Half of Makoko floats, the other half stays anchored. That dichotomy exists in its very being: it is a waterfront community—just off the Third Mainland Bridge on Nigeria’s Lagos Lagoon—with none of the luxury one associates with the term these days. It is in fact known as the world’s largest floating slum, with wooden shacks built on stilts passing for homes propped amid the grey-black sludge that is the lagoon water.
But water unites. Makoko came into being in the late 19th century when migrants moved in from various parts of Nigeria—their identities now as fluid as the settlement they call home. For, the settlement is seen as informal and its residents stateless by the government, which demolished houses this February, citing health and safety risks but what critics called a ‘land-grab’ attempt to gentrify the prime location in Nigeria’s largest city. It is said that about three lakh people reside in Makoko, but nobody knows for certain as it wasn’t included in the 2006 census. While the residents, largely fisherfolk, may feel like strangers in their own country, they have a kindred spirit in an art history professor from Andhra Pradesh. For, who better to identify with the stateless than someone with a nomad’s soul.
Prof Machavarapu Adinarayana, fondly known as Prof Adi, visited Lagos in 2013. He was invited by two Indian tech entrepreneurs, who took him around the city. When the hosts were busy, he explored the city on his own. But he was told to stay away from Makoko—nobody could enter Makoko, also known as the Venice of Africa, without paying the local boatmen, he was warned. Even then, there was no guarantee that he would not be robbed. “I thought I was not going to lose much,” recalled Adinarayana. And, off he went. He was stopped but he managed to convince the locals, so much so that not only was he shown around the settlement but he also got to paint murals on the slum walls. His hosts were left speechless.
That tale is one of many from Adinarayana’s travels across the world. The 70-year-old fell in love with travel, particularly with walking, as a child growing up in Chavatapalem near Ongole. By his own account, he has walked more than 30,000km across India and abroad. And his footprints have found their way in print—he has documented his travels in 10 books, all in Telugu.
That nomad soul of his is inherited. “It is in my DNA,” said Adinarayana. His grandfather, Vaikunta Perumallu, led a nomadic life, travelling from place to place, singing devotional songs and living on alms. His father Kotilingam shared the same passion, but could not pursue it after marriage. “My father recognised my zeal for travel quite early,” recalled Adinarayana. “When I was in class eight, he told me I would never become a family man.”
But what fed Adinarayana’s inherent desire to go looking for unexplored nooks were books, the first of which was Lokasanchari, the Telugu translation of renowned polymath Rahul Sankrityayan’s famous Ghumakkad Shastra (The Treatise of Wandering). Adinarayana read the book when he was in class 11, and was hooked. “I felt as if Rahulji was speaking directly to me in that library,” he recalled. “It was as if he was urging me to see the world as my own, to travel without fear and to live freely. The idea that one could belong everywhere and not be tied down stayed with me.” Even though he was in his teens then, the book gave Adinarayana clarity about life’s choices—he decided against marriage and a secure job.
Adinarayana was a voracious reader, and his early reading fuelled his wanderlust. He immersed himself in the works of writers associated with travel and reflective literature, including Matthew Arnold, Rabindranath Tagore, R.L. Stevenson and Aleksandr Pushkin. Telugu writers such as Chalam, Buchi Babu and D. Balagangadhara Tilak also had a deep influence on him. This sustained engagement with literature eventually found expression in his own writing. His first book, Bramana Kanksha (Wanderlust), published in 1999, drew wide attention in the Telugu literary world and struck a chord with readers for its novel treatment, elegant style, earthy flavour and vivid portrayal of beauty, joy and amazement. Within a year, the Andhra Pradesh government introduced a chapter from the book in its class 10 syllabus. Other books followed, teeming with interesting facts and anecdotes of people he had read about and met on travels and also of travellers of all kind—historical, women, tribal. Take, for instance, the fact that Sankrityayan was inspired by the French woman explorer Alexandra David-Néel, who visited Lhasa in 1924 when Tibet was forbidden to foreigners. Or, that the Russians, who celebrate Pushkin as their national poet, harbour a deep dislike for his wife, Natalia Pushkina.
But first, he had to walk that talk. Adinarayana began his full-fledged exploration in 1990 with a padayatra through the picturesque Himalayan villages around Chandrakhani Pass in Kullu district of Himachal Pradesh. One of his most defining journeys began on April 9, 1993, the birth anniversary of Sankrityayan. To commemorate the birth centenary year of the ‘father of Hindi travel literature’, Adinarayana and his two students set out on a 1,800km padayatra from Visakhapatnam to Darjeeling, Sankrityayan’s final resting place. Surprisingly, they completed the journey in just 40 days, mostly by using the cross-country routes. On their way to Darjeeling, they met Sankrityayan’s son Jeta at the North Bengal University campus in Siliguri. In Darjeeling, they met Sankrityayan’s wife Kamala, an accomplished author in Nepali and Hindi. “She was deeply moved to see us and welcomed us into her home. The next day, we visited Guruji’s resting place. She told us that our visit brought her more happiness than the several memorial meetings that happened that year,” recalled Adinarayana. News of the journey later inspired several others to undertake their own literary pilgrimage to Darjeeling.
While he stayed true to one of the decisions he took as a teen after reading Sankrityayan’s book—he stayed single despite getting marriage proposals on his trips—Adinarayana was compelled to take up a job. He did his PhD on temple architecture from Andhra University in Visakhapatnam in 1984, winning the gold medal for his thesis. He was about to embark on a pan-India trip when the head of the fine arts department Y.V. Lakshmaiah summoned him and convinced him to take up a lecturer’s position, saying that university life would better serve his passion. And, he did find a balance between work and travel, finishing his syllabus a little early to go places. He had no qualms losing pay, saying that he “preferred loss of pay over loss of life”. But when in class, he would be the most dedicated teacher. “Professor used to live in the department. We had great freedom to interact with him,” said M.T.V. Prabhakar, a former student. “The best thing about him is that there is no art history site he has not visited in India. So, he teaches Indian art history from his own experience, and it is fascinating.”
When he travels in India, Adinarayana doesn’t plan much, takes minimal luggage—just one rucksack and walking shoes—and stays wherever he reaches by night, mostly public places like temples, village centres or the places of hosts. Not a fussy eater, he eats what is offered to him, be it overnight soaked rice with palm jaggery by a fisherman in Tamil Nadu or deer steak with whiskey in Sweden. “Wherever I go, I always prefer local food,” he said. “I have never lived in a hotel, either in India or abroad. I take some basic precautions for security, but I don’t plan for accommodation and food.” That holds true for his travels abroad as well. “I have visited 15 countries, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Russia, Iran, Nigeria, France, Bhutan and Nepal,” he said. “In all the places I visited, I made sure I could stay with like-minded friends and explore topics of interest.” For ease of communication abroad, he mastered Esperanto, which helped him give lectures in countries like Brazil and Russia.
When he toured London in 2015, he wanted to visit the tomb of George Henry Borrow, a Cambridge scholar and author who became a gypsy out of sheer love for the lifestyle. Adinarayana maintains that Matthew Arnold’s famous poem The Scholar-Gipsy, in which an Oxford scholar becomes a gypsy, is inspired by Borrow. Adinarayana thought he would easily find Borrow’s grave in Brompton Cemetery, but it took him two days to locate it. “The grave was covered in shrubs. I cleared the bushes, offered my prayers and came back,” he said.
In May 2019, Adinarayana travelled to St Petersburg and visited a museum to witness an India connect. Famous Russian painter Nicholas Roerich came to Darjeeling in 1923 and lived in the same house where the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso, lived while in exile in 1912. While there, Roerich produced several paintings featuring the Himalayas and Buddhist motifs. Those paintings now adorn the walls of the musuem that Adinarayana visited in St Petersburg.
Another Russian who piqued his interest was Afanasy Nikitin, a merchant from Tver city who travelled to Persia and later to India (1466-1472; nearly 30 years before Vasco Da Gama came to India) and documented his travels. His A Journey Beyond the Three Seas paints a picture of then India. Adinarayana read his work and visited Revdanda, a seaport town 113km from Mumbai, where Nikitin disembarked on reaching India. He also visited Tver during his trip to Russia.
Adinarayana’s most significant achievement, perhaps, is tracing the original manuscript of Kashi Yatra Charitra, the first Indian language travelogue written by Enugula Veera Swamaiah, an East India Company official and philanthropist. Kashi Yatra Charitra competes with Varthamanapusthakam by Paremmakkal Thoma for the title of the first Indian-language travelogue. Varthamanapusthakam was written in 1790; however, it was published in 1936 after the manuscript was discovered. Veera Swamaiah took an entourage of 100 people from Chennai to Kashi in early 1830, which took him fifteen and a half months to complete. During the trip, he wrote to his friend K. Srinivasa Pillai. In late 1831, Veera Swamaiah sent the original manuscript of his travelogue to C.P. Brown, an East India Company official who was a Telugu linguist, and requested him to publish it. For some reason, Brown couldn’t publish it. In 1838, two years after Veera Swamaiah’s death, Pillai published a book, titled Kashi Yatra Charitra, compiled from the letters he had received.
Brown read this book and felt he didn’t need to publish the manuscript. However, he handed over the manuscript to the Madras Oriental Library with an accompanying letter, stating that the manuscript was the best of the three versions available, including Kashi Yatra Charitra and an abridged version of the manuscript Brown had. Kashi Yatra Charitra got three reprints, but nobody took Brown’s remark seriously. Adinarayana thought that publishing the manuscript would be a great tribute to Veera Swamaiah. With great difficulty, he obtained a digital copy of the manuscript and worked on the old Telugu script for more than five years. “One-third of the book had Sthalapuranas (text about a specific holy site or temple) and read like a spiritual book rather than a travelogue. I have rewritten an abridged version in modern Telugu,” he explained. This book brings alive 17th-century India, where the currency changed every few hundred kilometres.
What’s next? A book on Bilhana, an 11th century Sanskrit poet from Kashmir. He took a trip from Kashmir to Rameswaram via Varanasi, Somanath and Kalyana (today’s Basavakalyan in Karnataka). And, Adinarayana plans to retrace that route, hitchhiking his way into history.