Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

  My appointment was with Kamlesh Vora, the NIO’s head of archaeology, with whom I had been corresponding. I appreciated that he had taken the trouble to process my proposal at all, since he could perfectly easily have dismissed it out of hand or just ignored it, but the fact was that many months had passed and there was still no sign either of approval or disapproval from the higher authorities – in Delhi as it happened – to whom he had submitted it.

  ‘Now that you are here,’ he said, ‘perhaps it will galvanize them into action.’

  He picked up the telephone and placed a call to the offices of the Scientific Research Council, the NIO’s parent organization and an important spoke in the wheel of central government. A lengthy conversation then followed in Hindi. Finally, Kamlesh hung up: ‘There is a certain lady within the SRC who I need to talk to about your case.’ He gave me a gloomy look: ‘Unfortunately she is not at her desk today’ A smile: ‘But I’ll find her tomorrow.’

  ‘What do you expect the answer will be?’

  Kamlesh became gloomy again and explained that never before had the NIO had to deal with a request from an author to dive with them at Dwarka. If I was an academic or governmental institution seeking to send an observer to the site there would be set procedures to follow and the permission process would go along according to a well-ordered routine. But since I was a private individual, non-governmental, non-academic, and non-Indian into the bargain (raising issues about what sort of visa I should be travelling on), no one knew what to do with me.

  And here was the problem. The NIO’s annual campaign in Dwarka, which I was hoping to join, was scheduled to go ahead in mid-February (less than two weeks hence) but would continue only until mid-March. So my permission had to come through before then. If it didn’t I’d miss the campaign and therefore would lose my chance to dive at Dwarka until the following year.

  ‘You mean you only dive there for one month every year?’

  ‘If we’re lucky. Our funds are very limited, but we do what we can.’

  ‘What if I make my own arrangements? If the permission comes through after the NIO has gone is there any way that I can arrange to dive privately at Dwarka?’

  Kamlesh was horrified: ‘No, not at all. It is a protected national archaeological site, so our people have to be with you. Besides, there’s no private diving at Dwarka. There are no facilities there. It’s a very out of the way place. We bring our own compressor and tanks with us from Goa every year and take them away again when we leave …’

  My heart sank. Since I’d first learned of it in 1992 as a non-diver, the underwater city of Dwarka had beckoned to me like a fairytale kingdom that seemed far beyond my reach. Eight years later I’d acquired the skills, but not yet the permission, to dive at it. And I felt helpless to influence the matter in any way.

  ‘Come and see me mid-morning tomorrow,’ Kamlesh said. ‘I will try again with the SRC. Maybe I will have good news for you.’

  Write a letter

  I was back with Kamlesh by eleven the next morning, but there was no news, good or bad. The lady at the SRC was still not at her desk. He called her again. Still nothing. Finally, half an hour later, she answered her phone. Yes, she had received the paperwork concerning my proposed visit. Yes, it was being considered. No, there was no decision as yet. Kamlesh asked if anything could be done to speed things up. It might be a good idea, she told him, if I were to write a letter explaining in greater detail than in my original proposal exactly why I wanted to dive at Dwarka.

  Suppressing a mood of rising irritation and bad temper, I took a taxi back to the Ciudad de Goa hotel, fired up my portable computer and began to draft the letter – which Kamlesh suggested I should address in the first instance to Dr Ehrlich Desa, the Director of the NIO. ‘If he intervenes with the SRC on behalf of your case it will make a great difference.’

  When I met Kamlesh later in the afternoon to review the text of the letter, he told me that he had spoken to Dr Desa who had agreed to see me at ten the next morning.

  Two days later I left Goa. Permission had still not been given. But my meeting with Ehrlich Desa had been encouraging and he had promised his support in fast-tracking my application through the SRC. I felt confident that he and Kamlesh would do their best for me, and vaguely optimistic that somehow the necessary strings would be pulled to allow me to dive at Dwarka. We agreed to stay in touch by e-mail.

  Interlude: the quest for Kumari Randam

  My trip to India in February 2000 had multiple objectives and I had intended from the beginning to be on the road until the middle of March. So although the hold-ups and uncertainties about Dwarka were worrying, they hadn’t yet really inconvenienced me. It was perfectly possible that permission could still be granted …

  Meanwhile Santha and I had long planned another journey in southern India and flew first to Madras, now called Chennai, to pick up where we had left off in 1992.

  Then it had been a journey of personal reminiscence – Vellore and the shore temples of Mahabalipuram on the Coromandel coast. Now we would start in Mahabalipuram, travel inland from there to Tiruvannamalai, a temple sacred to Siva since time immemorial, and thence to Madurai, an ancient centre of Tamil learning linked again to the yogic god Siva. To the north-east of Madurai we planned to visit Poompuhur, and to the south-east Rameswaram on the thin spit of mainland that reaches out towards Sri Lanka, dividing the Palk Strait from the Gulf of Mannar. Then we would go on to Kaniya Kumari – Cape Comorin – on the southernmost tip of India.

  During 1999 I had begun background research on southern India and had been intrigued by what I had found.

  One source of information that had lain unopened in my library for far too long was Captain M. W. Carr’s Descriptive and Historical Papers Relating to the Seven Pagodas of the Coromandel Coast.15 As I reported in chapter 5, Carr’s anthology preserves strong local traditions of a fabulous antediluvian city at Mahabalipuram swallowed up by the waters of a great flood. Those traditions had certainly been in wide circulation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the papers in Carr’s anthology were written. I wanted to find out if they were still in circulation today and if there could be any substance to them.

  I had also come across the work of David Shulman, Professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His wide-ranging investigation of Tamil flood myths had helped to put places like Poompuhur, Madurai and Kaniya Kumari on the map for me. In the Tamil epic known as the Manimekalai it was said that the ancient port-city of Kaveripumpattinam had been flooded by the sea off the Poompuhur shore. Other traditions spoke of prehistoric wisdom schools or academies (sangam) established ‘in an antediluvian Tamil land stretching far to the south of the present southern border at Cape Comorin’.16 The name of this lost land, which had been swallowed up by the sea in two distinct inundations separated by thousands of years, was Kumari Kandam, and its last survivors were said to have fled to Madurai.17

  As usual when I’m on the road I was carrying a shoulder bag full of books and reference materials with me, some brought from England, some picked up along the way. Following my few days in Goa, I had added substantially to my stack with a pile of bulky annual conference reports and back numbers of the NIO’s Journal of Marine Archaeology that Kamlesh had given me.

  Serendipitously the very first of these that I browsed through on the flight from Goa to Chennai (volume 5–6 of 1995–6) opened with a lengthy paper entitled ‘Underwater Explorations off Poompuhur 1993.’18 Much of the paper concentrated on an archaeological validation of the Manimekalai myth, connecting it to the submerged ruins of Kaveripumpattinam ‘an ancient port town of 3rd century BC to 4th century BC’ that the NIO’s marine archaeologists had identified very close to the shore in water generally less than 3 metres deep.19 But the paper also reported the anomalous U-shaped structure that the divers had found at a depth of 23 metres more than 5 kilometres out to sea.20

  I immediately realized that this obscure and
neglected reference to a 1993 exploration that the NIO had never had the funds to follow up was potentially significant. I did not then have access, as I would later, to Glenn Milne’s computerized inundation maps. But at that depth and that distance from the shore, common sense alone suggested that the U-shaped structure must be extremely old.21

  The main author of the report and team-leader of the Poompuhur exploration had been S. R. Rao, Kamlesh Vora’s predecessor at the NIO and the original discoverer of the underwater ruins of Dwarka. Since he was now retired and living in Bangalore, only a short hop from Chennai, I decided on impulse that at some point on our journey in the south I would try to meet him.

  ‘It must have existed …’

  February 2000

  My encounter with Rao, which I’ve already reported in chapter 1, took place on 29 February. To my amazement the doyen of Indian marine archaeology proved open to the notion that an antediluvian civilization could have existed on the Indian coastal lands flooded at the end of the Ice Age:

  It must have existed. You can’t rule that out at all. Particularly, as I have said, since we have found this structure at 23 metre depth. I mean we have photographed it. It is there, anybody can go and see it. I do not believe it is an isolated structure; further exploration is likely to reveal others round about. And then you can go deeper, you see, and you may get more important things.22

  Well return to the quest for Kumari Kandam in chapter 11. For me a big part of it unfolded there and then in the year 2000 and an even bigger part – the diving part – in 2001.

  Meanwhile, a couple of days before my encounter with Rao, something suddenly shifted in the turgid backlog of Indian bureaucracy and Kamlesh e-mailed me with the good news that the permission had come through – ‘at the eleventh hour’ as he put it – and that I would be allowed to dive at Dwarka with the NIO team. Much was owed, apparently, to the robust support given to our adventure by Dr Desa. At any rate there would be no further obstacles and Santha and I should plan to reach Dwarka on 2 March.

  The problem of Dwarka’s age

  March 2000

  It felt good to be back in Dwarka again after so many years away and to have the opportunity at last to look into the mystery of its underwater ruins.

  When I’d interviewed him in Bangalore, Rao had reaffirmed his longstanding view that the ruins are those of an Indus-Sarasvati port probably built between 1700 BC and 1500 BC during the final years of the civilization’s decline and then flooded by an incursion of the sea. However, he admitted that the dates were a supposition not an empirical fact. Radiocarbon or thermoluminescence tests, which might settle the matter, had not been possible, since the latter requires pottery contemporary with the ruins and the former organic materials contemporary with the ruins – neither of which had yet been found in submerged Dwarka itself:

  Rao: I mean to be frank, you see, we did some thermoluminescence dating for the pottery extracted from the wall which is just on the shore – and of course it also partially gets submerged at some times. All right, that gives 1528 BC. But that is at a slightly higher terrace than the submerged one. So the submerged one must be earlier.

  GH: Would it be fair to say, concerning the underwater structures, that the minimum age would be about 1500 BC but that it is possible that they may be older?

  Rao: Oh yes, definitely, that you can definitely say. Minimum age would be about even 1500, 1600 BC, but an earlier date can’t be ruled out. I mean there is every possibility of getting earlier dates.

  GH: My understanding is that underwater structures that have been identified so far go down to about 12 metres under the sea?

  Rao: These structures go to about 10 metres depth. Of course, the ridge which was converted into a sort of wharf, that is at 12 metres depth. Beyond that we have gone, but not much.23

  GH: Do you think there’s any chance of further ruins being found further out into the sea?

  Rao: Maybe. Maybe. I won’t rule that out at all. Because, you see, what we did [beyond the 12 metre depth contour] was only side-scan sonar survey. I mean, a little diving as well we have done here, but not much, to be frank. I mean, if you dive for three days or four days only then you cannot expect to find much …24

  Expecting the best

  We were to dive at Dwarka off a small wooden sea-going trawler, a rough-and-ready working ship crewed by local fishermen that the NIO had chartered. Since its draft was too deep to approach the shore it was moored in the bay about half a kilometre to the south-west in front of the Gomati river mouth. We were ferried out to it in an inflatable dinghy that picked us up from the steps of Gomati Ghat, and as we chugged across the bay I found myself looking down impatiently at the water, hoping to get some glimpse of whatever lay below.

  The ruins had been thoroughly mapped by the NIO across a large area between the mouth of the Gomati – which now lay behind our dinghy to the north-east – and a submerged rock ridge about a kilometre out to sea to the south-west that had been cut and modified as a wharf when it was above water in ancient times. This was the wharf that Rao had mentioned as the site’s deepest known structure at 12 metres and which he suspected to have been part of its harbour.

  All the other remains, revealing the outlines of a series of spacious rectilinear buildings, lay much closer to shore between just 3 and 10 metres with the majority concentrated between 5 and 7 metres.25 These included twelve so-called ‘citadels’, protected by massive bastions, six on each bank of a now submerged section of the Gomati channel, where Rao told me he thought that ‘not only the King but also the army chief, other officials or his ministers used to live’.26 The ancient harbour city itself was divided into six blocks:

  All six sectors have protective walls built of large well-dressed blocks of sandstone, some as large as 1.5 to 2 m long, 0.5 to 0.75 m wide and 0.3 to 0.5 m thick. L-shaped joints in the masonry suggest that a proper grip was provided so as to withstand the battering of waves and currents. At close intervals semi-circular or circular bastions were built along the fort walls in order to divert the current and to have a proper overview of the incoming and outgoing ships … There are entrance gateways in all sectors as surmised on the basis of the sill of the openings. The fort walls and bastions, built from large blocks which are too heavy to be moved by waves and currents, are in situ up to one or two metres height above the boulder foundation in the sea. In a few places as many as five courses of masonry are visible but in others the wall and bastion have collapsed.27

  Map of submerged ruins off Dwarka. Based on Rao (1999).

  Prepped by such imagery of a fairytale underwater city, and the beautiful reconstructions of antediluvian Dwarka that feature in Rao’s books, I confess I was expecting the best as I clambered out of the dinghy and up the side of the NIO’s chartered fishing boat on the morning of 3 March 2000.

  Fog, weed and sludge

  In the relentless war of heat-exchange that goes on between a diver and the sea, it is the sea that always wins in the end. The process is faster in cold water, slower in warm water, and can be delayed further by an insulating wetsuit; however, the end result is always the same. If the sea is colder than the diver’s body temperature then the diver’s body temperature will begin to fall.

  I think of myself as a reasonably experienced diver but I’m fifty years old, way past my peak fitness, and I make mistakes. The mistake I made at Dwarka, though I’d been warned that the water was only 23 degrees centigrade (and thus 14 degrees below body temperature), was not to wear a wetsuit. This would have been fine if I’d been going down for just one or two short dives. But we did three dives that day, running to an hour or more each.

  The first two dives were on the big concentration of ruins that the NIO had mapped between the 5 and 7 metre contour lines. Gone were the lofty turrets, battlements and bastions of Rao’s reconstructions and of my imagination. All seemed to have been reduced to a ruin-field of haphazardly strewn stone blocks, the angles and edges of which poked here and there out of the t
hick sludge of sediment and slimy green weed that carpeted everything. And although the sea was calm that morning, allowing some settlement of silts carried down into the bay by the Gomati river, millions of tiny particles hung suspended in the water, scattering light like a fog.

  Through the fog I was just able to make out beneath me several dozen large limestone blocks that seemed to have come from a collapsed section of wall, not quite megalithic in the strict sense of the term, but very close to it, tumbled on top of one another. The wall had been dry-stone – no mortar in the joints to keep the courses together. But I could see how the masons had dealt with the problem. Many of the bigger blocks had been designed to lock into each other with dovetails and, as Rao had commented, with carefully chiselled L-shaped joints which would have given extra structural stability.

  The same architectural principle had been used in the massive curved bastions that had stood at the corners of the citadels. Although I found none intact, I several times came across huge curved monoliths, dressed and polished to very high standards and in one case still jointed to a second block.

  Also protruding out of the slime and ooze on the sea-bed were carved hemispherical stones, some up to a metre across, with circular holes drilled through their centres. These were thought to have been door sockets.

  And trapped amongst the rubble of ancient Dwarka there were still a number of three-holed triangular stone anchors that the NIO had not yet salvaged for the display outside their offices. Identical anchors, Rao had told me, were known to have been used in the Mediterranean by the merchant ships of Cyprus and Syria at around 1400 BC and also in the Persian Gulf and at the nearby Indus-Sarasvati port of Lothal.28 Assuming the 1400 BC date for this type of anchor to be generally valid, he regarded their presence at Dwarka as good circumstantial evidence in favour of his 1600 BC date for the city. Certainly, they could only have been dropped here after the ruins had been submerged deeply enough for boats to sail over them.