I read this article The Obsessively Detailed Map of American Literature’s Most Epic Road Trips some time back. I wanted to do the same with Indian road trips recorded in its literature. There are very few records of Indian writers recording their travel stories. Its still a work in progress and I will keep on adding new books when I find them.

There is no such knowledge of the nation as comes of traveling in it, of seeing eye to eye its vast extent, its various and teeming wealth, and, above all, its purposefull people.

Samuel Bowles wrote 150 years ago in Across the Continent, arguably the first true American road-trip book.

This map is an effort to visualize the journey of the authors as recorded in their books. Each book is represented by a different color in the map. The map has lines depicting routes of the author. Each route has markers depicting a place, when you click on any of these place, the authors description of the place is shown. Some places are visited by different authors, in that case zoom in to the location and read each authors description.

Indian Travels – Jeyamohan

Jeyamohan is a well known Tamil author and this book is about his road trip along with his friends through the Central India and records his understanding of India.

Jupiter’s Travel – Ted Simon

As part of Ted Simons world tour on his Triumph, he visited India. This map holds his recordings of India alone of his amazing book. When he was in India he had detoured to Srilanka and Nepal.

Kardhungla: Road trip from Chennai to Ladhak – Kokila Babu

This book logs the travel made by a family from Chennai to Ladhak and back.

If you know of a book which is non fictional and is about the authors journey in India recorded in a chronological order do let me know about it in the comments section. I will read it and update the map.

If you have any suggestion about the map/visualization, do let me know in the comments section.