By Sunrita Sen. Europe, 09:32 AM IST

Being an Indian in Russia is exciting - especially if you are on a trip like ours. Our group of 14 is on a car expedition from St. Petersburg to Mumbai following the footsteps of 15th century trader Afanasy Nikitin, possibly the first Russian to visit India and keep a record of his travels.

As we move away from the bigger cities of St. Petersburg, Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod to the provincial capitals Kazan and Samara, we find everywhere a keen interest in all things Indian and a warmth rarely seen in Russia's two larger cities or anywhere in Europe.

We're also being given rather special treatment by local governments in the divisions we pass through.

'In Russia, there is one way for the ordinary and one for specials, and Indians are among the specials,' explains Hari Vasudevan, Russian history specialist who is the driving force behind the expedition.

We have a Russian police escort from each local government who hand us over to the next one at their border. The police cars with their red and blue flashing lights and loudspeakers often stop traffic to allow our three Indian vehicles to move on.

Both in Nizhny Novogord, known as Russia's wallet when St. Petersburg is its head and Moscow its heart, and in Kazan we were taken on a sightseeing tour by the local authorities.

Dora, our guide in Nizhny, has already been to Goa on vacation, thanks to a prize she won from the travel agency she works for.

India is an exotic land to most Russians. A young girl caught up with me as I took photographs of the Nizhny Kremlin, the Russian equivalent to our forts.

Natalia said her friend was finally going to India in February after dreaming of riding an elephant since she was a child.

In Kazan, the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, several groups of young Russian girls staged an Indian dance show for us - classical Bharatnatyam and Bollywood-style dances. Their tutor, Janna, spent four years at Kalakshetra in Chennai learning the classical dance form.

Indian dance is hugely popular in Russia. Whether it is Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan or even more provincial Samara, Indian dance classes can be found everywhere.

On two separate occasions, in Moscow and Kazan, I met young girls who told me what attracted them to Indian dance. It turned out to have been either a television programme or a Hindi film. And the hope, perhaps, that it would give them a chance to escape momentarily into an oriental dream world.

The performance at the Euro-Asia Friendship House in Kazan was the highlight of a wonderful though bitterly cold day.

In freezing minus 13 degrees with an added wind chill factor blowing from the nearby Volga, we walked through the unique Kazan Kremlin, a UNESCO world heritage site with its 16th-century Annunciation cathedral and the 21st-century Kul Sharif mosque, which was opened last year.

The church and the cathedral in the Kremlin are symbols of the dual cultural heritage of the Tatarstan republic with its over 50 percent Muslim population.

In a way, Russia is as multicultural as India with a diversity of religions and ethnic mix, many of them asserting their distinctive identities since the break-up of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Our expedition team itself is like a travelling microcosm of India. We have three native Bengali speakers - one is from Tamil Nadu and the others are from Uttar Pradesh and Haryana.

The director of our film on the expedition is from Kashmir, the assistant director from Punjab and the sound technician from Kerala.

Groups of two's and three's often lapse into conversation in their vernacular, usually dwelling on the home food they've been missing for a little less than two weeks now. And we still have five weeks to go.

Russia has been especially difficult for the two vegetarians in our group who have had to survive on bread, salad, cabbage soup and pancakes.

For others, the food has been an adventure in itself ranging from the traditional breakfast meatballs in gravy, borsch (beef stew) and the blini (cottage cheese or meat stuffed pancakes) at roadside cafes.

And of course there are always the potatoes - boiled, mashed, grilled, fried - and usually smothered in a seasoning of dill.

We've been moving through the snow-covered Russian steppes, touching the Volga at Nizhny, Samara and Saratov and have so far covered over 2,000 km of our 10,000 km expedition.

Nikitin had taken the Volga route when he travelled to India in 1469-70. Perhaps he stopped at Kazan, Samara or Saratov. We can't be sure.

As we move south the temperatures are rising, much to the relief of the team unused to such cold climes.

But most of us agree that Russia in winter has been a unique experience with its vast fields of snow, white forests of bare spruce and birch, a half-frozen Volga at Kazan, and the fairy-tale look of quaint village homes and spectacular churches and cathedrals with their snow covered roofs, spires and domes.

By Sunrita Sen (Staff Writer, © IANS)