A traveller’s account and a Lithuanian Parsi connection in Mumbai

Mumbai: After the death of prominent Parsi priest and scholar Sir Jivanji Modi in Bombay in 1933, an obituary of his was published 5,000 km away in a Lithuanian newspaper. The tribute was written by a Lithuanian student who had been drawn to the city due to the striking similarities between Lithuanian and Sanskrit. He had studied and taught for two years on the goodwill of the Parsis, foremost of whom was Modi.
Antanas Poska, the adventurous traveller and language enthusiast, was the subject of a lecture delivered by Diana Mickeviciene, ambassador of the Republic of Lithuania, on Tuesday evening at the K R Cama Oriental Institute.
“I stumbled on this connection between Bombay’s Parsis and Lithuania on retracing the steps of my countryman,” she began. “It is due to him that JJ Modi and the Parsis are known in Lithuania.”
Broke but determined, Poska and a friend embarked on a motorbike trip in November 1929, a decidedly bad idea through the rains, snow and washed-up roads.
Poska got along with him two letters: one from the Esparanto Counsel inviting him to teach Esperanto, an artificial common language that was all the rage at the time and in which he was fluent, to the Baháʼí’s of Bombay; and another from Lithuanian intellectual Juozapas to Modi, putting in a good word for him as a student. This let a peek into Modi’s own association with Lithuania, from what Mickeviciene called an “accidental trip” to the country.
“Modi was travelling from Paris to St Petersburg in 1895 when he stepped down from the train along the way to get a flavour of the language,” she said. “He missed his train and spent a few days in Lithuania, meeting a few intellectuals. Both Kazakevicius and him kept up their correspondence for decades after.”
The letter to Modi opened the doors for Poska. On the very third day of his touchdown, his admission into Bombay University was fast-tracked; a teaching role at the K R Cama Oriental Institute was fixed, and he was introduced to NA Toothi, the Parsi founder of Bombay University’s sociology department. Poska would go on to live with Toothie in his Malad home for two years.
“In his journals, Poska describes Colaba as a suburb and Malad as a jungle. He fixated on the turn of the seasons, from the heat to the monsoons, which brought snakes, bugs and monkeys. Toothi’s house was suspected to be haunted and had a lot of strange and creaking noises, which both investigated,” said Mickeviciene to a predominantly elderly crowd of around 50, listening in rapt silence.
When Modi died in 1932, Poska wrote back home to Kazakevicius, describing his last day. “He did not show any fatigue and sat with me to discuss my studies, blessing me as he would every day,” read Mickeviciene. In his obituary, he described him as a “close friend of Lithuania and the language.”
Mickeviciene narrated that Poska’s departure from Bombay took him to Calcutta, where he submitted his doctoral thesis. On his way home, however, he was arrested in Turkey on the suspicion of being a British spy. With the financial struggles continuing, he hitchhiked from Bulgaria to home after he was let go, only to return to a tumultuous historical sequence: first the Nazis, then Soviet occupation during World War 2, and communism.
Under Stalin’s iron fist, he was sentenced to hard labour in Siberia, which was later commuted to obligatory resettlement in Kyrgyzstan. After his ultimate return to Lithuania, he was not included in academic circles due to the black mark of the sentence, although students visited him in clandestine groups to learn about his travels. He died in 1992, seeing the dawn of Lithuanian freedom.
“Eight volumes of his journals were published around a decade ago, but much of the information along the way was lost, so what remains are scraps. There are also many mistakes in them,” noted Mickeviciene. In a sweet attempt at closure, as he was never able to defend his thesis, Calcutta University gave him a posthumous doctorate in 2014, thanks to the ambassador’s efforts.
Continuing the tribute forward, the Cama Oriental Institute plans to reprint Poska’s obituary in its next journal.