Archaeologists’ reactions to the NIOT’s claims were understandably muted and in some cases hostile; in consequence there was virtually no international media coverage of the discovery which, very rapidly, seemed to have been forgotten. Nevertheless, I made contact with the NIOT and provisionally arranged to dive with them in the Gulf of Cambay in November-December 2001 as part of the final filming trip for the television series of Underworld.
When we arrived in India in November 2001, I talked with archaeologists at the NIO (National Institute of Oceanography – a completely separate operation from the NIOT) and they told me they did not accept that anything of significance had been discovered. Most likely, they said, the geometrical ‘structures’ seen on the side-scan sonar readings were merely artefacts of the imaging process. Likewise, R. S. Bisht, a director of the Archaeological Survey of India and a leading expert on the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, told me frankly that he did not believe the NIOT’s findings and that they must be ‘hallucinations’.
I was therefore not filled with optimism when I arrived in the port of Bhavnagar on the Gulf of Cambay to keep my previously made appointment with the NIOT – and my sense of unease increased when I was informed that Indian Naval Intelligence had refused to issue me a permit to dive on the alleged underwater site. Still, we set up the cameras for a day of filming on board the NIOT research vessel, the M.V. Sagar Paschmi, and waited to see what senior NIOT scientists had to say about the matter.
The story that they told us on camera and the evidence that they presented to us banished any reasonable doubts. Despite the ridicule and cold shoulders to which they had been subjected by the archaeological establishment, they had indeed made a discovery of staggering significance. According to Dr S. Kathiroli, the NIOT’s Project Director, and geological consultant S. Badrinarayan, they had been surprised by the hostile reactions of archaeologists to the initial announcement of their findings in May 2001. As scientists, however, they had decided to pursue the mystery further through empirical research and see where it led. Thus, between May and late November 2001 they had conducted further side-scan sonar surveys and backed these up with sub-bottom profiling around the geometrical structures.
The results confirmed their initial impression that extensive man-made ruins did indeed lie on the sea-bed in the Gulf of Cambay at depths of between 25 and 40 metres and at distances of up to 40 kilometres from the modern shoreline. The sub-bottom profiles revealed extensive, well-built foundations to the geometrical structures and in some cases walls rising as much as 3 metres above the sea-bed and extending down several metres below. Moreover, as well as the original ‘city-complex’ covering a rectangular area roughly 9 kilometres long and 2 kilometres wide, a second city of similar size had been found a little further to the south at similar depths. Both cities lie along the courses of ancient rivers that had flowed here when the area was above water, and in one case the remains of an ancient dam more than 600 metres long have been identified.
Thus far the NIOT had been unable to dive on the sites, due to the great tidal amplitude in the Gulf and extremely hazardous currents. Moreover, when they sent down their remotely operated vehicle (ROV), its cameras were unable to record clear images because of zero visibility due to dissolved solids in the waters of the Gulf. How therefore to get to the sort of ‘ground truth’ that might impress sceptical archaeologists? The only solution, the NIOT decided, was to lift samples directly off the sea-bed from the heart of the areas identified in their side-scans and sub-bottom profiles.
The results, which they showed us and we were able to film, are spectacular. In just one day of sampling using grabs and trawls more than 2000 man-made artefacts were recovered – including jewellery, stone tools, pottery and figurines. The assemblage, which is typically ‘pre-Harappan’ (and which includes carbon-datable human remains such as teeth), confirms that the underwater structures identified by the side-scans and sub-bottom profiles were indeed large-scale human settlements before their inundation. The extremely ancient character of the artefacts also seems to rule out any possibility that the underwater sites could date from a period later than the pre-Harappan. On the record S. Badrinarayan told me that in his opinion these submerged city-complexes must, at the very youngest, date to between 7000 and 8000 years ago and that the most likely agent of their inundation was sea-level rise at the end of the Ice Age rather than any kind of fault collapse due to seismic activity – for which the region is nevertheless renowned. Perhaps some catastrophic combination of earthquake activity and sea-level rise could account for the massive and apparently very sudden scale of the submersion which, on the face of things, appears to have obliterated an entire civilization in this region.
More work must be done to establish the dates exactly and to come to terms with the true nature of the enigma of the Gulf of Cambay. Yet we know already, by the very extent of the ruins, that they represent something that orthodox historians and archaeologists have never accepted – the possibility that a lost civilization lies concealed in Indian prehistory and that the Indian flood myth of Manu and the Seven Sages rests firmly on ground truth.
STOP PRESS
On 16 January 2002 India’s Minister of Science and Technology released the first results of carbon-dating of the artefacts from the flooded cities of the Gulf of Cambay. The results date the artefacts to 9500 years ago – 5000 years older than any city so far recognized by archaeologists.
Postscript 2 / The Underworld in the Bay of Bengal
3 April 2002, Mahabalipuram, Tamil Nadu
Sinking down through the murky waters of the Bay of Bengal a mile offshore of the south-east Indian town of Mahabalipuram, I found myself amongst huge submerged walls, plazas and pinnacles emerging out of the gloom – structures that seemed more like the work of gods or titans than of men and to belong more in the world of myth than that of history. With a kick of my fins I turned slowly around, and in every direction that I looked I saw extensive and impressive ruins stretching away. Involuntarily my heart began to pound and my breathing speeded up. Because for more than five years I had been diving the world’s oceans searching for evidence just such as this – the hard evidence that I had long believed must lie behind mankind’s collective inheritance of more than 600 ancient ‘flood myths’.
Readers who have come this far will recall that I first visited Mahabalipuram in 1956 when I was just six years old (my father was working as a surgeon at the Christian Medical College in the nearby town of Vellore). My next visit was on a journey of personal reminiscence in 1992. It was then (see chapter 5) that I purchased an anthology of travellers’ journals and reports edited by a certain Captain M. W. Carr in 1869 under the title Descriptive and Historical Papers Relating to the Seven Pagodas of the Coromandel Coast. The ‘Seven Pagodas’ is the old mariners’ name for Mahabalipuram, and on my third visit to the town in February 2000 (see chapter 11) I took Captain Carr’s anthology with me. In one paper J. Goldingham, Esq., writing in 1798, spoke of the part of Mahabalipuram that I remembered best from my childhood – the ‘Shore Temple’, carved out of solid granite, lashed by waves:
The surf here breaks far out over, as the Brahmins inform you, the ruins of a city which was incredibly large and magnificent … A Brahmin, about 50 years of age, a native of the place, whom I have had an opportunity of conversing with since my arrival in Madras, informed me his grandfather had frequently mentioned having seen the gilt tops of five pagodas in the surf, no longer visible.
An earlier traveller’s report, from 1784, describes the main feature of Mahabalipuram as a ‘rock, or rather hill of stone’, out of which many of the monuments are carved. This outcropping, he says:
is one of the principal marks for mariners as they approach the coast and to them the place is known by the name of ‘Seven Pagodas’, possibly because the summits of the rock have presented them with that idea as they passed: but it must be confessed that no aspect which the hill assumes seems at all to authorise this notion; and there are ci
rcumstances that would lead one to suspect that this name has arisen from some such number of Pagodas that formerly stood here and in time have been buried in the waves …
The same author, William Chambers, then goes on to relate the more detailed oral tradition of Mahabalipuram – given to him by Brahmins of the town during visits that he made there in 1772 and 1776 – that prompted his suspicion of submerged structures.
According to this tradition a Raja named Malecheren ruled at Mahabalipuram at some time in the remote past. He encountered a being from the heavenly realms who became his friend and agreed ‘to carry him in disguise to see the court of the god Indra’ – a favour that had never before been granted to any mortal:
The Raja returned from thence with new ideas of splendour and magnificence, which he immediately adopted in regulating his court and his retinue, and in beautifying his seat of government. By this means Mahabalipuram became soon celebrated beyond all the cities of the earth; and an account of its magnificence having been brought to the gods assembled at the court of Indra, their jealousy was so much excited at it that they sent orders to the God of the Sea to let loose his billows and overflow a place which impiously pretended to vie in splendour with their celestial mansions. This command he obeyed, and the city was at once overflowed by that furious element, nor has it ever since been able to rear its head.
Go where the fish are
It was this myth that now kept drawing me back to Mahabalipuram. Almost exactly a year later, in February 2001, I was there again – this time to interview fishermen on camera for my Channel 4 TV series, Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age. My wife, Santha, whose mother-tongue is Tamil – the language of Mahabalipuram – was seated beside me on the beach on a pile of drying nets with a large, gossipy, excited and jocular crowd gathering round us. Everybody in the village who might have an opinion or information to contribute was there, including all the fishermen – some of whom had been drinking palm toddy most of the afternoon and were in a boisterous and argumentative mood. What they were arguing about was their answers to the questions that I was asking and precisely who had seen what, where underwater – so I was happy to listen to their animated conversations and disagreements.
An elder with wrinkled nut-brown eyes and grey hair bleached white by long exposure to the sun and sea spoke at length about a structure with columns which he had seen one day from his boat when the water had been exceptionally clear. ‘There was a big fish,’ he told me. ‘A red fish. I watched it swimming towards some rocks. Then I realized that they were not rocks but a temple. The fish disappeared into the temple, then it appeared again, and I saw that it was swimming in and out of a row of columns.’
‘Are you certain it was a temple?’ I asked.
‘Of course it was a temple,’ my informant replied. He pointed to the pyramidal granite pagoda of the Shore Temple. ‘It looked like that.’
Several of the younger men had the usual stories to tell about heroic scary dives – lasting minutes, hearts thudding, their breath bursting in their lungs -to free fishing gear snagged on dark and treacherous underwater buildings. In one case, it seemed, a huge net had become so thoroughly entrapped on such a structure that the trawler that was towing it had been stopped in its tracks. In the case of another underwater ruin divers had seen a doorway leading into an internal room but had been afraid to enter it.
One strange report was that certain of the ruins close to Mahabalipuram emit ‘clanging’ or ‘booming’ or musical sounds if the sea conditions are right: ‘It is like the sound of a great sheet of metal being struck.’
‘And what about further away?’ I asked. ‘If I were to take a boat south, following the coast, what would I find? Are the underwater structures mainly just here around Mahabalipuram or are they spread out?’
‘As far south as Rameswaram you may find ruins underwater,’ said one of the elders. ‘I have fished there. I have seen them.’
Others had not travelled so far, but all agreed that within their experience there were submerged structures everywhere along the coast: ‘If you just go where the fish are then you will find them.’
Expedition
The next challenge for me was now somehow to set up a full-scale diving expedition to Mahabalipuram. The responsible authority in India is the marine archaeology division of the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO). However, I knew that the NIO, on its own, did not have sufficient funds or incentive to put an expedition in place.
Fortuitously at about this time – the spring of 2001 – I was approached by John Blashford Snell of the Dorset-based Scientific Exploration Society (SES). Over lunch at my home in Devon, Blashford Snell asked me if any of the mysteries raised by the research for my new book Underworld might make a worthwhile SES expedition. Naturally I suggested a quest for Mahabalipuram’s supposedly ‘mythical’ flooded city. I also recommended a second site, Poompuhur, which lies about 200 kilometres south of Mahabalipuram. In chapter 14 I describe my dives there with the NIO in February 2001 to investigate a mysterious ‘U-shaped structure’ that their own marine archaeologists had found at a depth of 23 metres (about 70 feet). I felt that it was worthy of much closer investigation and that a well-resourced diving expedition to both Poompuhur and Mahabalipuram stood a chance of making some exciting discoveries.
On Blashford Snell’s request I introduced the SES to the NIO and over the following months nudged and cajoled the sometimes faltering communications of the two organizations until the plans for the expedition had been fully approved. Former Royal Marines officer Monty Halls, himself a diving instructor, was selected by the SES to lead the expedition, and twelve volunteer divers, mostly from Great Britain, put up all the necessary funding.
Thus it was that in April 2002 I found myself once more in Mahabalipuram – this time supported by all the divers and expertise needed to test my hypothesis that the local myths of a flooded city might actually lead us to a city underwater. Naturally I feared the failure of such a public quest, whilst hoping that it would succeed. Yet even in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined how immediately self-evident it would be, from the moment we got in the water, that following the clues in the myths and local traditions had indeed led to the discovery of a major archaeological site …
How old?
But how old are the spectacular underwater ruins lying off the coast of Mahabalipuram likely to turn out to be?
As I sank down through the murky waters on my first dive there and began to notice the huge walls snaking across the seabed, I was struck – despite what the fishermen had told me – by the stark differences in architectural style between these looming submerged structures and the temples of the historical period, such as the Shore Temple, that I knew on land. The material was the same – local red granite – but in general the block sizes of the underwater structures were much bigger. On later dives I was to discover that they included clusters of truly enormous megaliths, weighing up to four tonnes each, that seemed to be the remains of colossal buildings torn apart by some powerful cataclysm – probably the very cataclysm that had flooded this place. Each gigantic cluster proved to lie at the centre and highest point of a large rectangle of ruins and these rectangular areas were spaced out at quarter-mile intervals north and south, parallel to the shore.
I made a couple of dives with Santha, who was shooting underwater stills, and a couple of dives with Trevor Jenkins, the expedition’s videographer. On one dive Trevor and I followed a superb, curved wall that ran unbroken for more than 16 metres. On another I was able to expose the core masonry on a different length of wall, revealing the fine jointing between blocks.
On the very last dive, at a site we’d tagged as ‘location 4’, Trevor discovered what he thought might be a stone carving of a lion’s head in profile lying on the seabed. I wasn’t so sure: it was too damaged and shrouded in marine growth for me to be certain what it was or even if it was man-made at all. While Trevor filmed it, I tried to clear a section of it with my knife, but all I
could establish was that it was solid granite, about the radius and thickness of a car wheel, and roughly crescent-shaped. I couldn’t make out any individual features – but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. It will have to be found again on some future dive, removed from the sea and studied in the lab before any firm conclusions can be drawn about what it is.
Hasty conclusions
That at any rate would be normal archaeological procedure. So I was confused after our return from Mahabalipuram to learn that the NIO had issued a press statement proposing a possible date and function for the submerged ruins and citing this very same ‘lion figure’ as evidence:
Based on what appears to be a Lion figure, of location 4, ruins are inferred to be parts of temple complex. The possible date of the ruins may be 1500–1200 years before present. Pallava dynasty, ruling the area during the period, has constructed many such rock-cut and structural temples in Mahabalipuram and Kanchipuram.
To come to such far-reaching deductions on the basis of ambiguous video footage of an alleged ‘lion figure’ strikes me as hasty, to say the least. None of the NIO archaeologists saw this ‘figure’ at first hand as Trevor and I did, and I for one am not convinced that it is any kind of figure at all. Moreover, the use of lion symbolism is widespread in India and indeed in global sculpture of almost all periods. Surely, therefore, a heavily overgrown and damaged object like this ought to be studied thoroughly before it and the submerged ruins all around it can safely be assigned to a specific dynasty such as the Pallavas or to a specific chronology such as 1500 to 1200 years ago?