Road Trip: The Grand Trunk Road

The Grand Trunk (GT) Road, as the travel writer Brian Paul Bach poetically imagines in his book The Grand Trunk Road from the Front Seat, begins from the core of the great banyan tree in Shibpur Botanical Gardens in Kolkata. And I don’t totally disagree with this rather anachronistic thesis. Granted, there’s a small road running between the Banyan Avenue in the garden and GT Road South. But the road commissioned by Afghan Emperor Sher Shah Suri during his short reign of Northern India between 1540 and 1545 precedes the tree, which is merely 250 years old, by at least another 150.