Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

  Last but not least, and again as we would expect with a maritime people, there is knowledge both of the dreads and dangers of the sea and of its joys and pleasures. Thus, on the one hand, there is the delightful hymn to Varuna which could only have been composed by someone completely at ease with the motions of the sea and the way that a sailing ship behaves as it skips the ridges of gentle waves or lies at anchor rocking on the swell. On the other hand, these ancient compositions also offer an insight into the awful predicament of the human lost alone in the ocean ‘which giveth no support, or hold, or station’. In a few simple words and images they allow us to know the fear and victimization felt by those on board a ship that is being mercilessly pummelled by storm waves ‘smiting’ it ‘like a fiercely-hating foe’. With the same minimal but effective description we learn of the ‘terror’ experienced by its sailors when an injured ship ‘quivers’ and begins to ‘let the water in’. And then there are such creatures to appease as the ‘Dragon of the Deep’ – aquatic monsters that would be out of place in fields or mountains but seem quite at home in the fantasies and experiences of a maritime people.

  I therefore find much in the Rig Veda to recommend the hypothesis that its original composers must have lived close to the sea and been familiar with the ways of the sea over a long period of time. This, at the very least, improves the odds in favour of a possibility briefly raised in previous chapters – namely that the Vedas (a superb religious literature with no known parent) might in fact have been the work of the undeniably maritime Indus-Sarasvati civilization (which was long known to have possessed a script but apparently had no religious literature).

  In that case the mystery of the origins of the Vedas would converge with the mystery of the origins of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization – origins that are receding further and further back into the past with each new turn of the archaeologists’ spade at sites such as Mehrgarh and Nausharo in Baluchistan that are already confirmed to be more than 8000 years old.

  I remind the reader again that 8000 years before the present is within the time-frame of the great post-glacial floods.

  Hidden treasures

  We’ve seen that the scholarly chronology really has no bearing, one way or another, on the ultimate age of the Rig Veda. Even the date of 1200 BC that is generally used turns out to be for codification only, with all concerned ready to admit that many of the actual compositions must be older – although exactly how much older nobody knows.

  It’s also obvious that the Rig is a composite work, recension after recension, layer upon layer, and that part of the difficulty of interpreting it probably comes from a jumbling of earlier with later material. Similarly, as Gregory Possehl argues, it looks like a work that underwent a long period of composition, ‘when new material was added and older verses were edited and changed’. Then at some point ‘this flexibility in composition stopped and the priests defined their text as immutable, not to be changed by one word or even one syllable, and the slightest mispronunciation or deviation from the canon was believed to be a sacrilege’.16

  So in a sense what the Rig presents us with is a dynamic body of scripture and oral history that kept on changing and growing, retaining its dynamism – conceivably even for thousands of years – before being frozen in amber and then preserved eternally in its interrupted form for later study and reflection.

  I see no need to get into the argument about when, precisely, that ‘freezing in amber’ might have occurred, or join with the scholars in bickering about a few hundred years here or there. I’m much more interested in the possibility that layers of extremely ancient oral history and tradition could be concealed alongside the much more recent material that the Rig also undoubtedly contains.

  The case of the vanishing river

  There is a river, spoken of repeatedly in the Rig Veda, that vanished into the earth – though not from human memory – thousands of years ago and that was only revealed again by satellite imaging and remote-sensing technology in the latter half of the twentieth century. It is the Sarasvati – the very same ancient river which now gives its name to the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, because large numbers of ‘Harappan’ and ‘pre-Harappan’ archaeological sites, dating back at least to the fourth millennium BC, have been discovered close to its former course. The Sarasvati began to dry out towards the end of the third millennium BC and to all extents and purposes had ceased to flow by the early second millennium BC. Even now, however, notes Gregory Possehl,

  there is a river bed, kilometres wide in some places and heavily cultivated, that the people of Haryana refer to as ‘Sarasvati’. During the monsoon, parts of this channel carry small amounts of water, most of which is quickly captured for irrigation. Thus the river that today’s people call Sarasvati is not entirely dead …17

  There is a bigger question to ask, however: when was it entirely alive? When, for example, was the Sarasvati alive enough to merit these descriptions of it in the Rig Veda?

  Sarasvati, the mighty flood …18

  Coming together, glorious, loudly roaring – Sarasvati, Mother of Floods … with fair streams strongly flowing, full swelling with the volume of their water …19

  She with her might … hath burst with strong waves the ridges of the hills … Yea, this divine Sarasvati, terrible with her golden path, foe-slayer … whose limitless unbroken flood, swift-moving with a rapid rush, comes onward with tempestuous roar … Yea, she most dear amidst dear streams … graciously inclined, Sarasvati hath earned our praise.20

  In the footnotes to his 1889 translation, long before the era of satellites and remote sensing, Griffith commented on the use of the word ‘she’ in the above verse and expressed a certain geographical puzzlement:

  She: Sarasvati as a river. The description given in the text can hardly apply to the small stream generally known under that name; and from this and other passages which will be noticed as they occur it seems probable that Sarasvati is also another name of Sindhu, or the Indus.21

  Griffith did not for a moment consider the possibility that the Sarasvati of the Vedas might have been a much greater ‘stream’ in the distant past than it is today (thus justifying the Rig’s description), and even translated without comment another passage that negates his own hypothesis by speaking of both rivers in the same verse:

  Let the great Streams come hither with their mighty help, Sindhu [Indus], Sarasvati, and Sarayu with waves. Ye Goddess Floods, ye Mothers, animating all, promise us water rich in fatness and in balm …22

  Because the Rig is in fact clear on the matter, scholars have long since given up the attempt to brush off the anomalous descriptions of the Sarasvati by trying to pretend that the Indus was meant. Nor-because of the perfect conformity between the ancient descriptions of a massive Sarasvati and the latest scientific evidence of a formerly massive Sarasvati – does there seem to be much mileage in writing it all off as hyperbole or poetic licence. Thus Possehl is prepared to concede:

  The image created in the Rig Veda for the Sarasvati River is one of a powerful, full-flowing river, not easily reconciled with the literal meaning of the name ‘Chain of Pools’. The discrepancy cannot simply be dismissed; swept under the carpet. It is a good example of how difficult it can be to use the Rig Veda, and the Vedic texts generally, as historical sources.

  It could be that when the composers of the Vedas first came to the Sarasvati it was a river of great magnitude, and these recollections are what we read in their texts. But over time the stream was robbed of its headwaters and dried up, becoming a chain of pools. For whatever reason, the name was changed and Sarasvati is the name that was preserved in the texts; awkward to be sure, but probably not insurmountable. This carries an interesting chronological implication: the composers of the Rig Veda were in the Sarasvati region prior to the drying up of the river and this would be closer to 2000 BC than it is to 1000 BC, somewhat earlier than most of the conventional chronologies for the presence of Vedic Aryans in the Punjab.23

  Possehl und
erstates his case. The ‘chronological implications’ of Vedic Aryans in the Punjab by 2000 BC are much more than ‘interesting’. They are potentially devastating for the academic edifice of Indian literary history founded on a date for the Rig Veda of around 1200 BC – and thus for every assumption about Indian prehistory that has ever been based on such a date for the Rig. At the very least, if this is what the references to a full and powerful Sarasvati mean, then the possibility of a connection between the Indus-Sarasvati civilization and the Vedic religion must be greatly enhanced.

  But the plot thickens …

  From mountain to ocean

  As well as presenting us with images of a powerful, fast-flowing, roaring river (that would seem to be have been historically accurate for the Sarasvati at any time up until the end of the third millennium BC) the Rig Veda tells us something else, very, very clearly, that at first sight does not appear to be historically accurate at all. It tells us that the Sarasvati known to the Vedic priests and sages ran unbroken from the mountains to the ocean:

  This stream Sarasvati with fostering current comes forth, our sure defence … the flood flows on, surpassing in majesty and might all other waters. Pure in her course from the mountains to the ocean …24

  The problem, in a nutshell, is this: the satellite studies indicate that the last time the Sarasvati flowed into any ocean may have been more than 10,000 years ago – in other words during the final millennia of the post-glacial meltdown. In a paper in the specialist journal Remote Sensing, S. M. Ramaswamy, P. C. Bakliwal and R. P. Verma make the following observations about the satellite data from which they draw this very important conclusion about the ‘palaeo-Sarasvati’:

  The occurrence of well-developed tentacles of palaeo-channels in the vast Indian Desert [north-east of the Rann of Kutch] and the final arm of the palaeo-channel as the Ghaggar … show that River Sarasvati flowed close to the Aravalli hill ranges [and] met the Arabian Sea in the Rann of Kutch.25

  The exact epoch in which the Sarasvati stopped flowing ‘pure in her course’ to the Arabian Sea and began to lose her way instead in the thirsty sands of the Indian Desert is not yet known with any certainty. Nevertheless, Ramaswamy, Bakliwal and Verma are quite satisfied that it was not in the ‘Holocene’ (the most recent geological age) but in the ‘late Pleistocene’ – about 12,000 years ago.26 The same approximate date has also been suggested by Bhimal Ghose, Anil Kar and Zahrid Jussain in a study for the Central Arid Zone Research Institute, Jodhpur,27 and by Ghose et al. in the Geographical Journal.28 B. P. Radhakrishna of the Geological Society of India similarly indicates the period between 8000 and 6000 BC as the time when melting ice-sheets in the Himalayas, accompanied by a great increase in precipitation, allowed ‘Sarasvati and all its tributaries [to flow] in full majestic splendour’.29 If all these scientists are interpreting the data correctly, then it is only to follow Possehl’s own logic to observe that the combination of the remote-sensing evidence and the textual evidence carries an interesting chronological implication: the composers of the Rig Veda were in the Sarasvati region at a time when that river still ran all the way to the sea, and this would be closer to 8000 BC than it is to 1000 BC.

  It goes without saying that such a date is not just ‘somewhat earlier’ but dramatically, startlingly, inexplicably earlier than any of the conventional chronologies for the presence of Vedic Aryans in the Punjab. So has the modern science of remote sensing revealed one of the deeper layers of the Vedic palimpsest? Or is it just a fluke that what appears to be an accurate geographical account of the Sarasvati river as it last looked 10,000 or even 12,000 years ago seems to have been preserved in the Rig2.

  Since leading mainstream scholars like Gregory Possehl have already all but accepted the heretical possibility that Vedic civilization was present in the Punjab by 2000 BC (on the basis of the colourful description of a full and turbulent Sarasvati) it seems invidious of them to ignore or sidestep the Rig’s equally colourful description of the Sarasvati flowing to the sea. However, this is exactly what Possehl does. Quoting the relevant passage (‘pure in her course from the mountains to the ocean’), he admits that ‘the Vedic pundits thought that the Sarasvati went to the sea’ but explicitly advises students to treat this observation ‘critically, not literally’30 – presumably because to take the observation literally would imply an ‘impossibly’ early date for Vedic civilization.

  Under Vedic skies

  There are other passages within the Rig – not to do with rivers at all – which also appear to contain material of very great antiquity. These particularly concern astronomical observations of various stars and groups of stars at set seasons – the spring and autumn equinoxes and the summer and winter solstices. Because of a phenomenon known as the precession of the equinoxes, the technical details of which need not detain us here,31 the constellations seen at these seasons slowly and magisterially trade places, as though revolving on a great belt in the heavens, at the rate of one degree every seventy-two years with a full cycle of just under 26,000 years.32 Thus, if an ancient text says ‘we saw the star such-and-such or the constellation such-and-such rising at dawn at midsummer’, then it is possible with modern astronomical formulae to calculate approximately when that observation must have been made.

  There are numerous statements of this sort about stars and the seasons in the Rig Veda which, if taken at face value, suggest that the Vedic sages made observations of the sky for thousands of years and from time to time added verses or hymns incorporating new astronomical data to the pre-existing compilation. The problem is that the range of dates, going back to the same epoch as the Sarasvati material, has always been thought of as too outlandish to be taken seriously by the majority of scholars.

  This is, however, not quite a uniform view. Two of the highly respected Vedic scholars of the late nineteenth century, Professor H. Jacobi and Bal Ganghadar Tilak, were in no doubt that very ancient celestial observations are embedded within the Rig. On the basis of astronomical references Jacobi dated most of the hymns to the epoch of 4500–2500 BC.33 And although Tilak’s more comprehensive study found the greatest concentrations of references pointing to approximately the same period, he noted that earlier dates were also flagged.34 Tilak thought that the most prolific epoch of Vedic composition had been between 4000 and 2500 BC – the ‘Orion period’ as he called it – in which references are found ‘from the time that the vernal equinox was in the asterism of Ardra to the time when it receded to the asterism of the Khtikas [the Pleiades]’.35 But he also identified an older sub-layer of Vedic hymns with what he called ‘the Aditi or the pre-Orion period’, stating: ‘we may roughly assign 6000–4000 BC as its limit’.36

  More recently David Frawley has pointed to other references which may carry the Rig Veda’s astronomical testimony back even earlier than 6000 BC, indeed ‘possibly as early as 7000 BC when the [winter] solstice first entered [the constellation of] Ashwini’37 (i.e., when the winter solstice was at or very near the beginning of the constellation of Aries).38 Frawley concludes:

  The Vedas look back to a time when the winter solstice, the Path of the Gods or northern course of the Sun, began near the beginning of the sign Aries … This does not mean that the hymns which use such symbolism were all composed during this era … It means that the Rig Veda looks back in its mythology to this era as determining much of the symbolism of its Gods and the order of its rituals …39

  The Era of the Seven Sages

  Why should the Rig look back in time towards such a distant epoch, roughly between 7000 and 6000 BC, if it does not have some very real and significant connection with that epoch?

  Oddly enough, exactly the same question can be asked of a system of calendrical reckoning still in use in some remote highland parts of India today, notably Kashmir.40 Described at length in the Puranas, it is called, suggestively, ‘the Era of the Seven Rishis’.41 Although it operates completely independently of the yuga system it does intersect with it at certain points and, indeed, it is
this very Saptarishi calendar which provides the referents that pundits have used to calculate the onset of the Kali Yuga to a date of 3102 BC.42

  To state a complicated matter briefly, the Saptarishi calendar envisages a series of revolving cycles, each of 2800 years duration (much shorter than those of the yuga system). And while the yuga system has no real beginning or end, the Saptarishi calendar has a definite start date – a very first ‘Era of the Seven Rishis’. This start date is 6676 BC.43 According to John Mitchiner’s detailed study:

  The complete cycle wherein occurs the start of the Kali Yuga will commence with Krittika in 3876 BC … while the preceding complete cycle will commence with Krittika some 2800 years earlier, namely in 6676 BC … and the following complete cycle will commence with Krittika in 1076 BC … The date of 6676 BC was in some sense regarded as being a starting point for Indian chronology.44

  Mitchiner points out that that there is historical corroboration for a seventh-millennium BC start-point for Indian chronology in the works of Greek and Roman authors. Notable examples are Solinus and Pliny (AD23–79), who said of the Indians that from the time of the founding-father of their civilization to the time of Alexander the Great: ‘they reckon the number of their kings to have been 154 and they reckon the time as 6451 years and 3 months’.45 Alexander entered the Punjab in 326 BC and left in the same year. The implication is that the ‘Father’ figure (associated with Bacchus in the Roman texts) ‘was thought to have reigned in India in 64511/4 + 326 = 6777 BC’.46