While the foreigner in colonial India has become, at least since EM Forster, something of a genre unto itself, the foreigners are almost invariably British and the novels mostly in English. Museum of the World by Christopher Kloeble is something of a novelty not just because it is based on the true story of the three Bavarian Schlagintweit brothers who explored India for the East India Company in the mid-19th century, but also because it was written in German; this new member of the canon appears via translation.

The brothers aimed to conduct scientific studies of India’s peoples, its mountains and study its magnetic field. Their trip was inspired by their hero, German scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. But they need a translator. This is where our protagonist, Bartholomew, who unlike the brothers is entirely fictional. Bartholomew is a 12-year-old boy living in an orphanage in Bombay, who has been taught German by an elderly Bavarian priest, Father Fuchs. But when Father Fuchs disappears, Bartholomew departs on an adventure to learn more than he expected about the father, himself and India.

Any book based on an orphan’s exploration in India amid the Great Game will draw comparisons with Kim.

When Bartholomew is taken from the orphanage for this multi-year journey across the subcontinent, his previously small world opens to new horizons. The brothers and Bartholomew then spend weeks preparing for their trip in Bombay, before heading across the country through south India to Madras and then up to Calcutta. From there they travel to Benares and briefly into Nepal before exploring the Indian Himalayas in Nanda Devi, on into Tibet back before coming to the Raj summer camp of Shimla.

While on the journey Bartholomew transitions from a boy to a young man, this is more than a coming of age story (or, as Kloeble might have it, a bildungsroman). Set in the years leading up to the Indian Mutiny of 1857, it is also a portrayal of a changing India. The book’s setting takes in major events from the Great Game to the opium trade and the 1855 Nepal-Tibet War and encountering the growing Indian resistance movement. Supporting this rich background is a diverse set of fictionalised real-life characters, from Lord Elphinstone to Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy and Governor General James Broun-Ramsay.

Along the journey, Bartholomew and the brothers face betrayal and intrigue, as they encounter rajas and revolutionaries on their way to Indians’ frontiers. Bartholomew has to learn to navigate the politics of the caravan that follows the German explorers and jockey for position and potential reward.

It is almost inevitable that any book based on an orphan’s exploration in India amid the Great Game would draw comparisons with Kim, Kipling’s epic, and the influence is clear without the book being a pastiche. As so many books on Europeans in the Raj have understandably centered on the British, the German perspective—leaving aside the occasional clunky sentence perhaps left over from the process of translation—is a welcome change.

Maximillian Morch is a researcher and author of Plains of Discontent: A Political History of Nepal’s Tarai (1743-2019) (2023)