Travel means different things to different people. For some, it’s a time to relax; for others, it’s a way of learning new cultures. For most, it’s a means of detaching from everyday life and experiencing a world far from home. However for these gentlemen, Ramnath Biswas and Bimal Mukherjee, it was a chance to step out of their comfort zones and see the world as it truly is — on the road. With their two-wheeled companions, they ventured into corners of the world once unheard of and uncharted for an Indian to explore.

Explorers Who Chose Bicycles Over Maps

Ramnath Biswas, born in 1895 in the Bengal Presidency, had already lived several lives before he set out on his global rides. A member of the revolutionary Anushilan Samiti, a soldier in Mesopotamia, and later a car mechanic in Sylhet, he discovered in the bicycle a companion that matched his restless spirit. His first great voyage began in 1931 from Singapore, leading him across Southeast Asia, Japan, and Canada before circling back. Two more expeditions followed, through the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Armed with little more than a mosquito net, a toolkit, and a banner declaring him a “Hindu Traveller,” Biswas relied on strangers’ generosity as he cycled across borders that few Indians had dared to cross. Illness, exhaustion, and prejudice dogged his path, yet he pressed on, his wheels etching invisible maps of courage.

If Biswas rode mostly alone, Bimal Mukherjee began as part of a quartet of cousins who left Calcutta with nothing but grit and conviction. Their early road stretched through Ranchi, Allahabad, and Delhi, where sympathetic officers connected them to networks abroad. From there, the journey grew harsher. They lugged their bicycles across the Thar desert, braved the Arabian sands, and crossed into Iran, Turkey, and Egypt. In Europe, they confronted the icy wrath of the Alps with bare hands, steering one-handed while tucking the other into their shirts for warmth. Their odyssey eventually took them through Britain, Scandinavia, the Americas, and back across Asia, a journey completed in 1937 that covered nearly the whole known world.

Fighting Colonial Stereotypes

What propelled them was more than wanderlust. Mukherjee and his companions were determined to shatter the colonial stereotype that Bengalis , and by extension, Indians , were weak, effeminate, and unfit for feats of endurance. The British had codified these prejudices into their doctrine of “martial” and “non-martial” races, but every turn of the pedals was a rebuke to that narrative. Their story, later told in Mukherjee’s Du Chakay Duniya (The World on Two Wheels), revealed not just the scope of their travels but the resolve behind them.

Together, Biswas and Mukherjee embodied a radical idea: that Indians could not only match the world’s adventurers but redefine what it meant to be global citizens under the shadow of empire. Their bicycles carried them across deserts and mountains, but their true achievement was dismantling the boundaries , colonial, cultural, and psychological , that sought to confine them. Nearly a century later, their stories remind us that greatness often begins with something simple: two wheels, an open road, and the conviction to keep pedalling.

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