– G. Parthasarathy Srinivasan
Ambitame naditame devitame Sarasvati |
Aprasasta iva smasi prasastim Amba naskridhi ||
(Rig.II. 41.16.)
“Sarasvati, you are the best of mothers, you are the best of rivers and you are the best of goddesses; although we are of no status, dear mother grant us merit.”
Incomparable is the one word that could describe the rediscovery of the Sarasvati river that had dried up sometime in 1900-1500 BC. Like the mythical phoenix coming out of its ashes, the River Sarasvati is reborn. This augurs well for Bharatiya civilization for its distant past is so little understood and its origins are being held for ransom with pseudo theories, floated by the colonial bureaucrats and historians of the last century, who definitely had an axe to grind.
History was kidnapped after independence by the dominant Marxist school of Historians who had been indoctrinated themselves to follow a certain line of ideological thinking at the cost of historical truth and thus very little was done by their institutional set up to throw new light on our collective past.
The entire course of the Sarasvati river has been meticulously analysed with scientific precision based on the most accurate and state of the art technology. Old time historians, who had no access to such tools for study, relied solely upon juxtaposition to form a hypothesis. In addition, the usual Marxist indoctrination techniques prevalent in academic institutions would have certainly influenced their outlook.
Dr. S. Kalyanaraman had no such blinders and consequent hiccups. He has completed the seven volumes (2100 pages) on Sarasvati single-handed and documented everything known to scientists about the river – a monumental task by any standards. Like the Rishis of yore, he did immense tapas to bring back the knowledge of the Vedic River Sarasvati. This is an encyclopaedic work with much technical content and over 4000 illustrations drawn from over 20 different scientific disciplines.
Swami Vivekananda said, “the history of India should be written by Indians” And in order to understand this history, one has to unravel the mystery of the Sarasvati River which was till now believed to have vanished but remained in the memory of Bharatiyas. At Prayag, where very Hindu goes to take a holy dip, it is believed that the Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati merge and that the Sarasvati does not flow visibly here but as ‘antaryami’ (literally “inner controller”, in invisible form). Now this oral tradition, which was dismissed by a many a historian of the traditional school, has been proved to be correct. Those legends carry with them good ground truths that were never explored.
Geologists have established that “there was a dramatic turn of the river Yamuna at a place called Paonta Saheb in Himachal Pradesh when the tributary rivers Giri and Tamasa were captured by the river Yamuna which became a pirate river and joined the Ganga at Prayag near Allahabad.The author remarks, “This is how the capture of the waters of Sarasvati by river Yamuna to join river Ganga is stated in Puranas of India to constitute the Triveni sangam at Prayag. This is a remarkable indication of the establishment of the facts recorded in the ancient texts of India to be ground truth based on geological and glaciological studies.”
PLATE TECTONICS
The Antiquity of the Sarasvati Civilisation is attested by glacial maps which indicate that the Indian subcontinent was not affected by the great ice age that covered most of the northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere with the glacial maximum of ca. 18000, “when most of Eurasia was filled with an ice sheet with little or no support for vegetation” and hence “with little or limited or no support to ecological systems that in turn support human settlements. These studies indicate that continuous habitation was possible in India since ca. 18000 years ago.
The river Sarasvati had flowed as a mighty river from the Himalayas to Gujarat for thousands of years prior to 1500 BCE, a date when the submergence of Dwaraka was reported and recorded in the Mahabharata. The final desiccation of the river was caused principally by massive tectonic movements of the type that was witnessed on 26 January 2001, when an earth quake with the intensity of 8.2 Richter scale struck Gujarat (considered equivalent to the potency of 220 hydrogen bombs exploded simultaneously).
Plate tectonics played a major part in the desiccation of the River Sarasvati, which is today seen to be lost in the deserts of Marusthali or the Thar Desert. A big fault line along the Aravalli ranges extending north-northeast from Siddhapura right through Delhi, “called the Luni Sukri lineament, which had a stunning structural control over the entire terrain of North West India…and the ongoing clash of the Indian or Deccan plate with the Tibetan or Eurasian plate. The plate was virtually along the course of and parallel to the courses of the rivers Sindhu and Sarasvati right up to the Himalayas.” This is the principal reason why the Rann of Kutch and Himachal Pradesh in India are declared as earthquake-prone zones. Plate tectonics also explains the continuous rise of the Himalayas and the formation of glaciers in a cyclical manner together with the ingress and recession of the sea levels along the Gujarat coast line.
After the Pokhran tests conducted by India on 11 May 1998, the Indian scientists of BARC isotope division headed by Dr. S. L Rao and Dr. Kulkarni conducted tests from 800 samples of water taken from deep wells around the test area to check the possibility of radiation leaks from water wells around this area. The results yielded surprising results: freshwater sources aged between 8,000 and 14,000 years were found in the middle of the desert and also, indications of fresh water of potable quality getting recharged from upstream sources,” perhaps from the Himalayan region, considering the scant rainfall in the region.
A HISTORIAN RECONSIDERS
The discovery of the river Sarasvati and the discovery of over 2,000 ancient sites on the banks of the river out of 2,600 establishes it as the centre of the civilisation in Bharat which evolved into the mature urban phase during the Bronze age starting in circa 3300 BCE. The discovery also conclusively establishes that there was no Aryan invasion or migration into India, (even Romila Thapar has now shifted to the migration theory instead of the invasion model) but that people had lived all along for several thousands of years on the banks of the Rivers Sarasvati and Sindhu and that the Sarasvati Civilisation is an indigenous and autochthonous evolution.
The story of disappearance of the mighty river Sarasvati is an epic story of the struggles of an ancient Civilisation of unparalleled excellence in the history of humankind.The Mahabharata mentions that the “river was disappearing fast” and “was later lost”. However, it was flowing in full, during the Rig Vedic period. This makes the Rig Veda much older than our history books would have us believe and contemporaneous in date to the so-called Indus Valley Civilisation, remarks Dr. Nanditha Krishna in a review in The New Indian Express. She goes on to acknowledge, “Like all Indian historians, I too grew up with and based all my research on the belief that the Indus Valley civilization was pre-Vedic. I am no longer so sure. Here are a people, the Aryans, who have left a cornucopia of literature but were believed to have left not a shred of material culture, not even a humble potsherd, for archaeologists to find. And there we have a civilisation in the same time at the same pace with sufficient evidence of the written word found on the seals. There are no signs of an invasion, just abandonment, like any ghost city or village that has lost its water source… Sarasvati is better known today as the Goddess of knowledge and wisdom. Knowledge of the missing river will give us the clue to our history and the origins of our civilisation. We are lucky to have modern scientific tools to help us. We have to be wise and accept the fact that some of our earlier information was possibly wrong, and that the Indus, Sarasvati and Vedic civilisations were one and the same.”
MARITIME RIVERINE CIVILISATION
The Sarasvati Civilisation was the substratum which sustained the maritime trade over an extensive region from central Asia and all over Bharat from Kashmir to Kanyakumari. In the Mausala Parva of the Mahabharata, Balarama undertakes a pilgrimage to offer homage to his ancestors all along the Sarasvati from its place of merger with the Arabian sea near Prabhas Pattan, (where the famous Somanath Temple is located), to its source origin in the Himalayas. The entire route with all the pilgrimage sites, the ashrams etc., has been described. The very same Rishis are venerated and remembered by the people even today by many melas that are celebrated every year, even now, in the villages. On the rediscovery of the Sarasvati River, David Frawley says: “The retreat of the Aryan invasion theory has been accompanied by the rediscovery of the Sarasvati river of Vedic fame, though many scholars are still unaware of the connection of the river with the Vedas. Recent excavation has shown that the great majority of Harappan settlements were east, not west of Indus. The largest concentration of sites appears in an area of Punjab and Rajasthan along the dry banks of the Sarasvati (now called the Ghaggar) in the Thar desert. Hundreds of sites dot this river, which appears to have been the breadbasket of the culture. Mohenjodaro and Harappa, the first large Indus sites found, appear to be peripheral cities, mere gateways to the central Sarasvati region. The main sites are found in a region of north-western India, which owing to the lack of water was never again a region of significant habitation.” Our sacred lore says that Maharishi Bhagiratha did immense tapas in days of yore to bring the Ganges from Lord Siva’s locks in the Himalayan heights to the plains. It took Dr. S. Kalayanaraman two decades of study and research to bring the facts about the vanished Sarasvati river to our grasp. This project is of much more importance than many of us can visualize for comprehending our ancient civilization. He says he has enough data for guiding 100 Ph. D. dissertations on the ancient civilisation of India! Any takers?
The writer is a student of Bharatiya civilisation for over 30 years and by profession a SAP /HR ERP Consultant and also an ISO 14000 environmental management systems auditor.
Title: Sarasvati (7 volumes, 2100 pages)
Author: Dr. S. Kalyanaraman
Publisher: Baba Saheb Apte Smarak Samiti; Tel: 080 – 6655238
Email: kalyan97@yahoo.com
ISBN: 81-901126-0
Price: Rs. 500/- (per volume)
First Edition, 2003.
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