The Adventure class 11 chapter 7 English Hornbill summary
The Adventure class 11 summary
Professor Gangadharpant Gaitonde was traveling in the jijamata Express pm the Pune-Bombay route. this train was much faster than the Deccan Queen and he noticed that there were no industrial townships outside Pune. the train first stopped at Lonavala. 40 minutes after it started from Pune and then for a little while at Karjat. it went on even faster through Kalyan.
In the meantime, professor Qaitonde, being a historian, was thinking of going to a big library in Bombay and looking through history books. he wanted to understand the present situation. he also decided to return to Pune and discuss with Rajendra Deshpande, who would surely help him understand what had happened .he hoped that a person called Rajendra Deshpande existed.
when the train stopped at a small station, Farhad. an Anglo-Indian ticket-checker went around checking tickets. Khan Sahib informed Gangadharpant that that was where the British Raj began. he inquired if Gangadharpant was going to Bombay for the first time. Gangadharpant had not been to this Bombay before. he asked khan sahib how he would go to Peshawar. Khan sahib replied that he would go to the victoria terminus and would take the Frontier Mail. it would go from Bombay to Delhi, then to Lahore, and then Peshawar. he would reach the next day
Then Khan sahib discussed his business and Gangadharpant listened eagerly. As the train passed through the suburban rail traffic, khan sahib explained that the blue carriages carried the letters, GBMR, which meant Greater Bombay Metropolitan Railway. the Union Jack painted on each carriage was a reminder that they were in British territory..
when the train reached Victoria terminus. the station looked remarkably neat and clean. most of the staff was Anglo-Indian and Parsee along with a few British officers.
As Gangadharpant came out of the station he found himself facing an impressive building. it was the east Indian house headquarters of the east Indian company. he was shocked. because as per the history books the east Indian company had been shut down soon after 1857. but here it was prospering.
He walked ahead along Hornby Road but he found there was no handloom house building, Instead there were boots and woolworth departmental stores, grand officers of LIoyds, Barclays and other British banks, as in a typical high street of a town in England.
He entered the forbes building and asked the English receptionist the he wished to meet Mr Vinay Gaitonde, his son. she searched through the telephone list and said that there was nobody with that name there. he was shocked he had a quick lunch at a restaurant, he went Asiatic society to solve the mystery of history.
In the library, he started browsing through the five volumes of history books including his own. volume one was about the history up to the period of Ashoka. volume two up to Samudragupta, volume three up to Mohammad Ghori, and volume four up to the death of Aurangzeb. Reading volume five, Gangadharpant finally arrived at the precise moment where history had taken a different turn. that page in the book described the battle of Panipat, and it mentioned that the Marathas won the battle. Abdali was defeated and he was chased back to Kabul by the triumphant Marathas army led by Sadashiv Rao bhau and his nephew, the young Vishwas Rao.