On a dreary February day in 1896, a gentleman by the name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, popularly known as Mark Twain, arrived at the Himalayan town of Darjeeling, having traveled up from the plains in the enchanting Darjeeling Himalayan Railway.

Almost 61 years of age, his exuberance was hardly ruffled because of the strenuous journey as he faithfully wrote his daily journal. And one entry describes his ride in the "Toy Train" as follows:

The railway journey up the mountain is forty miles, and it takes eight hours to make it. It is so wild and interesting and exciting and enchanting that it ought to take a week.

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Mark Twain in Later Years :[Photo Credit]

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Reasons for the visit

Though Darjeeling was a famous tourist destination even then, and he was travelling with his wife and daughter, Twain's visit was not really for leisure. It was part of his one year journey around the world, with three months in India, which he had to undertake due to dire circumstances he was going through at the time.

Mark Twain was Bankrupt! Yes, the genius who gave the world classics like Huckleberry Finn and Tom Swayer among others, had fallen on bad times and was basically broke! His recent business endeavors had failed badly and he was now in debt to the tune of $100,000.00 and more.

To recover the money he set upon a journey around the world giving lectures and writing, and was in India for almost three months. Darjeeling too was one of the venues where he was to give a lecture, and he was there because of this.

Did he achieve his mission?

Yes he did! He did manage to make enough to pay a large part of his debts, but the surprising aspect was that he was a big hit in India, and much of his success came from appearances here. The Indians were drawn by his strange accent and the hype created by the media, and all his venues were packed.

But his later writings, and entries in his daily journals seem to suggest that he too was influenced by India and its culture and way of life. One such entries is below.

"This is India! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations--the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien persons, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that allmen desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. Even now, after a lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me and I hope it never will."

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To read more about his trip in India, click here

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