4800 years ago
When I turned to study the final map of the four received from Milne it showed that sea-level was slightly higher 4800 years ago than it is today, marking the post-glacial high-stand of the sea. In the far south the Maldive islands had almost completely vanished and Sri Lanka was fully isolated from the mainland and in its modern form. On the mainland itself most parts of the coast were indistinguishable from those on a modern map, although the eminence on which Dwarka stands today would have been an island at that date. Much more significant marine incursions into areas that are now mostly dry land were shown into the Rann of Kuch and the Gulf of Cambay in the north-west and around Poompuhur-Tranquebar in the south-east.
But this made sense. I remembered that in the Persian Gulf too the sea-level had been a metre or two higher around 5000 years ago – as a result of a worldwide episode of rapid, relatively short-term flooding known as the Flandrian transgression.3 Presumably in India, as in the Gulf, the land had later been recovered thanks to the subsequent regression of sea-level to the modern value, combined with the local effects of silting. Indeed the salt-flats of the Rann remain susceptible to marine transgressions to this day and by 4800 years ago had become, temporarily, a large navigable extension of the Gulf of Kutch, scattered with numerous islands, that would not dry up for another thousand years. Into that gulf as far as Dholavira, the trade of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization was soon to be brought in great high-prowed ocean-going ships – the ships depicted on the terracotta seals of the mid-third millennium BC, the ships that also sailed further south, through the extended Gulf of Cambay, to the now landlocked port of Lothal.
The amount of time that Glenn Milne was able to spend making inundation maps for me was strictly limited, but there was a period within the range of 21,300 to 4800 years ago that I particularly wanted him to do some more modelling on. I already knew by comparing his map for 21,300 years ago with his map for 10,600 years ago what lands had been surrendered to the sea during the first two global floods (15,000–14,000 years ago and 12,000–11,000 years ago). Now I wanted more fine detail on what had happened between 8000 and 7000 years ago, when the third episode of global superfloods had been unleashed. Just to be on the safe side I asked Milne to give me a complete sequence of maps covering the period from 13,500 years ago down to the present.
What if?
India is so big that I sometimes find it difficult to conceive of it all at once. Now after my first session with the inundation maps it seemed to be dividing itself conveniently into the two great cultural, linguistic and geographical regions into which it has always divided itself – at least since the time of the Rig Veda – namely the Dravidian-speaking south and the Indo-European-speaking north.
In both these areas there had been extensive post-glacial flooding, and I was determined to dive in both if I could. But the south was far from the Himalayas, with which the Vedas associate the escape of the Seven Sages and Manu from the flood, while the north-west coast around modern Gujerat was not only much closer but also had lost more land more rapidly than any other part of India.
The conjunction begged an obvious speculation. What if by extraordinary bad luck some kind of civilization had been based in precisely this area, on land that had been inundated 11,000 or 8000 years ago at the end of the Ice Age?
If so, then it was by no means inconceivable that the survivors might have fled to the Himalayas, pretty much as the Vedic traditions state. They could not have got there by boat, of course. But if a boat had played an essential part in their survival of the flood then it was easy to see how the whole adventure might have been dramatized and remembered in later times as a boat journey.
I could think of several good arguments against this scenario. In no particular order: (1) What right had I to assume that there had been any civilization at all, anywhere, 11,000 or 8000 years ago? (2) Even in the unlikely event that a culture that was a little out of the ordinary had existed at that time, and had so far escaped discovery by archaeologists, why should it have chosen to concentrate itself in the very part of India that would suffer the most extensive post-glacial inundations – when there were so many other parts of India to choose from? (3) Even if both the prior improbabilities are granted and we accept that a civilization was there and was flooded, why did its survivors retreat all the way to the Himalayas? There was perfectly safe land in between that would have been much more congenial for settlement and for agriculture (presumably an important priority to Manu, who made such a point of ‘saving the name of vegetation’ and of bringing with him ‘all the seeds which have been described of old’).4
Yet history is full of examples of improbable things that have happened. It was thought improbable in the nineteenth century that a European army could ever be defeated in battle by an African army – until the Abyssinians routed the Italians at Adowa in 1896. It was thought improbable that the Titanic would sink on her maiden voyage, but she did. The residents of Pompeii obviously thought it was improbable that their city would be smothered by an eruption of Vesuvius, but it was.
So let’s just ask the question and be damned: what if a prehistoric people, with more sophisticated spiritual ideas and a more developed culture than is known to have existed elsewhere in India at this time, had evolved on the California-sized coastal domain between Goa and the Indus delta before it was inundated at the end of the Ice Age? What would have happened to that culture when the deluge came? What sort of story might its survivors have told? And-the heart of the matter really – could it be that story that is expressed in the Vedas?
The hypothesis that no one has tested
Even in the twenty-first century, long after it supposedly relinquished its grip, the dead hand of the ‘Aryan invasion of India’ theory still moulds our perceptions of the Vedas. The assumption that there ever was such a thing as an invasion, or even a distinct ethnic group called the Aryas, may have been abandoned, but we’ve seen in previous chapters how scholars have retained the closely related assumption (albeit within a much wider time-scale) of an overland migration of semi-nomadic or transhumant tribes towards India from somewhere in the general direction of Europe.
Underlying this assumption are other assumptions about the state of development of the migrants (in the early days of ‘the transition to agriculture’); about the kind of land that they might have inhabited before coming to India (plains, valleys, mountains); and about the various ‘environmental challenges’ (desertification, drastic changes in rainfall and temperature regimes, etc.) or ‘economic pressures’ (overpopulation, competition for scarce resources) that might have compelled them to migrate in the first place.
Because assumptions are free and everybody is entitled to one, the quest for the ‘Indo-European homeland’ has become something of a scholarly equivalent of the quest for Atlantis. By various highly ranked authorities at various times it has been placed as far afield as the North Pole, Scandinavia, central Europe, southern Russia, central Asia and eastern Anatolia.5 The suggestion that it might have been within India itself has only very rarely been made and then not by European scholars. Indeed in a survey of ‘Recently proposed homelands of the original Indo-Europeans’ the Sanskritist David Frawley, along with historian of religion George Feuerstein and Professor Subash Kak of Louisiana State University, found that only one out of ten of the homelands that had been proposed was in India (and that by an Indian academic) while the other nine were all set much further to the north and west.’6
Never, so far as I am aware, has a reputable scholar – Indian or otherwise – ever suggested a Vedic homeland located not only within India but also exclusively on the subcontinent’s coastal margins inundated at the end of the Ice Age. Nor for that matter do I know of any reputable scholar who has ever considered oceanic flooding in any shape or form amongst the ‘environmental’ challenges that might have compelled a migration of the ‘proto-agricultural’ Vedic peoples out of their ‘homeland’ (wherever that was) and into a wider theatr
e.
This seems like an oversight, since the origins of settled agriculture and ‘civilization’ in India – indeed of the very urban lineage that culminated millennia later in the Indus-Sarasvati civilization itself – are now known by scholars to go back at least as far as #500 years before the present. That is the approximate date – 6500 BC – of the first habitation strata at the extraordinary prehistoric town of Mehrgarh in Pakistan’s Bolan pass,7 an archaeological site of great mystery, as we shall see. It is also an early enough date to lie firmly within the time-frame of the three episodes of global superfloods at the end of the last Ice Age.
A maritime culture?
What sort of ancient culture would have chosen to locate itself exclusively in a region so close to the sea that the recurrent cycles of post-glacial floods might have seriously endangered it?
In my opinion only a maritime, sea-going culture – indeed a culture that was dependent on the sea – fits the bill. Moreover, there can be no objection in principle to the existence of such a culture in India 8000 or even 15,000 years ago – since scholars accept that early humans may well have been seafarers as much as 40,000 years ago and that by 10,000 years ago lengthy oceanic journeys and difficult navigational feats were being accomplished by supposedly ‘Stone Age’ peoples in many different parts of the world.8
Yet the assumption continues to be that the founders of the Vedic religion – the forefathers of those who sang the Vedic hymns that have come down to us – were hunter-gatherers or nomads or farmers who only reached India after a long overland journey (itself thought to have been motivated by the demand for more land). Most Western Indologists studying the Rig Veda have therefore never seen the need to analyse the many references that its ancient hymns contain to ‘seas’ and ‘oceans’. Indeed, only David Frawley, who is far from the mainstream but whose knowledge of the Vedas cannot be faulted, has attempted a serious investigation of this problem:
The modern, generally Western idea is that the Rig Veda is the product of a nomadic people invading India from the northwest, who, therefore, could not have known anything of the sea … However this idea does not come from the Veda itself. It is a preconception used to interpret it. We can only discountenance the many references to the ocean in the Rig Veda by redefining the regular Sanskrit terms for ocean presented in it to have meant nothing more than any large body of water, river or lake. If we take them as they appear … they fairly clearly show a maritime culture.9
Frawley argues that although forests and deserts are also mentioned in the Vedas, familiarity with these does not prove non-familiarity with the ocean:
The scope of Vedic geography is quite large, with mountains, plains, rivers and seas. This allowed scholars to focus on one side of it and become caught up in that one aspect. Yet the oceanic symbolism appears to be the most common.10
So much so, Frawley points out, that Ralph Griffith, the translator of the Vedas – who did not accept that the Vedic peoples had any experience of oceans – was compelled almost 100 times to translate various Vedic terms as ‘ocean’ or ‘sea’, because this is exactly what those terms mean and no alternative translation is possible.11 Other more ambiguous maritime references, in Frawley’s view, were mistranslated or treated simply as metaphors. And while he admits that the word ‘ocean’ in the Vedas is sometimes used as a metaphor (the ‘ocean of heaven’ for example), he argues persuasively that
such images do not reflect a lack of contact with the earthly ocean … They show great intimacy with the sea, not just as a practical fact but as a poetic image impressed on them by life in proximity to it.12
Nor are the maritime images in the Vedas confined to seas and oceans. They also include descriptions of sailing, of ships and of ship-borne trade. According to Professor S. P. Gupta:
There are … references to sea, i.e. samudra, and traders, i.e. panis, engaged in seaborne trade; navah, samudiiah, sata-aritia, etc. are such terms which clearly indicate it. Even piracy is mentioned. Attack by unscrupulous people on boats laden with goods in order to capture them finds clear mention in terms like duseva, tamovridha.13
If you listen to the Vedas you can hear the ocean
Scholars have long regarded it as legitimate to make firm deducations about the biblical world – its economy, its history, its environment, its sense of geography, its social organization, etc. – by studying the Old Testament.14 When the same approach is applied open-mindedly to the Rig Veda, you can hear the ocean:
All sacred songs have magnified Indra, expansive as the sea. (1, 11, 1)
He [the god Varuna] knows the path of birds that fly through heaven, and … of the
sea, He knows the ships that are thereon … (1, 25, 7)
Like as a watery ocean so doth he [Indra] receive the rivers spread on all sides in their ample width … (1, 55, 2)
The Seven mighty Rivers seek the ocean. (1, 71, 7)
O thou whose face looks every way, bear us past foes as in a ship … As in a ship convey thou us for our advantage o’er the flood. (1, 97, 7–8)
Come in the ship of these our hymns to bear you to the hither shore. (1, 46, 7)
Yea Asvins [two ‘divine intermediaries’ or ‘guardian angels’ frequently referred to in the Vedas], as a dead man leaves his riches, Tugra left Bhujyu in the cloud of waters … Ye brought him back in animated vessels … Bhujyu ye bore … to the sea’s farther shore, the strand of ocean … Ye wrought that hero exploit in the ocean which giveth no support, or hold, or station, what time ye carried Bhyjyu to his dwelling borne in a ship with hundred oars, O Asvins. (1, 116, 3–5)
Ye ever-youthful Ones … ye brought back Bhujyu from the sea of billows … uninjured through the ocean … (1, 118, 14–15)
O Asvins … Ye made for Tugra’s son [Bhujyu], amid the water floods, that animated ship with wings [sails?] to fly withal, whereon … ye brought him forth. And fled with easy flight from out the mighty surge. Four ships, most welcome in the midst of ocean, urged by the Asvins, saved the son of Tugra, him who was cast down headlong in the waters …(1, 182, 5–6)
O Maruts [sky and storm gods], from the Ocean ye uplift the rain, and fraught with vaporous moisture pour the torrents down. (5, 55, 5)
Earth shakes and reels in terror at their [the Maruts’] onward rush, like a full ship which, quivering, lets the water in. (5, 59, 2)
May Aja-Ekapad, the God, be gracious, gracious the Dragon of the Deep, and Ocean …(7, 36, 13)
Let not the sinful tyranny of any fiercely-hating foe smite us as billows smite a ship. (8, 64, 9)
As rivers swell the ocean, so, Hero, our prayers increase thy might. (8, 88, 8)
Ye furtherers of holy Law, transport us safe o’er many woes as over water-floods in ships. (8, 72, 3)
When Varuna and I embark together and urge our boat into the midst of the ocean, we, when we ride o’er the ridges of the waters, will swing within that swing and there be happy. (8, 88, 3)
In both the oceans hath his home, in eastern and in western seas. (10, 136, 5)
Well knoweth Savitar [the personification of the Sun as a life-giving force] where ocean, firmly fixt, o’erflowed its limit. (10, 149, 2)
Although the Vedas are eloquent on their own behalf, the passages above (quoted from the Griffith translation and representative of many other passages not reproduced here) do seem to raise a number of queries.
For example, as well as confirming a knowledge of the relationship between rivers and oceans – with references to rivers seeking the ocean, pouring into it, etc. – we are also presented with the concept of rivers filling up the ocean, quite a different matter. When was the last time that human beings are likely to have seen rivers literally filling up the ocean (rather than just flowing into it and making no difference to its level as they do today)? Could it have been the time when the ocean, previously thought to have been firmly fixed in its place, ‘o’erflowed its limit’ and when only those on board ships were safe from its floods?
And what about the Mar
uts, the storm gods, who ‘from the Ocean … uplift the rain, and fraught with vaporous moisture pour the torrents down’? Knowledge of the workings of our planet’s great ocean-evaporation-cloud-rainfall cycle is not something that we normally ascribe to proto-agricultural nomads who have never been near an ocean in their lives. But the idea should occur naturally to anyone who lives in sight of a coast – where, at times, the clouds do seem visibly to be drawing up moisture from the sea.15
Also amongst the quoted passages are references to the ‘eastern and the western seas’, and to ‘both the oceans’. These references suggest a rather widespread maritime experience (at the very least, presumably, of the Arabian Sea to the west of India and of the Bay of Bengal to the east).
Then we must consider the question of all those references to ships – hardly a subject of great interest or relevance to landlubbers but something that we would naturally expect to encounter in the discourse of mariners. And what ships! Ships in which to ride out the ‘water-flood’ as we have seen … ships so formidable and so secure that they are used as a metaphors for safety, security and protection … ships, with great sails and banks of oars, that fly across the waves so fast they hardly seem to get wet … ships that can brave the billows and pull off the spectacular rescue ‘from out the mighty surge’ of a man lost overboard and then return him safe to his dwelling on ‘the strand of ocean’.