a key area where an early form of the Indo-European language was spoken before 6500 BC. From there the distribution of the language and its successors into Europe was associated with the spread of farming … The zone of early farmers speaking Proto-Indo-European extended east to northern Iran and even to Turkmenia at the outset. The spread of Indo-European speech to the south, to the Iranian plateau and to north India and Pakistan, can then be seen as part of an analogous dispersal, related to demographic changes associated with the adoption of farming.29
After their forefathers had arrived in India, Renfrew’s hypothesis has it that the descendants of the original Neolithic migrants remained there and developed their society and religious ideas in situ for thousands of years. In his view they continued to speak an evolving form of the language brought with them from Anatolia that was to become Sanskrit – in which the Vedas would ultimately be composed. And although he has not explored the implications further, he clearly has no objection in principle to the idea that it was also they who founded the Indus-Sarasvati civilization.
Two sides of the same coin
Outside the cosy Pall Mall club of Western scholarship, Indian academics have been forthright in contemplating direct links between the Indus-Sarasvati civilization and the Vedic texts. Like Renfrew, Dr S. R. Rao, famous as the founder of marine archaeology in India, believes that the language of the Indus-Sarasvati cities was an early form of Vedic Sanskrit – and has even gone so far as to propose a full interpretation on this basis of all known examples of the Indus-Sarasvati script.30 A number of other leading scholars, such as Dr R. S. Bisht, Director of the Archaeological Survey of India, and S. P. Gupta, Professor of the History of Art in the National Museum Institute, New Delhi, also have similar ideas.
Bisht, for example, has argued that the hierarchical layout of Harappan towns was organized according to the Rig Vedic trimeshthin system which advocates three distinct sectors of settlement: Parama-Veshthina (Upper Township), Madhyama-Veshthina (Middle Township) and (Avama-Veshthina) (Lower Township). He also points out that the Harappan city of Dholavira in Gujerat, which dates back to the third millennium BC, measured 771 metres from east to west at its maximum extent and 616.8 metres from north to south, the ratio being 5:4. The Citadel, or Upper Township, measured 114 metres from east to west while from north to south it measured 92.5 metres, the ratio being again 5:4. Bisht does not think it is a coincidence that the same ratio is specifically mentioned in ancient texts setting out the proper construction of Vedic fire-altars.31
S. P. Gupta likewise points out that all the key characteristics ascribed to Rig Vedic religion and culture are already found in the mysterious ancient cities along the Indus and Sarasvati rivers. First and foremost amongst these characteristics are the cities themselves – since, contrary to the old view that the Vedas portray only a pastoral or nomadic lifestyle, all scholars now acknowledge that cities are frequently mentioned in the Rig and other Vedic texts as the homes of Aryans. Additional archetypally ‘Vedic’ characteristics that have been confirmed by excavation of the Indus-Sarasvati sites include the presence of cattle and of the domesticated horse, the use of fire-altars, and evidence of widespread international trade and deep-sea navigation. Gupta concludes:
Once it becomes reasonably clear that the Vedas do contain enough material which shows that the authors of the hymns were fully aware of the cities, city life, longdistance overseas and overland trade, etc., which characterized the Indus-Sarasvati urban gamut of cultural elements, it becomes easier for us to appreciate the theory that the Indus-Sarasvati and Vedic civilizations may have been just two complementary elements of one and the same civilization.32
Unlike Renfrew and other Western experts, however, the Indian scholars are not inclined to support any kind of European or central Asian origin for Vedic civilization. Instead, with good reason, they prefer to see it as a wholly indigenous development of their subcontinent – Indian through and through like the Indus-Sarasvati cities.
In this way they have begun the long-overdue process of bringing together one of the greatest and most profound spiritual literatures of antiquity with what is arguably the greatest and most remarkable urban civilization of antiquity. As well as resolving the paradox of a sophisticated urban culture with a script but no literature, and of a sophisticated literature with no urban culture evident behind it, this process has the potential to link the Vedas to known history and prehistory and to definite archaeological remains rather than to vapid speculations about an ‘Aryan invasion’.
Perhaps we are coming to a time when ancient India will speak for herself again after millennia of silence …
My Indian childhood
On a bright morning in July 1954, when I was three years and eleven months old, I got off a ship in the port of Bombay with my mother and father. We then made an immense journey across India by rail that I remember very little of (although I remember the ship very well), and eventually arrived in Vellore in the state of Tamil Nadu in the far south. There my father took up the post of general surgeon at the Christian Medical College Hospital.
We lived in a flat on the campus of the CMC with other doctors’ families and medical staff. We had a verandah to the rear of the flat that overlooked some distant palm trees at the edge of a field. During the monsoon season, if I plugged the drains of the verandah, it would fill up with rainwater like a swimming pool. The view of the palm trees bent double in the big winds of the monsoon used to make my heart race and my chest feel tight and I still remember it now as though it were yesterday.
Our flat was on the first floor. There was a dust-patch below in which I once found a lizard’s soft-shelled eggs. There was a lily-pond with enormous frogs. And there were trees to climb, including one with a tree-house.
I remember often being in Vellore, 5 kilometres away from the campus. Sometimes I would be at the CMC Hospital following my dad around. Or I would be at the Tamil school I attended at around the age of six where a fellow pupil once stabbed me in the left forearm with a pencil; I still bear the scar.
My father was on a missionary salary in India, so we thought we were as poor as church mice. Still, we employed a servant, who must have been a lot poorer than us. His name was Manikam. I remember he used to bring me my lunch every day in a skyscraper of circular aluminium tiffin tins and take me for rides on rickshaws through narrow streets jammed with tremendous crowds of people.
We had holidays too – Kodai, up in the mountains, where Trixie, my dog, was bitten by something rabid and had to be put down, and Mahabalipuram, on the coast just south of Madras, where I learned to swim. Imprinted on my memory for years afterwards – until I returned there, in fact, and was able to overlay old memories with new ones – were images of the eerie rock-hewn temples of Mahabalipuram, overlooking the Bay of Bengal.
My childhood encounter with India was formative and I am grateful that I was introduced at such an impressionable age to its aura of intriguing and impenetrable mystery, its velvety warmth and depth, its intense colours, sights, sounds, tastes and smells, its joyous, erotic beauty, its cruelty, its love, its passion and its never-ending drama of stark contrasts – past and present, sun and storm, desert and meadow, wealth and poverty, life and death …
My baby sister Susan was born in India and died less than a year later of some nameless disease. Then my brother Jimmy was born with an immune system so weak that he could not even fight off the most minor infections. Soon he too was teetering on the edge of death, his lungs ravaged by Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia – known today as one of the most awful opportunistic infections of AIDS. So, on a dark night in March 1958, when I was about seven and a half years old, I climbed on board an aeroplane with my mother and father and tiny, sad, sickly Jimmy almost invisible inside his portable oxygen tent.
And that was it. That was the end of my Indian childhood.
We flew back through the darkness. We stopped in Egypt, where I saw an ocean of sand from the air. We stopped in Zurich. I
t was snowing and I was bought my first-ever bar of Toblerone, a truly unforgettable experience. For a while I somehow became briefly separated from my father while we were on the ground and had terrible fears that the plane would leave without me. Finally we landed in London, where my parents rushed to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in a desperate but ultimately hopeless attempt to save Jimmy. Meanwhile, I was taken to Edinburgh by my grandmother. There I became entranced by snow, got soaked and frozen playing in it and promptly went down with a life-threatening case of pneumonia.
Indian Atlantis
Many years later, in the summer of 1992, a letter was forwarded to me by my publishers from an Indian lady resident in Canada. She had just read my then newly published book The Sign and the Seal and had noticed that it contains a few pages on the subject of Atlantis and considers the possibility of a lost civilization destroyed in a flood cataclysm. The reason for her letter was to tell me of an Indian tradition, which she rightly thought I might not have heard of, that spoke of something quite similar – a great city that had been swallowed up by the sea thousands of years previously. The name of the city, she said, had been ‘Dwarka’ or ‘Dvaraka’ and it was referred to in India’s sacred texts. More interestingly, a team of Indian marine archaeologists had been to the site where Dwarka was said to have been submerged and had found the remains of gigantic walls and fortifications underwater.
At the time I received the letter I was already deeply embroiled with research for my next book, Fingerprints of the Gods, (eventually published in 1995) and half considering a trip to India anyway. By then I was married to Santha, who is of Tamil origin (although she was born and brought up in Malaysia), and she too was keen on the idea. But it was the synchronicity and obvious potential relevance of the letter from Canada that focused our minds. We agreed that we would go if the Dwarka story checked out.
First I confirmed that there are indeed scriptural references to antediluvian Dwarka in ancient Indian texts. There are many. They speak very clearly of Dwarka’s foundation in a bygone age by the god Krishna in human form and of its submergence soon after Krishna’s death.
Next I looked to see if Dwarka, which the texts clearly locate in north-western India, had any counterpart on land in historical antiquity. I found that not only did it have such a counterpart but that there is still, today, a sacred city called Dwarka, which is one of India’s major sites of pilgrimage. It is located just where it should be, in the state of Gujerat on the north-western corner of the Kathiawar peninsula overlooking the Arabian Sea. And as my informant had correctly indicated, Indian marine archaeologists (led by S. R. Rao) had been diving about a kilometre off-shore and had discovered a very large submerged site. Although no datable artefacts had been found, the ruins had been assigned to the ‘late period’ of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, perhaps as late as 1700 to 1500 BC.
Santha and I didn’t dive in those days but it still seemed worth going to Dwarka just to get the flavour of the place and see if we could learn anything. So we began to plan a journey of about five weeks for November and December of 1992. We would go to Pakistan first to visit the world-famous Indus valley cities of Mohenjodaro and Harappa – cities that had traded with Sumer, cities as old as the Great Pyramid of Egypt. Then we would fly north to Nepal to visit Shanti and Ravi, Santha’s two children from her first marriage, who were attending the American School in Kathmandu. From Nepal we would travel to Delhi, the Indian federal capital, and then east to the state of Orissa to the sacred solar temples of Puri and Konarak on the Bay of Bengal. The next stop would be Tamil Nadu, so that we could visit Vellore, my childhood home, and explore Santha’s connections with southern India. From there we would fly to Gujerat and spend a week in Dwarka.
Well it didn’t quite work out that way. The best-laid plans in India almost never do. Riots and demonic hate-killings between Hindus and Muslims had led to a partial imposition of martial law. At the same time, for entirely unrelated reasons, the main domestic carrier, Indian Airlines, had gone on strike and was stranding passengers all over the subcontinent.
So although we did in the end reach Dwarka on that trip it was not by air but by road.
The flooding of Dwarka and the descent of the Kali Age
Indian thought has traditionally regarded history and prehistory in cyclical rather than linear terms. In the West time is an arrow – we are born, we live, we die. But in India we die only to be reborn. Indeed, it is a deeply rooted idea in Indian spiritual traditions that the earth itself and all living creatures upon it are locked into an immense cosmic cycle of birth, growth, fruition, death, rebirth and renewal. Even temples are reborn after they grow too old to be used safely – through the simple expedient of reconstruction on the same site.
Within this pattern of spiralling cycles, where everything that goes around comes around, India conceives of four great epochs or ‘world ages’ of varying but enormous lengths: the Krita Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Davapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. At the end of each yuga a cataclysm, known as pralaya, engulfs the globe in fire or flood. Then from the ruins of the former age, like the Phoenix emerging from the ashes, the new age begins.
And so it goes on – birth, growth, fruition, death, rebirth – endlessly across time. At the end of each cycle of four ages there is a super-cataclysm and then a new cycle of yugas begins.
Each cycle and each yuga within a cycle is believed in India to possess its own special character: the Krita Yuga is a golden age ‘in which righteousness abounds’. The Treta Yuga that follows sees a decline and ‘virtue falls short’. In the Davapara Yuga ‘lying and quarrelling expand, mind lessens, truth declines’. In the Kali Yuga ‘men turn to wickedness and value what is degraded, decay flourishes and the human race approaches annihilation’.
The story of Dwarka is tightly intertwined with this scheme of things. Reported in the ancient Indian epic known as the Mahabaratha (thought to have been composed a few hundred years after the Rig Veda) and in later sacred texts such as the Bhagvata Purana and the Vishnu Purana, it straddles two of the great world ages.
Towards the end of the most recent Davapara Yuga, the texts tell us, Dwarka was a fabulous city founded on the north-west coast of India. Established and ruled over by Krishna (a human avatar of the god Vishnu), it was built on the site of an even earlier sacred city, Kususthali, on land that had been reclaimed from the sea: ‘Krishna solicited a space of twelve furlongs from the ocean, and there he built the city of Dwarka, defended by high ramparts.’33 The gardens and the amenities of the city are praised, and we understand that it was a place of ritual and splendour.
Years later, however, as the Davapara Yuga comes to an end, Krishna is killed. The Vishnu Purana reports: ‘On the same day that Krishna departed from the earth the powerful dark-bodied Kali Age descended. The ocean rose and submerged the whole of Dwarka.’34 The Age of Kali thus ushered in turns out to be none other than the present epoch of the earth – our own. According to the Hindu sages it began just over 5000 years ago at a date in the Indian calendar corresponding to 3102 BC.35 It is an age, warns the Bhagvata Purana, in which ‘people will be greedy, take to wicked behaviour, will be merciless, indulge in hostilities without any cause, unfortunate, extremely covetous for wealth and wordly desires …’36
5 / Pilgrimage to India
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.
William Chambers, The Asiatic Researches, vol. 1, 1788
On the same day that Krishna departed from the earth the powerful dark-bodied Kali Age descended. The ocean rose and submerged the whole o
f Dwarka.
Vishnu Purana
It is a curious thing that if one wishes to select a date that truly does seem to mark the beginning of some kind of ‘new age’ in the Indian subcontinent, then it would have to be around about 3100 BC – the epoch traditionally signalled as the beginning of the Kali Yuga. It was at this time, at any rate, along the river valleys extending down from the Karakoram and Himalayan mountain ranges, that the largest urban civilization of antiquity began to stir. As we have seen it would later be called the Indus Valley civilization, or the Indus-Sarasvati civilization.
At its peak around 2500 BC this mysterious prehistoric culture boasted at least six large inland cities – others may yet await discovery – with populations in excess of 30,000. These urban hubs were linked to hundreds of smaller towns and villages and to several key ports like Lothal and Dholavira at strategic locations along its coastline and up its navigable rivers. Its borders enclosed an area larger than western Europe – 1.5 million square kilometres, extending from Iran in the west and Turkmenia and Kashmir in the north to the Godavari valley in the south and beyond Delhi in the east.1 It also had outposts overseas, including a once thriving colony in the Persian Gulf, and it had an extensive trading network supported by a large merchant navy.2
In November 1992, when Santha and I boarded the PIA flight from London to Karachi, I had heard enough about the ‘Indus Valley civilization’ (the only name by which I knew it then) to be intrigued by it, but was ignorant about the details. Like most people who know of it at all I identified it only with the first two sites to be excavated – Harappa and Mohenjodaro – which had attracted worldwide headlines and won everlasting renown when they were discovered in the 1920s.
Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization Page 15