asia have driven the journey and the book. “In Bangladesh,” says Khan, “the debate around identity construction pivots on language and faith.”
He talks of the strange relationship that his country has with India and Pakistan. “While India has a great deal of respect for Bengali culture, she holds a peculiar view towards the Muslim Bengali civilisation. The very opposite is true in Pakistan, where there is a negative view of Bengali culture because of its Indian roots, its close connection to the Devanagari script and the fact that it has too many Hindu proponents. So for India, Muslim Bengalis aren’t Bengali enough and for Pakistan, we aren’t Muslim enough.”
In writing the book, Khan wanted to “bring the pole to Bangladesh”; to see the world through Bangladeshi eyes. “Already, we are losing that need to seek validation from Kolkata or Islamabad.” For Khan, the journey was a way of saying Bangladeshis can be observers and definers, instead of the observed and defined.
The journey took three months, and the book took three-and-a-half years to write. The real challenge, he says, was revisiting the journey in retrospect. To ensure that the reconstruction didn’t suffer from romanticising, false memories or airbrushing, Khan decided to be as true to himself as he could, even at the risk of coming across as “sexist or racist”. At one place, he assumes that a fair-skinned Amritsari motel receptionist is suspicious of Khan’s “dark-skinned Muslim self”, but discovers the real and valid reasons for the man’s behaviour. “To have the bias is not a problem, but the minute you use it as a means to discriminate, it becomes a problem.”
Many of Khan’s own assumptions and biases crumbled as he travelled. He quotes Aldous Huxley, “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries”. “There are bigoted people everywhere, but in general, the theory that I’d be treated badly in India for being Muslim, or in Pakistan for being Bengali, was not true.”
Perhaps the most liberating thing for Khan was discovering that travelling overland made his own identity fluid. “When you are constantly moving, after a while you stop thinking of yourself as a person from a particular place in a particular time; you become a person of the world. Both your nationalism and ethnically defined identity become secondary, as you move through cultures and countries, and this fluidity makes you realise how arbitrary these borders are.” As Khan negotiated languages and cultures, he discovered that nationally defined identity is an imposed thing. People are recognisable first and simply as human beings.
