In both cases a cataclysm in the form of a global flood intervenes, swallowing up huge areas of land and destroying the antediluvian civilization.
In both cases survivors repromulgate the ancient knowledge in the new age – which is portrayed as a decline from the age before – forming a new group of Seven Rishis or a new Sangam suitable to that age.
Needless to say there are many differences between the two traditions – too many for either to be the result of direct influence from the other. Nevertheless, the underlying idea is essentially the same – that recurrent cataclysms afflict the earth, threatening the obliteration of human knowledge and a return to ignorance, but that an institution or ‘brotherhood’ (the Seven Rishis, the Sangam) survives ‘the periodic scourge of the deluge’ and rises again after the recession of the waters to carry the cause of knowledge forwards into the new age and to ‘bring glory and light to ignorant lands and peoples’.47
There are also prominent crossover figures suggestive of an unseen link. For example, the Sage Agastya, frequently listed amongst or alongside the Vedic Seven Sages, appears in Tamil traditions as a member of the First Sangam. Likewise, listed amongst the 549 members of the First Sangam is the Vedic god Rudra-Siva, master of animals, Lord of Yoga, ‘he of the braided hair’. And while his presence there may well, as Pillai argues, be just an outcome of Tamil ‘fabulists’ seeking to concoct a divine heritage for their work, it is worth remembering that Siva’s primary attribute is gnosis – or knowledge – and that whether in south India or the Himalayas he is associated with a cult of esoteric knowledge that is said to have been carried down from before the flood.
The tank and the pillar
Siva is everywhere in Madurai and stories of his deeds and miracles abound here. Even the Meenakshi temple is in fact two temples within a single walled complex – one, the smaller of the two, for the goddess Meenakshi, a wife of Siva, and one for Siva himself in his manifestation as Sundareshwar. The temple sits at the ancient geometrical centre of Madurai, occupying an area measuring approximately 220 × 260 metres48 – as large as the footprint of the Great Pyramid of Egypt.49 Its perimeter is embellished with eleven spectacular gopurams (entrance towers – the highest, in the south, rising to more than 50 metres), all of them luridly carved and painted with sensational three-dimensional scenes from Hindu mythology. Such scenes, made up of an estimated total of 33 million carvings,50 crowd in everywhere upon the visitor who approaches this vast complex of buildings – from the walls of its medieval stone gateways to the columns of its Thousand Pillar Hall.
The temple is not aloof from the great city that surrounds it, but rather the life of the city continues within its walls at a different pace. Sometimes it has the atmosphere of a market with colourful, noisy crowds bustling from shrine to shrine, beggars seeking alms, hawkers selling souvenirs and long-horned cows wandering about as though they own the place. It is surprising how often you will see a businessman slip off his shoes to stroll inside, smear sacred ash upon his forehead and offer prayers amongst the cool shadows and garlanded statues. Lean pilgrims and wild-haired sadhus gather from all parts of India seeking alms and enlightenment, couples and families come here on outings, and classes of schoolchildren march bright-eyed through the corridors, adding their shrill laughter to the non-stop hubbub of conversation and chanting.
I entered through the southern gopuram and made my way across a sunlit ambulatory to the nearby Citra Mandapa, an elegant cloistered colonnade with painted walls and ceilings surrounding the Golden Lotus Tank – perhaps the Meenakshi temple’s most spectacular feature. Legend has it that this very large tank, which measures 52 metres long by 36.5 metres wide, was ‘used to judge the merits of Tamil literary works’ during the Third Sangam period.51 The manuscripts that floated were considered great works of literature, and if they sank they were dismissed.’52
In terms of general appearance and design the tank strikingly resembles the Great Bath at Mohenjodaro – only there the rectangular ritual bathing pool has been empty and dry for thousands of years; here it is filled with green water and is still used by pilgrims for purification ceremonies. Much of the temple as we see it today dates from the thirteen century AD or later – while the Indus-Sarasvati cities had fallen into ruin by the second millennium BC – but I knew that the tank ‘prominently figures in legends connected with the origin of the shrine’.53 As at Tiruvannamalai these legends also state that the temple stands where it does because of the prior existence there of a sthala or pillar of natural stone – a Sivalingam – that had manifested in primordial times. In the case of Madurai, however, the pillar did not appear at the foot of a sacred mountain but was found standing upright in a forest ‘beneath a Kadamba tree’ where the Vedic god Indra was said to have built the first prehistoric shrine around it.54
Floorplan of Madurai temple. Based on Howley and Dasa (1996).
I was reminded of the cylindrical and conical stone pillars (of officially ‘unknown’, but I would have thought obvious, function) that have been excavated by archaeologists along the valleys of the Indus and the Sarasvati rivers at numerous Harappan and pre-Harappan sites.55 These ‘proto-Sivalinga’ are antedated by even earlier stone pillars of the same sort excavated from Neolithic settlements in India56 – so many of them that T. R. Sesha Iyenagar can write: ‘the worship of Siva in the form of a linga existed in the Stone Age, which certainly preceded the Vedic Age’.57
The truth is that nobody really knows when the ‘Vedic Age’ began just as nobody has yet found the beginning of the Siva cult in India. Powerful and omnipresent from the Himalayas to the deep south, it always seems to have existed – in the worship of the lingam, in the worship of the sacred mountain, in the worship of the god of yoga and knowledge, cross-legged, deep in meditation, surrounded by wild beasts.
This enigmatic figure, and the complex system of ideas and symbols that he evokes, must have come from somewhere.
Perhaps Kumari Kandam?
Look south
‘It was the most ancient continent in the whole world,’ exclaimed Dr T. N. P. Haran, Professor of Tamil Studies at the American College in Madurai. ‘The best and the ancient civilization existed there. And it belongs to Tamils.’
‘And if I wanted to find it – whatever’s left of it – where would I have to look?’
‘Kumari Kandam was a big land. So many people were there. The sea came in and it swallowed the whole thing.’
‘If I were to go diving off modern Kaniya Kumari, do you think I’d find ruins?’
‘I’ve no idea! But I wish you all the best!’
I persisted: ‘Should I look directly south of Kaniya Kumari?’
Haran thought for a while before replying: ‘Yes, I think at least 300 kilometres south of Kaniya Kumari. If you go there you will be able to get something.’
What fishermen know
Before returning to dive with the NIO at Dwarka at the beginning of March 2000 (reported in chapter 9) Santha and I completed the rest of our long overland journey in Tamil Nadu with visits to four coastal towns: Kaniya Kumari in the south, Rameswaram in the south-east, where India reaches out towards Sri Lanka across the Palk Strait, and Poompuhur and Mahabalipuram along the Coromandel coast facing the Bay of Bengal.
Mahabalipuram commands attention on account of the old myths of the Seven Pagodas and the sunken city of Bali (see chapter 5).
Kaniya Kumari is explicitly referenced in the Kumari Kandam tradition as the new southern border of India after the hilly and well-watered land that formerly lay to the south of it had been swept away in the deluge.
Rameswaram is identified in the Ramayana with what sounds like a land-bridge to Sri Lanka: ‘To build a bridge across the sea, the bears and monkeys hurled trees and rocks into the water which by the power of Rama remained afloat. The Gods looked down enthralled as the monkey armies moved across the sea on Rama’s bridge.’58 (The ‘monkey armies’ – don’t ask, it’s a long story! – are on their way to Lanka to rescue R
ama’s wife Sita from Ravana, the same demon king of a ‘former age’ whose antediluvian domain is said in the Ceylonese Chronicles to have stretched between Tuticorin and Mannar. So much land-bridge imagery, from two different traditions, and in just the right places!)
Poompuhur speaks for itself as the site of the submerged U-shaped structure. When I went there in February 2000 I knew that diving would be out of the question without going through a long permissions and money rigmarole with the NIO first. But I wanted to get a sense of the land side of the story and at least dip my toes in the water.
As we explored and talked to more and more local people it began to dawn on me that the ubiquitous south Indian traditions of lost lands and flooded cities – which so many scholars simply ignore in their evaluation of history – are well known and almost universally believed to be true accounts by the general public of the region.
This in itself does not necessarily mean anything. Superstitions and follies abound amongst the public in every country. But many of my informants were hard-bitten professional fishermen who for the most part were clearly not relaying half-remembered folklore that they had heard from their grandfathers, but were speaking from direct personal experience. Indeed, in Poompuhur and again in Mahabalipuram I met fishermen, who had nothing whatsoever to gain by deceiving me, who claimed to have seen with their own eyes what they described as ‘palaces’, or ‘temples’, or ‘walls’ or ‘roads’ underwater when diving down to free trapped anchors or nets.
An underwater ruin, if it is of any size, will function as an artificial reef, attracting many different species of fish to the shelter and security that it provides – particularly in areas like south-east India, where the sea bottom is largely flat and featureless. And since fishermen are in the business of catching fish, they naturally look out for places in the ocean where fish congregate for any reason. In this way they are often the first to find unsuspected underwater sites – and frequently may know of sites that archaeologists are unaware of.
My instinct is that this may well turn out to be the case along extensive stretches of the south Indian continental shelf which, except off Poompuhur, has never been the subject of a marine archaeological survey. My travels from Kaniya Kumari to Mahabalipuram have convinced me that the local sightings of anomalous submerged structures in these areas are too numerous, too consistent and too widespread to be safely ignored. Moreover, were it not for the NIO, no marine archaeology at all would have been attempted anywhere in the region. It is therefore surely significant that in the one place where the NIO has looked – Poompuhur – something as unusual as the U-shaped structure was found in a project lasting just a few days. It makes sense to suppose that if further systematic surveys and marine archaeology can be done underwater – at Poompuhur and at the other south Indian locations – then more discoveries are likely to be made …
At Mahabalipuram, in the little fishing village that lies in the curve of the bay a mile or so to the north of the Shore temple, Santha and I sat on the beach on a pile of drying nets with a large crowd gathering around 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 were 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.’
Which site to dive on?
If I had unlimited funds and complete freedom of action then I would long ago have organized full-scale marine archaeological expeditions at Kaniya Kumari, Rameswaram, Poompuhur and Mahabalipuram in the south and south-east of India, and all along the coast of the Gujerat peninsula and the Gulfs of Kutch and Cambay in the north-west. But I don’t have unlimited funds – or time – and India, for all her magnetism, is a vast challenge and energy drain best approached with a flexible schedule and a spirit of compromise.
Besides, India is one facet of ‘Underworld’, not the whole mystery. After returning to England in March 2000, with the Dwarka dives behind me, I could not afford to forget that other research was also crying out to be completed and that other journeys had to be made – at the very least to the Maldives, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and Japan. Although I had no intention of abandoning the wider investigation in India I therefore decided that for the immediate future I would focus my energies on getting to dive at Poompuhur – which I had already begun to negotiate with Kamlesh Vora before leaving Dwarka – and that all the other potential Indian dive sites would have to wait their turn.
Poompuhur was the obvious first choice, head and shoulders above the other contenders. Here alone advance work had been done by the NIO, who, quite extraordinarily and with absolutely no fanfare, appeared to have found precisely what I was looking for – viz. a large, well-organized and apparently man-made structure that had been inundated more than 10,000 years ago at a time when there was no known civilization in the vicinity that could have built it.
While keeping the money and permissions process going with the NIO by e-mail, I used the next several months to complete an intensive series of research and diving trips to Malta, Alexandria, the Balearic islands, the Canary islands and twice to Japan (once in April/May for seven weeks and again in September for a further two weeks).
By October 2000 my attention was very much back on Poompuhur again, when Glenn Milne’s calculations arrived showing that the U-shaped structure was in fact ‘11,000 years old or older’ – putting its inundation squarely in the same time-frame as the supposedly mythical foundation of the First Sangam at Tenmadurai, and as the supposedly mythical submersion of Plato’s Atlantis.
The next development came in December 2000 when Milne supplied me with a series of high-resolution inundation maps of India, spanning the period between 21,300 years ago and 4800 years ago, which tracked the changes in the subcontinent’s coastline caused by rising sea-levels during the meltdown of the Ice Age (see chapter 7). The maps show
not only the huge amounts of land that antediluvian India surrendered to the rising seas but how practical a proposition it is that an unidentified high culture – or cultures – of Indian antiquity could have been lost to archaeology during this period.
In December 2000 I also received confirmation from the NIO that permission had at last been granted for me to dive at Poompuhur. The trip could take place in February 2001 – exactly a year after my previous visit. Mercifully, the final arrangements and negotiations (and the money that had to be paid to the NIO) had been taken over on my behalf by a film crew from Channel 4 TV in Britain who were now covering my story. I welcomed the fact that whatever the NIO had to show me at Poompuhur would be documented properly for television. I was convinced that only by allowing the greatest number of people to see the U-shaped structure for themselves and to make up their own minds about it did it stand a chance of getting the attention it deserved from the archaeologists who had hitherto ignored it.
Unfolding the Indian floods
In January 2001 Glenn Milne, who had been working overtime, sent me more Indian maps – a complete sequence of high-resolution inundation simulations for 21,300 years ago; 16,400 years ago; 13,500 years ago; 12,400 years ago; 10,600 years ago; 8900 years ago; 7700 years ago; 6900 years ago.
Although I had a rough idea of what to expect, it was still a revelation to flip rapidly through these maps from the oldest to the youngest and watch the entire process of the post-glacial inundation of India unfold before my eyes. What I found most striking of all, however, was the way in which the two areas rich in flood myths where underwater ruins had already been found – off the coast of Gujerat in the north-west and off the coast of Tamil Nadu in the south-east -were also the two areas most clearly flagged by Glenn Milne’s maps as large and continuous antediluvian habitats in which it was conceivable that Ice Age civilizations could have flourished.
Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization Page 36