Christopher Kloeble’s novel, Das Museum Welt, translated from German to English by Rekha Kamath Rajan as The Museum of the World, is an extraordinary literary piece that takes its readers through an exhilarating journey of time and space. The novel is about the travels and explorations of three Bavarian brothers, Hermann, Adolph and Robert Schlagintweit, commissioned to survey the terrains of India by the East India Company under the endorsement of the renowned German scientist Alexander Von Humboldt. The novel begins with the arrival of the brothers in Bombay in 1854. The subsequent journey is narrated to the readers by a multilingual teenage orphan boy from Bombay, Bartholomew, who accompanies the brothers on their expedition as a translator. On the journey, Bartholomew also works on his ambitious project of creating his version of the first Indian museum, filled with objects that he finds ‘remarkable’.
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