Bhartiya History

Trials, tribulations & triumph of a cultural archeaologist

2006-09-09T22:26:00.000-07:00

Trials, tribulations & triumph of a cultural archeaologist - I

V SUNDARAM

Barbara Tuchman, the great American woman historian rightly observes: Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilisation would have been impossible. They are agents of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print.

These instructive and inspiring words are wholly applicable to 'AN ENTYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES' by Dr S Kalyanaraman and published by Asian Development Bank, Manila, Philippines. In more senses than one this is a landmark book in the world of languages, linguistics and culture. This book is a Multilanguage historical and cultural dictionary of South Asia; it is a lexicon; it is an encyclopaedia. To quote his own words: This is a comparative dictionary covering all the languages of South Asia (which may also be referred to, in a geographical/historical sense as the Indian sub-continent ). This dictionary seeks to establish a semantic concordance, across the languages of numeraire facile of the South Asian sub-continent : from Brahui to Santali to Bengali, from Kashmiri to Mundarica to Sinhalece, from Marathi to Hindi to Nepali, from Sindhi or Panjabi or Urdu to Tamil. A semantic structure binds the languages of South Asia, which may have diverged morphologically or phonologically as evidenced in the oral tradition of Vedic texts, or epigraphy, literary works or lexicons of the historical periods. This dictionary, therefore goes beyond, the commonly held belief of an Indo-European language and is anchored on proto-South Asian sememes.

The great pioneering Indologist Sir William Jones, founder of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1783, pronounced with authority the underlying genetic relationship between the classical languages, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in his third Annual Discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal on the History and Culture of the Hindus in February 1786 when he made the following epoch-making observation: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure : more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident, so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from a common source, which perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.
Long before Sir William Jones in 1786, the 16th century Italian scholar Sassetti apparently studied Sanskrit calling it 'a pleasant musical language' and uniting Deo with Deva. In the 17th century, the Dutch protestant missionary, Abraham Rogerius, published in 1651 the translation of Bhartrihari in Europe for the first time. So we find many Catholic missionaries of South India, French and Belgian, studying a little Sanskrit, and mixing with Tamil, producing the faked Ezour Vedam , the target of Voltaire's criticism; and Anquitil du Perron, visiting India before Sir William Jones, provoked the latter's sarcastic criticism of premature handling of Sanskrit texts. As early as 1725 we find the German missionary (translator of the Bible into Tamil) Benjamin Schultze emphasising the similarity between the numerals of Sanskrit, German and Latin.

Another remarkable Englishman, Horne Tooke, in his 'Diversions of Purley ' in 1786 anticipated Bopp and other pioneers of Comparative Grammar. The German traveller, Pallas, worked out the project of the mathematician-philopher Leibniz (1646 - 1716) and published 'Comparative Vocabularies of all the Languages of the World' in 1787. This uncritical work was soon superseded by the German grammarian-philosopher Adelung's Mithridates or General Science of Languages, published in four volumes between 1806 and 1817.

Dr S Kalyanaraman legitimately belongs to this great tradition of philologists and lexicographers, dictionary-compilers, etymologists, scholars and savants. He has compiled this unique, multilingual dictionary of the Dravidian, Arian and Mundarica language families which he took 18 years to complete. It has been published in three volumes, running to over 2000 pages with nearly 5 lakh words from over 25 ancient languages. This work covers over 8000 semantic clusters which span and bind the South Asian Languages. The basic finding is that thousands of terms of the Vedas, the Munda languages (eg.Santali, Mundarica, Soral), the so-called Dravidian languages and the so-called Indo-Aryan languages have common roots. This dictionary called Indian Lexicon has also been made available on the internet. He declares with humility: The author assumes full responsibility for the semantic and etymological judgements made and the errors that might have crept in with thousands of database iterations in organizing the semantic clusters found in the word lists (the lexicon includes over half-a-million Indian words). The author hopes that with the impossibility of 'dating' the origin of a word, all its inherent limitations, the omissions, intentional or otherwise and errors that will in due course be pointed out by scholars specialized in their fields, the Indian Lexicon will be a tentative, but bold start of a skeleton dictionary of the Indian linguistic area ca. 3000 B.C. and will be expanded further to include modern words.

Dr S Kalyanaraman was born on 20 October 1939. His mother tongue is Tamil. But all his school and under graduate education was in Telugu and Sanskrit in Andhra Pradesh. He is conversant with Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and Sanskrit languages. He graduated from Annamalai University in Economics and Statistics. He has a Doctorate in Public Administration from the University of the Philippines and his thesis Public Administration in Asia, a comparative study of development administration in six Asian countries ?? India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Thailand, Indonesia and Philippines. He joined the Asian Development bank in 1978. Earlier he was a Member of the Indian Railway Accounts Service from 1962.

During the last 11 years, starting from 1995, he has been working on Sarasvati River Research Project through his Sarasvati Sindhu Research Centre in Chennai. Ever since his return to India in 1995 and his presentation of a paper in the 10th World Sanskrit Conference on his research findings, he has devoted himself to promoting projects for the revival of the Sarasvati River.

Apart from the massive multilingual dictionary of South Asian languages, Dr Kalyanaraman has also authored several volumes on Sarasvati Culture and Civilisation. His other notable work is Indian Alchemy: Soma in the Veda. He has also contributed to Professor Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya's multi-volume work on History of Science and Technology in Ancient India

To return to Dr Kalyanaraman's Multilingual Etymological Dictionary of South Asian languages once again. The history of civilization is more than a tally of our dynasties, governments, wars, class struggles and cultural movements. Dr Kalyanaraman proves through this book that it is also the story of how human beings in the South Asian Region have learned to develop and operate systems of reference and information retrieval that are external to the brain. According to current estimates, Homo has been in existence for about 2 million years, although it may not have become Sapiens till around 100,000 years ago. If this estimate is reliable, then for 99.75% of the existence of the species Homo and for some 95% of the time that it has been Sapiens, there were no external systems at all. The brain with its erratic memory was the only apparatus available for knowing, referring and recording??and that was the natural state of things. The bulk of our ancestors would have found anything else unimaginable, and for some aboriginal peoples today, in remote areas, this statement still holds true.

This Etymological Dictionary clearly brings out the fact that language in the region which Dr Kalyanaraman has covered has been the master tool which man, in his endless adventure after knowledge and power, has shaped for himself, and which, in its turn, has shaped the human mind as we see it and know it. It has continuously extended and conserved the store of knowledge upon which mankind has drawn. It has furnished the starting point of all our science. In this context the great words of L.S.Amery come to my mind: 'Language has been the instrument of social cohesion and of moral law, and through it human society has developed and found itself. Language, indeed, has been the soul of mankind'.

We learn from Dr.Kayanaraman's Himalayan effort that language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous works of unconscious generations. Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Language is itself the collective art of expression, a summary of thousands upon thousands of individual intuitions. George Steiner in his great work Language and Silence observed: 'Languages code immemorial reflexes and twists of feeling, remembrances of action that transcend individual recall, contours of communal experience as subtly decisive as the contours of sky and land in which a civilization ripens. Any outsider can master a language as a rider masters his mount; he rarely becomes as one with its undefined, subterranean motion'. Eros and Language mesh at every point. Intercourse and discourse, copula and copulation, are sub-classes of the dominant fact of communication'.

As a learned and dedicated etymologist, Dr Kalyanaraman finds the deadest word in the South Asian Region to have been once a brilliant picture. We are delighted to learn at his feet that every language is indeed fossil poetry.

Trials, tribulations & triumph of a cultural archaeologist-II

'One goes to the potter for pots, but not to the grammarian for words. Language is already there among the people'

-Patanjali in Mahabhashya

In his historic work 'AN ENTYMOLOGICAL DICTIONARY OF SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES', published by Asian Development Bank, Manila, Philippines, Dr S Kalyanaraman states: 'In philology, as in archaeology, the search for 'truth' is an extension of a researcher's imagination. Imagination is not an act of faith, but a statement of hypothesis based on relational entities in linguistic structures identified through painstaking lexical work. Two such entities in linguistic structures are: morpheme and sememe which bind an etymological group. Sememe may be defined as a phoneme imbued with 'meaning'. Morpheme is defined as a 'meaningful' linguistic unit. Sememe constitutes the semantic substratum of a morpheme or simply, 'meaning'. What is 'meaning'? It is a concept closely linked to a social compact for inter-personal communication. The 'private language' of a speaker's brain (with 'personal' experiences embedded in neutral networks) is revealed through sounds uttered by the speaker. Language is formed if these uttered sounds echo the 'private language' of a listener. Such an echo constitutes meaning or the semantic sub-structure of a language. Sememes are the basic semantic structural units of a language which combine to yield morphemes or words. A sememe can, for example, be distinguished from a phoneme or a gesture which does not communicate a message in a social compact. Only those uttered sounds which are heard and accepted in a social compact can constitute the repertoire of a language. Sememes (or, dhatupada' ) are given a variety of phonemic and morphological forms in the lingua franca to constitute semantic expressions, or the vocabulary of an evolving and growing civilization'.

Ramana Maharishi asked the question: 'Who am I?' Likewise Dr S Kalyanaraman asks the introspective question: 'What is the justification for this comparative etymological dictionary of South Asian languages currently spoken by over a billion people of the world?' He says that an answer can be given at a number of levels:

1) The paramount need to bring people closer to ancient heritage of South Asian language family of which the extant South Asian languages (Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda language streams ) are but dialectical forms.

2) There is an imperative international public need to generate further studies in the disciplines of a) South Asian archaeology, b) general semantics and comparative linguistics , c) design of fifth-generation computer systems

3) There is a need to provide a basis for further studies in grammatical philosophy and neurosciences on the formation of semantic patterns or structures in the human brain?? neurosciences related to the study of linguistic competence which seems to set apart the humans from other living beings.

Finally Dr Kalyanaraman declares with magisterial clarity: 'The urgent warrant for my etymological dictionary is the difficulty faced by scholars in collating different lexicons and in obtaining works such as CDIAL (A Comparative Dictionary of Indo-Aryan Languages) even in eminent libraries. In tracing the etyma (literally meaning truth in Greek) of the South Asian languages, it is adequate to indicate the word forms which can be traced into the mists of history'.

Dr Kalyanaraman's Dictionary deals with more than 8000 semantic clusters relating to the South Asian Languages. Overarching this vast region??in geographical, linguistic and cultural terms??there is an areal 'South Asian Language Type'. Dr.Kalyanaraman seeks to prove this fact by establishing a semantic concordance among the so called Indo-Aryan, Dravidian and Munda languages. This area covers a geographical region bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south and the mountain ranges which insulate it from other regions of the Asian Continent on the north, east and west.

The semantic clustering attempted by Dr.Kalyanaraman in this Dictionary rests on the following hypothesis:

1 It is possible to reconstruct a proto-South Asian idiom or lingua franca of circa the centuries traversed by the Indus Valley Civilization (C.2500 to 1700 BC)

2 South Asia is a linguistic area nursed in the cradle of the Indus Valley Civilization.

Operating within this framework, Dr Kalyanaraman summarily rejects the two long standing and earlier assertions:

a) Sir William Jones's assertion in 1786 of an Indo-European Linguistic Family

b) F W Ellis's assertion in 1816 of a southern family of languages.

This cleavage was mischievously created by the Colonial British Rulers as a part of their strategy of Divide and Rule. Dr Kalyanaraman also dismisses the exclusion of the so-called Austro-Asiatic or Munda (or Kherwari) languages. His thesis is that there was a proto-South Asian Linguistic area (C 2500 BC) which included these three language groups. His underlying assumption is that the so-called Dravidian, Munda and Aryan Languages can be traced to an ancient South Asian Family by establishing the unifying elements in semantic terms. This is in keeping with the views of G.U.Pope in another context: ..that between the languages of Southern India and those of the Aryan family there are many deeply seated and radical affinities; that the differences between the Dravidian tongues and the Aryan are not as great as that between the Celtic for instance and the Sanskrit. It is in this spirit that Dr Kalyanaraman has dedicated this great dictionary to Panini and Tolkappiyam

Reading this fascinating book, we understand that each language is only in part an individual instrument. It is in the main, a community instrument used for community purposes. As such each language tends to launch out on a career of its own, to which individuals contribute very much as the coral insect contributes to the growth of a coral reef or island. The essence of language lies in the intentional conveyance of ideas from one living being to another through the instrumentality of arbitrary tokens or symbols agreed upon and understood by both as being associated with the particular ideas in question. In short language in this world is for keeping things safe in their places. Martin Heidegger rightly says that language is the house of being.

Words are but the signs and counters of knowledge, and their currency should be strictly regulated by the capital which they represent. The finest words in the world are only vain sounds, if you cannot comprehend. Words, when written, crystallize history; their very structure gives permanence to the unchangeable past. Francis Bacon said; 'men suppose their reason has command over their words; still it happens that words in return exercise authority on reason'. Words may be either servants or masters. If they are servants, they may safely guide us in the way of truth. If they become our masters, they intoxicate the brain and lead into swamps of confused thoughts where there is no solid footing.

Language is the amber in which thousands of precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved. It has arrested thousands of lightening-flashes of genius, which, unless thus fixed and arrested, might have been as bright, but would have also been as quickly passing and perishing as the lightning. Samuel Taylor Coleridge rightly observes: 'Language is the armoury of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests'.

We can infer the spirit of a nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years of social history has contributed a stone. And, universally, a good example of this social force is the veracity of language, which cannot be debauched. In this context Ralph Waldo Emerson rightly sums up: 'In any controversy concerning morals, an appeal may be made with safety to the sentiments which the language of the people expresses. Proverbs, words and grammar-inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision than the wisest individual'.

Language contains so faithful a record of the good and of the evil which in time past have been working in the minds and hearts of men, we shall not err, if we regard it as a moral barometer indicating and permanently marking the rise or fall of a nation's life. No wonder Noah Webster in his Preface to the great AMERICAN DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLIGH LANGUAGE wrote in 1828: 'Language is the expression of ideas; and if the people of our country cannot preserve an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language'.

Viewed in this light language is the most valuable single possession of the human race. Man does not live on bread alone: his other indispensable necessity is communication. We shall never approach a complete understanding of the nature of language, so long as we confine our attention to its intellectual function as a means of communicating thought. Language is a form of human reason, which has its reasons which are unknown to man. The mastery over reality, both technical and social, grows side by side with the knowledge of how to use a language?more particularly words. A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanging. In all senses it is the skin of living thought.

I enjoyed reading this Dictionary by Dr Kalyanaraman. I would pay my tribute to his work in the words of W H Auden: 'Though a work of literature can be read in a number of ways, this number is finite and can be arranged in a hierarchical order; some readings are obviously 'truer' than others, some doubtful, some obviously false and some absurd. That is why, for a desert island, one would choose a good dictionary, rather than the greatest literary masterpiece imaginable, for, in relation to its reader, a dictionary is absolutely passive and may legitimately be read in an infinite number of ways.'

Remnants of temple found in a Mosque washed out in floods

2006-08-14T17:34:00.000-07:00

• Attempt by Muslims to rebuild the structure overnight
• Severe tension in Paithan
• Assaults with lathis (sticks) on Shivsainiks

Idol of Nandi in shattered state in the ruins of the Mosque

Paithan: 13th August-In a 'Mosque' situated at the foot of Nathsagar in Jaikwadi, a wall of the Mosque collapsed with the onslaught of massive floods and some remnants of an ancient temple along with 'Nandi' head have been found.. To suppress this evidence of treasure of Hindu culture, Muslims overnight tried to build the structure. (This is the real nature of Muslims of trying to cover up their misdeeds -Editor)

On getting information about it, the Shivsainiks rushed to the spot and stopped the construction. (Congratulations to the Shivsainiks for stopping the construction-Editor) After police assaulted the angry Shivsainiks with lathis, they shouted powerful slogans in the city of,” We will build the temple there only" .As a result of this there is severe tension in the city of Paithan. In the meanwhile the police officer who did lathi assault on the Shivsainiks has been urgently transferred.

As the waters of the massive Godavari floods receded, the remnants of the razed Mosque came to light. The steps constructed of stones were also seen going towards the river. In the morning some of the young fishermen had gone to this area. At that time they found carved pillars of the temple and idol of Nandi in shattered state in the ruins of the Mosque. This news spread quickly like air in the whole city of Paithan. Immediately thereafter along with the Shivsena M.L.A Sandeepan Bhumre, the Taluka chief Arun Kale, Shri Somnath Pardeshi of the Durga Group,Khushal Bhavre, Nandalal Kale, Shivsainiks rushed to the incident spot. Thereafter the Tahsildar Madhav Nilawade was given the news about this. The Police Inspector Balasaheb Khillor and the officers of Archaelogy Department inspected the site.

While the discussion of the discovery of remnants of temple in the place of Mosque was going on the city, later in the afternoon fanatic Muslims starting immediately pulling strings. Hundred to one hundred and fifty Muslims entered the site with construction material. They started building a new wall after excavating the collapsed mud heap. Moment the Shivsainiks came to know about the construction by the Muslims, in the evening, along with 25-30 Shivsainiks, Raju Pardeshi, Deputy chief of the city Sagar Patil, Vijay Acharya again came to the incident site. Seeing the Shivsainiks coming the frightened Muslims fled the scene. The mob of the Muslims directly went to the police station. Then a big force of police appeared on the dispute scene. The police did a severe assault of lathis on the Shivsainiks who stopped the construction. (Would the police have been so prompt if it were Hindus in this place and would they have dared to do such a lathi assault on the Muslims?- Editor)

About 25-30 Shivsainiks were seriously injured in this. On the spreading of news about the inhuman lathi assault by the police, Hindus came on the road .In every square the assembled Hindus gave slogans of 'Har Har Mahadev', We will build the temple there only' and sent the city roaring.

With his background the Sub -Divisional Police Officer Raosaheb Nalabe entered Paithan.He tried to pacify both the assembled mobs. But the tension kept on mounting. The Shivsainiks strongly demanded the suspension of the Police Inspector Balasaheb Khillor, Police officer Somnath Gite.

Later Police Superintendent Sanjeevkumar Singhal urgently transferred police officer Gite.- (The God of Nature has exposed the cruel acts of the Muslims. There were lakhs of temples all over the world which were demolished and Mosques and Churches were built. Now Hindus at least wake up and fight to redeem the lost glory of Hindu Dharma or else it will never be- Editor)

Reference: Daily Saaamana (Marathi)

Vedic Mathematicians in Ancient India

2006-07-14T18:59:00.000-07:00

Kosla Vepa Ph.D

This compendium of notes planned as a series of essays is dedicated to the memory of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920), arguably the greatest number theorist in all of human history

Introductory Remarks

Uncovering the scope of Ancient Indian Mathematics faces a twofold difficulty. To determine who discovered what we must have an accurate idea of the chronology of Ancient India . This has been made doubly difficult by the faulty dating of Indian Historical events by Sir William Jones, who practically invented the fields of linguistics and philology if for a moment we discount the contributions of Panini (Ashtadhyayi)and Yaska (Nirukta) a couple of millennia before him . Sir William, who was reputed to be an accomplished linguist, was nevertheless totally ignorant of Sanskrit when he arrived in India and proceeded in short order to decipher the entire history of India from his own meager understanding of the language, In the process he brushed aside the conventional history as known and memorized by Sanskrit pundits for hundreds of years and as recorded in the Puranas and invented a brand new timeline for India which was not only egregiously wrong but hopelessly scrambled up the sequence of events and personalities. See for instance my chronicle on the extent of the damage caused by Sir William and his cohorts in my essay on the South Asia File .

It is not clear whether this error was one caused by inadequate knowledge of language or one due to deliberate falsification of records. It is horrific to think that a scholar of the stature of sir William would resort to skullduggery merely to satisfy his preconceived notions of the antiquity of Indic contributions to the sum of human knowledge. Hence we will assume Napoleon’s dictum was at play here and that we should attribute not to malice that which can be explained by sheer incompetence. This mistake has been compounded over the intervening decades by a succession of British historians, who intent on reassuring themselves of their racial superiority, refused to acknowledge the antiquity of India, merely because ‘it could not possibly be’. When once they discovered the antiquity of Egypt , Mesopotamia and Babylon, every attempt was made not to disturb the notion that the Tigris Euphrates river valley was the cradle of civilization. When finally they stumbled upon increasing number of seals culminating in the discovery of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa by Rakhal Das Banerjee and Daya Ram Sahni, they hit upon the ingenious idea that the Vedic civilization and the Indus Valley Civilization or the Saraswathi Sindhu Civilization, a more apt terminology since most of the archaeological sites lie along the banks of the dried up Saraswathi river, were entirely distinct and unrelated to each other. The consequences of such a postulate have been detailed in the South Asia File.

The second difficulty was the Euro centricity(a euphemism for a clearly racist attitude) of European mathematicians, who refused to appreciate the full scope of the Indic contributions and insisted on giving greater credit to Greece and later to Babylonian mathematics rather than recognize Indic and Vedic mathematics on its own merits. If this was indeed a surprise revelation, I fail to see the irony, when a similar Euro centricity was exhibited towards the antiquity of the Vedic people themselves.

The contributions of the ancient Indics are usually overlooked and rarely given sufficient credit in Western Texts (see for instance FAQ on Vedic Mathematics ).

The Wikipedia section on Indian Mathematics says the following;

Unfortunately, Indian contributions have not been given due acknowledgement in modern history, with many discoveries/inventions by Indian mathematicians now attributed to their western counterparts, due to Eurocentrism.

The historian Florian Cajori, one of the most celebrated historians of mathematics in the early 20th century, suggested that "Diophantus, the father of Greek algebra, got the first algebraic knowledge from India." This theory is supported by evidence of continuous contact between India and the Hellenistic world from the late 4th century BC, and earlier evidence that the eminent Greek mathematician Pythagoras visited India, which further 'throws open' the Eurocentric ideal.

More recently, evidence has been unearthed that reveals that the foundations of calculus were laid in India , at the Kerala School. Some allege that calculus and other mathematics of India were transmitted to Europe through the trade route from Kerala by traders and Jesuit missionaries. Kerala was in continuous contact with China, Arabia, and from around 1500, Europe as well, thus transmission would have

Furthermore, we cannot discuss Vedic mathematics without discussing Babylonian and Greek Mathematics to give it the scaffolding and context. We will devote some attention to these developments to put the Indic contribution in its proper context

However in recent years, there has been greater international recognition of the scope and breadth of the Ancient Indic contribution to the sum of human knowledge especially in some fields of science and technology such as Mathematics and Medicine. Typical of this new stance is the following excerpt by researchers at St. Andrews in Scotland .

An overview of Indian mathematics

It is without doubt that mathematics today owes a huge debt to the outstanding contributions made by Indian mathematicians over many hundreds of years. What is quite surprising is that there has been a reluctance to recognize this and one has to conclude that many famous historians of mathematics found what they expected to find, or perhaps even what they hoped to find, rather than to realize what was so clear in front of them.

We shall examine the contributions of Indian mathematics in this article, but before looking at this contribution in more detail we should say clearly that the "huge debt" is the beautiful number system invented by the Indians on which much of mathematical development has rested. Laplace put this with great clarity:-

The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India . The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.

We shall look briefly at the Indian development of the place-value decimal system of numbers later in this article and in somewhat more detail in the separate article Indian numerals. First, however, we go back to the first evidence of mathematics developing in India .

Histories of Indian mathematics used to begin by describing the geometry contained in the Sulvasutras but research into the history of Indian mathematics has shown that the essentials of this geometry were older being contained in the altar constructions described in the Vedic mythology text the Shatapatha Brahmana and the Taittiriya Samhita. Also it has been shown that the study of mathematical astronomy in India goes back to at least the third millennium BC and mathematics and geometry must have existed to support this study in these ancient times.

Equally exhaustive in its treatment is the Wiki encyclopedia, where in general the dates are still suspect. See for instance the Wikipedia on Indian Mathematics

Evidence From Europe That India Is The True Birthplace Of
Our Numerals

The views of savants and learned scholars from a non-Indian tradition about Indian mathematics are presented here. Note that most of these are dated prior to the1800’s, when India was still untainted with the prefix of being a colonized country

Severus Sebokt of Syria in 662 CE: (the following statement must be understood in the context of the alleged Greek claim that all mathematical knowledge emanated from them

"I shall not speak here of the science of the Hindus, who are not even Syrians, and not of their subtle discoveries in astronomy that are more inventive than those of the Greeks and of the Babylonians; not of their eloquent ways of counting nor of their art of calculation, which cannot be described in words - I only want to mention those calculations that are done with nine numerals. If those who believe, because they speak Greek, that they have arrived at the limits of science, would read the Indian texts, they would be convinced, even if a little late in the day, that there are others who know something of value". (Nau, 1910)

Said al-Andalusi, probably the first historian of Science who in 1068 wrote Kitab Tabaqut al-Umam in Arabic (Book of Categories of Nations) Translated into English by Alok Kumar in 1992

To their credit, the Indians have made great strides in the study of numbers (3) and of geometry. They have acquired immense information and reached the zenith in their knowledge of the movements of the stars (astronomy) and the secrets of the skies (astrology) as well as other mathematical studies. After all that, they have surpassed all the other peoples in their knowledge of medical science and the strengths of various drugs, the characteristics of compounds and the peculiarities of substances.

Albert Einstein in the 20th century also comments on the importance of Indian arithmetic: "We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made."

Quotes from Liberabaci (Book of the Abacus) by Fibonacci (1170-1250): The nine Indian numerals are ...with these nine and with the sign 0 which in Arabic is sifr, any desired number can be written. (Fibonacci learnt about Indian numerals from his Arab teachers in North Africa) .Fibonacci introduced Indian numerals into Europe in 1202CE.

G Halstead

...The importance of the creation of the zero mark can never be exaggerated. This giving to airy nothing, not merely a local habituation and a name, a picture, a symbol but helpful power, is the characteristic of the Hindu race from whence it sprang. No single mathematical creation has been more potent for the general on go of intelligence and power. [CS, P 5]

The following quotes are from George Ifrah's book Universal History of Numbers

The real inventors of this fundamental discovery, which is no less important than such feats as the mastery of fire, the development of agriculture, or the invention of the wheel, writing or the steam engine, were the mathematicians and astronomers of Indian civilisation: scholars who, unlike the Greeks, were concerned with practical applications and who were motivated by a kind of passion for both numbers and numerical calculations.

There is a great deal of evidence to support this fact, and even the Arabo-Muslim scholars themselves have often voiced their agreement

The following is a succession of historical accounts in favor of this theory, given in chronological order, beginning with the most recent

.
1. P. S. Laplace (1814): “The ingenious method of expressing every possible number using a set of ten symbols (each symbol having a place value and an absolute value) emerged in India . The idea seems so simple nowadays that its significance and profound importance is no longer appreciated. Its simplicity lies in the way it facilitated calculation and placed arithmetic foremost amongst useful inventions. The importance of this invention is more readily appreciated when one considers that it was beyond the two greatest men of Antiquity, Archimedes and Apollonius.” [Dantzig. p. 26]

2. J. F. Montucla (1798): “The ingenious number-system, which serves as the basis for modern arithmetic, was used by the Arabs long before it reached Europe. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that this invention is Arabic. There is a great deal of evidence, much of it provided by the Arabs themselves that this arithmetic originated in India .” [Montucla, I, p. 375J

3. John Walls (1616-4703) referred to the nine numerals as Indian figures [Wallis (1695), p. 10]

4. Cataneo (1546) le noue figure de gli Indi, “the nine figures from India ”. [Smith and Karpinski (1911), p.3

5. Willichius (1540) talks of Zyphrae! Nice, “Indian figures”. [Smith and Karpinski (1911) p. 3]

6. The Crafte of Nombrynge (c. 1350), the oldest known English arithmetical tract: II fforthermore ye most vndirstonde that in this craft ben vsed teen figurys, as here bene writen for esampul 098 ^ 654321... in the quych we vse teen figwys of Inde. Questio II why Zen figurys of Inde? Soiucio. For as I have sayd afore thei werefondefrrst in Inde. [D. E. Smith (1909)

7. Petrus of Dada (1291) wrote a commentary on a work entitled Algorismus by Sacrobosco (John of Halifax, c. 1240), in which he says the following (which contains a mathematical error): Non enim omnis numerus per quascumquefiguras Indorum repraesentatur “Not every number can be represented in Indian figures”. [Curtze (1.897), p. 25

8.Around the year 1252, Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes (1260—1310) composed a work entitled Logistike Indike (“Indian Arithmetic”) in Greek, or even Psephophoria kata Indos (“The Indian way of counting”), where he explains the following: “There are only nine figures. These are:
123456789
[figures given in their Eastern Arabic form]

A sign known as tziphra can be added to these, which, according to the Indians, means ‘nothing’. The nine figures themselves are Indian, and tziphra is written thus: 0”. [B. N., Pans. Ancien Fonds grec, Ms 2428, f” 186 r”]

9. Around 1240, Alexandre de Ville-Dieu composed a manual in verse on written calculation (algorism). Its title was Carmen de Algorismo, and it began with the following two lines: Haec algorismus ars praesens dicitur, in qua Talibus Indorumfruimur bis quinquefiguris

“Algorism is the art by which at present we use those Indian figures, which number two times five”. [Smith and Karpinski (1911), p. 11]

10. In 1202, Leonard of Pisa (known as Fibonacci), after voyages that took him to the Near East and Northern Africa, and in particular to Bejaia (now in Algeria), wrote a tract on arithmetic entitled Liber Abaci (“a tract about the abacus”), in which he explains the following:

Cum genitor meus a patria publicus scriba in duana bugee pro pisanis mercatoribus ad earn confluentibus preesset, me in pueritia mea ad se uenire faciens, inspecta utilitate el cornmoditate fiutura, ibi me studio abaci per aliquot dies stare uoluit et doceri. Vbi a mirabii magisterio in arte per nouem figuras Indorum introductus. . . Novem figurae Indorum hae sun!: cum his itaque novemfiguris. et turn hoc signo o. Quod arabice zephirum appellatur, scribitur qui libel numerus: “My father was a public scribe of Bejaia, where he worked for his country in Customs, defending the interests of Pisan merchants who made their fortune there. He made me learn how to use the abacus when I was still a child because he saw how I would benefit from this in later life. In this way I learned the art of counting using the nine Indian figures... The nine Indian figures are as follows:

987654321

[figures given in contemporary European cursive form].

“That is why, with these nine numerals, and with this sign 0, called zephirum in Arab, one writes all the numbers one wishes.”[Boncompagni (1857), vol.1]

11. C. U50, Rabbi Abraham Ben MeIr Ben Ezra (1092—1167), after a long voyage to the East and a period spent in Italy , wrote a work in Hebrew entitled: Sefer ha mispar (“Number Book”), where he explains the basic rules of written calculation.

He uses the first nine letters of the Hebrew alphabet to represent the nine units. He represents zero by a little circle and gives it the Hebrew name of galgal (“wheel”), or, more frequently, sfra (“void”) from the corresponding Arabic word.

However, all he did was adapt the Indian system to the first nine Hebrew letters (which he naturally had used since his childhood).

In the introduction, he provides some graphic variations of the figures, making it clear that they are of Indian origin, after having explained the place-value system: “That is how the learned men of India were able to represent any number using nine shapes which they fashioned themselves specifically to symbolize the nine units.” (Silberberg (1895), p.2: Smith and Ginsburg (1918): Steinschneider (1893)1

12. Around the same time, John of Seville began his Liberalgoarismi de practica arismetrice (“Book of Algoarismi on practical arithmetic”) with the following:

Numerus est unitatum cot/echo, quae qua in infinitum progredilur (multitudo enim crescit in infinitum), ideo a peritissimis Indis sub quibusdam regulis et certis lirnitibus infinita numerositas coarcatur, Ut de infinitis dfinita disciplina traderetur etfuga subtilium rerum sub alicuius artis certissima Jege ten eretur:

“A number is a collection of units, and because the collection is infinite (for multiplication can continue indefinitely), the Indians ingeniously enclosed this infinite multiplicity within certain rules and limits so that infinity could be scientifically defined: these strict rules enabled them to pin down this subtle concept.
[B. N., Paris, Ms. lat. 16 202, p 51: Boncompagni (1857), vol. I, p. 261

13. C. 1143, Robert of Chester wrote a work entitled: Algoritmi de numero Indorum (“Algoritmi: Indian figures”), which is simply a translation of an Arabic work about Indian arithmetic. [Karpinski (1915); Wallis (1685). p. 121

14. C. 1140, Bishop Raymond of Toledo gave his patronage to a work written by the converted Jew Juan de Luna and archdeacon Domingo Gondisalvo: the Liber Algorismi de numero Indorum (“Book of Algorismi of Indian figures) which is simply a translation into a Spanish and Latin version of an Arabic tract on Indian arithmetic. [Boncompagni (1857), vol. 11

15. C. 1130, Adelard of Bath wrote a work entitled: Algoritmi de numero Indorum (“Algoritmi: of Indian figures”), which is simply a translation of an Arabic tract about Indian calculation. [Boncompagni (1857), vol. Ii

16. C. 1125, The Benedictine chronicler William of Malmesbury wrote De gestis regum Anglorum, in which he related that the Arabs adopted the Indian figures and transported them to the countries they conquered, particularly Spain . He goes on to explain that the monk Gerbert of Aurillac, who was to become Pope Sylvester II (who died in 1003) and who was immortalized for restoring sciences in Europe, studied in either Seville or Cordoba, where he learned about Indian figures and their uses and later contributed to their circulation in the Christian countries of the West. L Malmesbury (1596), f” 36 r’; Woepcke (1857), p. 35J

17. Written in 976 in the convent of Albelda (near the town of Logroño, in the north of Spain ) by a monk named Vigila, the Coda Vigilanus contains the nine numerals in question, but not zero. The scribe clearly indicates in the text that the figures are of Indian origin:

Item de figuels aritmetice. Scire debemus Indos subtilissimum ingenium habere et ceteras gentes eis in arithmetica et geometrica et ceteris liberalibu.c disciplinis concedere. Et hoc manifèstum at in novem figuris, quibus quibus designant unum quenque gradum cuiu.slibetgradus. Quatrum hec sunt forma:

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1.

“The same applies to arithmetical figures. It should be noted that the Indians have an extremely subtle intelligence, and when it comes to arithmetic, geometry and other such advanced disciplines, other ideas must make way for theirs. The best proof of this is the nine figures with which they represent each number no matter how high. This is how the figures look:

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Al-Khwarismi (783-850 CE) Popularized Indian numerals, mathematics including Algebra in the Islamic world and the Christian West .Algebra was named after his treatise 'Al jabr wa'l Muqabalah'' which when translated from Arabic means 'Transposition and Reduction'. Little is known about his life except that he lived at the court of the Abbasid Caliph al Ma'amun , in Baghdad shortly after Charlemagne was made emperor of the west. and that he was one of the most important mathematicians and astronomers who worked at the house of Wisdom (Bayt al Hikma)

'

Muhammad Ben Musa aI-Khuwarizmi (circa 783—850.). Portrait on wood made in 1983 from a Persian illuminated manuscript for the l200th anniversary of his birth. Museum of the Ulugh Begh Observatory. Urgentsch (Kharezm). Uzbekistan (ex USSR ). By calling one of its fundamental practices and theoretical activities the algorithm computer science commemorates this great Muslim scholar.

2,300-year-old artefacts may change Ashoka-Buddhist history

2006-07-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

BHUBANESWAR: Orissa Institute of Maritime and South East Asian Studies (OIMSEAS) has unearthed some 2,300-year-old artefacts at Jajpur district in Orissa, which, it claimed, could change some historical narratives on the Ashokan period.

The description of Chinese pilgrim Hieun-Tsang about Ashoka that he had constructed 10 stupas in Odra country where Buddha had preached may come true.

Earlier, historians refused to accept the narrative. We have already analysed five stupas and found three more similar structures,” OIMSEAS Director Debaraj Pradhan told mediapersons here. He said a huge inscribed monolithic stupa along with other remnants of Buddhist establishments had been detected on top of Panturi hill in Jajpur district.

The current explorations and excavations are unique since nowhere in India will you find old artefacts in such a small area,” Pradhan said. The stupas were found at Langudi, Tarapur, Deuli Kayama hills, Neulipur, Bajragiri, Kantigadia and Panturi.

The organisation had extensively surveyed the Brahmani-Kelua river valley since 1996 to explore and excavate Buddhist sites. It had excavated Langudi hill site and discovered ancient Pushpagiri Vihara, an Ashokan stupa, two rare statues believed to be that of Emperor Ashoka himself, besides 54 rock-cut votive stupas, five Dhyani Buddha statues and remains of two monasteries.

The excavation of the fort of Radhanagar indicated that it could be the ancient capital of Kalinga, Pradhan, also the curator of state archaeology, said.

Either it could be Dantapura mentioned in Ceylonese literature Datha-Ddhatu-Vamsa or Tosali mentioned in special Dhauli rock edict of Ashoka,” he said.

The artefacts discovered from last year’s excavation established that Radhanagar or Tosali was a fort city. But interesting findings of this year indicated that it could be a port city.

The discovery of Roman Bullae (an earthen ornament) and Roman Rowlletted pottery suggested that the place had connections with Rome. And it could not have happened, had Tosali not been a port city,” Pradhan said. He, however, made it clear that only around five per cent of the total excavation had been completed.

Once we excavate the entire archaeologically-rich area in Jajpur district, we would be able to come to a concrete conclusion,” he said. Besides discovery of Ashokan period artefacts, archaeologists have also stumbled upon many antiques, which implies that the whole area could have been a hub of religious activities.

The current excavation also threw up broken Buddhist images, votive stupas and collection of pottery remains from the surface near Vajragiri.

Pradhan said Vajragiri could have had close cultural relations with Japan because the highest temple of Japan was the Vajragiri temple (Kongobu-Ji) at Kuito, the ancient capital of that country.

Interestingly, at the foot of the present Vajragiri a big ancient village Kotpur was situated, he said and added that more research is necessary to establish the connection.

The Vajragiri excavation had yielded one piece of stone trident, designed religious lamps 12 pieces of heavy iron rods and two pieces of conch in good condition.

Pradhan said most of the inscriptional evidence and its photographs have been sent to Dr K.V. Ramesh, retired director of epigraphy at Mysore, for deciphering.

The present inscriptional evidence may prove the association of Buddha with Kayama hill in Kalinga country in his lifetime,” he said.

Meanwhile, Orissa Culture Minister Suryanarayan Patro has directed Jajpur District Collector Aurobindo Padhi to visit all hills identified by OIMSEAS and involve eminent historians in the research work.

Scientists discover 500 BC sky map

2006-04-25T22:26:00.000-07:00

P Revathi
CNN-IBN
Posted Tuesday , April 25, 2006 at 21:38
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Hyderabad: When the carving of the Great Bear constellation on a stone, made around 500 BC at Mudumala village in Mahbubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh were discovered, scientists were suitably astounded.

They began to wonder how ancient Indian astrologers could tell exactly how stars and constellations were grouped without the help of modern devices such as the telescope.

The mystery was unravelled when scientists discovered an ancient sky map in Hyderabad.

The sky map, which is probably the oldest in Asia, was carved out by megalithic Indians with astounding accuracy.

The map represents the seven stars also known as the saptarishi mandal, which have for ages been used to pinpoint the North (for the Pole star, located above the North Pole lies opposite the Ursa Major or the Great Bear).

According to Reader, Department of History, Central University Hyderabad, Dr K P Rao, "The discovery of the sky map indicates that from olden days itself the Indians had adequate knowledge of Astronomical science. In fact they used this knowledge to construct monuments based on the directions denoted by stars and constellations."

According to Historians, this is the only sky map to be unearthed in India, probably even South Asia.

Over ages the stone which has the sky map carved on it, is being protected by the local folk.

Eighty menhirs (standing stones) and several hundred smaller stones surround the map. There is a local folklore, which talks about how these stones are cursed men and cattle.

"With this belief the local people do not even dare to cause any damage to the stones and so the sky map remained intact over ages," says Dr Rao.

A detailed study revealed that the megalithic Indians had good knowledge of solar trajectories and the sky map was used to determine the calendar and the seasons with precise information about sun rise-sun set with exact directions.

This information was expected to be used predominantly for agricultural operations.

Gold idols found in Tripura pond

2006-03-16T16:57:00.000-08:00

By Indo Asian News Service

Agartala, March 16 (IANS) Two gold idols have been recovered from a pond in Tripura, triggering a debate among experts that Buddhism and Hinduism co-existed in the state in ancient times.

The idols were found by labourers Wednesday at Bishramganj in west Tripura, about 35 km from here. One of the idols is a nine-inch Buddha flanked by two dancing girls while the other is an eight-inch image of Vishnu in a standing position.

The idols are being kept at the local magistrate's office before officials of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) take possession of them for ascertaining details regarding age and history.

Local historians and archaeological experts say there might have been some relation between Buddhism and Hinduism in Tripura till the 13th century.

A huge number of Buddha and Hindu idols have been recovered from north and south Tripura districts. The ASI is taking steps to protect them as national treasures.

The universality of Sanskrit

2006-03-15T16:35:00.000-08:00

By Sudhakar Raje

About 70 purely Sanskrit words have also been included in the Concise Oxford Dictionary with the same meaning. Additionally, there are more than 80 prefixes/suffixes in English that are Sanskrit-based. These are used to form at least one thousand words given in COD. The Sanskrit-based prefix “over” is used in 170 English words according to the Navneet Advanced Dictionary, and in 270, according to COD.

Concerted and continuing research in various fields of scholarship like archaeology, mythology, linguistics, history of religion and so on has conclusively proved that Hindu civilisation had once pervaded the whole ancient world. And as the one vehicle for the worldwide spread of Hindu religion and culture, Hindu science and art, Hindu medicine and mathematics was the Sanskrit language, it also spread internationally. Right from Rigvedic times Sanskrit-speaking emigrants from India had settled in various parts of Asia and Europe, eventually reaching even the so-called New World, the Americas, millenniums ago. This resulted in Sanskrit influence on the local languages of the contemporary world. Conversely, Sanskrit became, in a way, the language of the world.

Credible Claim
Is this much too sweeping a claim to be credible, or does it have a basis in fact? In search of an honest answer to this question this writer waded through about 60 sources, including around 30 standard works in various aspects of ancient history plus more than a dozen dictionaries. On collating the collected information language-wise as well as region-wise he found that the claim of Sanskrit having been the whole ancient world´s language can certainly be sustained, albeit in varying degrees.

This writer found that words based on, or derived from, Sanskrit are present, in one form or another, in 80 languages of the world, from the Far East to the Far West.

Among them four languages, for obvious reasons, need to be mentioned separately—English, Greek, Latin and Arabic.

English
The English language has a Vedic ancestry. In the aftermath of the Rigvedic Dasharajnya war, the Druhyu community, which had taken part in it and had been defeated, migrated westward, eventually reaching parts of Western Europe. There “Druhyu” became “Druid”, and the Druids later came to be called Celts. Their language was Celtic, which was spoken in large parts of Western Europe, including Britain, during the centuries preceding the Christian era. Modern lexicographers of English admit that some Celtic languages are still spoken in Britain, though they maintain that English falls in the “Germanic”, and not “Celtic”, branch of “Proto-Indo-European” languages. Suffice it to say here that no credible evidence exists of an Indo-European language or language-group.

So far as current English is concerned, according to Dr N.R.Waradpande one-fourth of the total English vocabulary is Sanskritic. Webster´s, the world´s biggest (18-volume) English dictionary, is said to have as many as 40,000 words described as “akin to Sanskrit”. Even in the “Concise” edition of the Oxford Dictionary this writer identified around 400 Sanskrit-based words. About 70 purely Sanskrit words have also been included in the Concise Oxford Dictionary with the same meaning. Additionally, there are more than 80 prefixes/suffixes in English that are Sanskrit-based. These are used to form at least one thousand words given in COD. The Sanskrit-based prefix “over” is used in 170 English words, according to the Navneet Advanced Dictionary, and in 270, according to COD. In the case of the Sanskrit-derived prefix “non” COD says the number of English words using it is “unlimited”. Many Sanskrit-based prefixes are also used in half a dozen languages like Greek, Latin, French and Gothic.

Greek
According to the Mahabharat, the descendents of ancient king Yayati´s son Turvasu were called the Yavanas. From Yavana originated the name Ionia. Ionia is a region in Asia Minor, and there is evidence showing that Vedic peoples migrated to Asia Minor after they established themselves in Iran. As Asian Minor is contiguous to Iran the Iranians seemed to have owed their language and culture to a two-fold influence—Indian and Iranian. Greeks from the north-west also came to Ionia, but his was after Vedic influence was well-established and the Ionian Greeks were linguistically and culturally absorbed by the Vedics from India.

The most ancient Greek work, Homer´s Illiad (about 900 to 800 BC) is in the Ionian language, which is influenced by the language of Turvasu, that is Sanskrit, and Avestan, the language of the Zoroastrian scriptures, which is only a phonetic variant of Sanskrit. This Ionian Sanskritic language was the mother of the Greek language.

This writer has identified about 100 Greek words in COD that are derived from Sanskrit. In addition, as mentioned earlier, many Greek prefixes are also Sanskrit-based.

Some Greek words not only have a Sanskrit derivation, they also have a Hindu history. A couple of examples:

Allopathy: Allopathy is an allied development as a branch of ancient Indian medicine, which prevailed in Europe and other parts of the world till about the end of the 18th century. The Greek prefix allos means “other”. So “allo-pathy” is borrowed from “the other”, that is, from the ancient Indian system of medicine—Ayurveda.

Indigo: The English word “Indigo” is derived from the Greek word Indigon, which means “from India”. Proof exits that Indigo was made and used to dye cloth in ancient India.

Prometheus: According to Greek mythology Prometheus was the first fire-giver. He is Pra-manth of the Rig Veda. In the Greek language Prometheus means “fore-sight”. The Vedic Atharvan fire was conceived in the brain (intellect) and actually produced by rubbing (manthana) together two hard substances.

Latin
Along with Greek, Vedic Asia Minor was also the cradle of Latin. Probably as a result of the break-up of the Vedic Hittite empire in Mesopotamia, a people later known as Etruscans first appeared in the Etruria region of Italy around 900 BC, from where, during succeeding centuries, they spread to other Italian areas including Latium, the birth-place of Latin. Later, because of the political dominance of the Roman Empire, Latin became the common language for centuries. This in turn spread Sanskrit roots to languages of Europe.

This writer has identified 130 Latin words in the COD that have a Sanskrit base. Also, as pointed out previously, a number of Latin prefixes are derived from Sanskrit.

Arabic
There is a clear presence of Sanskrit in the Arabic language, albeit in Arabicised forms. This writer has identified 40 such words.

Dr Waradpande says there would be more Sanskrit words in Arabic than in English. In his opinion, there is a close connection between Arabic and Zend, the language of Avesta, which signifies that Arabic should contain more Sanskrit words than English does, as Zend/Avestan is only a phonetic variant of Sanskrit.

Other Languages
Now about the other languages of the world. This writer divided the words he identified into the following global regions: South East, Far East, Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, North America. Then in each region he subdivided the languages into two broad categories—old and current. On so doing, his findings were as follows:

South East
Current languages: Indonesian (number of words 2), Burmese (3), Balinese (4), Javanese (5), Malaysian (16), Thai (51).

Old languages: Busang (Borneo) (5), Lava (Laos) (10).

Far East
Current languages: Mongolian (3), Japanese (8), Chinese (10).

Old languages: Tagalog (Philippines) (2), Maori (New Zealand) (16).

Middle East
Current languages: Pushtu (Afghanistan) (1), Hebrew (4), Khowari (Afghan region) (15), Kafiri (North Afghanistan) (18), Persian (38).

Old languages: Aramaic (Mesopotamia), Assyrian, Babylonian, Mitanni (Mesopotamia) (1 each), Akkadian (Mesopotamia), Khwarezmian (Iran) (2 each), Sumerian (3), Kashshi (Mesopotamia) (4), Hittite (Mesopotamia) (9), Avesta (18).

Central Asia
Current languages: Armenian (1), Khotanese (2), Tibetan (2).

Old languages: Tungus (Siberia), Phrygian (Asia Minor), (1 each), Tocharian (Region north of Black Sea) (3), Parya (Oxus region) (68), Niya Prakrit (Chinese Turkestan) (71).

Africa
Current languages: Swanili (East Africa), Amharic (Ethiopia) (2 each).

Old languages: Yoruba (Nigeria) (1), Egyptian (5).

Europe
Current languages: Basque (France/ Spain border region), Finnish (Finland) (1 each), Albanian, Lettic (Baltic country Latvia), Maltese (Mediterranean island Malta), Polynesian (Pacific island group), Portuguese (2 each), Danish (Denmark), Rumanian (4 each), Czech, Polish (Poland) (5 each), Dutch (Holland), Lithuanian (Baltic country Lithuania) (6 each), Norse (Norway) (7), Irish (9), Spanish (12), Romany (Roma gypsies of Europe) (23), German (33), Italian, Russian (34 each), French (46).

Old languages: Cornish (Celtic language of Cornwall in Britain), Gaulish (France), Umbrian (Italian region) (1 each), Welsh (Celtic language of Wales in Britain) (4), Gaelic (Scotland) (5), Gothic (Western Europe) (14).

South America
Old languages: Nahautl (1), Qechua (36).

North America
Old languages: Iroquois (1), O´odham (2).

Names
Names of persons, peoples, deities, rivers, mountains, regions and even whole countries that were derived from Sanskrit (some of which are still in use) can also be found all over the world. This writer has identified the following numbers of such names:

South East (92), Far East (24), Middle East (130), Central Asia (15), Africa (22), Europe (58), South America (24), North America (21).

These numerically meagre identifications in this article are clearly inadequate for qualifying it as serious research. However, even this preliminary collation of available information does indicate the global presence of Sanskrit—at times just a trace, at times quite clear. So perhaps some Sanskritists and linguists could team up to establish beyond doubt the truth of a quote with which the writer would like to conclude:

“Sanskrit was the original language of the earth.”

—Hallhead
(Quoted in Indian antiquities, Vol. IV; Ed. Thomas Maurice)
(Digest of Sanskrit Abroad! An International Glossary of Sanskrit-based Words in 80 Languages around the World, compiled and edited by the author, and currently under print.)

Sanskrit in English

2006-02-17T04:11:00.000-08:00

By Sudhakar Raje

In South-East Asia the influence of Sanskrit was so strong that it can be seen not only in old inscriptions but also in Sanskrit names for people and places that are still in use, such as in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Burma. In the Middle-East, the present homeland of fundamentalist Islam Sanskrit had an undeniable presence.

Once upon a time, millenniums ago, the whole world was Hindu. As the mist of antiquity are dispelled, layer by layer, by unceasing research in such diverse disciplines as Archaeology, Mythology, Cosmology, Geology, Linguistics and so on, the truth emerges that from the very dawn of human civilization Arya/Hindu influence pervaded the world from East to West.

Worldwide Hindu Civilization

The most obvious evidence of this global Hindu history is of course the idols and icons of various deities of the Hindu pantheon that have been found almost all over the world. Some Hindu deities, like Ganesha, Shiva, Vishnu and Durga, have a truly global presence. The worship of the Vedic Sun God was a popular religion in the Roman Empire, Egypt, and all over the Middle-East. As for the western hemisphere, the history of Hindu culture in the Americas is both hoary and extensive.

Worldwide Sanskrit
For this worldwide spread of Hindu religion and culture, Hindu philosophy and science, the one vehicle was the Sanskrit language. Prof Avinash Chandra writes in his book Rigvedic India, that emigrants from India settled in various parts of Asia and Europe in ancient times. This resulted in Sanskrit influence on local languages. Arnold Toynbee’s book Mankind and Mother Earth contains a map showing Sanskrit speaking nomads to the south-east of the Caspian Sea. When even nomads moving between Asia and Europe spoke Sanskrit, it is certain that the language was used by householders and educational institutions of Asia and Europe in those times.

In South-East Asia the influence of Sanskrit was so strong that it can be seen not only in old inscriptions but also in Sanskrit names for people and places that are still in use, such as in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Burma. In the Middle-East, the present homeland of fundamentalist Islam that stretches from Afghanistan to Arabia and extends to Egypt, Sanskrit had an undeniable presence. Sanskrit used to be spoken in the Hindu kingdom of Kabul, and a thousand years ago there was a Sanskrit university here. In Iran, the Zoroastrian scripture is written in the Avestan language, which is just a phonetic variation of Sanskrit.

Vedic Ancestry
As for Europe, in his monumental work The Story of Civilization Will Durant calls Sanskrit “the mother of Indo-European languages”. In the light of recent research by Indian scholars it would be nearer the truth to say that Sanskrit is not only the mother of Indian languages but the mother of European languages as well. In fact, this research strongly suggests that they have Vedic ancestry.

The Rig Veda contains the description of a great battle called Dasharajnya, the “Battle of Ten Kings”, which is the world’s oldest recorded battle. It was fought between the Tritsu King Sudasa on the one hand and a confederacy of ten peoples or clans on the other. These ten peoples were Pakhta, Bhalana, Alina, Shiva, Vishanin, Simyu, Bhrigu, Prithu and Parshu. Collectively they had two group names—Anu and Druhyu. The Druhyu king defeated in this battle was named Angara,. His successor, King Gandhara, migrated to the North-West with his clan and gave his name to the Gandhara country. The Puranas, which are the historical companion texts of the Rig Veda, clearly state that major sections of these Druhyus emigrated to distant lands to the North. Those among them who spread to Europe came to be known as Celts, and the language they spoke came to be called Celtic. During the last some centuries before the Christian era Celtic was spoken over a wide area of Europe from Spain to Britain. These ancient Celts were originally the Druids, who in turn were identifiable with the Druhyus.

The languages the peoples that fought the Dasharajnya war spoke had split into two broad groups, called Satem and Kentum, in the original Vedic/Indian homeland itself, the Anu speaking the Satem dialects and the Druhyu the Kentum ones, With the westward spread of the Druhyus the latter evolved into proto-proto-Indo-European languages, some of which became extinct, like Latin, while others developed into extant, spoken languages, including English.

This is borne out by a study of the etymology of English words. For instance, the words in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (COD) are stated to have generally Latin roots and frequently Greek roots. As a matter of fact, in numerous such cases the evolved English word or the Latin/Greek root has such a striking resemblance to a Sanskrit word, both phonetically and in respect of meaning, as to clearly suggest that the root of the given root is Sanskrit. This writer has identified hundreds of such words in COD. In addition, there are at least a thousand words in this dictionary where the prefix or suffix is derived from Sanskrit. COD also lists about 70 purely Sanskrit words as part of the English vocabulary.

Dr N.R.Waradpande is currently engaged in compiling a full-fledged dictionary of Sanskrit-based English words, and he is confident of identifying 10,000 such words. What is remarkable, Webster’s, the world’s biggest (18-volume) English dictionary, is said to have as many as 40,000 words described as “akin to Sanskrit”. In fact, says Warandpande, one-fourth of the total English vocabulary is Sanskritic.

Interesting Background
Some English words not only have a Sanskrit etymology but also a Hindu history. A few such examples are given here:

Abba: This word has not only a Sanskrit origin but also a Hindu history. Abba means ‘father’, and is derived from Sanskrit Appa—ap, ‘water’ + pa, ‘to drink’. There is a Hindu ritual to offer water to the father after his death, which he is supposed to drink. So Appa, ‘drinker of water’, means ‘father’.

Allopathy: Allopathy is an allied development as a branch of ancient Indian medicine, which prevailed in Europe and other parts of the world till about the end of the 18th century. Allo means ‘a learned borrowing’ from the Greek word allos, meaning “other”. So ‘Allo-pathy’ is borrowed from ‘the other’, that is from the ancient Indian system of medicine, Ayurveda.

Bane: The English word ‘bane’, meaning ‘a curse’, has an interesting Hindu mythological background. Ancient king Prithu-Vainya was considered the original Arya king, because he started the practice of agriculture. He is thus honoured as the founder of the Arya (‘agricultural’) civilization. ‘Vainya’ means ‘son of Vena’. King Vena, however, was a tyrant, and was described as a curse on Dharma. So ‘bane’, derived from ‘Vena’, means a curse.

Brahmin: A curious example of how not only a Sanskrit term but even the Hindu concept underlying it has become established in the English language is provided by the word ‘Brahmin’. In his magnum opus Kane and Abel best-selling British novelist William Archer frequently uses this term to denote a particular class of people or its style of speech or accent. According to the Concise Oxford Dictionary ‘Brahmin’ means “a socially or culturally superior person”.

Elephant: The word ‘elephant’ is an interesting combination of Sanskrit and Arabic roots. It has three components, al-ibha-danta. Al is Arabic for ‘the’, while ibha and danta are Sanskrit, meaning ‘elephant’ and ‘tooth’. The English word ‘ivory’, meaning ‘elephant’s tusk’, has a related etymology. The Hebrew word ‘habbin’ is derived from ‘ibha’, as also the Egyptian word ‘abu’. This becomes ‘ebut’ in Etruscan and ‘eboreum’ in Latin, finally becoming ‘ivory’ in English.

Indigo: The English word ‘Indigo’ is derived from the Greek word ‘Indikon’, which means ‘from India’. Proof exists that Indigo was made and used to dye cloth in ancient India.

Non: The English (and also French and Latin) prefix ‘non’ is derived from the Sanskrit word na/no, meaning ‘no’. Navneet Advanced Dictionary (English-English-Marathi) has given about 550 English words using this Sanskrit-derived prefix. Concise Oxford Dictionary says the number of English words using this prefix is “unlimited”.

Over: The English prefix ‘over-’ is derived from the Sanskrit term upari, meaning ‘above’/ ‘upon’, excessive’/ ‘extra’. Navneet Advanced Dictionary has given a list of about 170 words using it. Concise Oxford Dictionary contains about 270 English words formed with this prefix.

Is Ramayana a mere epic or part of India’s ancient history?

2006-02-07T05:16:00.000-08:00

By Arabinda Ghose

Most of the Hindus of India and Nepal as also of countries where emigrant Hindus live in sizeable numbers celebrate Ram Navami, which falls on the ninth day of the bright half of the lunar month of Chaitra, corresponding to March-April of the Georgian calendar. Countries of South-East Asia such as Thailand too revere Lord Rama and the predominantly Muslim nation of Indonesia celebrates Ramayana as a ballet.

The Valmiki Ramayana in Sanskrit as also the Tulsi Ramayana by Saint Tulsidas in Hindi are extremely popular volumes throughout India and abroad. But is Ramayana a description of the lives and times of Lord Rama and the Raghukul (the descendants of King Raghu) and the times during an unknown period of India’s ancient “history” or is it nothing but an epic which, Hindus believe to be a true account of the events in ancient India?

Shri Pushkar Bhatnagar, who is a computer expert, claims that he has not only calculated the exact date and time of Lord Rama’s birth, but all happenings in his life till his age of 39 years, when he had returned to Ayodhya after slaying Ravana. According to him Lord Rama was born at 12.30 p.m. on January 10, 5114 b.c. Shri Bhatnagar has relied entirely on the positions of the sun, the moon and the planets, visible to the naked eye those days, described by Sage Valmiki in his Ramayana for calculating the day and even time of many of the events in the life of Lord Rama.

This article is merely a rewriting of the letter of Shri Bhatnagar published by Asian Agri History, dated October-December, 2004, a magazine which is devoted to discovering and writing about the ancient systems of agriculture that was in vogue in the Asian region in ancient times.

A computer specialist claims firm dates of Ramayana, says Lord Rama was born in 5114 b.c.

The following is the extract of the letter:

“Moving forward, it has been stated that on the Amavasya (new moon day) of the 10th month of the 13th year of his exile he (had) fought Khar and Dushan and on that day, a solar eclipse was seen from Panchawati. Not only had a solar eclipse occurred that day, but the planets too were arranged in the sky in a particular manner (that day). Six months later, when Rama (had) killed Bali on the Amavasya of Ashadh (June-July) of the 14th year of (his) exile, another solar eclipse was visible in the morning sky and after five months, when Hanuman went to meet Sita in Lanka, a lunar eclipse was witnessed in the evening. Besides these, several other planetary positions have been mentioned at different other places.

“It is important to know that planetary positions keep (on) changing every day in the sky and they do not repeat (the same positions) for lakhs of years. Moreover, if we know the position of all the planets in the sky, they refer to one and only one date in history.

“The effort to provide dates to the planetary positions mentioned in (the) Ramayana and other Vedic literature began with (the) legendary Bal Gangadhar Tilak in his well-known book The Orion. However, the efforts made so far were based on manual computations. Since one revolution of these planets is completed in a highly complex fractional number (apparently the author refers to the period of the revolution of these planets around the sun and of the rotations on their axes), it is difficult to arrive at the accurate day and time in history (when these events had taken place). But in the late 1990s, many (computer) software were developed (in order) to track the positions of the planets in the sky and with these software, (the) planets’ position at any given point of time in the sky can be known.

“By using a powerful planetarium software, I found that the planetary positions mentioned in the Ramayana for the date of the birth of Lord Rama had occurred in the sky at 12.30 p.m. on January 10, 5114 b.c. It was the ninth day of the Shukla Paksha of Chaitra (March-April) month too. Moving forward, after 25 years of the birth of Lord Rama, the position of (the) planets in the sky tallies with their description in the Ramayana. Again, on the Amavasya of the 10th month of the 13th year of exile, the solar eclipse had indeed occurred and the particular arrangement of (the) planets in the sky was visible. (Date comes to October 7, 5077 b.c.). Even the occurrence of the subsequent two eclipses also tally with the respective descriptions in (the) Valmiki Ramayana. Date of Hanuman’s meeting (with) Sita in Lanka was September 12, 5076, b.c. In this manner, the entire sequence of the planetary positions gets verified and all the dates can be precisely determined.”

Is Ramayana a description of the lives and times of Lord Rama and the Raghukul (the descendants of King Raghu) and the times during an unknown period of India’s ancient “history” or is it nothing but an epic which, Hindus believe to be a true account of the events in ancient India?

Shri Bhatnagar adds that the entire dating had been conducted objectively because the software does not permit any manipulation and the verses of the Ramayana were also free of any doubts. Leading scientists and those in the field have appreciated this work. Since the entire sequence tallies, it proves that all the observations in the Ramayana were actual recordings and not conjectures.

Indologists suggest, Shri Bhatnagar says, that he should produce some archaeological evidences in support of these dates because for western historians, these dates are too old to be accepted. “By God’s grace” he says, “I came across an interesting archaeological evidence also”. He describes that evidence in the following paragraphs.

“About a few months ago, NASA (National Aeronautical and Space Administration of the United States) had photographed an ancient bridge like structure between India and Sri Lanka and stated that it appeared to be man-made. Most of our historians and theologists jumped at the story and said that it was related to Lord Rama. NASA denied having made any statement regarding how the bridge got built, etc. The enthusiasm died soon and nothing could be concluded since we were trying to prove that it was built millions of years ago.

“Just analyse the situation”, said Shri Bhatnagar, “Suppose you build your house with stones which are millions of years old. Does your house also become millions of years old? The answer is a clear No”.

“This was the mistake we were making while trying to claim the ancient bridge and the antiquity of Lord Rama to millions of years ago. Actually, the remains of the bridge, which Lord Rama had built, are still available at a place called “Chedu Karai”in Tamil Nadu. Chedu means setu (bridge) and karai means corner. Interestingly, the remains of the bridge are available at the depth of ten feet below the water and these are about 1.5 kilometres inside the sea.

Valmiki mentions that six months later, when Rama (had) killed Bali on the Amavasya of Ashadh (June-July) of the 14th year of (his) exile, another solar eclipse was visible in the morning sky and after five months, when Hanuman went to meet Sita in Lanka, a lunar eclipse was witnessed in the evening. Besides these, several other planetary positions have been mentioned at different other places.

“We are all aware that the rise of sea level, ever since the end of the last ice age (about 16,000 b.c.) is a continuous phenomenon. Countries like the USA and Australia which are having large coast lines and large cities on the coasts are making emergency plans to deal with the constant and accelerated rise in sea level which threatens the cities like New York.

“So, with the intention of studying the subject I went through a number of research papers and tried to find the scientific data available on the rise of sea-level over a period of time. I, accordingly, sent a mail to one of the research scholars for data on the rise of sea level over the last 7,000 years. And the rate of rise of sea suggests that about 7,000 years ago, the sea level was exactly about 10 feet below the present level.

Hence one can prove that the ‘remains of the bridge’ which are about ten feet below the present sea level, are part of the bridge which was built around 7,000 years ago. This is what works out to be the date of era of Lord Rama astronomically.”

“One can imagine that at the time when Hanuman crossed the sea and again the army crossed it, the sea level was about ten feet below what we see today and at that time the sea was behind by about 1.5 to 2 km. In about 7,000 years, it has encroached the land by about two km. All these findings, in a comprehensive manner have been published in a book called Dating the Era of Lord Rama.”

Was Buddhism driven out of India?

2006-01-17T20:28:00.000-08:00

By M.S.N. Menon

No. It is a canard. Alie propagated by vested interests. What are the facts? Buddhism was a reaction to the growing permissiveness and distortions of Aryan society. It was, therefore, puritanical. But by banning drinking, dancing, singing and theatre, Buddhism sowed the seeds of opposition.

But Buddhism was also revolutionary. It was “the logical development of the religion of the Hindus,” says Dr. Radhakrishnan. It played a significant role in human history.

On this, Northcote Parkinson says: “In the rallying of Asia against western pressure, Buddhism played a central role like no other religion before or since; its influence extended to the whole of Asia. It lent vigour to all that was attractive in Hinduism.”

Naturally, for about a thousand years (from 3rd century BC to 6th century AD), Buddhism was the dominant religion of India, although it broke up into two—Mahayana and Hinayana. It had little opposition. When Fa Hien, the Chinese student, visited India in the 5th century AD, Buddhism was flourishing along with Hinduism. But by the 6th century AD, Buddhism had broken up into 18 sects. So, when Hieun Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim visited India in the 7th century AD, Buddhism was in decline. What is more, by distorting the Master’s message and reverting in some ways to Hindu beliefs and practices, Mahayana had lost its attraction. Buddha himself had anticipated the decline in one of his talks with Ananda, his chief disciple.

The conquest of Central Asia and Afghanistan by the Muslims was a major blow to Buddhism. Historian, Pramanath Bose writes that “Buddhism...got so engulfed in the superstitions of Turanians that it transformed itself into some of the grossest forms of Scythian idolatry.” Buddhism as an ethical system had little impact on Central Asia, which explains how Islam was able to overwhelm this huge region in so short a time.

It was this decline of Buddhism which brought up the resurgence of Saivism and Vaishnavism. And Shankara, by incorporating many of the Buddhist doctrines into Hinduism, made Buddhism redundant. But the final blow to Buddhism came with the advent of Islam in India.

Muslim invaders made it a point to extirpate Buddhism from India. They destroyed every vihara, where the monks lived and taught. Thus, the 500 viharas built by Ashoka in Kashmir and the 600 feet high stupa built by Kanishka were the first to be destroyed. Historian Vincent Smith says that the monks, who survived the holocaust, fled to south and to the Himalayas (Nepal, Tibet). In short, few dared to stay in India. The invaders also destroyed Taxila and Nalanda, the two great Buddhist universities. The cream of Buddhist scholarship lived here. Thus, every symbol of Buddhism was destroyed as part of a deliberate policy.

It is not true that Brahmanism opposed Buddhism. The first disciples of the enlightened one were all Brahmins. For example, Maha Muggalanna, Sariputta, Maha Kashyapa, Asita, Kaundinya. Buddha rejected only the Brahminical rituals, the authority of the Vedas and the oppressive caste system.

According to Smt Rhys Davids, among the 246 poet-authors mentioned in the Thera Gatha, 113 were Brahmins, 70 Kshatriyas. Thus, it is clear that Buddhism had no real opposition in India. In Fact, the kings gave equal protection to both Hinduism and Buddhism. For example, the Gupta empire, although Hindu, gave full protection to Buddhism. So did Harsha’s empire. Lalitaditya, the greatest king of Kashmir, although not a Buddhist, built the largest Vihara for the Buddhists.

If Buddhism was brought down by anyone (which is not the case) it was done by the Buddhist monks. The hasya literature in Sanskrit is full of humour and satire against the Buddhist monks—of how they took to meat, drinks and women. Naturally, Buddhism lost the respect in which it was held earlier.

It may be a digression, but let us see how the Buddhists fared in China. In China, it was the growing monkish population that forced the emperor to ban Buddhist activities. In 477 AD there were as many as 6,478 monasteries in northern China. It grew to 30,000 by 534 AD. And there were as many as 77,258 monks. To the industrious Chinese, this growing parasitic population was a drag on their economy and a danger to their way of life. Buddhism never recovered from that blow. But it is also true that, as in India, Taoism absorbed what was noble in Buddhism.

Although the Buddha did not advocate a monastic life, the monks propagated that only a monastic life could attain nirvana with any measure of certainty. Thus millions of Hindus took to monastic life. It became a way of life among Buddhists.

With focus on nirvana, life itself came to be secondary, not to speak of defence and security matters. India was thus least prepared to meet the onslaught of the Muslims. In the event, the Hindus closed their ranks against the Muslims. And they were not prepared to be tolerant to any divisive criticism from the Buddhists and Jains. Which explains why Buddhism almost disappeared from India.

But where did the Buddhists disappear? They went back to their ancient faith—Hinduism—to resist the Muslims.

Ancient Hindu civilisation and mathematics

2006-01-17T20:18:00.000-08:00

By Dr R.N. Das

The ancient Hindu sages discovered the miracles of modern scientific tools. Believe it or not, the following are the glorious examples of them.

I. The Concept of Zero

The concept of zero came from the revered Hindu sages in Vedic times thousands of years ago.

Without the concept of zero the binary system is blind. No counting, no commerce or no computer business. The earliest documented “date” was found in today’s Gujarat [BC 585-586] in an inscription on Sankedia copper plate. In Brahamaphuta—Siddhanta of Brahamagupta (7th century CE), zero was lucidly explained. Muslim invaders from Central Asia crossing the Hindukush mountain ranges invaded Bharat 1300 years ago and plundered its beauty, riches, books, thrones and what not. They plagued the holy land with sword, loot, arson and rape and destroyed and ravaged the whole land in the name of jehad and “Allah”. There was no Steven Spielberg (Schindler’s List) like cinema director who could document this sordid past of our history. There was no patent system at that time. Might was right. They considered those substances of robbery maal-e-ganimat (booty looted from kafirs to be distributed among themselves and friends of theirs) and thus inculcated those invaluable theorems of mathematics, astronomy and geometry in Arabic books in around 770-1200 CE. From there, those extraordinary concepts were carried to Spanish Europe in the 8th century. However the concept of zero was referred to as shunya in the early Sanskrit texts of the 4th century BC and was clearly explained in Pingala’s Chand Sutra of the 2nd century too.

II. The Contribution to Astronomy

Hindu sages told modern scientists how to map the sky in terms of glaring stars almost 4000 years ago. Copernicus published his theory of revolution of the Earth around the Sun in 1543 AD only. But our Aryabhatta in the 5th century had stated that the Earth revolves around the Sun in these specific words: “Just as a person boarding on a boat feels that the trees on the banks are moving, people on the revolving earth also feel that the sun is moving”. Such illustrious teaching of astronomy was rarely seen in the contemporary writings of the Greek astronomers. In his Aryabhatteem, he clearly stated that our Earth was round and it rotated on its own axis, orbited the Sun and was suspended in the space. It also explained that the lunar and solar eclipses occurred by the interplay of the shadows of the Sun, the Moon and the Earth.

III. The Law of Gravity

The Law of Gravity was known to the ancient Hindu astronomer Bhaskaracharya. In his Surya Siddhanta he noted: “Objects fall on the Earth due to force of attraction of the Earth. Therefore, the Earth, planets, constellations, the Moon, and the Sun are all held in the galaxy due to this great cosmic attraction.”

It was in 1687—1200 years later—that Sir Isaac Newton discovered (re-discovered?) the Law of Gravity, which was already invented by the greatest Hindu astronomer Bhaskaracharya, of course which was written in the holiest language, Sanskrit.

IV. The Invention of Trikonmiti

The word geometry seems to have emerged from the Sanskrit word gyaamiti, which means measuring the Earth. And the word trigonometry is similar to trikonmiti meaning measuring triangular forms.

Euclid was famous for the invention of geometry in 300 BC whilst the concept of trikonmiti had emerged in 1000 BC in Bharat. It is evident lucidly from today’s “practice of making fire alters (at homagni kshetra) in different shapes, e.g., round, triangular, hexagonal, pentagonal, square and rectangular”. It was part and parcel of daily pujas and homagnis in ancient times. The treatise of Surya Siddhanta (4th century) described in fascinating details about trigonometry, which was introduced in Europe by Briggs 1200 years later in the 16th century.

V. The Invention of Infinity

The value of “Pi” was first invented by the ancient sages of Bharat. The ratio of circumference and diameter of a circle is known as “Pi” which gives its value as 3.14592657932...

The old Sanskrit text Baudhayna Sulbha Sutra of the 6th century BC mentioned that above-mentioned ratio as approximately equalled to that of Aryabhatta’s ratio [in 499 BC] worked out the value of “Pi” to the fourth decimal place as [3x (177/1250) = 3.1416]. Many centuries later, in 825 AD, Arab mathematician, Mohammed Ibn Musa admitted: “This value of “Pi” was given by the Hindus (62832/20,000 = 3.1416).”

VI. Baudhayna’s Sulbha Sutra versus Pythagoras’s Theorem

The famous Pythagoras’s theorem states: “The square of the hypotenuse angled triangle equals to the sum of the two sides.” This theorem was actually discovered by Euclid in 300 BC but Greek writers attributed this to Pythagoras. But the irony of fate is that our so-called intellectuals (indeed Macaulay’s sons who have forgotten their old but rich and glorious ancient Hindu heritage) had also accepted that theorem as a contribution of Pythagoras. They never read or tried to know that Baudhayna’s Sulbha Sutra which has been existing for many thousands of years (written in the Sanskrit) had already described lucidly the theorem as follows: “The area produced by the diagonal of a rectangle is equal to the sum of the area produced by it on two sides.”

VII. The Measurement of Time or Time Scale

In Surya Siddhanta, Bhaskaracharya calculated the time taken by the Earth to revolve around the Sun up to the 9th decimal place. According to Bhaskaracharya’s calculation it is 365.258756484 days.

Modern scientist accepted a value of the same time as 365.2596 days.

The difference between the two observations made by ancient Hindu sage Bhaskaracharya just by using his super brain (in the 4th century AD) and today’s NASA (National Aeronautic and Space Agency) scientists of America by using super computer (in the 20th century AD) is only 0.00085, i.e., 0.0002 per cent of difference.

The ancient Bharatbhoomi had given the world the idea of the smallest and largest measuring units of Time. In modern time, only Stephen Hockings, Cambridge University Professor of theoretical physics, had the courage to venture into the abysmal depth of the eternity of Time. Astonishingly, our ancient sages taught us the following units of time:

Krati =34,000th of a second
Truti =300th of a second
2 Truti =1 Luv
2 Luv = 1 Kshana
30 Kshana =1 Vipal
60 Vipal = 1 Pal
60 Pal = 1 Ghadi (=24 Minutes)
2.5 Ghadi = 1 Hora (=1 Hour)
24 Hora = 1 Divas (1 Day)
7 Divas = 1 Saptah (1 Week)
4 Saptah = 1 Maas (1 Month)
2 Maas = 1 Ritu (1 Season)
6 Ritu = 1 Varsha (1 Year)
100 Varsha = 1 Satabda (1 Century)
10 Shatabda = 1 Saharabda
432 Saharabda = 1Yug(Kali Yuga))
2 Yuga = 1 Dwapar Yuga
3 Yuga = 1 Treta Yuga
4 Yuga = Kruta Yuga
10 Yuga = 1 Maha Yuga (4,320,000)
1000 Maha Yuga = 1 Kalpa
1 Kalpa = 4.32 Billion Years.

Therefore, the lowest was 34,000th of a second known as krati and the highest of the measurement of the Time was known as kalpa, which equalled to 4.32 billion years. Is it not amazing? Are you not feeling proud to be a Hindu descendent? Swami Vivekananda, the modern sage of Bharat, stated in his famous sermons compiled in his Rousing Call to the Hindu Nation, “Take pride in Hinduism; pronounce yourselves as a descendant of a Hindu. Boast to be a Hindu and give a clarion call to rouse the Hindu nation from its lethargy and slumber.”

VIII. The Invention of Decimal System

It was the ancient Bharatbhoomi that gave us the ingenious methods of expressing all the numbers by means of 10 symbols (decimal systems)—an invaluable and gorgeous idea that escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest Greek philosophers and mathematician produced by antiquity (100-130BC).

The highest prefix used for raising 10 to the power in today’s mathematics is “D” for 1030 (for Greek Deca).While as early as 100 BC Hindu mathematicians had exact names for figures up to 1053.

a. Ekam = 1

b. Dashkam = 10 (101)

c. 1 Shatam = 100 (102)

d. 10 Shatam = 1 Shahashram = 1000 (103)

e. 10 Dash Shahashram = 10,000 (104)

f. Laksha = 100,000 (105)

g. Dash Laksha = 10,00,000 (106)

h. Kotihi = 10, 00, 0000 (107)

i. Ayutam = 100,000,000 (109)

j. Niyutam = 100,000,000,000 (1011)

k. Kankaram = 10,000,000,000,000 (1013)

l. Vivaram = 10,000,000,000,000,000 (1016)

m. Pararadahaa = 1017

n. Nivahata = 1019

o. Utsangaha = 1021

p. Bahulam = 1023

q. Naagbaalaha = 1025

r. Titlambam = 1027

s. Vyavasthaanapragnaptihi = 1029

t. Hetuhellam = 1031

u. Karahuhu = 1033

v. Hetvindreeyam = 1035

w. Sampaata Lambhaha = 1037

x. Gananaagatihi = 1039

y. Niravadyam = 1041

z. Mudraabalam = 1043

aa. Saraabalam = 1045

ab. Vishamagnagatihi = 1047

ac. Sarvagnaha = 1049

ad. Vibhutangaama = 1051

ae. Tallakshanaam = 1053

Is it not amazing to know that the ancient Hindu sages used to remember them just by using their outstanding memory power or was there some super computer known to them also, which we are quite unaware of?

In Anuyogadwar Sutra, written 100 BC, one numeral had been shown to be raised to as high as 10140 which is beyond our outmost stretches of imagination. All of our remaining hidden treasures, which had not been destroyed or stolen by the foreign mercenaries and invaders, were written in Sanskrit, mother of all languages, which should be revived. It is our legacy to inherit such rich property that our forefather had left for us by their meticulous observations over thousands of years ago.

All hidden treasures are written in Sanskrit, which we are quite ignorant of and our so-called Macaulay’s sons are trying their best to prevent us from knowing about our glorious past. Sir Monier-Williams rightly said: “Hindus are perhaps the only nation, except the Greeks, who have investigated independently and in true scientific manner, the general laws that govern the evolution of languages.”

There was no patent system at that time. Might was right. They considered those substances of robbery maal-e-ganimat (booty looted from kafirs to be distributed among themselves and friends of theirs) and thus inculcated those invaluable theorems of mathematics, astronomy and geometry in Arabic books in around 770-1200 CE.

More than this, the Hindus had made considerable advances in astronomy, algebra, arithmetics, botany and medicine, not to mention their superiority in grammar, long before some of these sciences were cultivated by the most ancient nations of Europe.

Indeed, Hindus were Spinozists 2000 years before the birth of Spinoza, Darwinians many centuries before the birth of Darwin, and evolutionists, centuries before the doctrine of evolution had been accepted by Aldus Huxley’s of our times, and before any word like evolution existed in any language in this world.

We should take a vow to work together to search those hidden treasures out, propagate the notion that Sanskrit is not a dead language. Sanskrit is the elite of the elitist, classic of the classics and it should be revived once again. We will again sit in the seat of the world assembly with our head held high and with pride. I would like to draw the final touch with the quotation from Swami Vivekananda, “I do not see into the future nor do I care to see. But one vision I see clear as life before me, that the ancient Mother has awakened once more sitting on her throne rejuvenated, more glorious than ever. Proclaim her to all the world with the voice of peace and benediction.”

Indian scholar deciphers Indus script

2006-01-16T17:33:00.000-08:00

1/16/2006 7:28:44 AM HK Correspondent

CHENNAI: The Indus valley script, an enigma for scholars for over 130 years, has been deciphered by Dr S Kalyanaraman, a Chennai based scholar. Ever since the first Indus seal with script was discovered in 1870 by Alexander Cunningham, efforts were on to decipher the script. "The decipherment of the script is central to unraveling the true chronology and history of Indian civilization and culture," Dr Kalyanaraman told Haindava Keralam.

Dr. Kalyanaraman, a former senior executive with the Asian Development Bank at Manila quit his job to devote full time for the research on Inter-linking of Indian rivers and deciphering the script of the Indus seal. Over the last 26 years, Dr Kalyanaraman has compiled a multi-lingual comparative dictionary for over 25 ancient Indian languages with about half-a-million words and has put it up on the internet.

It was a journey in a Pakistan International Airlines flight which made Dr Kalyanaraman to quit his high paying ADB job. "I was presented with replicas of two seals, really paper-weights, by the PIA sincve I was traveling by the first class on that day," said Dr Kalyanaraman. Curiosity forced Dr Kalyanaraman to ask the PIA staff about the replicas. He was literally shocked by the reply given by them. "They said that the seals were from Mohenjodaro and it established the 5,000-year old history of the civilization of Pakistan. They kept silent when I pointed out to them that there was no Pakistan at that time," Dr Kalyanaraman explained.

"About 5000 years ago, there was only Bharat mentioned in the Rigveda. Visvamitra, a Rigveda rishi, refers to the people of Bharat as Bharatam Janam (that is, people of the nation of Bharata),"pointed out Dr Kalyanaraman, author of a major book "Saraswathi".

He pointed out that the word Bharatiyo in Gujarati means 'caster of metals' and goes on to present an array of evidence from about 4000 epigraphs on a variety of objects from what he calls "Sarasvati Civilization". The epigraphs appear on seals, tablets, potsherds, ivory rods, copper plates, even on metallic weapons.

The breakthrough in confirming his decipherment has come from two sources: 1. the presence of Sarasvati hieroglyphs on two pure tin ingots discovered in a ship-wreck in Haifa, Israel; and the presence of Sarasvati hieroglyphs on artefacts in archaeological sites of Jiroft (Iran) and Adichanallur (Tirunelveli, South India).

According to Dr Kalyanaraman, the glyphs are pictorials connoting homonyms (similar sounding words which could be depicted pictorially) of metals, minerals, alloys and furnaces. "For example, a jar with a rim, an antelope, an elephant, a rhinoceros, a heifer (bull-calf) can be depicted pictorially. The words related to these glyphs are homonymous with words for varieties of minerals, metals, alloys and furnaces," Dr Kalyanaraman explained.

Dr Kalyanaraman, claims that the code of the script or writing system has been decoded simply as representation of the repertoire of smiths, smithy, mines, and metal workshops. The arte facts are gathered from many sites; there are about 2,000 archaeological sites on the banks of a desiccated River Sarasvati (representing about 80% of the 2600 total archaeological sites of the civilization dated to between 3500 to 1900 Before Common Era, BCE).

Some of the sites are: Rakhigarhi (near Delhi), Kunal, Kalibangan, Banawali, Ropar (near Kurukshetra, Chandigarh), Dholavira, Lothal, Surkotada, Prabhas Patan, Dwaraka (Gujarat) and of course, Mohenjodaro, Harappa (Pakistan), Mehergarh (Afghanistan). A woman's burial found at Mehergarh contained ornaments including a wide bangle made of s'ankha; the surprise was that this burial was dated to 6500 BCE. The s'ankha industry continues even today in Tiruchendur, near Gulf of Mannar, South Indian coastline where West Bengal handicraft corporation obtains s'ankha to make bangles which are a must for every Bengali bride to wear during marriage. A remarkable continuity of culture and an industry unbroken for the last 8500 years !

He quotes profusely from the great Indian epics to substantiate his claims. "The language of the epigraphs is said to be mleccha (Meluhha, mentioned in cuneiform records of Mesopotamia). Vatsyayana refers to cipher writing as mlecchita-vikalpa (alternative representation by copper workers)," according to Dr Kalyanaraman.

Mleccha is also referred to as a spoken language in Mahabharata; Yudhishthira and Vidura converse in Mleccha about the shellac palace (lakshagriha) constructed to trap the Pandavas with metallic and non-metallic killer devices. An example of mleccha is 'helava, helava' comparable to the 'elo,elo' boatmen's song by seafaring and river-faring navigators who navigate hugging the coastline and along rivers which were the highways of ancient times, enabling long-distance trade over very long distances exceeding 3,000 kms., making the Sarasvati civilization the most extensive civilization of its times.

"Languages of present-day India can be explained from a common source and the theory is called 'Proto-Vedic Continuity Theory', "says Dr Kalyanaraman.

These claims could have a significant effect on the study of languages and contribute to historical studies emphasizing the essential continuity and unity of Indian civilization and culture as a continuum from 6500 BCE to the present-day.

Studies show most Indians are descendants of early humans

2006-01-12T17:30:00.000-08:00

Aryan impact myth crumbles
The Telegraph - Calcutta
G.S. MUDUR

New Delhi, Jan. 11: Two new genetic studies have disputed long-held beliefs that pastoral central Asian people brought agriculture to India and contributed heavily to the genetic make-up of modern Indian populations.

The central Asian people who migrated to India included the Aryans who began arriving around 3,500 years ago.

The studies by scientists in Calcutta with colleagues in other countries might force historians to revise current ideas about the impacts of migrations from central Asia beginning about 8,000 years ago on India.

A study by scientists at the Central Forensic Science Laboratory in Calcutta has revealed that most present-day Indians are the descendants of early humans who began to arrive in India about 60,000 years ago. It suggests that modern Indians do not owe much genetic makeup to central Asians who arrived much later.

The findings do lend support to the migration of people from central Asia into India.

“Although we did find genetic signatures from central Asian populations in Indian communities, there are not enough (signatures) to prove large-scale mixture with local populations,” research team leader Vijendra Kashyap told The Telegraph.

The scientists, who analysed the Y-chromosomes of 936 men from 77 castes and tribes across India, published their findings in the journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on Monday.

The conventional view has been that pastoral central Asians, also called Indo-Europeans, brought agriculture into India, although some researchers have challenged this in the past.

“The perennial concept of people, language and agriculture arriving in India together through the northwest corridor does not hold up to close scrutiny,” Kashyap and his colleagues at the University of Oxford and the Estonian Biocentre said in their research paper.

The analysis of certain sections of the human genome — such as the Y-chromosome in men or the mitochondrial DNA in women — can help scientists determine the “genetic distance” between races and piece together ancient human migratory patterns.

Recent studies by international research teams have shown that the earliest modern humans arrived in India from Africa, trudging along the Indian Ocean coast about 60,000 years ago on their way further into southeast Asia.

“Our findings suggest most modern Indians have genetic affinities to the early settlers and subsequent migrants and not to central Asians or Aryans, as they’re called,” a research scholar at the CFSL said.

The CFSL study also failed to find specific genetic signatures associated with the world’s earliest farmers in any of the 936 men in India. These signatures have been earlier found in central Asia, North Africa and Europe.

An independent genetic study by Partha Mazumder at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta with colleagues at Stanford University and elsewhere has found that the majority of genetic signatures among men in India are older than 10,000 years.

The study of 1,100 men from 36 ethnic groups in India, 8 in Pakistan and 18 from the southeast Asian region has indicated that many of the genetic signatures have arisen in India and predate the arrival of the Indo-Europeans and their expansion in India.

“The genetic contribution from central Asia has not been as large as generally believed,” Mazumder said.

His study has also indicated that the genetic input of people who might have brought agriculture into India from West Asia has been limited.

The oldest known site of agricultural activity so far in the subcontinent is Mehrgarh in Pakistan where there is evidence of cultivation of barley and wheat in 7000 BC. But some scientists believe that agriculture emerged spontaneously in India and wasn’t brought here.

A few years ago, archaeologists had a few years ago unearthed the remains of an ancient settlement near Udaipur in Rajasthan that they say points to the independent evolution of cultivation in India.

Grain of rice points to pre-Harappan culture

2006-01-05T17:08:00.000-08:00

VADODARA: Developed cultures may have existed in India more than 7,000 years ago. This would mean that they existed even before the Harappan civilisation.

And a clue to this prehistoric culture came from something as simple as a grain of rice. Archaeological Survey of India director BR Mani revealed this in Vadodara during an international seminar on Magan and Indus Civilisation, which ended on Thursday.

The ASI and MS University have organised the seminar to study the relations between the two civilisations.

Giving details about an older civilisation, Mani said that the recent excavations at archaeological sites of Virana in Haryana and Lahura-Deva in Uttar Pradesh have revealed that developed cultures dating back to the sixth century BC and seventh century BC existed in the country.

"This would mean that there were pockets were urbanisation would have started before the well-developed urban civilisation of the Harappans," said Mani.

"Till the 1940s, there was no scientific methodology for dating and hence evidence obtained from excavations at some sites was either not properly studied or was ignored.

But now we have studied a variety of rice that was obtained from the Lahura-Deva site, which revealed that there were regular farming and cultivation activities going on in 6th century BC," he said.

Mani also said that revelation of developed cultures should not be misunderstood as a separate civilisation.

"We have also received pieces of pottery and other evidence from sites like Lahura-Deva and they have created a lot of curiosity as they can themselves become a tool to trace the evolution of Harappan civilisation," he added.

Did Early Humans First Arise in Asia, Not Africa?

2006-01-02T21:05:00.000-08:00

Nicholas Bakalar
for National Geographic News
December 27, 2005

Two archaeologists are challenging what many experts consider to be the basic assumption of human migration—that humankind arose in Africa and spread over the globe from there.

The pair proposes an alternative explanation for human origins: arising in and spreading out of Asia.

Robin Dennell, of the University of Sheffield in England, and Wil Roebroeks, of Leiden University in the Netherlands, describe their ideas in the December 22 issue of Nature.

They believe that early-human fossil discoveries over the past ten years suggest very different conclusions about where humans, or humanlike beings, first walked the Earth.

New Asian finds are significant, they say, especially the 1.75 million-year-old small-brained early-human fossils found in Dmanisi, Georgia, and the 18,000-year-old "hobbit" fossils (Homo floresiensis) discovered on the island of Flores in Indonesia.

Such finds suggest that Asia's earliest human ancestors may be older by hundreds of thousands of years than previously believed, the scientists say.

"What seems reasonably clear now," Dennell said, "is that the earliest hominins in Asia did not need large brains or bodies." These attributes are usually thought to be prerequisites for migration.

The authors maintain that, although there is no absolute proof, putting all the evidence together requires an open mind about other geographical origins of the first humans.

The First Asians?

The authors point out that there is very little solid information about the first early humans in Asia, and paleontologists are left with assumptions that are too often treated as historical facts.

There is no archaeological or fossil evidence to prove that early humans moved from southern Africa to the Nile Valley in the early Pleistocene (1.8 million years ago to 11,500 years ago), they say.

The earliest evidence of a human ancestor in Asia appears to be the 1.8-million-year-old cranium found in Mojokerto, Indonesia. But, the authors note, the fact that no older specimens have been found in Asia does not prove that they didn't exist.

Dennell and Roebroeks get support for their proposal from other experts.

"I think this is an interesting and constructively provocative paper," said Chris Stringer, a researcher in the department of palaeontology at London's Natural History Museum.

"Evidence of humans in the Caucasus [region of Asia], China, and Java more than 1.6 million years ago implies either a very rapid spread from Africa after about 1.8 millions years ago, or that such populations were established outside Africa earlier than present evidence suggests," he said.

"I certainly think we should keep an open mind about the big picture."

Best Guess

The earliest tools found in Asia are routinely attributed to Homo erectus, a species known to have come from Africa.

H. ergaster—an African species that many experts believe gave rise to H. erectus—is assumed to have been the only primate capable of migrating out of Africa.

Experts cite its body form—long limbs, humanlike proportions, and a brain capable of figuring out how to hunt for meat—as evidence that it was the only species suited to life in prehistoric Asian terrain.

This might be a persuasive argument—except for the fact that australopithecines, an older form of humanlike primates, had colonized the African savannah by 3.5 million years ago.

Similar grasslands extended across Asia at the time, suggesting that australopithecines could have survived quite well in the region, the authors say.

What's more, fossil evidence for H. ergaster in Asia in the early Pleistocene is weak.

No one yet knows where H. floresiensis first came from, but it may turn out that the diminutive species has its origins in Asia.

Stringer, of the Natural History Museum, sees this as a possibility.

"The unresolved status of the intriguing Flores finds attributed to H. floresiensis leaves open the possibility that this species is the end result and last survivor of an ancient migration of very primitive humans, or even prehumans, that formerly existed more widely across Asia."

So when did early humans first leave Africa? Could they have left as early as 2.6 million years ago, as soon as they started making stone tools?

"Hominins could easily have left Africa two million years ago," Dennell said. "After all, they certainly didn't need big brains or bodies to do so."

Maybe, he concluded, "the Dmanisi [Georgia] hominins are an extremely primitive version of H. erectus that is the ancestor of the H. erectus populations in both Java and those in East Africa.

"In other words, we might be looking at [human migration] 'out of Asia,' and not 'out of Africa.'"

Stephen Oppenheimer - Science magazine paper on Out of Africa

2005-12-22T22:17:00.000-08:00

Stephen Oppenheimer contributes to 'Science' magazine paper on 'Out of Africa'

This recent paper published in 'Science' by Vincent Macaulay and an international team of researchers including Professor Stephen Oppenheimer of Green College, Oxford, and a member of the Bradshaw Foundation Advisory Board, provides irrefutable evidence of the early timing and southern location of the only migration out of Africa to succeed and give rise to all modern non-African peoples.

The paper states that all non-Africans descend from a single group of humans that left Africa by a coastal route across the mouth of the Red Sea to South Asia. This disproves current theories – which argue for several successful exits via different routes and at different times, including a direct northern route to Europe 45,000 years ago.

stephen oppenheimer,
photograph byFreda Oppenheimer

The paper endorses the claims and new conclusions made by Stephen Oppenheimer 2 years ago in his 2003 book ‘Out of Eden’ [‘The Real Eve’ in the USA], the material of which was used in the Channel 4 programme of the same name, and the Discovery Channel film ‘The Real Eve’, and in the Bradshaw Foundation’s Journey of Mankind Genetic Map.

One or more exits from Africa? North .v. South

A commonly held view has been that modern humans left Africa both round the north and the south of the Red Sea in several waves to populate Europe and Asia. New analysis of genetic trees in isolated ‘relic’ populations on the trail in Southeast Asia by Oppenheimer and others now overturns that orthodoxy. The research shows that there was only a single dispersal from Africa, via a southern coastal route, across the mouth of the red Sea, through India and onward into Southeast Asia and Australasia. There was subsequently a northern offshoot from the Gulf region, leading ultimately to the settlement of the Near East and Europe, but this only occurred much later.

Stephen oppenheimer Stephen Oppenheimer

DNA Sampling Team
photograph by
Freda Oppenheimer

Semang Villagers
photograph by
Freda Oppenheimer

The key to this new and detailed story of our migration is mitochondrial DNA [mtDNA]. MtDNA passes from mother to child, each generation, unchanged, therefore every person alive on the Earth today has inherited this small collection of genes from one single great-great-great-grandmother, nearly two hundred thousand years ago. There are occasional mutations in the mtDNA molecule, enabling the tracing of migrations of people. This trail of maternal inheritance is backed up by the Y-chromosomes passed only down the male line. The mtDNA and Y trees each show only one branch coming out of Africa, implying only one exit.

The key findings in ‘OUT OF EDEN’, all now supported by the research published this week in SCIENCE, are:

There was one exodus from Africa via an earlier southern route 60 to 80 thousand years ago that led to the peopling of the rest of the planet.

Modern humans only reached Europe the long way round, via Southern Arabia, with this retarded movement into Europe taking place approximately 50,000 years ago.

Malaysian tribes provide a living link to the route pursued east after the exodus across the Red Sea, as modern humans beachcombed their way to Australia over several thousand years.

Early Europeans were not the first to learn to paint, carve, develop complex culture and speak, and do not represent a major biological advance. Evidence indicates that humans must have arrived in India already painting and fully ‘modern’.

Bradshaw Foundation

Did Early Humans Go North or South?

2005-12-22T22:14:00.000-08:00

Peter Forster and Shuichi Matsumura

Abstract

When the first early humans ventured out of Africa, which way did they go? Studies of maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA are revealing the excursion choices of our earliest ancestors. In their
Perspective, Forster and Matsumura discuss two new studies of the mitochondrial DNA of the indigenous peoples of Malaysia and the Andaman islands (Macaulay et al., Thangaraj et al.). These studies suggest that the earliest humans took a southern route along the coastline of the Indian Ocean before fanning out over the rest of the world.

Extract from Forster & Matsumura

"In Europe, Neanderthals were replaced by modern humans only about 30,000 to 40,000 years ago, whereas southern Australia was definitely inhabited 46,000 years ago and northern Australia and Southeast Asia necessarily even earlier (9, 10). Or did our ancestors instead depart from East Africa, crossing the Red Sea and then following the coast of the Indian Ocean (11)?

References:
9. G. Barker, Asian Perspect.44, 90 (2005).
10. J.M. Bowler et al., Nature421, 837 (2003).
11. S. Oppenheimer, Out of Eden (Constable, London, 2003).".

The Rigveda and the historical sense of Indians

2005-12-04T03:53:00.000-08:00

By T.P. Sankaran Kutty Nair

History divorced from truth, does not help a nation—its future should be laid on the stable foundations of truth and not on the quicksands of falsehood, however alluring it may appear at present. India is now at the crossroads and I urge my young friends to choose carefully the path they would like to tread upon.

—Ramesh Chandra Majumdar

History has had assigned to it the task of judging the past; of instructing the present for the benefit of the ages to come

—Leopold von Ranke

These two views of two great historians carry considerable weight even today. Ranke is the father of modern scientific history and R.C.Manjumdar, doyen among Indian historians.

With the opening of the Vascoda Gama epoch in Indian history, began the long interaction between the East and the West. In those days, one of the charges against India was that India produced, “no great historian or historical work, and Indians had no historical sense, although Indians excelled in other branches of learning”. The western scholars charged Indians of not having written a proper history of India. To this charge, Indians reacted by projecting the Rigveda, which remains even today the oldest book of knowledge. Cole Broke had revealed that the oldest product of Indian literature is the Rigveda. The three German scholars Bopp, Grimm and Humboldt established the intimate relationship among all Aryan languages, the most primitive form of which was shown to be preserved in the language of the Rigveda. Max Mueller (1823-1900) a German Orientalist and Indologist settled at Oxford acquired a mastery over Sanskrit without the help of a teacher. He then turned to comparative language studies which involved him in the study of the Zend Avesta. The Zend Avesta led him to the study of comparative religion and of the editing of the whole text of the Rigveda (1845-79) with the commentary of Sayana. His History of Sanskrit literature (1859) mapped out in chronological order all the Sanskrit texts known till then. His interest in mythology on which he wrote appealing essays led him further into the study of comparative religion and to the publication of The Sacred Books of the East (1879-1904) A monumental achievement, this collaborative enterprise made available in English, translations of 50 major oriental non-Christian scriptures. The Rigveda is neither a historical nor a heroic poem, but mainly a collection (Samhita) of hymns by a number of priestly families, recited or chanted by them with appropriate solemnity at sacrifices to the God. Of the various recensions of the Rigveda known in tradition only one, namely the Sakala recension consisting of 1017 hymns of very unequal length has come down to us apparently complete, and it is this Sakala recension that is meant when one speaks of the Rigveda. The Rigveda is not— as it is often represented to be—a book of folk poetry nor does it mark the beginning of a literary tradition. Bucolic, heroic and lyrical elements are not entirely absent, but they are submerged under a stupendous mass of dry and stereotyped hymnology dating back to the Indo-Iranian era and held as a close preserve by a number of priestly families whose sole object in cherishing those hymns was to utilise them in their sacrificial cult.

Most of the hymns were not composed as such but were mechanically manufactured out of fragments of a floating anonymous literature and the process of manufacturing hymns in this manner must have continued for a long time. The division of the whole Samhita into ten mandalas and the number and arrangement of hymns in these mandalas are not at all arbitrary. It is hardly an accident that the number of hymns contained in the first and the last mandalas is exactly the same, namely 191. The kernel of the Rig Samhita is however constituted by the so called family mandalas ie. the six consecutive mandalas from the second to the seventh, each of which is supposed to have been composed by a particular family of priests. The ninth mandala is most pronouncedly a ritual mandala. The principle governing the original arrangement of hymns in the family mandalas seems to have been determined by three considerations—deity, metre and the number of verses contained in the hymns concerned. Each family a mandala opens with a group of hymns dedicated to Agni, immediately followed by another group addressed to Indra, then dedicated to various gods. That the tenth mandala is later in origin than the first nine is however perfectly certain from the evidence of the language. But it is also certain that the whole of the Rig Samhita including the tenth mandala has assumed practically the same form in which we find it today, already before the other Samhitas came into existence. The hymns of the Rigveda contain abundant geographical data including reference to the mighy Himalayas. Out of the 31 rivers mentioned in the Vedic texts about 25 names occur in the Rigveda alone. The Rigveda enumerates several streams most of which belongs to the Indus system. The Rigvedic people not only knew the sea but were mariners and had trade relations with the outside world. Vedic literature confined itself to religious subjects and notices political and secular occurrences only incidentally so far as they had bearing on the religious subjects. As Pargiter has very pertinently observed, “ancient Indian history has been fashioned out of compositions which are purely religious and priestly, which notoriously do not deal with history and which totally lack historical sense. The extraordinary nature of such history may be perceived if it was suggested that European history should be constructed merely out of theological literature. What would raise a smile if applied to Europe, has been soberly accepted when applied to India. The force of these remarks is undeniable and no student of Indian history should ignore legendary element in the Puranas and epics. It is necessary to remember that the traditions are not genuine historical facts so long as or so far as they are no corroborated by contemporary texts as other reasonable evidence. But the traditional history is valued beyond doubt because it helped us to reconstruct genuine history. The historical sense of Indians as we projected earlier through the Rigveda is then proved to be not a reality but more a myth.

The Rigveda is neither a historical nor a heroic poem, but mainly a collection (Samhita) of hymns by a number of priestly families, recited or chanted by them with appropriate solemnity at sacrifices to the God.

The Rajatarangini and the Indian historical sense

Some Indian scholars pointed out the importance of Rajatarangini written by Kalhana of Kashmir. It is not only a classic of Sanskrit narrative poetry but is the earliest extant history of Kashmir written in the middle of the 12th century, in the age when the crusaders of Europe were fighting in western Asia. It is a unique masterpiece of Kalhana, a blend of authentic chronicle and imaginative poetry inspired by the poet’s passionate love of his exquisitely beautiful homeland. It was in 1892 that Pandit Durga Prasad published the Rajatarangini in a Sanskrit text form, followed by similar efforts made by Sir Aurel Stein. Stein brought out an English translation in two volumes in 1900 under the caption Chronicle of the Kings of Kashmir based on a French translation done by Troyer during 1840-1852.

The name of the book indicates the meaning as saga of the kings of Kashmir or river of kings. It is narrated in eight cantos, each canto being called a taranga or wave by the author. It is a continuous history of the kings of Kashmir from mythical time (1184 BC) to the date of its composition ie. 1148-1149. The colophon of the work informs us that its author Kalhana was the son of Champaka, the Minister of King Harsha of Kashmir (1088-1100). The Rajatarangini is the only Sanskrit work, with a historical perspective.

To quote Jawaharlal Nehru, “Rajatarangini is the only work hitherto discovered in India having any pretensions to be considered as history. Such a book must necessarily have importance for every student of old Indian history and cultural.” (sic-Ancient Indian History)

The principle governing the original arrangement of hymns in the family mandalas seems to have been determined by three considerations—deity, metre and the number of verses contained in the hymns concerned.

It is a history and it is a poem, though the two perhaps go ill together, and in translations we see their unavoidable admixture of myth and reality combined together. Written eight-and-half centuries ago the work covers the history of over two millenniums. The early part of mythological phase is brief and vague and sometimes fanciful (first three taranginis) but Kalhana’s period had been covered in a close up narrative. It is not at all a pleasant story as it was a period of romanticism and warfare side by side. Consider it as the romantic age in Indian history as testified to by the romances of Rajput princes and princesses, spread all over the Indian subcontinent. It was also an age of quixotic chivalry and knighthood wherein the people of Kashmir suffered under mighy feudal barons. It is too much of palace intrigue, murder, treason, tyranny and civil war. It is the story of autocracy and military oligarchy. In essence it is a story of the kings, the royal families and the nobility, not of common folk. No wonder it is given the title “River of Kings”.

(To be continued)

(The author retired as Head, Department of History, University College, University of Kerala.)

Early humans settled India before Europe, Study suggests

2005-12-04T03:51:00.000-08:00

kazinform.org

LONDON. November 15. KAZINFORM - Modern humans migrated out of Africa and into India much earlier than once believed, driving older hominids in present-day India to extinction and creating some of the earliest art and architecture, a new study suggests.
The research places modern humans in India tens of thousands of years before their arrival in Europe, Kazinform cites Brian Vastag for National Geographic News.

University of Cambridge researchers Michael Petraglia and Hannah James developed the new theory after analyzing decades' worth of existing fieldwork in India. They outline their research in the journal Current Anthropology.

"He's putting all the pieces together, which no one has done before," Sheela Athreya, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University, said of Petraglia.

Modern humans arrived in Europe around 40,000 years ago, leaving behind cave paintings, jewelry, and evidence that they drove the Neandertals to extinction.

Petraglia and James argue that similar events took place in India when modern humans arrived there about 70,000 years ago.

The Indian subcontinent was once home to Homo heidelbergensis, a hominid species that left Africa about 800,000 years ago, Petraglia explained.

"I realized that, my god, modern humans might have wiped out Homo heidelbergensis in India," he said. "Modern humans may have been responsible for wiping out all sorts of ancestors around the world."

"Our model of India is talking about that entire wave of dispersal," he added. "[T]hat's a huge implication for paleoanthropology and human evolution."

A New Model

Petraglia and James reached their conclusions by pulling together fossils, artifacts, and genetic data.

The evidence points to an early human migration through the Middle East and into India, arriving in Australia by 45,000 to 60,000 years ago, they say.

Their model begins about 250,000 years ago, when Homo heidelbergensis arrived in India toting crude stone tools. Digs in central India in the 1980s turned up skeletal remains of the species, and other sites revealed almond-shaped hand axes chipped from stone.

Meanwhile in Africa modern humans arose about 190,000 years ago, most archaeologists believe. These humans too developed stone tools.

Scattered evidence, such as red ochre—perhaps used as body paint—suggests early African humans also dabbled in the creative arts.

The new theory posits that as much as 70,000 years ago, a group of these modern humans migrated east, arriving in India with technology comparable to that developed by Homo heidelbergensis.

"The tools were not so different," Petraglia says. "The technology that the moderns had wasn't of a great advantage over what [Homo heidelbergensis] were using."

But modern humans outcompeted the natives, slowly but inexorably driving them to extinction, Petraglia says. "It's just like the story in Western Europe, where [modern humans] drove Neandertals to extinction," he says.

The modern humans who colonized India may also have been responsible for the disappearance of the so-called Hobbits, whose fossilized bones were discovered recently on the Indonesian island of Flores.

But Athreya of Texas A&M argues that the evidence for such a "replacement event" in India remains weak.

"You have to explain the reasons for the replacement, [such as] technical superiority," she said.

"The genetic evidence shows there were multiple migrations out of Africa, so there would have been multiple migrations into [India]. But I think these migrating populations didn't completely replace the indigenous group."

Early Art

Petraglia and James's report presents evidence of creativity and culture in India starting about 45,000 years ago. Sophisticated stone blades arrive first, along with rudimentary stone architecture.

Beads, red ochre paint, ostrich shell jewelry, and perhaps even shrines to long-lost gods—the hallmarks of an early symbolic culture—appear by 28,500 years ago.

This slow change is in contrast to what many scientists believe played out in Europe. Modern humans blew through the continent like a storm about 40,000 years ago, and Neandertals quickly disappeared.

The switch happened so rapidly—as evidenced by the sudden arrival of advanced stone tools and an explosion of cave painting and other art—that anthropologists call it the "human revolution."

"What we have is a much patchier, very slow and gradual accumulation of what we call modern human behavior in South Asia," Petraglia says.

"And that just simply means that culture developed in a slightly different way in South Asia than it did in Western Europe."

A dearth of fossils and artifacts in India makes Petraglia and James's research even more valuable, writes Robin Dennell, professor of archeology at the University of Sheffield, in a comment accompanying the study.

The subcontinent has produced just one set of early Homo sapiens fossils, found in a cave in Sri Lanka and dated to about 36,000 years ago.

Despite this, Petraglia hopes his analysis throws new light onto early human history in India.

"We're trying to give a wake up call to anthropologists … saying that we have to be looking at all parts of the world," he says.

"If we really want to tell the story of human evolution we've got to bring all parts of the world into the story."

Legend of Dwaraka

2005-10-08T20:33:00.000-07:00

Krishna- the protector of Mathura, the lord of Dwaraka and the reciter of the Bhagwad Gita on the battlefield of Kurukshetra-is one of the most enduring legends of India. But was he also a mortal, historical figure? Two books look at connections between the ancient texts and archaeology.

By T.R. Gopaalakrushnan

After killing Kamsa, Krishna and his brother Balarama placed Ugrasena on the throne and remained in Mathura. This greatly angered Kamsa's father-in-law Jarasandha, the emperor of Magadha. He repeatedly attacked Mathura to avenge Kamsa's death. Although Krishna and his small Yadava army were able to defeat Jarasandha's hordes every time, it was an unequal contest in which superior numbers were bound to tell in the long run. So Krishna led the Yadavas to the west coast. They built the fortified town of Dwaraka on the site of the ancient Kushastali, which became Krishna's seat for the rest of his eventful life. Dwaraka was submerged in the sea 36 years after the Mahabharata War. Forewarned, Krishna had persuaded the Yadavas to move to higher ground in Prabhas (near modern Somnath). Shortly thereafter, the Yadavas, or at least their leaders, destroyed themselves. Krishna himself died a few days later, killed by a hunter's arrow.
Does this bare-bones out- line of the colourful story of Krishna have a true, historical core? Are Krishna and Dwar-aka actual historical entities? For a majority of Indians, the answer is an unequivocal yes. Some archaeologists and historians too are now willing to accept that the common man's faith does have a basis in fact.

RECREATING A PAST THAT WAS CONSIDERED A MYTH: A scale model of coastline and township of Dwaraka displayed in the Birla Science Museum in Hyderabad; (above) The main temple at Dwaraka

The strongest archaeological support comes from the structures discovered under the sea-bed off the coast of Dwaraka in Gujarat by the pioneering team led by Dr S.R. Rao, one of India's most respected archaelogists. An emeritus scientist at the marine archaeology unit of the National Institute of Oceanography, Rao has excavated a large number of Harappan sites including the port city of Lothal in Gujarat. In his book The Lost City of Dwaraka (Aditya Prakashan, Rs 1500), published in 1999 he writes about his undersea finds: "The discovery is an important landmark in the history of India. It has set to rest the doubts expressed by historians about the historicity of Mahabharata and the very existence of Dwaraka city. It has greatly narrowed the gap in Indian history by establishing the continuity of the Indian civilisation from the Vedic Age to the present day."

The strongest archaeological support comes from the structures discovered under the sea-bed off the coast of Dwaraka in Gujarat by the pioneering team led by Dr S.R. Rao, one of India's most respected archaelogists. An emeritus scientist at the marine archaeology unit of the National Institute of Oceanography, Rao has excavated a large number of Harappan sites including the port city of Lothal in Gujarat. In his book The Lost City of Dwaraka (Aditya Prakashan, Rs 1500), published in 1999 he writes about his undersea finds: "The discovery is an important landmark in the history of India. It has set to rest the doubts expressed by historians about the historicity of Mahabharata and the very existence of Dwaraka city. It has greatly narrowed the gap in Indian history by establishing the continuity of the Indian civilisation from the Vedic Age to the present day."

But not all are convinced. Some point to 'contradictions' in his findings and lack of other corroboration. Others believe that the entire story of Krishna as written in the Mahabharata is pure mythology, and any claims of archaeological evidence must necessarily be incorrect. As historian R.S. Sharma has written in his history textbook for class X students: "Although Lord Krishna plays an important role in the Mahabharata, the earliest inscriptions and sculpture pieces found in Mathura between 200 BC and 300 AD do not attest his presence." (The BJP has attempted to have these lines deleted from the textbook.)

But there are archaeological finds that do attest to Krishna as a historical figure. For instance excavations in Bedsa (near Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh) have unearthed the remains of a temple of 300 BC in which Krishna (Vasudeva) and Balarama (Samkarshana) are identified from their flagstaff. Krishna's son Pradyumna, grandson, Aniruddha and another Yadava hero, Satyaki, have also been identified.

A more recent historical record, dated 574 AD, occurs in what are called the Palitana plates of Samanta Simhaditya. This inscription refers to Dwaraka as the capital of the western coast of Saurashtra and states that Krishna lived here.

No one has so influenced the course of India's religion, philosophy, art and literature as Krishna. Traditional belief is that Krishna lived in Dwaraka at the end of the Dwapara Yuga. Dwaraka, in fact, is considered one of the seven holiest and most ancient Indian cities. The others are Ayodhya, Mathura, Haridwar, Varanasi, Kanchi and Ujjain, which together are known as Mokshada-that which leads to salvation.

According to Hindu historical tradition, Kali Yuga began with the death of Krishna more than 5,000 years ago. The Puranas are emphatic on the cultural degradation that set in after the Mahabharata war, which is seen as one of the most important turning points in ancient Indian history. Krishna, according to traditional belief, participated in that transition.

Artefacts recovered from the sea bed, like the reconstructed perforated jar (left) found in Bet Dwaraka, included a low footed stool of basalt and a pestle of granite and a grinder cum pounder of dolerite, among others.

"Krishna very much existed in flesh, blood and bones," said Madhav Acharya, archaeologist at the Haryana archaeological department. "It is difficult, if not impossible, for a thing like the Mahabharata to be believed till today in the same spirit and faith unless there is some truth to the story. And that truth is the power struggle, and the main characters. One of them was Krishna. The power struggle is not a myth. If the heart of the story is to be believed as a historical event, then Krishna too should be seen as a historical character."

Excavations all over north and western India, however, show that a highly developed society had existed long before the accepted dates and theories of ancient Indian history. But researchers like N.S. Rajaram and David Frawley argue that the Harappan civilisation represents the material remains of the Vedic Age.

The postulate has its opponents, notably the well-known historian Romila Thapar. "The latest entrants into the field (of history) are Indian scientists from the US, who in the guise of using science and computers are now holding forth on the Aryan problem," she wrote some time ago in an article. "They are neither willing to acknowledge that they know little about archaeology, history or linguistics nor willing to work with such specialists."

A few others are straddling the fence. "This debate about ancient Indian history is in fact not at all about finding the truth," said Dr Bhagwant Josh, professor of contemporary history at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. "One side wants to appropriate the glory and pride of what is considered the most systematised civilisation of city dwellers, by linking their past to it, and the others want to deny them that." On the specific issue of the legend of Dwaraka, Josh said, "Krishna must have been historical as well as mythical. Much before the historical Krishna was born, the mythical Krishna must have existed (there is a reference to a Krishna in the Rig Veda); the historical Krishna would have been named after the mythical one."

The other important issue is the nature of the connection between archaeology and India's ancient texts and literature. Pratnakirtim apavirnu, know thy past, exhort the Vedas and Upanishads, which for long had been described as myth and legend or as religious texts without much historical value. Some historians have consistently opposed making any connection between Harappan archaeology and Vedic literature as part of the same historical and cultural stream. A position that is increasingly being challenged. "The core reality of these texts must be taken as the basis of further exploration of the sites of the Mahabharata tradition," said Rao, "as whatever was there in the late Indus Valley civilisation period is reflected in the civilisation of the Mahabharata."

Inevitably, some scholars and historians disagree. "No individual character like Krishna or Rama can be found through archaeology," said Prof. B.D. Chatopadhyay of the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU. "Archaeology can reconstruct the material culture of a people. Krishna is known from legends, epics and puranas. Interpolating archaeology with literature is fraught with difficulties. The efforts of some historians and archaeologists to correlate textual evidence with archaeological finds have not found a consensus even among themselves, and serious archaeologists are questioning the exercise."

AN ARTIST'S IMPRESSION OF FORTIFIED DWARAKA: The general layout of the city described in ancient texts agrees with that of the submerged city

Not so, said R. S. Bisht, director of excavations and exploration at the Archaeological Survey of India, Delhi, who is a strong believer in correlating archaeological finds with the ancient literature, as he did in the case of the Harappan civilisation and Rig Veda. "The Rig Vedic people were the authors of the Harappan civilisation," he said. He has little doubt of the historicity of Krishna. "In the Upanishads, as I see it, there are no fictitious kings. So Krishna was a historical figure."

Other well-known historians like Prof. B.B. Lal, former director-general of ASI and author of a recent book on the Saraswati civilsation, too have said that it is time for a rethink. But while the numbers of those who agree on this point is increasing, there is as yet no consensus on the period mentioned in the texts, especially the Mahabharata, which is pounced upon by critics of this approach. As Chatopadhyay pointed out, "If one is sure about the dates of the texts, then some idea of the society that produced it can be had, but we have no knowledge of the dates, and the Mahabharata was authored over a long-drawn period."

Leaving aside the date issue for now, it seems reasonable to accept the postulate that the Harappan sites relate to the Vedic culture described in the Vedas, Puranas and the Mahabharata. "The Vedic literature matches with the description of the archeological finds," said Madhav Acharya. As Rao said, "religion, language, yoga, town planning and maritime activities point to the mature Harappan as the Vedic period. And the connecting link between this and the Mahabharata or late Harappa period is what some call the ochre coloured pottery and what we call late Harappan pottery. Geography also shows similar evidence."

"Krishna very much existed," said Madhav Acharya. "If the Mahabharata is to be believed then Krishna too should be seen as a historical character."

Rajaram and fellow researcher N. Jha say the Harappan seals are full of Vedic motifs. Madhav Acharya feels that that was a time "when people had language but no script. Till Brahmi, which can be read, there was no script but there was an oral tradition. The Harappan script has not been found in huge volumes." Rao said people who recited the Vedas might not have written it down because of difficulties with pronunciation. But he is convinced the Harappan civilisation could not have been built without writing and advanced knowledge.

Be that as it may, archaeological finds do show that coastal Gujarat could well have been an important part of the Vedic and pre-Harappan fold. As Rao writes in his book, "Long before the Mahabharata period the Indus valley civilisation had penetrated deep into Kutch at Dholavira and Surkotada by 3000 BC. It reached its climax between 2800-1900 BC at Lothal. They spoke a proto-Aryan language akin to Old Indo-Aryan (Vedic Sanskirt) and their basic concept of cosmic, moral and religious order mentioned in the Indus seals was similar to that of the Rig Veda."

The underwater discoveries in the Gulf of Cambay subsequent to Rao's expeditions off Dwaraka, and other excavations off the coast show that the region probably had human settlements from very ancient times, 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. One of them could well have been Krishna's Dwaraka (known in ancient times as Kushastali or 'Place of Kusha'), the destruction of which is so graphically described by Arjuna in the Mausala Parva of the Mahabharata: "The sea, which had been beating against the shores, suddenly broke the boundary that was imposed on it by nature. The sea rushed into the city. It coursed through the streets of the beautiful city. The sea covered up everything in the city. I saw the beautiful buildings becoming submerged one by one. In a matter of a few moments it was all over. The sea had now become as placid as a lake. There was no trace of the city. Dwaraka was just a name; just a memory."

According to the ancient texts, the west coast around Gujarat has been the traditional land of the Yadavas, or Yadus who claimed descent from Yadu, the eldest son of Yayati. Centuries before Krishna, the Yadu king Arjuna Kartavirya had been defeated by Parashurama. Bhrigukaccha, the modern Broach, is named after the Bhrigu clan of Parashurama. (Krishna undertook a sea voyage from Bhrigukaccha to Prabhas, according to Bhagavata Purana.) So Krishna was only returning to the land of his ancestors.

The location and topography of the site selected by Krishna made it safe from Jarasandha's attacks. Reaching Dwaraka bounded by the sea and Rann was a hazardous task for Jarasandha's army. Secondly, being a good port, Dwaraka promised prosperity to the enterprising people. Not that it was totally immune from attack. Krishna's Dwaraka was attacked by the king of Salva (modern Sind) while he was away at Indraprastha to attend Yudhishtira's rajasuya ceremony.

Many scholars accept all this mainly on literary grounds. What was lacking was archaeological evidence linking Gujarat, Dwaraka and Krishna. Which is what prompted Rao to lead a marine archaeological expedition to the coastal region near modern Dwaraka in search of submerged settlements that might correspond to Krishna's capital.

The underwater expeditions-which won Rao the first World Ship Trust Award for Individual Achievement-were undertaken after extensive on-shore excavations had yielded incontrovertible evidence of a protohistoric settlement of 1600 BC destroyed by the sea. Conducting 12 expeditions during 1983-1990, Rao identified two underwater settlements, one near the present-day Dwaraka and the other in the nearby island of Bet Dwaraka. In the book The Lost City of Dwaraka describing his discoveries, Rao suggested that Krishna occupied these places around 1500 BC.

In search of submerged human settlements: A diver inspecting the rocky ridge having man-made holes for securing boats

What Rao and his team discovered was a well-fortified township that extended more than half a mile from the shore. The sketch plan of Dwaraka, prepared on the basis of structural remains exposed in the sea-bed, suggests six different sectors of the town all fortified and some interconnected. Two major roads, each about 18m wide, connect a group of three buildings on the east which formed another designated enclosure, in which six bastions were found in a line.

The foundation of boulders on which the city's walls were erected showed that the land had been reclaimed from the sea some 3,600 years back. The submerged township extended in the north up to Bet Dwaraka (Also known as Sankhodhara-said to have been the pleasure resort of Krishna and his consorts Satyabhama and Jambavati. The area is noted for its conch shell of good quality which was in great demand as a non-corrosive substitute for metal). It extended up to Okhamadhi in the south, and Pindara in the east. (A pearl fishing village for more than 3,000 years, Pindara is a holy place-Pinda Taraka is mentioned in the Mahabharata where sage Durvasa had his hermitage.)

The general layout of the city of Dwaraka described in ancient texts agrees with that of the submerged city and shows evidence of town planning. For example: "Land was reclaimed from the sea near the western shores of Saurashtra. A city was planned and built here. Dwaraka was a planned city, on the banks of the river Gomati. This beautiful city was also known as Dwaramati, Dwarawati and Kushastali. It had well-organised six sectors, residential and commercial zones, wide roads, plazas, palaces and many public utilities. A hall called Sudharma Sabha was built to hold public meetings. The city also boasted of a good harbour."

The excavations show that Dwaraka was an urban centre with certain specialised industries such as boat building and metal working as evidenced by this copper lota (left) found in the sea bed. Iron too was known to the smiths of Bet Dwaraka.

The Sabha Parva text of the Mahabharata describes houses, but none had survived the sea. A few paved paths, drains, etc. were traced. Some houses or public buildings had pillared halls. "An idea of the houses built of dressed and undressed stones in ancient Dwaraka can be had from the structures laid bare in the Harappan town of Surkotada in Kutch," said Rao.

Kushastali is the name given to a pre-Dwaraka (or Harappan) settlement that had been abandoned and reoccupied and rebuilt during the Mahabharata period, said Rao, who identifies Bet Dwaraka with Antardvipa of the epic. "The word dvipa as used in the Mahabharata often conveys the sense of any land between two rivers or two waters, although it is also used for a continent," said Rao. "The Harappan seal inscriptions mention happta dvappa (sapta dvipa-seven lands) and bhadrama dvappa (bhadrama dvipa-a seal found at Kalibanga meaning most auspicious land). Also, "the fort wall and submerged walls in the sea confirm the appellation varidurga, citadel in the water, given to Dwaraka in the Mahabharata."

Rao also finds confirmation of the reference to Dwaraka as nagara (city) in the epic. The high level of civilisation in ancient Dwaraka is borne out by the engineering skill, advanced technology and the high literacy of the people. "It was an urban centre with certain specialised industries such as boat building, shell working, pearl diving and perhaps metal working also," said Rao.

The stone mould found in the intertidal zone compares favourably with similar moulds found in Lothal and other Indus towns just as the tidal dock at Lothal built in 2300 BC is seen as the precursor of the port installation of Dwaraka. Iron was already known to the smiths of Bet Dwaraka as attested to by iron stakes, nails and other iron objects. Terracotta wheels of toy carts were also recovered.

By 1500 BC almost the entire township seems to have been destroyed. But while it existed, one later description of the city reads, "The yellow glitter of the golden fort of the city in the sea throwing yellow light all round looked as if the flames of vadavagni (volcano) came out tearing asunder the sea."

Among the objects recovered from the sea-bed that establish the submerged township's connection with the Dwaraka of the Maha-bharata was a seal (just 18mmx20mm) with the images of a bull, unicorn and goat engraved in an anticlockwise direction. "The motif is no doubt of Indus origin but the style shows considerable influence from Bahrain," writes Rao. "The bull, unicorn and goat motif on seals from mature Harappan levels of Kalibangan and Mohenjo Daro is distinct from that of Bet Dwaraka which belongs to the late Indus period." But the seal does corroborate the reference made in the ancient text, the Harivamsa, that every citizen of Dwaraka should carry a mudra as a mark of identifiction and none without a seal should enter it.

"When we got the seal we were really excited," said Dr. Rao. "Secondly, we got a stone mound in which they cast some spear heads. So some weapons were definitely locally manufactured. The Mahabharata mentions that when Dwaraka was attacked they inserted iron stakes. We got one of those. These are evidences which corroborate what the texts said. But the evidence that really clinched the issue was the mudra and the references to two Dwarakas at the place mentioned in the ancient texts like Sabha Parva."

Over 12 expeditions during 1983-1990, with funding for just 20 days in a year: Dr Rao and his pioneering team working off the coast of Dwaraka

The topography of the Okha region reveals seven parts interspersed by the Rann. They may be the seven islands that existed during the Mahabharata period and referred to in later texts. The occurrence of proto-historic (1600 BC) pottery on land suggests there were smaller towns between Dwaraka and Kushastali in ancient times. "With a large port town of Dwaraka, a shipyard in Bet Dwaraka and three other satellite towns at Aramda, Varwala and Nagewsar, the concept of the city state of Darukavana or Dwaravati must have been given a concrete shape," speculates Rao. If all these settlements are taken as one unit, Darukavana extended over 45 km from north to south and at least 25 km from east to west approximating to eight yojanas, if not more.

Also, the Dwaraka harbour provided the earliest clear evidence of modifying natural rock to serve the needs of a harbour. Two rock-cut slipways of varying width extending from the beach to the intertidal zone were discovered, which "could have been designed for launching boats of different sizes." This technique was adopted by the Phoenicians much later, around 900-800. The structures and the large stone anchors lying under the sea at Dwaraka are also seen as indicative of large ships being anchored out at sea while smaller boats carried men and cargo up the river.

Among artefacts reovered from Dwaraka and Bet Dwaraka were pottery carrying inscriptions in old Indo-Aryan (Vedic or archaic Sanskrit) script and were found to be 3,528 years old in thermoluminescence testing. Rao deciphers one of the potsherds recovered to read baga (God) in late Harappan characters and assignable to 1800-1600 BC and another as Mahakaccha sah pa, conveying the sense of "sea (or sea god) king (or ruler) protect"-an appeal to the sea god for protection. A similar appeal has been deciphered in a seal inscripion from Mohenjo Daro.

Triangular three-holed anchors weighing 120-150 kg, the biggest weighing 560 kg, found were similar to pre-Phoenician anchors found in Syria and Cyprus and were dated around 1500 BC. Another archaeologically significant find was a lunate shaped moonstone (chandrasila). This and a beam found in the vicinity suggested to Rao's team that there existed a temple here. Stone artefacts recovered from the sea-bed included a low footed stool of basalt, finely polished found along with brass arches, a pestle of granite and a grinder cum pounder of dolerite. Two single-holed spheroid stone objects, use unclear, datable to 1500-1400 BC were found, besides iron nails, brass objects, a copper bell, a highly corroded copper lota and a few bronze nails. Low zinc brass produced at Lothal in 2300-2000 BC is similar in composition to that found at Dwaraka.

Admittedly, there is not much dispute about the general area of Krishna's kingdom. "The dating of Rao's material was done, not by archaeologists, but by scientists at the Physical Research Lab, and that cannot be disbelieved. So it is definitely ancient Dwaraka," said Acharya. But in terms of time, Rao's explorations place Krishna and the Mahabharata in the post-Harappan period or after the break-up of the Harappan empire due to natural causes around 2200-1900 BC.

"Generally our findings have been accepted," said Rao. "There are a few who think that the date 1700-1800 BC that we have assigned is not in consonance with the traditional date of 3102 BC. But so far as the archaeological evidence from on shore and off-shore excavations and thermoluminescence dating is concerned Kushastali with its late Harappan relics where the first Dwaraka was built may be assigned to 1700 BC and the town on the mainland may be slightly later," Rao said. "Although traditional date of 3102 BC cannot be confirmed by avaiable evidence, it is better to explore deeper waters of Bet Dwaraka," said Rao. "There is one other possibility. In Bet Dwaraka there are the mudflats. We are not able to dig because you hit water at an early depth and neither diving nor excavations are possible." (Archaeological excavations show that modern Dwaraka is the seventh settlement of the name on this site. It is now generally accepted that the earlier cities have been, at various times, swallowed by the sea. Interestingly, the only ancient temple for Matsya, Vishnu's incarnation at the time of the great flood, is to be found at Sankhodhara in Bet Dwarak.)

The structures and stone anchors lying under the sea indicate large ships being anchored out at sea while smaller boats carried men and cargo up the river as visualised in this artist's impression of the harbour of ancient Dwaraka.

Madhav Acharya too favours the later dates. "There is a difference in the geographic areas as well as the time frame of the Saraswati civilisation that is wholly Vedic, and the setting of the Mahabharata," he said. According to him, while the Saraswati-or the Harappan-civilisation centres on the Saptasindhu rivers (the Indus, the Saraswati and the five rivers that make up Punjab), the Mahabharata has the Ganga and the Yamuna, besides the Kurukshetra area in Haryana, as the backdrop. "The earliest habitation in the Ganga-Yamuna region does not go back beyond 1200-1100 BC, and in Mathura and the Mahabharata sites there is no evidence of earlier inhabitation."

The date arguments notwithstanding, there can be no denying the importance of Rao's findings. With Krishna consigned to mythology, the modernists of course insist that the undersea discoveries must have an explanation different from Rao's interpretation and correlation with the ancient texts, though they have yet to come up with one. Researchers like Rajaram view Rao's findings as confirmation of their theories that the Mahabharata belongs to a much earlier period.

Rajaram, in his yet to be published book Search for the Historical Krishna, cites three main reasons as to why the site discovered by Rao is actually a later Dwaraka than the one built by Krishna. First, considering the abundant Vedic symbolism found in Harappan archaeology, which Rao too says, the lack of any Vedic motifs in the artefacts found in the undersea excavations suggests that the settlement was a later one. Rajaram theorises that Krishna's Dwaraka most probably lies below the existing ruins at a further depth of around 2.5 to 5 metres based on his calculations on the likely rise in sea levels over the past 5,000 years.

Low zinc brass produced at Lothal in 2300-2000 BC is similar in composition to that found in artefacts like this bronze bell excavated at Dwaraka. Also, a stone mould compares favourably with similar mould found in Lothal and other Indus towns.

The second reason cited is that Krishna of the Mahabharata and the archaeology of his Dwaraka must fit the picture of the region and society portrayed in the ancient texts. This, Rajaram says, better fits in the early Harappan (3100 BC) period than the post Harappan period favoured by Rao and some others. Especially since some of the artefacts recovered from the sea-bed show a strong affinity with West Asia, especially the Kassite empire of Babylon.

The third reason is the mismatch between the political situation described in the Mahabharata and the picture given by post-Harappan archaeology. "There can be little doubt that Krishna was a Vedic figure," said Rajaram. According to the Mabhabharata, Krishna's links were with the Kurus, the Panchalas and Mathura, all in the Vedic heartland to the north. "Just as there is no denying the Kassite influences on Rao's Dwaraka, there is no denying the historic Vedic link between the Purus (or Kurus) and the Yadus along the Saraswati river, which should place them before the complete drying up the ancient river around 2200-1900 BC."

This seal establishes the submerged township's connection with Dwaraka of Mahabharata. It corroborates the reference in the Harivamsa that says every citizen of Dwaraka should carry a mudra as a mark of identification.

Further, Rajaram argues, the Mahabharata describes India as made up of established kingdoms, with good communications and a common elite language. "It was an age of large kingdoms and empires and imperial aspirations," he insists. In fact the geography as described in the epic is accepted by many scholars. Historian S.M. Ali is quoted in Rao's book: "The georgrapahical matter contained in the Mahabharata is immense. It is perhaps the only great work which deals with georgraphic details and not incidentally as other works." So Krishna's Dwaraka must fit into the geography and society described in the epic, which obviously corresponds far more to the early Harappan rather than the post-Harappan period which saw the rise of regional cultures, what Rao calls Janapadas, Rajaram argues in his book. (Rao gives the following chronology: Pre-Harappa 3400-3100 BC; mature Harappa 3100-1900 BC; late Harappa 1900-1500 BC.)

The town was well-fortified with engineering skill, as seen in the hemispherical door-socket (left) and literacy as seen in the inscription in the earthern trough (right) in old Indo-Aryan script which Rao deciphers as Mahakaccha sah pa, conveying the sense of "sea (or sea god) king (or ruler) protect".

Moreover, in looking at the historical basis for the Dwaraka legend, a key question is not just about Krishna but also whether the Mahabharata war and other participants in the war were historical also. One cannot have one without the other. And Rajaram and Jha, in their yet to be universally accepted decipherment of the Harappan seals, say there are many references to Krishna and other Mahabharata characters in the Indus Valley seals, some of which date back to 5000 years.

For instance, one seal they have deciphered as Devapi, the elder brother of Bhishma's father, Shantanu. Among other names related to Krishna deciphered are Akrura (Krishna's friend), Yadu (Krishna's ancestor), and Sritirtha (old name for Dwaraka). Another seal they read as 'Murari Vrishni anga' meaning 'Murari of the Vrishnis,' and one more as 'Vrishni varpa,' implying he had a beautiful body. In fact, Jha and Rajaram say they have found the word 'Vrishni' appearing on numerous Harappan seals. Vrishni of course was Krishna's clan, living in a region where recent excavations have shown that the Harappan Civilisation was thriving.

The identification of Krishna's Dwaraka thus calls for devising methods of identifying sites and artefacts that belong to the Mahabharata period, though there is little consensus among historians and archeologists on dating this period. For this, it is necessary to get at the root of the main literary source of the period, the Mahabharata. "Recent research has shown that the epic is not a myth but a recreation of history. This is the consensus among most historians and archaeologists," Rao argues.

While one may or may not agree with Rao's conclusions, he has made an important contribution by connecting literature and archaeology. He has shown that identifying Krishna's Dwaraka and other places connected with the Krishna story as well as the larger story of the Mahabharata itself and other ancient texts is possible by looking for similar connections between literature and archaeology, and be the starting point for excavations for other historic and legendary places.
with Vijaya Pushkarna

Newly-discovered Mamallapuram temple fascinates archaeologists

2005-10-08T19:05:00.000-07:00

By T.S. Subramanian

Parts of the ancient temple discovered to the south of the Shore Temple at Mamallapuram during the excavation done from February to April 2005. — Photo Courtesy ASI

CHENNAI, APRIL 9 . The temple discovered by the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), a few hundred metres to the south of the Shore Temple at Mamallapuram, near Chennai, must have been as big or even bigger than the Shore Temple, said archaeologists conducting the excavation there. The ASI had discovered massive remains of a temple on the shore, close to the Shore Temple during the excavations it had conducted in February and March.

While continuing the excavation, it discovered a subsidiary shrine adjacent to the remains of a square garbha graham (sanctum sanctorum) of the newly- discovered temple.

The garbha graha measures 2.6 metres by 2.6 metres. The sanctum sanctorum is surrounded by an open courtyard, which is encircled by a massive prakara (outer wall). A beautiful ring-well, made of terracotta; a sculpted capstone, a shikara stone; parts of a stupa; granite architectural members with sockets; and beautiful potsherds have been found within this temple complex.

The newly discovered temple "is a separate complex by itself. Its magnitude and area is akin to that of the Shore Temple," said T. Satyamurthy, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, Chennai Circle. Alok Tripathi, Deputy Superintending Archaeologist, Underwater Archaeology Wing, ASI, who is heading the current excavation at Mamallapuram, said, "This temple must have been as big or bigger than the Shore Temple."

What has fascinated archaeologists is that mason's marks (engravings) have been found on the granite architectural members of the square garbha graha.

These mason's marks depict a bird, a lamp, a bow and arrow, and two interconnected triangles. The bird occurs like a leitmotif on several stones.

"We have found a lot of mason's marks, who built this temple. We have to compare these mason's marks [with those found elsewhere] and find out whether the same group built the temples at Kancheepuram. In the temples in north India, the mason's marks have been studied quite well," Dr. Tripathi said.

Mamallapuram is known for its unparalleled works of architecture including open-air bas relief, rock cut temples and structural temples built by the Pallava kings Mahendravarman, Narasimhavarman I, Paramesvara and Narasimhavarman II, during the 7th and 8th century A.D.

The majestic Shore Temple, which stands on the edge of the sea, was built by Narsimhavarman II (circa 690- 715 A.D.). He also built the huge Kailasanatha temple and the Iravatanesvara temple at Kancheepuram. Nandivarman II (circa 736-769 A.D.) built the Vaikunta Perumal temple.

Obviously, the newly discovered temple close to the Shore Temple, was built by the Pallava kings. The question that arises is: why did the Shore Temple survive while this one did not?

The ring well of the temple, made of terracotta. — Photo Courtesy ASI

Dr. Satyamurthy said, "The Shore Temple was built on bed rock. So it survived all these years. But this temple was constructed on sand and it collapsed. There was some setback, it developed cracks and collapsed." There must have been several reasons behind the survival of the Shore Temple and the collapse of the newly discovered temple, he said.

The ASI so far has not been able to find the deities of the square garbha graha and the subsidiary shrine adjacent to it. "There must have been deities inside because it was a structural temple. The deities must have been at a high level. We are now excavating at a lower level," said Dr. Tripathi. He pointed out that the garbha graha had a definite pattern. It was divided into four parts. Stones had been arranged in a specific manner.

The ring-well made of terracotta, found in the open courtyard, is an arresting sight. "Four rings have been exposed. There may be more. We have to see how deep it is," he added.

The ASI has also discovered the remains of a second temple, built on a low-slung rock, to the south of the Shore Temple. To the north of the Shore Temple, it has found onland a wall under water (because the water table is very high). Six blocks of stones of this wall ran to a length of 20 metres, said Dr. Tripathi. More trenches would be dug on land to see how far this wall ran. This wall extended into the sea (that is west to east) and its remains have been found in the sea. The ASI officials are keen on finding out the extent to which this wall runs into the sea and where it turns. For, they want to know whether the Shore Temple was surrounded by a prakara on all its sides. A wall existed north to the south, they said.

The discovery that added 2,000 years to Indian history

2005-10-06T18:12:00.000-07:00

by RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE

Finding Forgotten Cities: How the Indus Civilization was Discovered By Nayanjot Lahiri, Permanent Black, Rs 750

It is difficult to believe today that even in the early twenties of the last century, recorded Indian history was said to have begun with the Vedic Age around 1200 BC. One archaeological discovery changed all this and pushed back the frontiers of Indian history by at least 2,000 years.

The announcement that the Indus Valley Civilization had been discovered was made in 1924 by John Marshall, the then director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India. The discoveries were hailed as similar in scale to the discovery of Troy by Heinrich Schliemann, and of Minoan Crete by Arthur Evans. The discoveries announced by Marshall added a new dimension to the Indian and world civilization.

Nayanjot Lahiri, a trained archaeologist herself, tells the story of how the civilization came to be discovered. Her research is detailed and the documents she mines have never been used before. She has a great story to tell and she tells it well, with a wealth of fact and interpretation. Written from an archaeologist’s viewpoint, there was always the danger of the book descending into too many technical details. Lahiri avoids this and has produced a book that is enjoyable.

The ruins in Harrappa — one of the principle sites of the Indus civilization — were visited and described by 19th century British explorers and some of them even guessed that underneath the mound lay the relics of an ancient city. The first archaeologist to visit Harrappa was Alexander Cunningham who began the first excavations there in 1872. Cunningham discovered that some of the bricks from the ruins had been carried away to provide ballast for the railway lines being laid to link Multan to Lahore. Cunningham, as Lahiri explains, saw his excavations through a Buddhist grid. Thus he saw the artefacts and the seals he unearthed as going back to Buddhist times. He was unaware of the full significance of the past he had delved into. A proper excavation of Harrappa had to wait till 1921 upto which date it “teetered on the verge of being excavated”.

Before excavations at Harrappa could proceed apace, news came that Rakhaldas Banerji, a historian and archaeologist from Calcutta, had discovered in Mohenjo-daro in Sind seals similar to those found in Harrappa. From the ruins of Mohenjo-daro, or mound of the dead, Banerji had retrieved what can only be described as a treasure. He had found and recognized seals of the Harrappa type. By the early Twenties, it was clear that archaeologists in India, led by Marshall, were poised to make a major breakthrough.

It fell to Marshall, of course, to string together the findings of the two sites, and he was forced to confront “a range of cultural congruences between the two sites”. The seals were similar; the bricks were identical; there were clay bangles of the same kind in both places. He wrote, “this forgotten civilization, of which the excavations of Harrappa and Mohenjo-daro have now given us a first glimpse, was developed in the Indus valley itself, and just as distinctive of that region as the civilization of the Pharraohs was distinctive of the Nile…There is no reason to assume that the culture of this region [i.e. the Indus Valley] was imported from other lands, or its character was profoundly modified by outside influences.”

Marshall’s initial conclusions were remarkably perceptive and accurate. In many ways, Lahiri’s book is a tribute to Marshall and his achievements. But the book also brings to life the careers of such early pioneers of Indian archaeology as Banerji and Daya Ram Sahni. She has also rescued from obscurity the work of the Italian, Luigi Pio Tessitori, to whom history owes the first findings of Kalibangan in Rajasthan, another important site of the Indus Valley Civilization.

What happened in history is often a mystery. Lahiri enlightens us on how what happened in prehistoric India became a part of known history.

Lord Krishna’s Dwarka not in Jamnagar but in Junagadh: ISRO

2005-10-04T17:25:00.000-07:00

Navhind Times on the Web: India

PTI Ahmedabad Oct 4: Giving a totally new twist to the location of Lord Krishna’s birthplace Dwarka, satellite pictures taken by the Indian Space Research Organisation have indicated that Dwarka did not exist in Jamnagar, as the historians believe, but in Junagadh district of Gujarat.

A senior scientist with the ISRO’s space application centre, Dr P S Thakker, who has worked on this project, said, “What is interesting is that ISRO’s findings corroborate what is mentioned in the vedas and other ancient Hindu scriptures about the geographical location of Dwaraka but contradicts what the archaeologists and modern historians say about the present Dwarka which they claim is in Jamnagar district of Gujarat.”

Though the study was done by the ISRO four years back it was confined to abstract papers on a dusty shelf.

Satellite images can pinpoint things that are not visible to the naked eye. For example, it can indicate the presence of ruins of a city which has been long buried under the soil.

Mr Thakker said that there are nine sites in Gujarat which claim to be the original Dwarka.

Those sites are: the town of modern Dwarka in Jamnagar district, Mul Dwarka near Kodinar in Junagadh district, Muli in Surendranagar district, Panch Dwaraka near Vankaner in Rajkot district, Bet Dwarka in Jamnagar district near Okha and a city believed to be submerged in the great Rann of Kutch.

Another site which also claims to be Dwarka is Jima Durga in Junagadh district. Descriptions of Lord Krishna’s Dwarka mentions the presence of rivers, forests, mountains, gardens having colourful flowers in its environs. But the present-day Dwarka, which exists in Jamnagar, doesn’t match with the descriptions found in literature but what matches perfectly are the satellite images which were taken of Junagadh district, Mr Thakker added.

He said the available literature indicates existence of two different Dwarkas at two different periods. One Dwarka was that of Lord Vasudeva and the other was that of Lord Krishna’s.

Lord Vasudev’s Dwarka, which was submerged in the Arabian Sea about 3500 years ago, and Lord Krishna’s Dwarka were both located in Junagadh district near Prabhash Kshetra, according to Mr Thakker.

In 1988, the sixth marine archaeological expedition of the National institute of Oceanography, Goa led by Dr S R Rao, emeritus scientist, had discovered hitherto unknown features of a city in Jamnagar which Dr Rao had claimed to be Lord Krishna’s Dwarka.

The expedition carried out by Dr Rao had come across inner and outer gateways of the proto-historic port city flanked by circular bastions built of massive blocks of sandstone.

From the inner gateway, a flight of steps led to the Gomati river the submerged channel of which has been traced over a length of 1.5 km in the seabed.

However, Mr Thakker claims this unknown feature of a city discovered by Dr Rao could be any other city settled after he said that the study of the satellite data perfectly matches with the description given in Tri Shasthi Shlaka Purush Charta (history of 63 outstanding personalities) written by Hemchandrachary, a distinguished Jain muni of the 11th century who has given a geographical description of Lord Krishna’s Dwarka built by kuber at Lord Indra’s behest.

Mr Thakker said the presence of Navda village in the vicinity (which means boat) and milollite limestone found in the vicinity of Girnar in Junagadh suggested the presence of a sea in this area.

“Thus it seems that Lord Vasudev’s dwarka which was submerged in the sea as well and the Dwarka of Lord Krishna were located in Junagadh district near Prabhash Kshetra. Excavation and further study is required to get more scientific information on Dwarka,” he added.

Mahabharata war in the history of the Hindus

2005-09-30T01:23:00.000-07:00

By S. Govindaswamy

It is claimed that the civilisation that originated on the banks of river Saraswati is the most ancient in the history of mankind, based on historical and linguistic study of the Rig Veda. It is also claimed that Rig Veda is the world's oldest available text. These sweeping statements can only be wishful thinking as no references to support research works have been given. How proper is it to call Rig Veda as a text, as Vedas (smiritis) did have only an oral tradition.

If Shantanu was the great grandfather of the Kauravas and Pandavas, he would have lived three generations earlier and not four as mentioned.

What is the independent evidence that the 'accepted date' of Mahabharata war was 3101 B.C? Taking the above figure to be correct the latest verses of Rig Veda were composed around 3200 b.c.

From Krishna to Rama

a) In the discussion the author has used Solar (Sauramana) year, precession of equinoxes (seasons) and lunar (Chandramana) year.

b) Before drawing conclusions it is necessary to know which Panchangams (Almanacs) were in use and when these were computed. As per one Panchangam, year 5107 of Kaliyuga, the most ancient, is running now. Does it not mean that there were no Panchangams earlier than 3000 B.C.? If so,this coincided with the given date for Mahabharata war. The astrological references to Rama's birth and observation of Ashwins in winter solstice have probably been made prior to the start of the Kaliyuga Panchangam!

c) In the calculation of the periods of Krishna and Rama, the author has mixed up precession of equinoxes with thithis (phases) of moon. The former is based on the wobbling of earth's axis in clockwise (opposite to its rotation and orbit around sun) direction. The latter is the relative angles between the sun and moon due the latter's rotation around the earth. It is true that the difference. Between Chaitra Shukla Saptami and Chaitra Pournami, is eight days. The author points out, that winter ended on Chaitra full moon day during Rama's period and on Chitra Shukla Saptami during Mahabharata war. Application of precession of the equinoxes to the thithis is not correct. If the end of winter had been given based on sun's motion the above calculation would be correct. The moon's phases do not occur at the same corresponding position of sun with respect to stars, in any two years. Precision refers only to sun's position with respect to the equator (Bhumadhya rekha), Tropic of Cancer and Carpricorn (Kataka and Makara rekhas). For example sun is in winter solstice on December 23. If the preceding new moon (Amavasya) occurred at the same star (degree) during Rama's birth and Bhishma's death, it would establish sun's position also. If so the author's calculation is acceptable.

d) It is mentioned that Bhishma breathed his last when Uttarayana started on Magha (February-March) Shukla Ashtami. In the next line it is mentioned that winter ended on Chaitra (April-May) Shukla Sapta Saptami. The difference is two months. This needs clarification.

e) Sidereal day is approximately four minutes longer than solar day. Sidereral year is one day more than solar year because earth's rotation around the sun amounts to one extra revolution with respect to stars. The statement that sidereal year is longer than solar year by 20 minutes 23 seconds due to precession of the equinoxes, is wrong.

Sun comes to Ashwini on April 14/15 (Tamil New Year Day). This is start of Chittirai month (Mesha month in Kerala). This is called as Baishaki in Punjab. Is there an advance of one month sun is having a declination of approximately 90 34' North. If Ashwini was in winter solstice as per riches 7/69/3 and 1/112/13 the declination would have been 23030' south. The precession between December 23 and April 14 is 110 days. Hence the period would be 110X 72=7920 years; approximately 5000 b.c. The author has given this as 7000 b.c. I hope that the author will go through my comments and correct me and give clarifications where ever required.

Was Indian temple hit by ancient tsunami?

2005-09-22T17:35:00.000-07:00

Archaeologists find 2,000-year-old ruins in danger zone

Updated: 1:13 p.m. ET Sept. 21, 2005

BANGALORE, India - Archaeologists in southern India have discovered the ruins of an ancient Hindu temple that may have been destroyed centuries ago by a tsunami, an official said Wednesday.

The temple appears to have been built between the second century B.C. and the first century A.D. It was excavated this month just north of Mahabalipuram, a port town in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, by a team from the government Archaeological Survey of India, the team’s chief Thyagarajan Satyamurthy said.

The region where the temple was found is in the same area affected by the Dec. 26 Asian tsunami. But the hardest-hit areas of India were farther south near Nagappattinam.

“This is the earliest temple discovered in this region so far,” Satyamurthy said.

The archaeologists are trying to determine the date of the tsunami from sand and seashells found at the brick temple, dedicated to Lord Muruga, a Hindu god, Satyamurthy told The Associated Press.

He said there was more damage on the side of the temple facing the sea, and that the sand and shell deposits at the structure were not normally found so far inland.

Geophysicists at a government laboratory in southern Trivandrum city called them “palaeo-tsunami” deposits, he said.

Temple built upon temple
The temple was found one layer below a granite temple excavated by the same team in July, leading archaeologists to theorize that the Pallava kings, who ruled the region between A.D. 580 and 728, built the latter temple atop the remains of the older one.

The team also found stucco figurines, terra-cotta lamps, beads and roofing tiles. Similar articles and large bricks were typically used around the beginning of the first millennium, he said.

Just as an ancient tsunami may have ravaged the temple outside Mahabalipuram, last year’s Indian Ocean tsunami revealed other temples and monuments that had been buried for centuries.

But the ruins of this temple were not uncovered by the recent tsunami, and excavation did not begin until after the tsunami struck.

The finding also revived a debate over whether references in ancient literature to cities and towns being submerged by violent waves referred to a tsunami.

“Our discovery now poses very interesting questions not only about ancient Tamils but also about the history of tsunami,” Satyamurthy said.

India could have been cradle of civilisation

2005-09-09T17:52:00.000-07:00

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 09, 2005

KOLKATA: Could India’s oldest skull be the missing link between early man (Homo erectus) and modern humans (Home sapiens)?

The CT-scan report of the 600,000-year-old skull, found by the Geological Survey of India in 1982 from Narmada Valley, may shed a new light on the evolution of man, hope experts.

The scan on the skull was carried out at a city hospital on Wednesday.

Former GSI (Nagpur) director Arun Sonakia told TOI on Thursday that the scan report might reveal something extremely exciting. “We need some time to interpret the results. However, what we can say now is that it can reveal something very exciting... It can prove that India was also a cradle of civilisation,” Sonakia said.

According to the modern theory of evolution, the evolutionary lines of apes and early humans diverged around seven million years ago.

Some two million years ago, Homo erectus expanded out of Africa into Europe and Asia. Over the next 1.5 million years the populations of these three continents followed different evolutionary courses and became distinct species.

Europe’s became the Neanderthals, Asia’s remained Homo erectus, but Africa’s evolved into Homo sapiens, from where it spread again to the rest of the world.

Sonakia said the skull was not of a Homo sapiens. Although a morphological study of the skull had been done soon after its discovery, there was no internal study.

“Any internal study needed a CTscan. There are some sedimentations inside the skull. Once we remove the skull, it will crumble,” Sonakia said.

The geologist added that a study of the skull’s lobe structure, as revealed by the scan, can show which faculty of man was more developed at the time.

All interpretation will be done in association with experts from the Institute of Human Paleontology, France. Three experts from the institute — Henry de Lumley, Madamme Lumely and Emily Vialet — were present at the time of the scanning.

ASI unearths 1200-year-old Subrahmanya temple

2005-08-13T21:24:00.000-07:00

FOC

CHENNAI: The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has unearthed the ruins of a nearly 1,200-year-old temple, believed to be of the Pallava period, near the Tiger Cave in Mamallapuram.

The ASI excavators had recently come across a rock inscription with details about a grant made to a nearby temple. Based on this, they started excavation here one week ago, ASI officials here said.

Only 25 per cent of the temple remains, along with two more rock inscriptions belonging to the same period, have been unearthed so far, said T. Sathyamurthy, superintending archaeologist, ASI, Chennai circle, who is also the director of excavations. He said this is the second temple unearthed in Mamallapuram in the last one year.

“What we found are the remains of a temple built during the Pallava period. This discovery will be of public interest. The temple remains are located right on the beach and it would be a wonderful treasure for those who love archaeology,’’ Sathyamurthy said.

The ASI excavators have unearthed the plinths of the temple made out of granite stone and bricks and two pillars with Pallava period inscriptions. “We have not analysed the details of the inscription yet. But from the script it can be made out that the remains belong to the Pallava period,’’ Sathyamurthy said.

It would take some more time to unearth the complete remains as the preliminary data suggests existence of a huge temple beneath. “We will get a much clearer picture within seven to 10 days. We see chances of a bigger temple underneath and the excavation will take some more time,’’ he added.

Once the excavation is complete, the ASI would preserve the temple in its present condition. This, according to ASI officials, would add to the tourist attraction of Mamallapuram, one of the most important historic tourist spots in South India.

The recent excavations carried out by the ASI have raised the interests of archaeological enthusiasts in Mamallapuram. They believe more such temples of archaeological and historic value would be lying covered in Mamallapuram.

Remains of Subrahmanya temple found near Mamallapuram

2005-07-21T22:28:00.000-07:00

Author: T.S. Subramanian
Publication: The Hindu
Date: July 12, 2005

The remains of a Subrahmanya temple belonging to the Pallava period (circa 8th century A.D.) have been found on the beach close to the Tiger Cave, a few kilometres off Mamallapuram, near here.

The discovery has renewed the debate whether the temple was one among the Seven Pagodas that reportedly existed on Mamallapuram's shores that are famed for its Pallava monuments. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), Chennai Circle, had unearthed in February and March this year the massive remains of a Pallava temple a few hundred metres from the Shore Temple.

Now comes the latest discovery close to the Atiranachandesvara cave-temple, popularly called the Tiger Cave. "This temple may belong to an earlier period than the temple discovered close to the Shore Temple because it has a brick foundation. These bricks belong to the Pallava period," said T. Satyamuthy, Superintendent Archaeologist, ASI, Chennai Circle. The remains of this 1,200-year-old temple include two granite pillars. While one pillar bears the inscription of the Pallava king Dantivarman, and is dated to 813 A.D., the other pillar has an inscription of another Pallava king, Nandivarman III, and is dated to 858 A.D.

Speaks about donations

Both the inscriptions, in Tamil, speak about donations to the Subrahmanya temple, at a place called Thiruvizhchil — present-day Salavankuppam — where the Tiger Cave is situated. The pillar belonging to Nandivarman III's reign has a "trishul" engraved on top — a typical Pallava symbol. The ASI, Chennai Circle, which is excavating the temple, has also found a lot of bricks and potsherds from the ruins of the collapsed temple. A copper coin belonging to the Chola period was found on the surface.

A few hundred metres from the Tiger Cave is a big monolithic rocky outcrop. It has three inscriptions of the Rashtrakuta king Krishna III and the Chola kings Parantaka Chola and Kulotunga Chola. When S. Rajavelu, Epigraphist, ASI, read one among the three, he found that it belonged to the fourth regnal year of the Rashtrakuta king, Krishna III, who reigned in the 9th century A.D.

The inscription spoke about the existence of a Subrahmanya temple at Tiruvizhchil and the donation of land for maintaining the temple.

`Good result'

Mr. Rajavelu discovered a mound nearby and felt it might contain the ruins of the temple. There were surface indications to that effect too. Mr. Satyamurthy said that when the ASI excavated the mound situated about 100 metres from the sea, "we got a good result."

The ASI found the temple's plinth, which is made of sliced granite slabs. The temple could have had a square plan and it had an inner core, made of brick and rock. A small outer wall, made of brick, has been found. G. Thirumoorthy, Assistant Archaeologist, ASI, said this could be one of the earliest Subrahmanya temples found in Tamil Nadu, since the bricks found belonged to the early medieval period.

Mr. Thirumoorthy said incriptions belonging to three different dynasties — Pallavas, Rashtrakuta and Cholas — spoke about the existence of the Subrahmanya temple at Tiruvihchil. Mr. Rajavelu said the pillar, which had an inscription belonging to the seventh regnal year (813 A.D.) of Dantivarman, talks about a Brahmin woman named Vasanthanar, wife of Sri Kambabhattar of Sandilya Gothram, belonging to Manaiyur, near Tiruvallur, donating 16 "kazhanchu" (small balls of gold) to the Subrahmanya temple. The interest from this gold was meant to be used to maintain the temple's perpetual lamp.

The other pillar, with the inscription belonging to the 12th regnal year (858 A.D.) of another Pallava king, Nandivarman III, mentions that one Kirarpiriyan of Mamallapuram donated ten "kazhanchu" of gold to the temple.

The villagers and the village assembly should use the interest accrued from the gold to conduct the temple festival during the Tamil month of Karthigai, it said.

`Interesting' fact

According to P. Aravazhi, the temple builders had used a mixture of clay, brickbats and stone to provide stability to the foundation because the temple was built on beach sand.

"Although the Subrahmanya cult was popular in the form of Somaskanda panels during the Pallava period, it is interesting that a separate structural Subrahmanya temple of the Pallava period has been found so close to Mamallapuram," said Mr. Rajavelu.

Mr. Satyamurthy said the temple had existed up to the 13th Century, because the inscription belonging to Kulotunga Chola on the rocky outcrop mentioned Tiruvizhchil village.

1,300-year-old temple found at Mamallapuram

2005-07-21T22:25:00.000-07:00

Publication: The New Indian Express
Date: July 12, 2005

The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has unearthed the ruins of a nearly 1,300-year-old temple, believed to be of the Pallava period, near the Tiger Cave in Mamallapuram.

The ASI excavators had recently come across a rock inscription with details about a grant made to a nearby temple. Based on this, they started excavation here one week ago, ASI officials here said.

Only 25 per cent of the temple remains, along with two more rock inscriptions belonging to the same period, had been unearthed so far, T Sathyamurthy, Superintending Archaeologist, ASI, Chennai Circle, who is also the director of excavations, told this website’s newspaper on Monday. He said this is the second temple unearthed in Mamallapuram in the last one year.

‘‘What we found are the remains of a temple built during the Pallava period. This discovery will be of public interest. The temple remains are located right on the beach and it would be a wonderful treasure for those who love archaeology,’’ Sathyamurthy said.

The ASI excavators have unearthed the plinths of the temple made out of granite stone and bricks and two pillars with Pallava period inscriptions. ‘‘We have not analysed the details of the inscription yet. But from the script it has been made out that the remains belong to the Pallava period,’’ Sathyamurthy said.

It would take some more time to unearth the complete remains as the preliminary data suggested existence of a huge temple beneath. ‘‘We will get a much more clear picture within seven to 10 days. We see chances of a bigger temple underneath and the excavation will take some more time,’’ he added.

Once the excavation is completed, the ASI would preserve the temple in its present condition. This, according to ASI officials, would add to the tourist attraction of Mamallapuram, one of the most important historic tourist spots in South India.

The recent excavations carried out by the ASI have raised the interest of archaeological enthusiasts on Mamallapuram. They believe more such temples of archaeological and historic value would be lying covered in Mamallapuram.

The Hindu history of the Arabs

2005-07-13T04:39:00.000-07:00

By Sudhakar Raje

SHRI M.S.N. Menon’s Desert in the Life of the Arab (Organiser, May 8, 2005) shows how effectively Muslim Arabs have erased their pre-Islamic past from the world’s memory. His claim that “the Arab had no past to think of, or to be proud about” is astounding, and it is necessary to put the record straight, because Arabia has had an astonishingly long and rich Hindu history.

How far back into the dim past it stretches can be seen from the strange belief that when Hajrat Adam came down from the Garden of Eden (that is, heavens), he first descended into India, from where he journeyed to Arabia. Having provided this amazing tit-bit Bharatiya Sanskriti Kosh (Marathi, 1982) uses it as the basis to observe, “Therefore the Arabs consider India their fatherland, Pitru Bhumi.” (Unfortunately, more than a thousand years of Islamic aggressions on India have belied this pious statement. Rather, they stand testimony to the fact that Muslims have always looked upon India not as a land to be revered, but as a land to be ravished.)

Such fantasies apart, evidence exists to show that there was a strong Hindu presence in pre-Islamic Arabia, which, in turn, was reflected in an equally strong presence of Hinduism itself. This evidence is available in an anthology of ancient Arabic poetry titled Se’-arul Oqul. Page 197 of this anthology contains a poem praising the Vedas composed by a poet named Labi bin Akhtab bin Turfa, who lived 2300 years before Mohammed, that is, about 4000 years ago.

Much later, yet five centuries before Mohammed, there was a poet named Jarkham bin Tai, who wrote a beautiful poem on Lord Krishna. Then there was another pre-Islamic Arab poet by name Noman bin Adi, who has written a poem in praise of the great ancient Hindu king Vikramaditya. An article in the commemoration issue of a journal of Ujjain published on the occasion of the 2000th anniversary of the Vikram Era contains a description of Vikramaditya’s rule over Arabia. Seven such poems of pre-Islamic times are still extant, says Bharatiya Sanskriti Kosh.

Coming down to Mohammed’s own time, a poem by Umar bin Hashsham eulogises Lord Shiva, specifically mentioning him by the name ‘Mahadeva’. This poem appears on page 265 of the Se’-arul Oqul anthology. Hashsham was also known as Abul Haqam, which was his family name. He was Mohammed’s uncle, but there were sharp religious differences between the two. Because of this hostility Mohammed’s followers changed his name from Abul Haqam, which means ‘father of knowledge’ to Abul Jahal, which means ‘father of fools’. Hashsham refused to become a Muslim, and was finally killed in a battle with Muslims.

This Literary evidence is strengthened by social evidence in the form of a prosperous trading community called Sabaeans that lived in the South of Arabia. These Sabaeans practised “an ancient natural religion”, in which “the sun, the moon and the planets” figured prominently. They “believed in the migration of the soul and in great world periods.....” (Encyclopedia Americana.) Rebirth and Yugas are both prominent Hindu tenets.

Then there was another pre-Islamic Arab poet by name Noman bin Adi, who has written a poem in praise of the great ancient Hindu king Vikramaditya. An article in the commemoration issue of a journal of Ujjain published on the occasion of the 2000th anniversary of the Vikram Era contains a description of Vikramaditya’s rule over Arabia.

Even the First Encyclopedia of Islam attests to the high standard the Sabaean civilisation had achieved. It says archaeology has uncovered “sculptures and remains of colonnades, palaces, temples, city walls, public works, specially water works etc., which confirm the brilliant picture of Sabaean culture”. (Vol. VII.)

Whether dating from Sabaean times (800 b.c. onwards) or even earlier, there are pink or saffron-coloured stone structures and remains of deserted cities of pre-Islamic times scattered in the desert wastes of Arabia. In his book With Lawrence of Arabia Lowell Thomas gives a graphic account of one such city called Petra, where “several hundred thousand people must once have lived...”. He describes a magnificent temple near the city, which looked like “a delicate and limpid rose”, and “was carved from the cliff almost 2000 years ago”.

And this leads one to the question of questions: was Kaba, the present holy of Islamic holies, a former Shiva temple? In his well-researched book Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them Sita Ram Goel has dealt with this subject in some detail. He begins by saying that initially he had rejected the claim, but some facts that he came to know later had compelled him to revise his opinions, and, although still unsure about the Shiva temple, he “cannot resist the conclusion that it was a hallowed place of Hindu pilgrimage”.

The tradition of Kaba being a Shiva temple was very much alive in the times of Guru Nanak, and is preserved in the Makke-Madine di Goshati (ed. Dr. Kulwant Singh, Patiala, 1988). During his travels in the Middle East Guru Nanak visited Mecca, where he had religious discussions with Islamic theologians, and he reportedly told them, “Mecca is an ancient place of pilgrimage, and there is a Linga of Lord Mahadeva here”.

Famous Chinese traveller Huen Tsang has also written that during the glorious reign of King Harsha India’s influence, culture and religion had extended upto Mecca, where Shiva’s black Linga was revered by the Arabs. The late Dr S.B. Varnekar, a reputed Sanskritist, had written to this writer that he had heard the term ‘Meccashwar’, though not seen it used.

There is a clear presence of Sanskrit words in the Arabic language, albeit in Arabicised form. More than a score such words can be identified without much trouble. In fact, Dr N.R. Waradpande, a scholar of Sanskrit, wrote to this writer: “If I get a dictionary of Arabic with pronunciation of Arabic words in Romen or Nagari script, I will be able to find more Sanskrit words in Arabic than in English.”

‘Hind’ was a popular name among pre-Islamic Arabs. Many years ago Arabic Scholar Dr Jeelany had written in this journal that many Arab women had this name. One of Mohammed’s wives, as well as one of his aunts, were named Hind. The original name of Laila of the well-known Laila-Majnu love story was also Hind.

Finally, the Hindu history of Arabia far pre-dates the comparatively recent times when most of the Arab peninsula became Saudi Arabia, while a small stretch of the southern coastal region became a group of small states known as United Arab Emerates (UAE). This needs to be stated because Bahrain in the UAE was clearly an outpost of the Vedic civilisation. Scholars surmise that Bahrain was called Dilmun in ancient times. In his book In search of the Cradle of Civilisation David Frawley speculates that Dilmun was probably “a colony of the Indus-Saraswati civilisation”.

All this should suffice to show that Shri Menon’s critique of the Arabs is not valid for Arabs per se, but only for Muslim Arabs. The Arabs certainly had a past, and it was glorious enough to be proud of—had not Islam taught them to hate anything pre-Islamic as anti-Islamic and to wipe it off their collective consciousness.

And even this hatred for the infidel took time to take root. Actually the early Arab Muslims were eager learners, and they did not hide their admiration of the Hindus, from whom they sought to learn as many things as the Hindus could teach them. This admiration is amply evident in the accounts of contemporary travellers, chroniclers and historians, such as Sulaiman the Merchant, Abu Zaid Saifi, Abu Dulf bin Muhalhil, Burzurg bin Shahriyar, Masudi, Istakhari, Ibn-i-Hauqal Muqaddasi, al-Biruni, and Ibn-i-Battuta. Their records reveal the admiration the Arabs had for Indian/Hindu arts and sciences, and their influence on Arab civilisation—even after the advent of Islam. Equipped by their Hindu mentors, they became a conduit for the transmission of Hindu knowledge to the West. How well they learnt from the Hindus what they taught to the West is demonstrated by a tiny but tell-tale detail—the Hindu numerals they taught the Westerners became known in the West as Arabic numerals.

Ancient complex bigger than Nalanda found near Raipur

2005-06-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

The Telegraph - Calcutta

Temple titan with carnal carvings
R. KRISHNA DAS

Raipur, June 20: An ancient temple complex four times bigger than Nalanda with stone carvings not seen even in Khajuraho has been discovered at Sirpur, a town on the Mahanadi near here.

About 200 mounds, 100 Buddha vihars, four Jain vihars and more than 100 Shiva temples spread across 25 sq km were found during excavations that began in February but have had to be suspended for the monsoon.

While this makes it the biggest temple complex of the sixth and seventh centuries to be uncovered so far, the finding is significant not for size alone.

For the first time, stone carvings depicting sexual activity among animals have been found. “This is the rarest of carvings seen in Indian archaeology,” said K.K. Muhhamed, superintending archaeologist with the Archaeological Survey of India. These are not seen even at Khajuraho and Ellora, he stressed.

A.K. Sharma, who supervised the digging on assignment from the state government, called for Sirpur’s inclusion in Unesco’s World Heritage List. “There are many unique features that give Sirpur a distinct identity on the Indian archaeological map,” he said.

The town about 80 km east of the Chhattisgarh capital is one of a few medieval heritage sites in India with specimens of Shaiva, Vaishnava, Buddha and Jain architecture, Sharma added. A 1.8-metre Shivalinga, believed to be the tallest in the state, has been found during the recent excavations.

The digging was to have been started in 2000, but got delayed when Sharma was directed to lead a team that conducted the excavation in Ayodhya following a court order to search for remains of a Ram temple at the disputed site.

Agreeing with Sharma, Muhhamed said Sirpur gave temple architecture in India a turning point. The Laxman Temple here is one of the country’s finest brick temples and the only one of its time, after Bhitargaon in Kanpur, that has a shikhara.

The shikhara or kailash was not seen in temples built before the 7th century and its construction was a turning point in temple architecture, Muhhamed iterated.

Sirpur was an important centre of Buddhism from the 6th to the 10th century, and Chinese scholar and traveller Hiuen Tsang visited it in the 7th century.

A Buddha vihar with underground rooms and a six-foot Buddha statue was discovered here during earlier excavations. Mahashivgupt Balarjun, the most famous ruler of South Kosal of which Sirpur was the capital, was a Shaivaite but patronised the Buddha vihar.

The Chhattisgarh government is now planning to develop Sirpur as a tourist destination and has proposed a fund of Rs 4 crore. The Centre is offering another Rs 5 crore. Japan and other countries where Buddhism spread will also be tapped.

Vedic "Aryans" and the Origins of Civilization A Literary and Scientific Analysis

2005-06-13T17:42:00.000-07:00

Author: N. S. Rajarama, and David Frawley
Reviewer: Dr. K. D. Prithipaul

The impact of colonization during the British domination of India was not merely political and economic. It extended to the collective psychology of the people and in the latter's perception of its own culture. This was noticeable in the manner in which the educated Indian citizen came to view his or her past. The myth that quickly gained credence in academic circles arose from the Western Indologists' view that ancient Indian history was initiated by an invasion of Aryans coming from somewhere in Central Asia. Several generations of Indian scholars, honestly mistaken by the assumption that the learned philologists trained in the scientific and "objective" methods of research in Western academe, conscientiously taught and wrote the history of their country by taking the myth of the Aryan invasion as a starting point.

Of late, however, some Indian historians and Indologists have deemed it necessary, under the imperative of truth-seeking, to reexamine the premises (1) of the Western philologists' claim of the veracity of an Aryan-invasion theory and (2) of its cultural consequences. Drs. N. S. Rajaram and D. Frawley have, in this context, brought forth a cogent, coherent argument that purports to lie to rest once and for all the erroneous theory of the Aryan invasion of India around 2000 BCE. To buttress their thesis the authors use the resources of their deep knowledge of the Sanskrit language, their acquaintance with the most recent archaeological discoveries, their expertise in mathematics and in coíputing science. In short, they bring to a focus a remarkable synthesis of several "disciplines" to unlock the arcane secrets of Sanskrit texts that the early Indologists overlooked. The evidence thus brought forth from several original sources provides sound reasons to refute the earlier invasion theory. The dominant idea that gives the clue to their theme is that while the Aryans have a literature, but no history or geography, the Harappans have a sophisticated urban civilization, a history and geography, but no language or literature. The paradox disappears when the two are assimilated into a unitive history and geography. It becomes logical then to argue for North India as the original home of the Aryans. The authors further argue for a reversal of the movement of the Aryans: they moved "out of" India into the outlying areas, in ancient Persia and beyond. This new theory receives support from archaeology and from a comparative analysis of Mesopotamian and Egyptian mathematics with Vedic mathematics. It is evident that the polyvalent learning of the authors provides a vastly superior key to the secrets of the past than the mere gratuitous speculation of earlier Indologists, of Friedrich Max Muller in particular. In fact the authors do pay a worthy tribute to Max Muller for his many attainments and for his contributions to the discovery of India by Western scholars. At the same time, faithful to their own insights and convictions, based on their own findings, they demonstrate how the foundation of the invasion theory was more an expression of the prejudice fed by racist theories that were spawned by Western academic anthropology and supported by the triumphant colonial enterprises of West European countries.

The significance of this work consists in its being an important confirmation of Indian history having at last decisively come into its own, freed from the distortions of the arbitrary normative conclusions of earlier Western historians. The authors pay tribute to other scholars - D. Sethna, S. Talageri, S. B. Roy, K. C. Varma, and others - whose contributions have altered the perception of ancient Indian history with the evidence that it actually had an indigenous genesis. With a fair measure of self-reliance and confidence, they even propound the thesis that the early Vedic civilization was not merely a locally restricted way of life, but actually spread out to other parts of West Asia and Africa. A welcome aspect of this work is its refutation of certain Marxist Indian historians who persist in their attachment to the superstitious theories bequeathed by the Indologists of Max Muller's generation. The authors rightly point out that "not one significant contribution has been made by Indian historians belonging to the elite 'establishment'." At the same time they make it clear that they are not driven by the need to write an apology of Indian chauvinistic nationalism. Theirs is a statement of veracity based on hard evidence. At the same time the authors recognize that their work is not the last say in the ongoing process of unveiling the truth about ancient Indian history. They acknowledge that gaps still remain in the task of reinterpreting Vedic history. Nevertheless, their contribution provides substantial material that will enable the historians of India to work towards the common goal of knowing what happened at the beginning of the Vedic civilization and to collaborate with one another to bring about a synthetic reconstruction of the historical integrity of the country.

Vedic "Aryans" and the Origins of Civilization stands out as a major original and fresh statement of what India was. It is lucidly written. The intricacies of the mathematical discussions and of Vedic linguistics, are expressed with clarity in a language which will appeal to both the scholar and the layperson. This is indeed a felicitous way of writing about a difficult and abstruse subject. The book is commendable for its style, the seriousness of its purpose, and for the originality of the thesis that claims to establish that the moral and intellectual order that marked the early Vedic culture arose in that part of India irrigated by the Sarasvati River, a region that then stood as a greenhouse in which were grown the saplings that were subsequently transplanted and grew into the trees of civilizations in the surrounding lands.

The reader must rush to read this very well written book on a subject that will fascinate even those unacquainted with the history of India.

The book can be ordered from: World Heritage Press, 1270 St-Jean, St-Hyacinthe, Canada J2S 8M2

Hindus have not learnt from history

2005-05-04T05:50:00.000-07:00

By Arya Das

Madhya Pradesh has a glorious history, which is traced in the Rigveda. Lord Rama had spent a major part of his life in Chhattisgarh and Orissa among the tribals. Right from the 4th century b.c. to the 17th century a.d. the state witnessed the rules of kings from famous dynasties: the Mauryas, the Sungas, the Kanvas, the Satvahanas, the Khatrapas, the Nagas, the Guptas, the Kalchuris, the Chalukyas, the Rashtrakutas, the Parmars and the Bundelas. The rulers of those dynasties were so powerful that they became legends in their own time.

The warrior and scholar Raja Bhoja, who is believed to have ruled in the 11th century a.d., is a household name in India. Raja Bhoja was a warrior and a Sanskrit scholar who wrote 23 books. Undoubtedly he was one of the greatest architects in the world. The remnants of the massive lake near Bhojpur temple, which once covered an area of 273 square miles, can still be seen. Every district of Madhya Pradesh echoes the heroic tells of Hindu kings and monarchs.

A big, 8-feet long rock carrying the order of King Ashoka, who was then the Governor of Vidisha, is preserved at Sanchi. King Ashoka ostracised some Buddhist monks for their alleged involvement in creating a schism within Buddhism. Whatever may be the greatness of our past rulers, they had committed the same mistake year after year—internecine wars, which allowed the smooth entry of foreign powers or their proxies. The ruins of Hindu forts strewn across the state echo the stories of chivalry, sacrifice and betrayal by kings and monarchs. Many great Hindu kings of central India actually met their end in these wars.

After the fall of Moghul Empire, the Gonds established their supremacy in Bhopal and in parts of Malwa region. The Gonds were butchered in one of the most treacherous acts committed by the Afghan soldier, Dost Muhammad Khan, who founded Bhopal in the 18th century a.d. In a treacherous move, Dost Muhammad entered into a treaty with the Gonds and invited them for a feast near a river in the Gond’s stronghold, Jagdishpur. He butchered them when the unsuspecting Gonds got drunk after a hearty dinner. Dost Muhammad renamed Jagdishpur as Islamnagar and established his capital there.

Madhya Pradesh's history is replete with stories of Hindu leaders who paid a heavy price for their war ethics and for their selfish agenda of inviting outsiders to kill their own brethren. Dost was hired by Hindu kings to punish their adversaries. The end of the legendary Raja Bhoja was caused by the Hindu kings only. The combined armies of the neighbouring Hindu kings defeated Raja Bhoja and opened the path to Afghan and Moghul rulers to enter central India.

Hindus have not learnt anything from history because they don’t know how to preserve historical monuments as a reminder of their past follies. History in India has not been written and taught in the manner to correct the past follies, but to repeat the past mistakes over and over again. Britain and France preserve every stone marked with their nation’s glory through authentic documentation. Even the British have documented the loot they shipped away from India and elsewhere.

Madhya Pradesh has now started a new chapter by preserving its glorious history. In a recent policy initiative, the state government has identified places which still hold the memory of brave kings who ruled central India through the ages. In the past two years the government has developed good roads linking places of tourist interest. The government has also made a survey of all important tourist centres in Madhya Pradesh to develop tourism clusters in the state.

The chairman, Nitish Bhardwaj, of Madhya Pradesh State Tourism and Development Corporation, is out to put Madhya Pradesh on the world tourism map. His role as Krishna and Rama in mythological serials will help market pilgrim tourism in the state. Nitish Bhardwaj has emphasised the need for tourism clusters, “The famed sculptures of Khajuraho temples cannot sustain the needs for expanding the tourism industry, and thus it is imperative to connect the adjoining areas.”

The state is out to salvage history from the verge of destruction. Places associated with great kings and monarchs since 4th century b.c. will be preserved and documented so that the local people know their history and culture well to boost their self-respect and confidence and make their state prosperous. While technology makes the society progress, history builds the foundation of the society.

Aryans were Indians, they did not invade

2005-04-26T17:59:00.000-07:00

By R.A. Goel

Under the pretence of detoxification of the alleged saffronisation of school educational texts, many self-proclaimed intellectuals and acclaimed fellow-travellers are pushing the questionable but long-held fictitious propaganda, which is offensive as much to the truth as to the self-respect of even the sleeping, sluggish, Indian society.

1. A classical instance of the canard is the continued plugging in of the thesis that the Indo-Aryans were not the sons of the soil of India and that they were as much intruders or invaders as the other recorded historical invaders and plunderers from Alexander onwards.

2. Aryans of India possessed the earliest known book and spoken words in the entire world literature as their Vedas. It is amazing that it does not strike as extremely odd to the so-called intellectuals and rationalists that if the early Aryans of India had their original abode elsewhere outside this country, it would be elementary to expect the knowledge contained in the Vedas to have necessarily pre-existed in such land of their alleged origin. So, the universally accepted proposition that the Vedas were the earliest known literature of the world, both spoken and recorded, does establish that no other people anywhere possessed the capacity and the treasury and knowledge of the Vedas-like literature. Accordingly, when no other foreign people outside India had Veda-like literature at their command, it would be calumny to persist with the awkward proposition that people of some foreign land were the ancestors of the Indo-Aryans and that the Aryans poured into or streamed into India from other lands or regions of the world.

3. A few more aspects of the ridiculous thesis that Aryans entered India from elsewhere are intended to be highlighted in the subsequent discussions.

4. An obstinate myth in circulation for centuries is regarding the origin of Aryans being from land outside India.

We can get an insight from the extracts of such an attempt from historian R.S. Sharma's history textbook of Class XI entitled Ancient India (p. 70) published by NCERT.

“Originally the Aryans seem to have lived somewhere in the region stretching from southern Russia to Central Asia. Certain names of animals, such as goats, dogs, horses, etc. and names of certain plants such as pine, maple, etc. are similar to one another in all the Indo-European languages. They show that the Aryans were acquainted with the rivers and forests. Curiously enough, common words exist only in a few Aryan languages for mountains although the Aryans crossed many hills.”

The Aryans had a concept of universalism not advanced by any people of that age; they glorified non-violence, then not preached or practiced anywhere in the world.

5. The facts, however strongly suggest the foregoing hypothesis to be altogether fictitious and imaginary:

Commonality of linguistic words, roots, phrases or even grammar may exist amongst English, Greek, Italian, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit or other languages of the world just as simple words like father, mother, daughter, etc. would show but there is hardly any evidence that Englishmen, Italians, Arabs had common ancestors in any known historical era.

Noted historian, Vincent A. Smith, has clearly concluded the proposition that “Language was no proof of commonality of blood”. (Oxford History of India by Vincent A. Smith, 1957, p. 40).

It is sheer superstitious prejudice and continued misplaced belief in myths with their least factual or historic foundation that tempts or drives even learned people and scholars into such superstitious labyrinths.

6. It is conceded in the history textbook by R.S. Sharma, NCERT, 1999 (p. 71) as follows:

“A little earlier than 1500 b.c. the Aryans appeared in India. We do not find clear and definite archaeological traces of their advent.”

7. The above clear admission by the proponents of the theory of non-Indian origin of Aryans, despite all endeavours to paint Aryans as foreigners immigrating into India, is really astounding. These scholars themselves admit the absolute absence of any trace of archaeological evidence in their possession in support of this much-hyped and persistently repeated myth.

8. It is a surreptitious suggestion and a mere naïve conjecture and surmise in gross distortion of truth or history seemingly with the blind purpose to equate other foreign people entering and invading India as being of the same kind of intruders that Aryans were wrongly suggested to be.

9. It is our intent to show in further write-ups that Aryans were natives of India, and not in the least intruders or invaders or immigrants or migrants into India at any point of time in history or of pre-historic period. This caricature of history, being absurdly carried out by known learned historians persistently, must in the interest of truth and historical values cease unless these scholars have pursuits other than truth in the matter.

This matter can hardly be put on the back burner any further. It has already done grave injustice to the Aryans and to the people of India. Pricking of this prejudicial and false hypothesis is essential to show its absolutely imaginary origin.

10. How the hypothesis of Aryan intrusion into India came to be widely postulated during the efforts to reconstruct history of India needs some exposition:

1. Oxford History of India (p. 32), 1957, says: “From the Vedic hymns it has been possible to piece together a reasonably coherent picture of Aryan invaders on their first impact with the black, flat-nosed Dasyus who comprised their native opponents and subjects.”

2. “In fact, the accepted belief in the Indo-Aryan immigration from Central Asia depends largely on the interpretation of geographical allusions in the Rig Veda and Yajurveda. Direct testimony to the assumed fact is lacking and no tradition of an early home beyond the frontier survives in India.”

3. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 14, (p. 228) records: “From the 4th century b.c. two scripts were in issue-Kharosthi in the north-west and the more important Brahmi elsewhere.”

4. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol.14 (p. 228) holds:

“Trade, for example, between the Roman Empire and South-east Asia via south India was considerable in the early centuries of the Christian era.”

5. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 18 (p. 630) mentions:

“The Vedas are in a sense hymns, but the gods to which they refer are not persons but manifestations of the ultimate truth and reality.”

6. The Aryans had no slave system; they reared cows. They were agriculturists and not pastoral or indulging in animal husbandry like the Asians. They had no feudal landlords; they never attacked or enslaved any people or country, not even Ceylon; they had no purdah; they cremated their dead while all the remaining communities of the world buried their dead. The script of their language was from left to right, unlike the Semitics or Iranians whose script ran from right to left. They had village democratic units and no kings or lords or chiefs like Central Asians or Mongols or Tartars. These features are in sharp contradistinction to the contemporary Central Asian or Arabic or Roman or Greek traditions or habits or institutions of these people. The Aryans could not, therefore, ever have been their constituents at any point of time in history.

7. The Aryan had a concept of universalism not advanced by any people of those eras; they glorified non-violence, not preached or practiced anywhere in the world. What more proof is required to show their distinct identity from any other people of those days?

8. The Vedic people had no founding Prophet unlike Abraham of the Jews, Christ of the Christians, Mohammed of the Muslims and many others. This shows their absolute exclusive personality, different from other peoples or faiths.

9. There is no concept of an ‘infidel’ or ‘Jehad’ or ‘holy war’ in the Aryan culture, civilisation or faith. The entire world outside the Aryan fold considers people different from themselves as heretics. The Aryans, therefore, had abiding gentleness and humanism, not known or possessed by others.

10. Vedic women were scholars and also participated in village sabhas and vidvat-mandals. Such respect and authority given to women was absolutely unknown to Central Asians of those days. Never have been a group of people belonging to such Central Asian communities shown such respect.

11. The Aryans, unlike other people, had no concept or tradition of having a standing army. The Aryans were republicans; the term jana occurs at about 275 places in the Rig Veda. Republicanism was unknown to the rest of Asia in those days.

12. Muir’s History (Sanskrit version, Part-II) records: “No Sanskrit books, howsoever old, mention Aryans as being of non-Indian origin. There is also no hint or evidence to show or suggest that the Rig Veda mentions dasa’s (slaves) or asuras as people belonging as aborigines of India.

13. Bal Gangadhar Tilak clearly admitted to Umesh Chander Vidya Ratan that Aryans hailed from the Arctic and that (he) Tilak had read only the translation of the Vedas by Western authors, and not the Vedas translated or commented upon by the (original) Hindus. Tilak, therefore, admitted that he could not clearly vouchsafe for the authenticity of his theory.

14. Jawaharlal Nehru in his book Discovery of India (p. 92) mentioned that Plotinus (a.d. 205-270), an Iranian and other philosophers came to study Indian philosophy, including the Upanishads. From them, these ideas also reached Saint Augustine (a.d. 354-430)-the greatest of Latin Church fathers, and through Augustine the Aryan philosophy thus influenced the Christianity of the day.

15. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 18 (p. 972) the blood group B prevalent in India is found elsewhere in the world in eastern Asia or India or Africa but is not in any substantial existence in Europe or Central Asia. The Aryans could not have, therefore, emanated from Central Asia or Europe.

16. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 6 (p. 292) says: “Although in appearance the majority of Indian people look like Europeans, in blood type they are similar to Mogoloid neighbours to the east who are quite distinct from Central Asia (or people of the Steppes of the Siberia of erstwhile USSR).

17. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 1 (p. 34) again holds:

“Type B blood, high in Asia with a maximum in northern India, is low in Europe and in Africa.” This also goes to show that the Aryans of India did not migrate from either Europe or Africa.

18. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 10 (p. 722) admits that “the assumption that the people whose languages are related, or also related racially is spurious.”

19. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 21 (p. 31) makes the following admission regarding the origin of the Aryans in India:

“Theories of the origin of the Aryans in India relate to the question of what has been called the Indo-European homeland. In the 17th and 18th centuries, European scholars who first studied Sanskrit were struck by the similarity in its syntax and vocabulary to Greek and Latin. This resulted in the theory that there had been a common ancestry for these and other related languages, which came to be called the Indo-Europeans group of languages. This, in turn, resulted in the notion that the Indo-European-speaking people had a common homeland from which they had migrated to various parts of Asia and Europe. This theory led to unlimited speculation which continues today, regarding the original homeland of Aryans and the date of their dispersal from it. The early history of India is still beset by ‘the Aryan problem’ which often clouds a genuine search for historical insight into this period.”

11. The time has come now when, as per German philosopher Rudolf Karl Bultmann's advice, the demystification and demythologisation of the Aryan ingress into or their alleged invasion of ancient India can no longer be avoided. We have to expose its absolute hollowness as well as its fictitious origin. This matter can hardly be put on the back burner any further. It has already done grave injustice to the Aryans and to the people of India. Pricking of this prejudicial and false hypothesis is essential to show its absolutely imaginary origin. Its continuous repetition is obstinate, motivated by a fatal disregard of the truth. The habit is merely in line with the imitative peculiar to Indian people’s trait of self-denigration. It is misconceived modernism and false rationalism. The entire enlightened world has stopped subscribing to this myth already.

12. History has established that Tamilians, Dravidians and the so-called northern Indians had a common ancestral script, the Brahmi. Dravidians and Aryans, even if a little physically different in appearance, are not different racial people in blood group or other genetics of importance. Nambudiri Brahmins of Kerala show the classical case of Aryans’ and Dravidians’ merger of identities.

Aryans had no practice of untouchability. Caste system was not known to the Aryans. It was an aberration of much later times dating to the dark period of Indian history following the invasions by Huns and Shakas that led to the caste syndrome. In the Vedic and Aryan regimes, the alleged Shudras even became rulers and kings when they acquired such faculties.

The Aryans are indigenous people of India inasmuch as Chinese are of China or Arabs are of Arabia. The story of their intrusion into India was fabricated by some foreigners deliberately to justify their aggression, brutalities, invasions, suppression, and enslavement of India in the past two millennia. The Aryans alone have the proud heritage of belonging to this ancient land and its eclectic as also syncretic universalism. They sent out the message of peace and brotherhood for the entire world’s peoples’ progress and prosperity (sarve bhavantu sukhin). Yes, but then the Aryans shall not accept hegemony by others or any further vilification to the effect that they invaded India at any point of time. They are the original people of India or Aryavarta or Hindustan or Bharat, call it what you may.

(The writer is a retired engineer-in-chief and can be contacted at 630, Sector 16-A, Faridabad, Haryana.)

More temples pop out of sea-bed

2005-03-31T17:03:00.000-08:00

Statesman News Service

CHENNAI, March 31. — After the excitement of discovering man made rock structures under sea off Mahabalipuram coast, the excavation team of the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) has now unearthed traces of two more temples on shore.
Adjoining the Shore Temple, these findings could perhaps lend credence to legends about ‘Seven Pagodas (temples)’ having stood on this historic spot, once a flourishing port town under the Pallavas.

“We are presently excavating the remains of two structural temples on shore, both to the south of the Shore Temple. They appear to be similar in size to the Shore Temple. And, linking these discoveries to our earlier excavations under sea where we found man made rock structures, there is enough evidence to suggest that there are more submerged temples built during the Pallava period,” Dr Alok Tripathi, deputy superintending archeologist, ASI, in charge of the underwater excavations off the Mahabalipuram coast, told mediapersons here.

He explained that excavations of one of the temples came up with a 8 x 8 square metre garbhagriha (sanctum sanctorum),’ and an entrance porch in front facing the east towards the sea. After an open courtyard of 15 feet width, a two-metre thick prakara wall had been dug up.

“We also found a large number of architectural fragments and mouldings including parts of a shikara (the top of a temple),” carved segments form the prakara and other parts,” Mr Tripathi said, adding that the temple was 20 metres wide and 25 metres long. Excavations are also on near three rocks bearing marks of human activity.
“One of these rocks has a superstructure, which indicates another structural temple,” said Mr Tripathi. The team also found chisels, perhaps used by the workers, and a well made of terracotta rings. The walls, not surprisingly, extended into the sea. “Some rock portions get exposed during low tide,” said the ASI official, adding that the excavation generated useful information about the construction of structural temples and would also throw light on the causes of destruction of coastal monuments.

New archaeological findings and River Saraswati

2005-03-15T16:33:00.000-08:00

Dr Dinesh Agarwal

Saraswati River Discovered

It is well known that in the Rig Veda, the honour of the greatest and the holiest of rivers was not bestowed upon the Ganga, but upon Saraswati, now a dry river, but once a mighty flowing river all the way from the Himalayas to the ocean across the Rajasthan desert. The Ganga is mentioned only once, while the Saraswati is mentioned at least 60 times. Extensive research by the late Dr Wakankar has shown that the Saraswati changed her course several times, going completely dry around 1900 b.c. The latest satellite data combined with field archaeological studies have shown that the Rig Vedic Saraswati had stopped being a perennial river long before 3000 b.c.

As Paul-Henri Francfort of CNRS, Paris recently observed, “...we now know, thanks to the field work of the Indo-French expedition that when the proto-historic people settled in this area, no large river had flowed there for a long time.”

The proto-historic people he refers to are the early Harappans of 3000 b.c. But satellite photos show that a great prehistoric river that was over 7 km. wide did indeed flow through the area at one time. This was the Saraswati described in the Rig Veda. Numerous archaeological sites have also been located along the course of this great prehistoric river thereby confirming the Vedic accounts. The great Saraswati that flowed “from the mountain to the sea” is now seen to belong to a date long anterior to 3000 b.c. This means that the Rig Veda describes the geography of north India long before 3000 b.c. All this shows that the Rig Veda must have been in existence no later than 3500 b.c. (Aryan Invasion of India: The Myth and the Truth by N.S. Rajaram)

The Ganga is mentioned only once, while the Saraswati is mentioned at least 60 times.

River Saraswati in Rig Veda

The river called Saraswati is the most important of the rivers mentioned in the Rig Veda. The image of this ‘great goddess stream’ dominates the text. It is not only the most sacred river, but also the goddess of wisdom. She is said to be the mother of the Vedas.

A few Rig Vedic hymns which mention Saraswati river are presented below:

“Ambitame naditame devitame Saraswati (II.41.16)

(The best mother, the best river, the best goddess, Saraswati)

“Maho arnah Saraswati pra cetayati ketuna dhiyo visva vi-rajati (I.3.12)

(Saraswati, like a great ocean, appears with her ray; she rules all inspirations)

“Ni tva dadhe vara a prthivya Ilays-pade sudinatve ahnam: drsa-dvatyam manuse Apayayam Saraswatyam revad agne didhi (III.23.4)

(We set you down, oh sacred fire, at the most holy place on earth, in the land of Ila, in the clear brightness of the days. On the Drishadvati, the Apaya and the Saraswati rivers, shine out brilliantly for men)

“Citra id raja rajaka id anyake sarasvatim anu; parjanya iva tatanadhi vrstya sahasram ayuta dadat (VIII.21.18)

(Splendour is the king, all others are princes, who dwell along the Saraswati river. Like the rain-god abounding with rain, he grants a thousand times ten thousand cattle)

“Saraswati like a bronze city: ayasi puh; surpassing all other rivers and waters: visva apo mahina sindhur anyah; pure in her course from the mountains to the sea: sucir yati girbhya a samudrat (VII.95.1-2)”

All this indicates that the composers of the Vedic literature were quite familiar with the Saraswati river, and were inspired by its beauty and its vastness that they composed several hymns in her praise and glorification. This also indicates that the Vedas are much older than the Mahabharata period which mentions Saraswati as a dying river.

While the direct connection between the late Indus script (1600 b.c.) and the Brahmi script could not be definitely established earlier, more and more inscriptions have been found all over the country in the last few years, dating 1000 b.c., 700 b.c., and so on.

Decipherment of Indus Script

Dr S.R. Rao, who has deciphered the Indus script, is former head of Archaeological Survey of India, a renowned marine archaeologist, has been studying archaeology since 1948, and has discovered and excavated numerous Indus sites. He has authored several monumental works on Harappan civilisation and Indus script. To summarise his method of decipherment of Indus script, he assigned to each basic letter of Indus the same sound-value as the West Asian letter, which closely resembled it. After assigning these values to the Indus letters, he proceeded to try to read the inscriptions on the Indus seals. The language that emerged turned out to be an ‘Aryan’ one, belonging to the Sanskrit family. The people who resided at Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and other sites were culturally Aryan and this is confirmed by the decipherment of the Harappan script and its identity with Sanskrit family. The Harappan culture was a part of a continuing evolution of the Vedic culture, which had developed on the banks of Saraswati river. And it should be rightly termed as Vedic-Saraswati civilisation.

Among the many words yielded by Dr Rao’s decipherment are the numerals: aeka, tra, chatus, panta, happta/sapta, dasa, dvadasa and sata (1,3,4,5,7,10,100) and the names of Vedic personalities like Atri, Kasyapa, Gara, Manu, Sara, Trita, Daksa, Druhu, Kasu, and many common Sanskrit words like, apa (water), gatha, tar (saviour), trika, da, dyau (heaven), dashada, anna (food), pa (protector), para (supreme), maha, mahat, moks, etc.

While the direct connection between the late Indus script (1600 b.c.) and the Brahmi script could not be definitely established earlier, more and more inscriptions have been found all over the country in the last few years, dating 1000 b.c., 700 b.c., and so on, which have bridged the gap between the two. Now it is evident that the Brahmi script evolved directly from the Indus script.

(Sources: Decipherment of the Indus Script, Dawn and Development of Indus Civilisation and Lothal and the Indus Civilisation.)

The people who resided at Harappa, Mohenjo-Daro, and other sites were culturally Aryan and this is confirmed by the decipherment of the Harappan script and its identity with Sanskrit family.

New Archaeological Findings

Since the first discovery of buried townships of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro on the Ravi and Sindhu rivers in 1922, respectively, numerous other settlements, now numbering over 2,500 stretch from Baluchistan to the Ganga and beyond and down to Tapti. Various archaeologists have unearthed a valley, covering nearly a million-and-a-half sq.km. And, the fact which was not known 80 years ago, and which archaeologists now know, is that about 75 per cent of these settlements are concentrated not along the Sindhu or even the Ganga, but along the now dried up Saraswati river. This calamity—the drying up of the Saraswati—and not any invasion was what led to the disruption and abandonment of settlements along Saraswati river by the people who lived a Vedic life. The drying up of the Saraswati river was a catastrophe of vast magnitude, which led to a massive outflow of people, especially the elite, who probably went to Iran, Mesopotamia and other neighbouring regions for livelihood. Around the same time (2000-1900 b.c.), there were constant floods or/and prolonged droughts along the Sindhu river and its tributaries which forced the inhabitants of the Indus Valley to move to other safer and greener locations, and hence a slow but continuous migration of these highly civilised and prosperous Vedic people took place. Some of them moved to south-east, and some to north-west, and even towards European regions. For the next 1,000 years and more, dynasties and rulers with Indian names appear and disappear all over West Asia confirming the migration of people from East to West.

Seabed structure could be temple

2005-03-13T01:04:00.000-08:00

PTI/ New Delhi

Archaeologists have found "structures" buried in the sea off the coast of Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu that shows evidences of "human activities" and could lend credence to the age-old myth of existence of seven temples in the area, five of which are believed to be under the sea.

Mahabalipuram, which was recently ravaged by the killer tsunami, is known as the land of "seven pagodas" and archaeologists say they have found stone blocks and pottery under the sea and are examining whether the site is that of the fabled temples that went underwater.

"Some of the rocks we found under sea bore definite signs of human activities. We have already found remnants of a temple off shore. This new finding is not in isolation and we will have to compare and correlate it with the on shore structures," said Alok Tripathi, deputy superintendent of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).

The ambitious expedition, jointly conducted by the Indian Navy and the ASI, began in early 2001 with the aim to clear the mystery behind the seven temples in Mahabalipuram, where only one temple exists now.

"We have recovered artefacts and structures, which resemble the shore temple during the expedition, which lasted for more than three years," Vice Admiral, Sureesh Mehta, deputy chief of naval staff told reporters here.

The ASI undertook preliminary search of the area in 2001 and based on the results, a team of Navy divers and ASI officials carried out extensive exploratory work in the area with INS Darshak, a hydrographic survey vessel, providing administrative support.

Razed temple rebuilt after 615 years

2005-02-27T21:15:00.000-08:00

The newly-constructed Jogulamba temple at Alampur.

By D. Sreenivasulu

ALAMPUR, FEB. 27. Jogulamba Devi temple at Alampur, one of the 18 Sakti peethams in Indian sub-continent, including Sankari Devi temple in Sri Lanka, has been reconstructed after 615 years. According to historical sources, the temple was razed to the ground during Muslim invasion in 1390 AD. The local people put up a fierce resistance and killed the invaders and moved the main idol to the nearby Balabrahmeswara temple. Since then, the idol had been worshipped in the secluded place in the temple.

Alampur, 20 km from Kurnool, which is known as `Dakshin Kasi' flourished as spiritual and education centre in ancient times.

The Chalukyas of Badami, mainly by the initiative of Pulakesin-II put up a number of temples in and around Alampur in the 7th and 8th centuries. At Alampur alone, Chalukyas built nine temples devoted to Navabrahmeswara and Jogulamba.

Of them, eight magnificent temples of Navabrahmeswara survived but the temple of Tarakabrahma could not be traced.

The Jogulamba temple was reconstructed at the same place where it stood. The temple was rebuilt in the same way it was described in the `Rasaratnakaram' of Nityanatha Sidha of 12th century AD. Sankaracharya was believed to have installed `Sri Chakra' at Jogulamba temple, which is not available now.

Since the Alampur temple complex was declared a heritage site, the supporters of Jogulamba temple had a difficult time to convince the Archaeological Survey of India and the State Government to revive the temple.

Fund mobilisation

The temple was designed to match the Chalukyan architecture so that the new temple would fit into the group of temples.

The Endowments Department, led by the former Commissioner, Ajay Kallam, took initiative to raise funds for reconstruction of the temple. The temples across the country donated money for the temple while Srisailam Devastanam adopted it to ensure uninterrupted rituals.

Giving the reasons for failure to revive the temple in the last 600 years, Sanskrit scholar, historian and epigraphist, Gadiyaram Ramakrishna Sarma, has analysed that political uncertainty prevailed during the medieval age delayed the reconstruction of the temple.

India finds more 'tsunami gifts'

2005-02-27T21:06:00.000-08:00

Indian divers have found more evidence of an ancient port city, apparently revealed by December's tsunami.

Experts say a lion revealed by the tsunami is from the 7th Century

Stone structures that are "clearly man-made" were seen on the seabed off the south coast, archaeologists say.

They could be part of the mythical city of Mahabalipuram, which legend says was so beautiful that the gods sent a flood that engulfed six of its seven temples.

Other relics were revealed when the powerful waves washed away sand as they smashed into the Tamil Nadu coast.

'Clear pattern'

The Archaeological Survey of India launched the diving expedition after residents reported seeing a temple and other structures as the sea pulled back just before the tsunami hit.

The new finds were made close to the 7th Century beachfront Mahabalipuram temple, which some say is the structure that survived the wrath of the gods.

"We've found some stone structures which are clearly man-made," expedition leader Alok Tripathi told the AFP news agency.

"They're perfect rectangular blocks, arranged in a clear pattern."

The ancient "gifts" of the tsunami are expected to be presented to an international seminar on maritime archaeology in Delhi next month.

Other discoveries made at Mahabalipuram earlier this month include a granite lion of a similar age to the temple that experts believe had been buried for centuries before the tsunami shifted the sand.

Archaeologists have been working at the site for the last three years, since another diving expedition discovered what appeared to be a submerged city, including at least one temple.

The myths of Mahabalipuram were first written down by British traveller J Goldingham who was told of the "Seven Pagodas" when he visited in 1798.

Tsunami throws up ancient city

2005-02-23T16:28:00.000-08:00

Surajit Dasgupta in New Delhi

Feb. 23. – The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) here has confirmed the finding of a new ancient site near Mahabalipuram, about 48 kilometres south of Chennai.

Expecting an entire lost city, the archaeologists began underwater excavations, on Thursday, of what is believed to be an ancient city and parts of a temple uncovered by the tsunami off the coast of a centuries-old pilgrimage town.

Three rocky structures with elaborate animal carvings have emerged near the coastal town of Mahabalipuram, which was battered by the tsunami.

The force of the tsunami waters removed sand deposits revealing structures, which appear to belong to a port city built in the seventh century, said Mr T Satyamurthy, a senior archaeologist with the ASI, Chennai office.
“The tsunami has exposed a bas relief which appears to be part of a temple wall or a portion of the ancient port city. Our excavations will throw more light on these,” Mr Satyamurthy said.
The six-foot rocky structures that have emerged in Mahabalipuram include an elaborately carved head of an elephant and a horse in flight. Above the elephant’s head is a small square-shaped niche with a carved statue of a deity. Another structure uncovered by the tsunami has a reclining lion sculpted on it.

According to archaeologists, lions, elephants and peacocks were commonly used to decorate walls and temples during the Pallava period in the seventh and eighth centuries thus making them infer that the discovered structure must have been a temple wall. “These structures could be part of the legendary seven pagodas,” Mr Satyamurthy said.

Search begins for 'submerged temples'

2005-02-22T17:02:00.000-08:00

By: P C Vinoj Kumar
February 20, 2005

Chennai: A team of officials from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), aided by Navy divers, have begun a joint off shore exploration at the historic town of Mahabalipuram, near Chennai, to look for ‘submerged temples’ following the surfacing of some rock cut reliefs near the Shore Temple in the aftermath of the tsunami.

Experts, including underwater photographers, headed by marine archaeologist Alok Tripathi, have arrived from Delhi and are camping in Mahabalipuram.

The exploration would go on till March end, Tripathi said.

Mahabalipuram, also known as Mamallapuram, located about 60 km from Chennai, was once a flourishing seaport during the time of the Pallava kings. The tsunami washed away the topsoil on the beach and exposed some sculptures carved on boulders.

These were located on the southern side of the Shore Temple, a World Heritage Monument, which is located very close to the sea.

Besides, the ASI staff had spotted rocks, which they suspect could have been submerged sculptures, or parts of any other structure, as the sea receded from the coastline after the tsunami.

The spotting of rocks and the surfacing of buried sculptures has fuelled speculations whether there had been totally seven temples in Mahabalipuram, including the Shore Temple.

People over the centuries have believed that the other six temples had been submerged in the sea.

Alok Tripathi said this belief had prevailed over the centuries, but as an archaeologist, he was not willing to believe it, unless he found evidence.

Tripathi said his team had been conducting explorations in the area for the last two years.

“This time we have narrowed down the area of our operation. Besides, we would be conducting excavations along with exploration in both land and sea,” Tripathi said. An area of 500 square metres has been earmarked in land and sea for the operation.

The archaeologist said that the ASI had involved the navy in the exploration last year also. Since the commencement of the post tsunami operation two days ago, navy divers have been exploring the sea from 8 am to 3 pm daily.

Islam’s Other Victims: India

2005-02-22T16:56:00.000-08:00

By Serge Trifkovic
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 18, 2002

Adapted from The Sword of the Prophet: A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam by Dr. Serge Trifkovic.

The fundamental leftist and anti-American claim about our ongoing conflict with political Islam is this: whatever has happened or does happen, it’s our fault. We provoked them into it by being dirty Yankee imperialists and by unkindly refusing to allow them to destroy Israel. But two things make crystal clear that this is not so:

1. The political arm of Islam has been waging terroristic holy war on the rest of the world for centuries.

2. It has waged this war against civilizations that have nothing to do with the West, let alone America.

This is why the case of Moslem aggression against India proves so much. Let’s look at the historical record.

India prior to the Moslem invasions was one of the world’s great civilizations. Tenth century Hindustan matched its contemporaries in the East and the West in the realms of philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. Indian mathematicians discovered the number zero (not to mention other things, like algebra, that were later transmitted to a Moslem world which mistaken has received credit for them.) Medieval India, before the Moslem invasion, was a richly imaginative culture, one of the half-dozen most advanced civilizations of all time. Its sculptures were vigorous and sensual, its architecture ornate and spellbinding. And these were indigenous achievements and not, as in the case of many of the more celebrated high-points of Moslem culture, relics of pre-Moslem civilizations that Moslems had overrun.

Moslem invaders began entering India in the early 8th century, on the orders of Hajjaj, the governor of what is now Iraq. (Sound familiar?) Starting in 712 the raiders, commanded by Muhammad Qasim, demolished temples, shattered sculptures, plundered palaces, killed vast numbers of men — it took three whole days to slaughter the inhabitants of the city of Debal — and carried off their women and children to slavery, some of it sexual. After the initial wave of violence, however, Qasim tried to establish law and order in the newly-conquered lands, and to that end he even allowed a degree of religious tolerance. but upon hearing of such humane practices, his superior Hajjaj, objected:

"It appears from your letter that all the rules made by you for the comfort and convenience of your men are strictly in accordance with religious law. But the way of granting pardon prescribed by the law is different from the one adopted by you, for you go on giving pardon to everybody, high or low, without any discretion between a friend and a foe. The great God says in the Koran [47.4]: "0 True believers, when you encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads." The above command of the Great God is a great command and must be respected and followed. You should not be so fond of showing mercy, as to nullify the virtue of the act. Henceforth grant pardon to no one of the enemy and spare none of them, or else all will consider you a weak-minded man."

In a subsequent communication, Hajjaj reiterated that all able-bodied men were to be killed, and that their underage sons and daughters were to be imprisoned and retained as hostages. Qasim obeyed, and on his arrival at the town of Brahminabad massacred between 6,000 and 16,000 men.

The significance of these events lies not just in the horrible numbers involved, but in the fact that the perpetrators of these massacres were not military thugs disobeying the ethical teachings of their religion, as the European crusaders in the Holy Land were, but were actually doing precisely what their religion taught. (And one may note that Christianity has grown up and no longer preaches crusades. Islam has not. As has been well-documented, jihad has been preached from the official centers of Islam, not just the lunatic fringe.)

Qasim’s early exploits were continued in the early eleventh century, when Mahmud of Ghazni, "passed through India like a whirlwind, destroying, pillaging, and massacring," zealously following the Koranic injunction to kill idolaters, whom he had vowed to chastise every year of his life.

In the course of seventeen invasions, in the words of Alberuni, the scholar brought by Mahmud to India,

"Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country, and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion toward all Moslems."

Does one wonder why? To this day, the citizens of Bombay and New Delhi, Calcutta and Bangalore, live in fear of a politically-unstable and nuclear-armed Pakistan that unlike India (but like every other Moslem country) has not managed to maintain democracy since independence.

Mathura, holy city of the god Krishna, was the next victim:

"In the middle of the city there was a temple larger and finer than the rest, which can neither be described nor painted." The Sultan [Mahmud] was of the opinion that 200 years would have been required to build it. The idols included "five of red gold, each five yards high," with eyes formed of priceless jewels. "The Sultan gave orders that all the temples should be burnt with naphtha and fire, and leveled with the ground."

In the aftermath of the invasion, in the ancient cities of Varanasi, Mathura, Ujjain, Maheshwar, Jwalamukhi, and Dwarka, not one temple survived whole and intact. This is the equivalent of an army marching into Paris and Rome, Florence and Oxford, and razing their architectural treasures to the ground. It is an act beyond nihilism; it is outright negativism, a hatred of what is cultured and civilized.

In his book The Story of Civilization, famous historian Will Durant lamented the results of what he termed "probably the bloodiest story in history." He called it "a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within."

Moslem invaders "broke and burned everything beautiful they came across in Hindustan," displaying, as an Indian commentator put it, the resentment of the less developed warriors who felt intimidated in the encounter with "a more refined culture." The Moslem Sultans built mosques at the sites of torn down temples, and many Hindus were sold into slavery. As far as they were concerned, Hindus were kafirs, heathens, par excellence. They, and to a lesser extent the peaceful Buddhists, were, unlike Christians and Jews, not "of the book" but at the receiving end of Muhammad’s injunction against pagans: "Kill those who join other gods with God wherever you may find them." (Not that being "of the book" has much helped Jewish and Christian victims of other Moslem aggressions, but that’s another article.)

The mountainous northwestern approaches to India are to this day called the Hindu Kush, "the Slaughter of the Hindu," a reminder of the days when Hindu slaves from Indian subcontinent died in harsh Afghan mountains while being transported to Moslem courts of Central Asia. The slaughter in Somnath, the site of a celebrated Hindu temple, where 50,000 Hindus were slain on Mahmud’s orders, set the tone for centuries.

The gentle Buddhists were the next to be subjected to mass slaughter in 1193, when Muhammad Khilji also burned their famous library. By the end of the 12th century, following the Moslem conquest of their stronghold in Bihar, they were no longer a significant presence in India. The survivors retreated into Nepal and Tibet, or escaped to the south of the Subcontinent. The remnants of their culture lingered on even as far west as Turkestan. Left to the tender mercies of Moslem conquerors and their heirs they were systematically destroyed, sometimes—as was the case with the four giant statues of Buddha in Afghanistan in March 2001—up to the present day.

That cultivated disposition and developed sensibility can go hand in hand with bigotry and cruelty is evidenced by the example of Firuz Shah, who became the ruler of northern India in 1351. This educated yet tyrannical Moslem ruler of northern India once surprised a village where a Hindu religious festival was celebrated, and ordered all present to be slain. He proudly related that, upon completing the slaughter, he destroyed the temples and in their place built mosques.

The Mogul emperor Akbar is remembered as tolerant, at least by the standards of Moslems in India: only one major massacre was recorded during his long reign (1542-1605), when he ordered that about 30,000 captured Rajput Hindus be slain on February 24, 1568, after the battle for Chitod. But Akbar’s acceptance of other religions and toleration of their public worship, his abolition of poll-tax on non-Moslems, and his interest in other faiths were not a reflection of his Moslem spirit of tolerance. Quite the contrary, they indicated a propensity for free-thinking in the realm of religion that finally led him to complete apostasy. Its high points were the formal declaration of his own infallibility in all matters of religious doctrine, his promulgation of a new creed, and his adoption of Hindu and Zoroastrian festivals and practices. This is a pattern one sees again and again in Moslem history, down to the present day: whenever one finds a reasonable, enlightened, tolerant Moslem, upon closer examination this turns out to be someone who started out as a Moslem but then progressively wandered away from the orthodox faith. That is to say: the best Moslems are generally the least Moslem (a pattern which does not seem to be the case with other religions.)

Things were back to normal under Shah Jahan (1593-1666), the fifth Mogul Emperor and a grandson of Akbar the Great. Most Westerners remember him as the builder of the Taj Mahal and have no idea that he was a cruel warmonger who initiated forty-eight military campaigns against non-Moslems in less than thirty years. Taking his cue from his Ottoman co-religionists, on coming to the throne in 1628 he killed all his male relations except one who escaped to Persia. Shah Jahan had 5,000 concubines in his harem, but nevertheless indulged in incestuous sex with his daughters Chamani and Jahanara. During his reign in Benares alone 76 Hindu temples were destroyed, as well as Christian churches at Agra and Lahore. At the end of the siege of Hugh, a Portuguese enclave near Calcutta, that lasted three months, he had ten thousand inhabitants "blown up with powder, drowned in water or burnt by fire." Four thousand were taken captive to Agra where they were offered Islam or death. Most refused and were killed, except for the younger women, who went into harems.

These massacres perpetrated by Moslems in India are unparalleled in history. In sheer numbers, they are bigger than the Jewish Holocaust, the Soviet Terror, the Japanese massacres of the Chinese during WWII, Mao’s devastations of the Chinese peasantry, the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, or any of the other famous crimes against humanity of the 20th Century. But sadly, they are almost unknown outside India.

There are several reasons for this. In the days when they ruled India, the British, pursuing a policy of divide-and-rule, whitewashed the record of the Moslems so that they could set them up as a counterbalance to the more numerous Hindus. During the struggle for independence, Gandhi and Nehru downplayed historic Moslem atrocities so that they could pretend a facade of Hindu-Moslem unity against the British. (Naturally, this façade dissolved immediately after independence and several million people were killed in the religious violence attendant on splitting British India into India and Pakistan.) After independence, Marxist Indian writers, blinkered by ideology, suppressed the truth about the Moslem record because it did not fit into the Marxist theory of history. Nowadays, the Indian equivalent of political correctness downplays Moslem misdeeds because Moslems are an "oppressed minority" in majority-Hindu India. And Indian leftist intellectuals always blame India first and hate their own Hindu civilization, just their equivalents at Berkeley blame America and the West.

Unlike Germany, which has apologized to its Jewish and Eastern European victims, and Japan, which has at least behaved itself since WWII, and even America, which has gone into paroxysms of guilt over what it did to the infinitely smaller numbers of Red Indians, the Moslem aggressors against India and their successors have not even stopped trying to finish the job they started. To this day, militant Islam sees India as "unfinished business" and it remains high on the agenda of oil-rich Moslem countries such as Saudi Arabia, which are spending millions every year trying to convert Hindus to Islam.

One may take some small satisfaction in the fact that they find it rather slow going.

Serge Trifkovic received his PhD from the University of Southampton in England and pursued postdoctoral research at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His past journalistic outlets have included the BBC World Service, the Voice of America, CNN International, MSNBC, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Times of London, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is foreign affairs editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture. This article was adapted for Front Page Magazine by Robert Locke

Dive 'n' discover Lord's kingdom

2005-02-20T03:16:00.000-08:00

TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 19, 2005

AHMEDABAD: The barren coastline of Gujarat could emerge as an exotic destination for global tourists, if initiatives by the government and a private firm to market a dive into the submerged ancient city of Dwarka are any sign.

If all goes well, back-packers can head for Bet Dwarka this summer, go scuba-diving a hundred feet beneath the sea to explore Lord Krishna's swarna-nagri, which went under the sea thousands of years ago to be discovered only recently. And also, flirt with whale sharks, rub shoulders with sea turtles and even view live corals.

Adventure Sports Ltd (ASL), a local firm that promotes adventure sports and tourism recently entered into a memorandum of understanding with the Gujarat government to kick off the project at a cost of Rs 13 crore.

The company expects 3,000 to 4,000 certified divers as well as scuba diving enthusiasts from across the country to travel all the way to this temple town during mid-March and May end.

"The potential for this kind of tourism is extremely high. There has been a paradigm shift in the attitude of travellers. In addition to experiencing 'something different', a class of tourists also wish to return home equipped with new skills," says Vishwas Bhamburkar, chief executive officer of ASL.

Bhamburkar says that his firm has already received around 200 e-mails, a large number from Delhi, wherein people have evinced interest in his plans. The company is planning to offer a four-day package for a cool Rs 16,000.

The Archeological Survey of India (ASI) recently established the presence of a city submerged under the sea near the temple town of Dwarka, for many years believed to be the abode of Lord Krishna.

Excavators from the ASI have found remains of a citadel wall, crockery pieces and rubbles of a palace about 40-60 feet deep in the sea. The visibility in the sea in the area is also conducive for scuba diving, Bhamburkar says.

"This is perhaps the first time in the world that one would be diving to see a submerged city", he claims.

The scuba diving enthusiasts could also experience a stay in "live aboard" boats, which the ASL plans to design to lodge a family or a group.

India: The mother of Western civilisation

2005-02-19T17:41:00.000-08:00

By Dr R. Brahmachari

Whenever the Western scholars begin a discussion on any branch of their knowledge such as literature, philosophy, science, medicine and so on, they always start from Greece, and thus they try to convince that the Hellenic civilisation is the fountainhead of today’s Occidental wisdom and people like Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Pythagoras, etc. were the authors of their cultural heritage. In this way they try to project that the present Western civilisation grew independently in Greece and hence it was not indebted to the civilisation of any other group of people on the globe. But a close scrutiny reveals that the people who are now being revered as the father of Western wisdom were the people who migrated in large numbers from India and established colonies in Greece, Egypt, Persia, Mesopotamia, Italy, North and South America and many other places. And hence Indians were, in fact, the authors of civilisations which are now called ancient civilisations of Egypt, Rome Mesopotamia and so on, including that of Greece.

Every Indian should be proud to know that Parasya, the real name of today’s Persia, was derived from Sanskrit parashu, or the axe which Shri Parashuram, the Brahmin warrior and one of the incarnations of Lord Vishnu, used to carry. He should also be glad to know that the great Roman Empire was the creation of immigrant Hindu Kshatriyas, who had settled in Italy, and the city of Rome was named after Lord Rama, the King of Ayodhya. Still today, the name of the city is spelled not as Rome, but Roma in Italian. Once upon a time, the two countries, Norway and Sweden, collectively called Scandinavia, were ruled by Shri Kartikeya, the son of Lord Siva. It is well known that Skanda was the other name of Lord Kartikeya and the land was therefore, called Skandanabhi. And scholars agree that today’s Scandinavia was derived from Sanskrit Skandanabhi.

Similarly the Caspian Sea was named after Rishi Kashyapa and words like August, Augustine, etc. were derived from Rishi Agastya. Arka is another name of the sun. The Sanskrit arka became Arak in the West, as Dharma or Karma became dharam and karam in northern India. Gradually this Arak became Araak and finally today’s Iraq.

It would be really perplexing for every Indian to know that Lord Krishna, the son of Devaki, became Apollo in Greece. Radhakant is the other name of Lord Krishna, and since Radha is a woman and abala, he is also known as Abalakant, and this abala became Apollo in Greece. Similarly, Lord Shiva of Kailash became the Greek god, Zeus. The place in Greece where people from Magadh (today’s Bihar) were settled was called Magadhan. After passage of time, Magadhan became Makedan or Macedan and finally Macedonia, the birthplace of the great warrior, Alexander. Where-from had the name Alexander been derived? A man of incomparable beauty is called Alokasunder in Sanskrit and after passage of time, this Alokasunder became Alexander in Greece. Thousands of years ago the Brahmins, belonging to the tribe of Bhil, left their dwelling place Hamman in Afghanistan and settled in Greece, where their chiefs were called Bhilpos, a corrupt of Bhilpati. Later on this Bhilpos became Philip, the tribe to which the father of Alexander belonged and hence, Alexander was an immigrant from Hamman in Afghanistan.

The place in Greece where people from Magadh (today’s Bihar) were settled was called Magadhan. After passage of time, Magadhan became Makedan or Macedan and finally Macedonia, the birthplace of the great warrior, Alexander. Wherefrom had the name Alexander been derived?

There is a small place called Attak, lying on the bank of River Sindhu, 942 miles north of the Arabian Sea. People who migrated to Greece from Attak, named their new dwelling place as Attak-sthan, which after passage of time became Atakthan and ultimately the great Greek city, Athens. The descendants of Laxman, the younger brother of Lord Ram, after migrating to Greece, set up a colony called Lughmon, which later on became Lacmon. The immigrants from Ayodhya were called Ayodhan (people of Ayodhya) in Greece. Later on this Ayodhan became Ionan and the nearby sea was named the Ionian Sea. These descendants of Ram were also known as Cul-ait-ram (Ram’s family) which ultimately became Call-id-Romos. A group of these people migrated to Italy, founded the city of Roma and the great Roman Empire. Another branch of them migrated to Peru in South America.

Shali is a kind of fine rice and des-shali stands for the place where this kind of rice is cultivated. This des-shali in Greece became Thessali, a provice of Greece. Adri is the other name of the Himalayas, and from this Adri, the sea between Italy and Greece was named the Adriatic Sea. Falguni or Phalgooni was another name of Arjuna. In Greece, this Phalgooni became Phalg-oonus and the settlement of the descendants of Phalgoonus was called Phal-goonia. Today, the place is called Pelagonia, a part of the province of Thessali. Ano-ther name of Arjuna was Ajeya which became Aegeus and his descen-dants, who were settled in eastern Greece, were called Aigaios or Aigaians and the adjoining sea became the Aegean Sea.

The early settlers in Greece were known as Pelasgians and scholars believed that the word Pelasgians had been derived from Pelargos. But Pelargos has several meanings. Firstly, Pelargos means ‘sea’ and hence some scholars believe that they were called Pelasgians because those early settlers came to Greece by the sea. Secondly, pelo means ‘to till’ and argos means land. So, many believe that they were called Pelasgians as those early settlers were tillers of land or simply farmers. A third group of scholars believe that those early settlers came from the state of Bihar in India. In those days, Bihar was also known as Pelas, and hence they were called Pelasgians.

Why did the Indians start migrating to Greece and other Western countries in large numbers? Scholars believe that after the Kurukshetra war the Kshatriya tribes, who fought for the Kauravas and survived the war, began to migrate in large numbers to escape humiliation and persecution by the winner Kshatriyas. According to the most modern estimate, the Kurukshetra war took place in 3069 b.c. and hence the said migration occurred 5,000 years ago.

Hella is the other name of Greece and many believe that the name came after a mountain called Hela, situated in Baluchistan in today’s Pakistan. They also believe that the people of that locality were the first among all the Indians to reach Greece. The contributions of these people from Hela mountain, who were sun-worshippers, played a vital role in Greek history and civilisation. From Hela, the Greek name Helios for the sun was derived. The settlements of these Hela people were called Hela-des (land of Hela) which ultimately became Helados.

The immigrants from Ayodhya were called Ayodhan (people of Ayodhya) in Greece. Later on this Ayodhan became Ionan and the nearby sea was named the Ionian Sea.

After passage of time, they were known as Phoenician sailors and traders. In Greek, the word cori stands for the mouth of a river. So the people who migrated from the mouth of River Sindhu, were called Cori-Indus. Later on, this Cori-Indus became Corinthus and their settlement became the city of Corinth.

Many believe that the word Europe was derived from Sanskrit surupa and the name of the Caucasus mountain was derived from Kaikeyi, the mother of Prince Bharat, the younger brother of Lord Ram. Most scholars believe that the epics Illiad and Odyssey are nothing but imitations of Ramayana. The prime story of Ramayana is abduction of Sita and liberating her from captivity; even the epics of Homer narrate a similar story, where Sita has been replaced by Helen, the queen of Troy.

How were the names of the celebrated Hellenic scholars derived? Many people believe that the Sanskrit word Arya became Aristo in Greece, and from this Aristo names like Aristotle, Aristarcus and English words like aristocrat, aristocracy, etc. have been derived. Scholars also believe that Socrates was a corrupt of Sukracharya or Sukra. In Sanskrit vidyapith stands for a seat of learning and Vidyapith-guru stands for the teacher or acharya. In Greece, this Vidyapith-guru became pith-guru, which after a passage of time became Pithgoras, and from this Pithgoras the English Pythagoras was derived. Thus it can be shown that the scholars who are believed to have authored the Greek or Hellenic civilisation, were, in fact, Kshatriya immigrants from India. And hence, it can safely be said that India is also the mother of civilisation, which is now known as Hellenic, or Greek civilisation.

For further reading:

1. India in Greece by E. Pococke.
2. The History of Greece by G. Grote.
3. The Social Conditions of the Greeks by Rev. J.B. Ottley
4. Sanskrit and Modern Medical Vocabulary by A. Bagchi

Tsunami Uncovers Ancient City in India

2005-02-18T19:57:00.000-08:00

Feb 18, 5:34 PM EST

MAHABALIPURAM, India (AP) -- Archaeologists have begun underwater excavations of what is believed to be an ancient city and parts of a temple uncovered by the tsunami off the coast of a centuries-old pilgrimage town.

Three rocky structures with elaborate carvings of animals have emerged near the coastal town of Mahabalipuram, which was battered by the Dec. 26 tsunami.

As the waves receded, the force of the water removed sand deposits that had covered the structures, which appear to belong to a port city built in the seventh century, said T. Satyamurthy, a senior archaeologist with the Archaeological Survey of India.

Mahabalipuram is already well known for its ancient, intricately carved shore temples that have been declared a World Heritage site and are visited each year by thousands of Hindu pilgrims and tourists. According to descriptions by early British travel writers, the area was also home to seven pagodas, six of which were submerged by the sea.

The government-run archaeological society and navy divers began underwater excavations of the area on Thursday.

"The tsunami has exposed a bas relief which appears to be part of a temple wall or a portion of the ancient port city. Our excavations will throw more light on these," Satyamurthy told The Associated Press by telephone from Madras, the capital of Tamil Nadu state.

The six-foot rocky structures that have emerged in Mahabalipuram, 30 miles south of Madras, include an elaborately carved head of an elephant and a horse in flight. Above the elephant's head is a small square-shaped niche with a carved statue of a deity. Another structure uncovered by the tsunami has a reclining lion sculpted on it.

According to archaeologists, lions, elephants and peacocks were commonly used to decorate walls and temples during the Pallava period in the seventh and eighth centuries.

"These structures could be part of the legendary seven pagodas. With the waters receding and the coastline changing, we expect some more edifices to be exposed," Satyamurthy said.

Temple-shaped structures discovered at Mamallapuram

2005-02-18T19:54:00.000-08:00

Friday, 18 February , 2005, 19:53

Chennai: The offshore and onshore exploration off the famous tourist spot of Mamallapuram, 50 km from Chennai, by the Archaeological Survey of India and the Indian Navy has brought to light a temple shaped structure located 100 metres north east of the present shore temple there.

Also a square structure, resembling the sanctum sanctorum of about three metres in width, had been located 120 metres north east of the shore temple, a Navy press release said.

Located in an area of ten metre diameter, the structure was covered with marine growth and the centre was found buried under the silt.

Another L shaped wall structure, about 500 metres into the sea from the shore temple, had also been located.

Local fishermen claim that these structures were of five such temples believed to have been submerged underwater.

The current search operation was a follow up to the uncovering of a hitherto silted up Pallava sculpture, dating to seventh century AD, on the beachfront by the December 26 tsunami, the sources added.

Ancient Cities May Predate Mesopotamia

2005-02-16T17:09:00.000-08:00

A British marine archaeologist Graham Hancock has been examining a submerged city on the East Coast of Tamil Nadu.

Mr. Hancock says a civilization thriving there may predate the Sumerian civilization of Mesopotamia in present-day Iraq and definitely existed before the Harappan civilization in India and Pakistan. He has been excavating the site off the coast of Poompuhar, near Nagapattinam, 400 km south of Chennai.

At a meeting of the Mythic Society in Bangalore in early December, Mr. Hancock said underwater explorations in 2001 provided evidence that corroborated Tamil mythological stories of ancient floods. He said tidal waves of 400 feet or more could have swallowed this flourishing port city any time between 17,000 and 7,000 years ago, the date of the last Ice Age.

The Gulf of Cambay was also submerged, taking with it evidence of early man´s migration. The populations Mr. Wells and Mr. Pitchappan (see previous article) mapped settled on India´s East Coast 50,000 to 35,000 years ago and developed into modern man. According to Hancock, "the Poompuhar underwater site could well provide evidence that it was the cradle of modern civilization." Hancock´s theory is strengthened by findings of India´s National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), which has explored the site since the 1980s.

Man-made structures like well rims, horseshoe-shaped building sites are some of the lost city´s secrets. At low tide, some brick structures from the Sangam era are still visible in places like Vanagiri. The region, archaeologists say, has been built over and over again through the ages and some of its past is now being revealed. Mr. Glenn Milne, a British geologist from Durham University, has confirmed Hancock´s theory.

Paradigm shift in history

2005-02-16T17:00:00.000-08:00

N.S. RAJARAM

Like physics a century ago, historical research today is in the midst of a paradigm shift. New methods need to be devised for dealing with data from sources like underwater archaeology, ecology and satellite photography.

THE HISTORY of India, especially of ancient India, is now in the midst of a major debate. This is over new data as well as new methods that they demand. When the study of ancient India by Europeans began in the late Eighteenth century, the driving force was the European discovery of Sanskrit and the extraordinary affinity between it and European languages, especially Latin and Greek. This resulted in new academic disciplines like comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies. It gave rise also to philology, a discipline devoted to the reconstruction of history and culture based on the comparative study of ancient languages such as Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and others.

Philology and theology

In the light of this, it is natural that the most influential figures in writing Indian history, especially ancient history, happened to be philologists rather than historians in the real sense. They put their stamp on the historical method also. According to Ralph T.H. Griffith, the well-known translator of the Rigveda, "The great interest of the Rgveda (sic) is historical rather than poetical. As in its original language we see the roots and shoots of the languages of Greek and Latin, of Kelt, Teuton and Slavonic, so the deities, the myths, and the religious beliefs and the practices... the comparative history of the religions of the world would have been impossible without the study of the Veda."

The passage is revealing in more ways than one. Philologists and historians of religion saw the Rigveda less as a literary work than as a source of philology and history, especially history of religion. As a result, right from the beginning, the field of linguistics (philology) and Indian history and culture — often called Indology — became inseparable from religion. And because of the perceived value of the Vedas as source in the study of religions, it soon attracted theologians like Bishop Caldwell and Reverend W.W. Hunter, who continue to exert their influence on Indology.

The work of these pioneers — both linguists and theologians — has left its imprint on the historical method and historiography. Even secular scholars like Max Muller could not escape the influence of theology. The real point is not that Nineteenth century scholars resorted to theological methods and beliefs that go with them, but the continued persistence of such methods and arguments well into the Twentieth century. For example, Murray Emeneau writing as late as 1954 asserted: "At some time in the second millennium BC, probably comparatively early in the millennium, a band or bands of speakers of an Indo-European language, later to be called Sanskrit, entered India over the northwest passes. This is our linguistic doctrine, which has been held for over a century and a half. There seems to be no reason to distrust the arguments for it, in spite of the traditional Hindu ignorance of any such invasion."

The fact that such an argument invoking a "linguistic doctrine" as authority could be made a scholarly field in the face of confessed lack of evidence bears testimony to the influence of theology on history. Observing such doctrinaire approaches, the Greek scholar M. Kazanas recently noted: "Several scholars indulge in semantic conjurings saying that various names in the RV (Rigveda) refer to places and rivers in Afghanistan, Baluchistan, Iran, etc., but... such interpreting (turning facts into metaphors and symbols, and vice versa) one can prove anything." (`Indigenous Indo-Aryans and the Rigveda' in: The Journal of Indo-European Studies, Vol. 30, Number 3 and 4, Fall/Winter 2002.)

This should not be seen as just disagreement over facts and conclusion, but as getting to the heart of the current debate over methodology— between a heritage based on linguistics and theology and an approach that seeks to place empirical data at the bottom of any theory. This phenomenon is more a commentary on human behaviour than objective research. Also, it is by no means limited to history. Even physics, a subject in which empirical data is paramount, has not been exempt from it. Max Planck, one of the founders of modern physics, observed in 1936:

"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarised with the idea from the beginning."

All this highlights a crucial point: when confronted with new data that contradict an established theory, its proponents tend to ignore or rationalise the contradictions with ingenious arguments, or "turning facts into metaphors and symbols" as Kazanas puts it. This becomes more and more complex as data from new fields like geomorphology, satellite photography and genetics have to be dealt with as is the case today. As a result, arguments become highly convoluted taking one further and further from reality. This can be understood by looking at the growing body of knowledge about the Vedic river known as the Sarasvati.

The Sarasvati example

The Rigveda gives great importance to a river known as the Sarasvati. While the Ganga receives only one mention, the Sarasvati is mentioned at least 60 times. Vasishta, the seer of the seventh book of the Rigveda (7.95.5) describes Sarasvati as the river (and goddess) that brought prosperity to the "progeny of Nahusha" (Nahusha was one of the ancestors of the Bharatas, who were also known as the Purus and later as the Kurus). He also describes the Sarasvati as "purest among the rivers, flowing from the mountains to the sea." According to Bharadwaja of the sixth book (6.61.2), the Sarasvati in her course through the mountains "crushed boulders like the stems of lotus plants." From all this we learn that the Sarasvati was the greatest river, the most holy and also nourished large populations. This idea finds expression in the following famous verse by Gritsamada (2.41.16): ambitame, naditame, devitame Sarasvati. ("Sarasvati, best of mothers, best river, best goddess.")

There is now no river answering to this description. This led scholars to dismiss it as the imagination of poets. This is still the position of some scholars who insist that philology must have the final say in any debate. More to the point, beginning in 1978, evidence for the Sarasvati became available in the form of satellite images acquired by earth-sensing satellites launched by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation). These images showed traces of paleo-channels that lay along the course of the Sarasvati river described in the ancient literature. They showed an ancient river channel ranging in width from 6 to 8 kilometres, exceeding 14 kilometres in places.

Once satellite data established the existence of the Sarasvati, several archaeologists, notably the late V.S. Wakankar, undertook the task of locating its course on the ground by correlating satellite data with ground observations. This and the succeeding investigations showed that the Sarasvati river described in the Rigveda is not a myth but a great river that flowed in a course more or less parallel to the Indus but to the east of the Sutlej. After going through many vicissitudes, the Sarasvati dried up completely around 1900 BC, except for a few minor seasonal streams along its former course. Nonetheless, some scholars continue to use arguments, mainly philological, to claim that the river never existed. At the same time, they gave no explanation for the abundant data attesting to its existence but insisted on the validity of their theory.

All this has an important lesson to offer. Like science, history must also progress. Progress is always driven by new discoveries that expose the shortcomings of old theories. To take an example, the Michelson-Morley experiment to determine the velocity of light gave rise to Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Also, at crucial points in history, progress comes in quantum jumps rather than in a smooth flow.

Paradigm shift

This invariably results in a "paradigm shift" that leaves aside old theories and methods. Any such shift leads to new methodologies — like the mass-energy equivalence and the uncertainty principle that lie at the foundation of modern physics. This also calls for new disciplines. This appears to be the situation in history today.

Noting this, Dr. B.P. Radhakrishna, President of the Geological Society of India and the editor of the authoritative volume Vedic Sarasvati: Evolutionary History of A Lost River in Northwest India (Geological Society of India) remarked in a recent editorial: "Evidence on the antiquity of Indian civilisation is considerable and can no longer be ignored. Archaeologists have no right to claim any monopoly of interpretation. Findings of other disciplines must also be taken into consideration. ... Geo-archaeology, an emerging field in earth science, has a very important role to play in unravelling the prehistorical evolution of man and civilisation in South Asia. We should build up a strong indigenous school of research in this vital area, with modern tools of underwater sampling, videography and mapping. Only then, can we come out with bold hypothesis to alter the entrenched `semi-colonial' perspectives of history and prehistory that will stand the test of time."

This is part of the paradigm shift. It demands new paradigms and a fresh outlook not tied to the past. It is also the challenge before the next generation of historians.

Vedic literature and Air-planes

2005-02-16T16:49:00.000-08:00

"European scholarship regards human civilization as a recent progression starting yesterday with the Fiji islander, and ending today with Rockefeller, conceiving ancient culture as necessarily half savage culture."...wrote Shri Aurobindo Ghosh, (1872-1950) most original philosopher of modern India.

"Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." - Aldous Huxley...

Shakuna Vimana. Click to enlarge. There are no physical remains of ancient Indian aircraft technology but references to ancient flying machines are commonplace in the ancient Indian texts. Several popular ancient epics describe their use in warfare. Depending on one's point of view, either it contains some of the earliest known science fiction, or it records conflict between beings with weapons as powerful and advanced as anything used today...

The mention of airplanes is found many times throughout Vedic literature, including the following verse from the Yujur-Veda describing the movement of such machines: "O royal skilled engineer, construct sea-boats, propelled on water by our experts, and airplanes, moving and flying upward, after the clouds that reside in the mid-region, that fly as the boats move on the sea, that fly high over and below the watery clouds. Be thou, thereby, prosperous in this world created by the Omnipresent God, and flier in both air and lightening."...

The Rg Veda, the oldest document of the human race includes references to the following modes of transportation:

Jalayan - a vehicle designed to operate in air and water.
Kaara- Kaara- Kaara- a vehicle that operates on ground and in water.
Tritala- Tritala- Tritala- a vehicle consisting of three stories.
Trichakra Ratha - Trichakra Ratha - Trichakra Ratha - a three-wheeled vehicle designed to operate in the air.
Vaayu Ratha- Vaayu Ratha- Vaayu Ratha- a gas or wind-powered chariot.
Vidyut Ratha- Vidyut Ratha- Vidyut Ratha- a vehicle that operates on power...

The Arthasastra of Kautilya (c. 3rd century B.C.) mentions amongst various tradesmen and technocrats the Saubhikas as ' pilots conducting vehicles in the sky'. Saubha was the name of the aerial flying city of King Harishchandra and the form 'Saubika' means 'one who flies or knows the art of flying an aerial city.'...

The seven greatest capital cities of Rama were known in classical Hindu texts as ‘The Seven Rishi Cities’. According to ancient Indian texts, the people had flying machines which were called ‘vimanas’. The ancient Indian epic describes a vimana as a double- deck, circular aircraft with portholes and a dome, much as we would imagine a flying saucer. It flew with the "speed of the wind" and gave forth a ‘melodious sound’. There were at least four different types of vimanas; some saucer shaped, others like long cylinders (‘cigar shaped airships’)."...

The Ramayana even describes a beautiful chariot which 'arrived shining, a wonderful divine car that sped through the air'. In another passage, there is mention of a chariot being seen 'sailing overhead like a moon.' "The references in the Mahabharata are no less astounding:..More

9,500-Year-Old City Found Underwater Off India

2005-02-16T16:46:00.000-08:00

Discovery in Bay of Cambay Will Force
Western Archaeologists to Rewrite History

The civilization of Ancient Egypt occurred in a past so remote that today it seems mystical. The pyramids and other temples, with their hieroglyphics depicting a flourishing civilization, have a mysterious, almost magical appeal. It seems inconceivable that people of an advanced society could have walked those ancient streets.

Now, it was announced in January, a civilization has been uncovered that would have appeared just as ancient to the people who built the pyramids as the pyramids seem to us.

According to marine scientists in India, archaeological remains of this lost city have been discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India. And carbon dating says that they are 9,500 years old.

This news completely contradicts the position of most Western historians and archaeologists, who (because it did not fit their theories) have always rejected, ignored, or suppressed evidence of an older view of mankind's existence on planet Earth. Human civilization is now provably much more ancient than many have believed.

According to the BBC's Tom Housden, reporting on the Cambay find:

The vast city — which is five miles long and two miles wide — is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years. The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from India's National Institute of Ocean Technology, who were conducting a survey of pollution. Using sidescan sonar, which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean, they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120 feet. Debris recovered from the site — including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculpture, and human bones and teeth — has been carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old (BBC article).

Several reports confirm this estimate. Housden added, "The whole model of the origins of civilisation will have to be remade from scratch."

Unheard-of Scope of Cambay Ruins

The BBC article tells us that the remains of this ancient city stand upon "enormous foundations." Marine archaeologists discovered them with a technology known as "sub-bottom profiling."

Author and filmmaker Graham Hancock, an authority on archaeological investigations of ancient civilizations, reportedly said that the evidence was compelling. For example, he said that the oceanographers had found two large blocks that were larger than anything that's ever been found. "Cities on this scale," Hancock told BBC Online, "are not known in the archaeological record until roughly 4,500 years ago when the first big cities begin to appear in Mesopotamia.

Theorists are postulating that the area where this city exists was submerged when the ice caps melted at the end of the last Ice Age.

"A month ago in mid-January [2002]," says Hancock on his website, "marine scientists in India announced they had sonar images of square and rectangular shapes about 130 feet down off the northwestern coast of India in the Gulf of Khambhat (Cambay). . . . [There are] sonar shapes with 90-degree angles. The Indian Minister of Science and Technology ordered that the site be dredged. What was found has surprised archaeologists around the world" (GrahamHancock.com/news.)

The Find Includes Human Remains

Linda Moulton Howe, who investigates occurrences of this type worldwide, interviewed Michael Cremo about this new discovery. Cremo is a researcher and author of the book Forbidden Archaeology. Cremo, Howe said, has visited India and attended local meetings about the Cambay site.

"Within the past few months," Cremo told her, "the engineers began some dredging operations there and they pulled up human fossil bones, fossil wood, stone tools, pieces of pottery, and many other things that indicated that it indeed was a human habitation site that they had. And they were able to do more intensive sonar work there and were able to identify more structures. They appeared to have been laid out on the bank of a river that had been flowing from the Indian subcontinent out into that area."

According to Howe:

Even if we don't know what the cultural background of the people is, if it does happen to be a city that is 9500 years old, that is older than the Sumerian civilization by several thousand years. It is older than the Egyptian, older than the Chinese. So it would radically affect our whole picture of the development of urban civilization on this planet.

Now, if it further happens that additional research is able to identify the culture of the people who lived in that city that's now underwater — if it turns out they are a Vedic people, which I think is quite probable given the location of this off the coast of India — I think that would radically change the whole picture of Indian history which has basically been written by Western archaeologists.

Also see Explorer Finds Evidence of Life Before Great Flood

Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age

2005-02-16T16:44:00.000-08:00

A Vedic and India Perspective
By David Frawley

People throughout the world retain the memory of earlier great spiritual civilizations that existed long before our current reckoning of history. Myths of Atlantis and Lemuria, stories of great floods and antediluvian kingdoms exist in all the ancient literatures of the world. These include Jewish, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, Chinese, and Mayan traditions to name but a few. The ancient Egyptians and Sumerians-- whom we credit with the founding of civilization--saw themselves only as offshoots of earlier more enlightened, pre-flood cultures. They looked in wonder and awe to such bygone ages, a curious response if they indeed were the real inventors of civilization! Yet this memory is much deeper than any literary records. It is engrained in our human psyche as a collective or racial imprint. Many indigenous and aboriginal peoples retain such knowledge and poets and novelists of all types reflect it in their visions. This is why stories of ancient mysteries are always so captivating. They remain popular in spite of the many efforts to deny them. Orthodox archaeology has long tried to dismiss such flood stories as mere fantasy, or reduce them to more recent and smaller events. Yet we do have clear evidence of a great flood at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago, which generally agrees with ancient chronologies like that of Plato's Atlantis. In addition, new archaeological finds, particularly those of marine archaeology, suggest the existence of several older submerged civilizations from areas as diverse as Cuba to India, indicating that hard evidence is out there. The end of the last Ice Age brought about major geological disruptions, changes of climate and the raising of the oceans by several hundred feet that would submerge or destroy most human habitations, which even today are located largely by the ocean or in low lying areas. The difficulty of finding evidence of pre-flood cultures should be not be confused with their lack of existence.

Graham Hancock has been at the forefront of alternative archaeology and the effort to connect this memory of lost civilizations to archaeological findings all over the world. Hancock is not only innovative; he is probing and scientific in his analysis. He follows the cutting edge of marine archaeology and examines the sites himself. He has also taken care to examine the literature and traditions of the regions he investigates, which help locate and interpret such sites that local peoples are surprisingly still aware of.

The popularity of Hancock's work shows how irrelevant are standard academic views of the ancient world, which few people read and few who read remember. Current academic views reconstruct ancient civilization as a crude effort to evolve the type of 'advanced' technological civilization which we have today.

These views are not only superficial (for example, reducing cultures to pottery styles) but wrong. Certainly the ancients did not view themselves according to our modern conceptions of civilization based upon politics and economics. They saw themselves carrying on spiritual traditions from pre-flood cultures, which had a higher level of civilization than they did, including occult and technological knowledge that was lost to them.

Why is it, one may ask, that orthodox archaeologists are so slow to examine or explore these older traditions? The reason is simple. Such discoveries would totally undermine current historical and cultural views of humanity. Our civilization may not be the first, the last or the highest. Ours may just be one in a series of many civilizations, whose purpose may be more spiritual than material. Our civilization may not be unique and may even be a deviation from the broader movement of human spiritual culture that reaches out to the universe on the level of consciousness, not simply through technology. This is what the Vedic and Yoga tradition teaches us as well.

Such a prospect would require not only a total rewriting of history but a total reexamination of the purpose of our species and the meaning of life, which can only be disconcerting to existing paradigms and the institutions which uphold them.

The Role of India

In most examinations of lost civilizations, there has been a surprising tendency to leave India out of the picture. While the wonders of Egypt or Sumeria are often discussed, the equally great wonders of ancient India are seldom mentioned. This is strange because India is the main country that has preserved our ancient human heritage, both materially and spiritually. For example, in India today one can observe the same type of temple worship still being practiced like that which once occurred in ancient Egypt, Babylonia, Greece or Mexico, along with the same emphasis on the spiritual and the sacred as the focus of life.

India has extensive archaeological remains that are among the largest and oldest in the world. Harappan India or India of the so-called 'Indus Valley Civilization' was the largest urban civilization in the world of its times in the third millennium BC (3100-1900 BCE), with major sites extending from the Ganges river in the east to Afghanistan in the west, from the border of Iran to near Bombay. However, India's role in ancient civilization has been largely ignored in favor of more culturally comfortable, though geographically much smaller cultures in the Near East, in spite of the fact that such ancient cultures frequently lauded the greatness of India themselves. How many of us know that the civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia would fit easily into Harappan India with much room to spare, so much larger was the Indian civilization. There has been an even greater ignoring of the Vedic literature of India, which is by far the largest that has been preserved from the ancient world.

The many thousands of pages of this mantric literature dwarf all that the rest of the world has managed to save from such early eras. Yet instead of putting Vedic literature on par with the Pyramids of Egypt in terms of civilizational achievements, scholars reduce the Vedas to the rantings of illiterate nomads from Central Asia, who by all accounts should have left no literature anyway. The spiritual wisdom of the Vedic mantras is ignored according to a view that the Vedas are only a nature poetry of barbarian invaders. This is in spite of the fact that the Vedas were the foundation for the great yogic and mystical traditions of Asia through Hindu and Buddhist traditions and the whole science of Yoga, which frequently refer to them. Not only has Vedic literature been ignored, there has been an additional effort to keep the Vedic literature separate from the great archaeological remains in the country of the various Harappan sites. We are told that the great urban civilization of ancient India and the great Vedic literature that India preserved as its ancient heritage are not connected to each other at all. We are left with 'a civilization without a literature' and a 'literature without a civilization', though both a great literature and a great civilization came from ancient India and often use the same symbols.

This is in evidence in the many Vedic images found in Harappan sites and on Harappan seals like the Brahma bull, figures in yoga postures, Shiva-like Gods, fire altars and swastikas. Here the new geology and marine archaeology has ruled in favor of the ancients. Vedic literature describes its homeland on a long lost river called the Sarasvati, which according to Vedic descriptions flowed east of the Indus from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. Modern satellite photography has clearly indicated the existence of this great river, as have numerous geological and ground water studies conducted over the last few decades, which show that the Sarasvati was once over ten kilometers in width and flowed from the mountains to the sea, dwarfing the nearby Indus. As the Vedas say, the Sarasvati was the largest river of the region at the time. It was the center of a great civilization and the vast majority of ancient Indian and Harappan ruins have been found on the now dried banks of the Sarasvati.

As the Sarasvati River dried up around 1900 BCE, the Vedic civilization which describes the river as its immemorial homeland must be much older.

Graham Hancock breaks down this anti-India barrier and elevates ancient India back to the forefront of ancient civilizations. He shows that the spiritual foundation of the Vedas cannot be divorced from the earliest civilization of the region. He quotes the Vedas to show how they reflect a great flood and the establishment of a new civilization after it. Hancock shows how the Vedas reflect a maritime civilization which developed amidst the crashing glaciers that produced the waters to make the now dry Sarasvati the largest river in India. Marine archaeology shows a number of submerged sites off the coast of Kachchh and Cambay in what would have then been the old Sarasvati delta region. A Gulf of Cambay urban site has recently been dated by Indian archaeologists to 7500 BCE. This would totally change our view of history as we now date cities only after 3500 BCE. It is here that Hancock is now seeking what he calls the holy grail of his quest for this older civilization of the pre-Ice Age era. It is here that we can look for the tradition of Manu, the Hindu flood figure and first king and law giver, and the great sages, the Angirasa and Bhrigu rishis who were traditionally connected both to Manu and to the sea. This earlier civilization was preserved in India in two traditions. The first is the Vedic tradition, which grew up on the Sarasvati River at the end of the Ice Age. The second is the Tamilian tradition, which reflected pre-Ice Age cultures off the coast of South India. Hancock recognizes both and is also exploring sites by South India, near Mahabalipuram, an ancient sacred Tamilian area that evidences a large urban site out to sea. Clearly we are just beginning to discover the mysteries of ancient Indian civilization, which unfold another layer of world civilization that we have forgotten. Hancock's work marks a new era in our study of the ancient world, not only in terms of the revolutionary nature of his ideas but also with the vividness that he projects them, using the tools not only of science but those of the mass media as well. We must now look to an older stratum of maritime civilization that existed before the end of the last Ice Age in order to really understand the movement of history. And for this India has an important, if not central role. Indians often complain of how the British distorted their history. Here Hancock, a new Britisher, provides the cure. The question is whether Indians will take it up and follow his lead into reviving the ancient spiritual glory that the Vedas, Purana, Agamas and Sangam literature so eloquently proclaims. Let us hope they do. There is much in this vast literature that reflects such an older and more spiritual heritage for humanity that connects us with the conscious universe as a whole.

The sea claimed an ancient capital of India. Now it has given it back

2005-02-14T16:55:00.000-08:00

By Jan McGirk
14 February 2005

Two granite lions placed as guardians of an ancient city proved impotent before the power of the sea. But that same force has brought them to light centuries later.

The Boxing Day tsunami has revealed what archaeologists believe to be the lost ruins of an ancient city off Tamil Nadu in Southern India.

The 30-feet waves, which reshaped the Bay of Bengal and swept more than 16,000 Indians to their deaths, shifted thousands of tons of sand to unearth the pair of elaborately carved stone lions near the 7th-century Dravidian Shore Temple at Mahabalipuram.

Indian archaeologists believe these granite beasts once guarded a small port city under the Pallava dynasty, which ruled much of southern India from 100BC to AD800. The six-foot high lion statues, each hewn from a single piece of granite, are breathtakingly lifelike. One great stone cat sits up alert while the other is poised to pounce.

Two foundation walls also remain visible beneath the murky waters.

The tsunami also desilted a large bas-relief stone panel close to the Shore Temple. The half-completed sculpted elephant scoured clean by the waves now attracts mobs of visitors who touch its eroded trunk as a good luck talisman.

Scientists from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) are descending on the World Heritage temple complex of Mahabalipuram, south of Madras, to examine these relics and to launch an underwater survey.

They were discovered by a fishermen who survived the disaster when he was catapulted aloft by the tsunami and reportedly clung for hours to the great arch of the Shore Temple. He spotted the undersea structures from this perch and told district authorities.

Marine archaeologists have been working with divers from Delhi and a team from the Scientific Exploration Society in Dorset to search for any remnants of this ancient port since April 2002.

"The sea has thrown up evidence of the grandeur of the Pallava dynasty," the superintendent ASI archaeologist, T Sathiamoorthy, said last week. "We're all excited about these finds."

Sailors used to refer to Mahabalipuram as the "Seven Pagodas".

Tsunami throws up India relics

2005-02-11T18:01:00.000-08:00

By Soutik Biswas
BBC News, Delhi

The deadly tsunami could have uncovered the remains of an ancient port city off the coast in southern India.

Archaeologists say they have discovered some stone remains from the coast close to India's famous beachfront Mahabalipuram temple in Tamil Nadu state following the 26 December tsunami.

They believe that the "structures" could be the remains of an ancient and once-flourishing port city in the area housing the famous 1200-year-old rock-hewn temple.

Three pieces of remains, which include a granite lion, were found buried in the sand after the coastline receded in the area after the tsunami struck.

Undersea remains

"They could be part of the small seaport city which existed here before water engulfed them. They could be part of a temple or a building. We are investigating," says T Sathiamoorthy of Archaeological Survey of India (ASI).

Archaeologists say that the stone remains date back to 7th Century AD and are nearly 6ft tall.

They have elaborate engravings of the kind that are found in the Mahabalipuram temple.

The temple, which is a World Heritage site, represents some of the earliest-known examples of Dravidian architecture dating back to 7th Century AD.

The monument also has gigantic open air reliefs hewn out from granite.

The tsunami waves have also helped the archaeologists in desilting one such relief which had been covered with sand for ages.

A half-completed rock relief of an elephant got "naturally desilted" by the ferocious waves and is now drawing large crowds at this popular tourist destination.

For the past three years, archaeologists working with divers from India and England have found the remnants of the ancient port.

Archaeologists say they had done underwater surveys 1 km into the sea from the temple and found some undersea remains.

Legend

The myths of Mahabalipuram were first set down in writing by British traveller J Goldingham, who visited the South Indian coastal town in 1798, at which time it was known to sailors as the Seven Pagodas.

The myths speak of six temples submerged beneath the waves with the seventh temple still standing on the seashore.

The myths also state that a large city which once stood on the site was so beautiful the gods became jealous and sent a flood that swallowed it up entirely in a single day.

The tsunami has also washed up a 9 inch-tall bronze Buddha on the coast off Kalapakkam in the state.

"It was lying with some other objects. It must have been carried out to the sea from Burma or Thailand," says T Sathiamoorthy.

The Buddha has been handed over to the local authorities, and may sound find a place in an Indian museum.

"We will protect it if nobody claims it," says Mr Sathiamoorthy.

Ancient Hindus could navigate the air

2005-02-09T17:57:00.000-08:00

By Shachi Rairikar

“The ancient Hindus could navigate the air, and not only navigate it, but fight battles in it like so many war-eagles combating for the domination of the clouds. To be so perfect in aeronautics, they must have known all the arts and sciences related to the science, including the strata and currents of the atmosphere, the relative temperature, humidity, density and specific gravity of the various gases...”

—Col. Olcott in a lecture in Allahabad, in 1881.

The Rig Veda, the oldest document of the human race, includes references to the following modes of transportation: jalayan—a vehicle designed to operate in air and water (Rig Veda 6.58.3); kaara—a vehicle that operates on ground and in water (Rig Veda 9.14.1); tritala—a vehicle consisting of three storeys (Rig Veda 3.14.1); trichakra ratha—a three-wheeled vehicle designed to operate in air (Rig Veda 4.36.1); vaayu ratha—a gas or wind-powered chariot (Rig Veda 5.41.6); vidyut ratha—a vehicle that operates on power (Rig Veda 3.14.1).

Ancient Sanskrit literature is full of descriptions of flying machines—vimanas. From the many documents found, it is evident that the scientist-sages Agastya and Bharadwaja had developed the lore of aircraft construction.

The Agastya Samhita gives Agastya’s descriptions on two types of aeroplanes. The first is a chchatra (umbrella or balloon) to be filled with hydrogen. The process of extracting hydrogen from water is described in elaborate detail and the use of electricity in achieving this is clearly stated. This was considered to be a primitive type of plane, useful only for escaping from a fort when the enemy had set fire to the jungle all around. Hence the name agniyana. The second type of aircraft mentioned is somewhat on the lines of the parachute. It could be opened and shut by operating chords. This aircraft has been described as vimanadvigunam, i.e. of a lower order than the regular aeroplane.

The process of extracting hydrogen from water is described in elaborate detail and the use of electricity in achieving this is clearly stated.

Aeronautics or Vaimaanika Shastra is a part of Yantra Sarvasva of Bharadwaja. This is also known as Brihadvimaana Shastra. Vaimaanika Shastra deals with aeronautics, including the design of aircraft, the way they can be used for transportation and other applications, in detail. The knowledge of aeronautics is described in Sanskrit in 100 sections, eight chapters, 500 principles and 3,000 shlokas. Great sage Bharadwaja explained the construction of aircraft and the way to fly it in air, on land, on water and use the same aircraft like a submarine. He also described the construction of war-planes and fighter aircraft.

Vaimaanika Shastra explains the metals and alloys and other required material, which can make an aircraft imperishable in any condition. Planes which will not break (abhedya), or catch fire (adaahya) and which cannot be cut (achchedya) have been described. Along with the treatise, there are diagrams on three types of aeroplanes—Sundara, Shukana and Rukma.

The aircraft is classified into three types—Mantrika, Tantrika and Kritaka, to suit different yugas or eras. In krita yuga, it is said, Dharma was well established. The people of that time had the divinity to reach any place using their ashtasiddhis. The aircraft used in treta yuga are called Mantrika vimana, flown by the power of hymns (mantras). Twenty-five varieties of aircraft including Pushpaka vimana belong to this era. The aircraft used in dwapara yuga were called Tantrika vimana, flown by the power of tantras. Fifty-six varieties of aircraft including Bhairava and Nandaka belong to this era. The aircraft used in kali yuga, the on-going yuga, are called Kritaka vimana, flown by the power of engines. Twenty-five varieties of aircraft including Sundara, Shukana and Rukma belong to this era.

Bharadwaja states that there are 32 secrets of the science of aeronautics. Of these, some are astonishing and some indicate an advance even beyond our own times. For instance, the secret of para shabda graaha, i.e. a cabin for listening to the conversation in another plane, has been explained by elaborately describing an electrically worked sound-receiver that did the trick. Manufacture of different types of instruments and putting them together to form an aircraft are also described.

It appears that aerial warfare was also not unknown, for the treatise gives the techniques of shatru vimana kampana kriya, and shatru vimana nashana kriya, i.e. shaking and destroying enemy aircraft, as well as photographing enemy planes, rendering their occupants unconscious and making one’s own plane invisible.

In Vastraadhikarana, the chapter describing the dress and other material required while flying, talks in detail about the clotheswear for both the pilot and the passenger separately.

Ahaaraadhikarana is yet another section exclusively dealing with the food habits of a pilot. This has a variety of guidelines for pilots to maintain their health through strict diet.

Bharadwaja also provides a bibliography. He had consulted six treatises by six different authors previous to him and he gives their names and the names of their works in the following order: Vimana Chandrika by Narayanamuni; Vyoma Yana Mantrah by Shaunaka; Yantra Kalpa by Garga; Yana Bindu by Vachaspati; Kheta Yaana Pradeepika by Chaakraayani; Vyoma Yaanarka Prakasha by Dundi Natha.

As before Bharadwaja, after him too there have been Sanskrit writers on aeronautics and there were four commentaries on his work. The names of the commentators are Bodh Deva, Lalla, Narayana Shankha and Vishwambhara.

Vaimaanika Shastra explains the metals and alloys and other required material, which can make an aircraft imperishable in any condition.

Evidence of existence of aircraft are also found in the Arthashastra of Kautilya (c. 3rd century b.c.). Kautilya mentions amongst various tradesmen and technocrats the saubhikas as ‘pilots conducting vehicles in the sky’. Saubha was the name of the aerial flying city of King Harishchandra and the form saubika means ‘one who flies or knows the art of flying an aerial city’. Kautilya uses another significant word, akasa yodhinah, which has been translated as ‘persons who are trained to fight from the sky’. The existence of aerial chariots, in whatever form it might be, was so well-known that it found a place among the royal edicts of Emperor Asoka and which were executed during his reign from 256-237 b.c.

It is interesting to note that the Academy of Sanskrit Research in Melkote, near Mandya, had been commissioned by the Aeronautical Research Development Board, New Delhi, to take up a one-year study on ‘Non-conventional Approach to Aeronautics’, on the basis of Vaimaanika Shastra. As a result of the research, a glass-like material which cannot be detected by radar has been developed by Prof. Dongre, a research scholar of Benaras Hindu University. A plane coated with this unique material cannot be detected using radar.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the Indian science of aeronautics and Bharadwaja’s research in the field was that they were successfully tested in actual practice by an Indian over a 100 years ago. In 1895, full eight years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, USA, Shivkar Bapuji Talpade and his wife gave a thrilling demonstration flight on Chowpatty beach in Mumbai.

An even more astonishing feature of Talpade’s aircraft was the power source he used—an ion engine. The theory of the ion engine has been credited to Robert Goddard, long recognised as the father of liquid-fuel rocketry. It is claimed that in 1906, long before Goddard launched his first modern rocket, his imagination had conceived the concept of an ion rocket. But the fact is that not only had the idea of an ion engine been conceived long before Dr Goddard, it had also been materialised in the form of Talpade’s aircraft.

Talpade, a resident of Mumbai, was an erudite scholar of Sanskrit literature, especially of the Vedas, an inventor and a teacher in the School of Arts. His deep study of the Vedas led him to construct an aeroplane in conformity with the descriptions of the aircraft available in the Vedas and he displayed it in an exhibition arranged by the Bombay Art Society in the Town Hall. Its proving the star attraction of the exhibition encouraged its maker to delve deeper into the matter and see if the plane could be flown with the aid of mercurial pressure. For, the one hundred-and-ninetieth richa (verse) of the Rig Veda and the aeronautical treatise of Bharadwaja mention that flying machines came into full operation when the power of the sun’s rays, mercury and another chemicals called naksha rasas were blended together. This energy was, it seems, stored in something like an accumulator or storage batteries. The Vedas refer to eight different engines in the plane and Bharadwaja adds that they are worked by electricity.

Talpade carried on his research along these lines and constructed an aeroplane. In his experiments he was aided by his wife, also a deep scholar of the Vedic lore, and an architect-friend. The plane combined the constructional characteristics of both Pushpaka and Marut Sakha, the sixth and eighth types of aircraft described by Bharadwaja. It was named Marut Sakha meaning “friend of the wind”.

With this plane, this pioneer airman of modern India gave a demonstration flight on the Chowpatty beach in Mumbai in the year 1895. The machine attained a height of about 1,500 feet and then automatically landed safely. The flight was witnessed, among many others, by Shri Sayajirao Gaekwad, the Maharaja of Baroda and Justice Govind Ranade and was reported in the Kesari, a leading Marathi daily newspaper. They were impressed by the feat and rewarded the talented inventor.

Unfortunately, Talpade lost interest in things after his wife’s death, and after his own death in 1917 at the age of 53, his relatives sold the machine to the Rally Brothers, a leading British exporting firm then operating in Mumbai. Thus, the first ever attempt at flying in modern India, undertaken and made successful by an Indian, in a plane of Indian manufacture and built to Indian scientific specifications, slid into the limbo of oblivion.

(The writer can be contacted at shachi_rairikar@hotmail.com)

History of Indian Science And Technology

2005-02-06T16:17:00.000-08:00

Overview

It is now recognized that western criteria are not the sole benchmark by which other cultural knowledge should be evaluated. While the term 'traditional' sometimes carries the connotation of 'pre-modern' in the sense of 'primitive' or 'outdated', many of the traditional sciences and technologies were in fact quite advanced even by western standards as well as better adapted to unique local conditions and needs than their later 'modern' substitutes. In countries with ancient cultural traditions, the folk and elite science were taken as part of the same unified legacy, without any hegemonic categorizations. However, modernization has homogenized various solutions, and this loss of ideas is similar to the destruction of biodiversity. Colonizers systematically derogated, exterminated or undermined the local traditional science, technology and crafts of the lands and people they plundered, because of their intellectual arrogance, and also to control and appropriate the economic means of production and the social means of organization. Modern societies created hegemonic categories of science verses magic, technology verses superstitions etc., which were arbitrary and contrived. But many anthropologists who have recently worked with so-called 'primitive' peoples have been surprised to learn of some of their highly evolved and sophisticated technologies. The term 'Traditional Knowledge System' was thus coined by anthropologists as a scientific system which has its own validity, in contradistinction to 'modern' science.

The United Nations University proposal defines Traditional Knowledge Systems as follows:

Traditional knowledge or 'local knowledge' is a record of human achievement in comprehending the complexities of life and survival in often unfriendly environments. Traditional knowledge, which may be technical, social, organizational, or cultural was obtained as part of the great human experiment of survival and development.

Laura Nader describes the purpose of studying TKS: "The point is to open up people's minds to other ways of looking and questioning, to change attitudes about knowledge, to reframe the organization of science -- to formulate a way of thinking globally about traditions."

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Modern science can perhaps be dated to Newton's times. But Traditional Knowledge Systems date from more than 2 million years, when Homo habilis started making his tools and interacting with nature. Since the dawn of history, different peoples have contributed to different branches of science and technology, often in a manner involving interactive contacts across cultures separated by large distances. This interactive influence is becoming clearer as the vast extent of global trade and cultural migration across large distances is being properly recognized by researchers.

However, one finds that generally the history of science as commonly taught is mostly Eurocentric. It typically consists of two phases: It starts with Greece, neglecting the influences of others upon Greece. Then it 'fast forwards' many centuries to the Enlightenment period around 1500, to claim modern science as an exclusively European triumph, by neglecting the influence of others, especially India, upon the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. The European Dark Ages is presumed to be dark worldwide, when in fact, the rest of the world thrived with innovation and prosperity while Europe was at the peripheries until the conquest of America in 1492.

Thanks to especially the work of Joseph Needham, China's contributions to global knowledge have recently become known to a wide range of scholars. Even more recently, thanks largely to Arab scholars, the important role of Islamic empires in the transmission of ideas into Europe has become better appreciated. However, in the latter case, many discoveries and innovations of India, as acknowledged by the Arab translators themselves, are often depicted as being of Arab origin, when in fact, the Arabs often retransmitted what they had learnt from India over to Europe.

Therefore, the vast and significant contributions made by the Indian sub-continent have been widely ignored. The British colonizers could never accept the fact that Indians were highly civilized even in the third millennium BC, when the British were still in a barbarian stage. Such acknowledgment would destroy the civilizing mission of Europe that was the intellectual premise for colonialization. British Indologists did not study TKS, except to quietly document them as systems competing with their own, and to facilitate the transfer of technology into Britain's Industrial Revolution. What was found valuable was quickly appropriated (see examples below), and its Indian manufacturers were forced out of business, and this was in many instances justified as civilizing them. Meanwhile, a new history of India was fabricated to ensure that present and future generations of mentally colonized people would believe in the inherent inferiority of their own traditional knowledge and in the superiority of the colonizers' 'modern' knowledge. This has been called Macaulayism, named after Lord Macaulay who successfully championed this strategy of Britain most emphatically starting in the 1830s.

Because it became difficult for Europeans to ignore the massive archaeological evidence of classical Indian science and technology, they propounded that Indus Civilization had to be a transplant from the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations. These constructions in historiography have tended to be cumulative rather than re-constructive, i.e. more layers were constructed without re-examining or correcting prior ones. Unfortunately, since independence there has not been much improvement in such distortions of history, and this has continued to negatively impact the understanding and appreciation of TKS. Many in India's intellectual elite continue to promote the notion that pre-colonial India was feudalistic, pre-rational, and by implication in need of being invaded for its own benefit.

This has created a climate in which entrenched prejudice against TKS still persists in contemporary society. For example, according to TKS activist Madhu Kishwar, India's government today continues to make many TKS illegal or impossible to practice. Even after independence, many British laws against TKS have continued, even though their original intent was to destroy India's massive domestic industry and foreign trade and to replace them with Britain's Industrial Revolution. It is significant to note that today less than 10% of India's labor works in the 'organized sector', namely as employees of a company. The remaining 90% are individual freelancers, contract laborers, private entrepreneurs, and so on, many of whom still practice their traditional trades. However, given the perpetuation of colonial laws that render much of their work illegal, they are highly vulnerable to all sorts of exploitation, corruption, and abuse. The descendants of India's traditional knowledge workers, who built massive cities, technologies, and dominated world trade for centuries, are today de-legitimized in their own country under a democratic government. Many of today's poor jatis, such as textile, masonry, and metal workers, were at one time the guilds that supplied the world with so many and varied industrial items.

It is important to note that amongst all the conquered and colonized civilizations of the Old World, India is unique in the following respect: Its wealth was industrial and created by its workers' ingenuity and labor. In all other instances, such as the Native Americans, the plunder by the colonizers was mainly of land, gold and other natural assets. But in India's case, the colonizers had a windfall of extraordinary profit margins from control of India's exports, taxation of India's economic production, and eventually the transfer of technology and production to the colonizer's home. This comprised the immense transfer of wealth out of India. From being the world's major exporting economy (along with China), India was reduced to an importer of goods; from being the source of much of the economic capital that funded Britain's Industrial revolution, it became one of the biggest debtor nations; from its envied status as the wealthiest nation, it became a land synonymous with poverty; and from the nation with a large number of prestigious centers of higher education that attracted the cream of foreign students from Eurasia, it became the land with the highest number of illiterate persons. This remains a major untold story. The education system's subversion of India's TKS in its history and social studies curricula is a major factor for the stereotyping about India. Even when told of these things, few westerners and elitist Indians are willing to believe them, as the prejudices about India are too deeply entrenched.
THE GLOBAL PROBLEM TODAY

The present day globalizing economy with its mass media glorification of the western lifestyle is resulting in the homogenization of human 'wants' and in unachievable expectations. Conventional western technology by itself cannot deliver or sustain this false promise to the world, for several reasons:

* Westernized living is unachievable by billions of poor humans, because the capital required simply does not exist in the world, and the trickle down effect is too slow to reach the bottom tier where most of humanity lives.

* Western civilization depends upon inequality -- there must be cheap labor 'somewhere else', and cheap natural resources purchasable from somewhere, without regard to the big picture of world society or global ecology. This practical necessity of the present-day global capitalist system conflicts with the equal rights of states and persons long theorized and promoted. All sorts of reasons are offered against such drastic proposals as opening all borders and allowing free competition among all available laborers, contradicting the 'freedom' position so popular in theory.

* The western economic development model demands 'growth' to sustain valuations in the stock markets, and growth cannot be indefinite. A steady state economy in zero growth equilibrium would devastate the wealth of the west, since the financial models are predicated on growth.

* Even if the above obstacles could be overcome and the world's six billion persons were to achieve western lifestyle, it would be unsustainable for the planet's natural resources to sustain.

When Gandhi was asked whether he would like India to develop a lifestyle similar to England's, his reply may be paraphrased as follows: The British had to plunder the Earth to achieve their lifestyle. Given India's much larger population, it would require the plunder of many planets to achieve the same.

If the idealized lifestyle is unavailable to all humanity, then on what basis (morally, intellectually, and in terms of practical enforcement) do a few countries hope to sustain their superiority over others so as to maintain such a lifestyle? The point is that employing TKS is an imperative for humanity at large, while reducing global dependence on inequitable and resource draining "advanced" knowledge systems.

We have to study, preserve, and revive the Traditional Knowledge Systems for the economic betterment of the world in a holistic manner, as these technologies are eco-friendly and allow sustainable growth without harming the environment. India's scientific heritage needs to be brought to the attention of the educated world, so that we can replace the Eurocentric History of Science and Technology with an honest globalization of ideas. This goal requires generations of new research in these fields, compilation of existing data, and dissemination through books, seminars, websites, articles, films etc.
INDIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO GLOBAL SCIENCE
Civil Engineering

The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization was the world's first to build planned towns, with underground drainage, civil sanitation, hydraulic engineering, and air-cooling architecture. Oven baked bricks were invented in India in approximately 4,000 BC. From complex Harappan towns to Delhi's Qutub Minar and other large projects, India's indigenous technologies were very sophisticated in design, planning, water supply, traffic flow, natural air conditioning, complex stone work, and construction engineering.
Metal Technologies

They pioneered many tools for construction, including the needle with hole at the pointed end, hollow drill, and true saw. Many of these important tools were subsequently used in the rest of the world, centuries later during Roman times. India was first to produce rust-free iron. In the mid-first millennium BC, the Indian wootz steel was very popular in the Persian courts for making swords. The British sent teams to India to analyze the metallurgical processes that were later appropriated by Britain. Making India's metal works illegal was motivated partly by the goal to industrialize Britain, but also because of the risk of gun manufacturing by potential nationalists. India's exporting steel industry was systematically dismantled and relocated to Britain.
Textiles

India's textile exports were legendary. Roman archives contain official complaints about massive cash drainage because of imports of fine Indian textiles. One of the earliest industries relocated from India to Britain was in textiles, and it became the first major success of the Industrial Revolution, with Britain replacing India as the world's leading textile exporter. Many of the machines built by Britain used Indian designs that had been improved over long periods. Meanwhile, India's textile manufacturer's were de-licensed, even tortured in some cases, over-taxed, regulated, etc., to 'civilize' them into virtual extinction.
Shipping and Ship Building

India participated in the earliest known ocean based trading systems. Regarding more recent centuries, it is known to scholars but not to the general public that Vasco da Gama's ships were captained by a Gujarati sailor, and much of Europe's 'discovery' of navigation was in fact an appropriation of pre-existing navigation in the Indian Ocean, that had been a thriving trade system for centuries before Europeans 'discovered' it. Some of the world's largest and most sophisticated ships were built in India and China. The compass and other navigation tools were already in use at the time. ('Nav' is the Sanskrit word for boat, and is the root word in 'navigation', and in 'navy', although etymology is not a reliable proof of origin.)
Water Harvesting Systems

Scientists estimate that there were 1.3 million man-made water lakes and ponds across India, some as large as 250 square miles. These are now being rediscovered using satellite imagery. These enabled most of the rain water to be harvested and used for irrigation, drinking, etc. till the following year's rainfall. Village organizations managed these resources, but this decentralized management was dismantled during the colonial period, when tax collection, cash expropriation, and legal enforcements became the primary function of the new governance appointed by the British. Recently, thousands of these 'talabs' have been restored, and this has resulted in a re-emergence of abundant water year round in many places. (This is a very different approach compared to the massive modern dams built in the name of progress, that have devastated the lives of millions.)
Forest Management

Many interesting findings have recently come out about the way forests and trees were managed by each village and a careful method applied to harvest medicines, firewood, and building material in accordance with natural renewal rates. There is now a database being built of these 'sacred groves' across India. Again, it's a story of an economic asset falling into disuse and abuse because of dismantling the local governance and uprooting respect for traditional systems in general. Massive logging by the British to export India's timber to fund the two world wars and other civilizing programs of the empire are never mentioned when scholars try to explain India's current ecological disasters. The local populations had been quite sophisticated in managing their ecology until they were dis-empowered.
Farming Techniques

India's agricultural production was historically large and sustained a huge population compared to other parts of the world. Surpluses were stored for use in a drought year. But the British turned this industry into a cash cow, exporting massive amounts of harvests even during shortages, so as to maximize the cash expropriation. This caused tens of millions to die of starvation while at the same time India's food production was exported at unprecedented rates to generate cash. Also, traditional non-chemical based pesticides have been recently revived in India with excellent results, replacing Union Carbide's products in certain markets.
Traditional Medicine

This is now a well-known and respected field. Much re-legitimizing of Indian medicine has already been done, thanks to many western labs and scientists. Many multinationals no longer denigrate traditional medicine and have in fact been trying to secure patents on Indian medicine without acknowledging the source.
Mathematics, Logic and Linguistics

Besides other sciences, Indians developed advanced math, including the concept of zero, the base-ten decimal system now in use worldwide, and many important trigonometry and algebra formulae. They made several astronomical discoveries. Diverse schools of logic and philosophy proliferated. India's Panini is acknowledged as the founder of linguistics, and his Sanskrit grammar is still the most complete and sophisticated of any language in the world.

There were numerous other indigenous Indian industries. India's manufactured goods were highly prized around the world. We must evaluate the historical importance of these TKS based on their economic value for their time, when their importance could be compared to today's high tech industry. India's own English educated elite should be made aware of this to shed their Macaulayite inferiority complexes. Furthermore, the development, refinement and extension of TKS offer potential benefits capable of resolving or diminishing some of the inequities in modern societies worldwide.
FOLK SCIENCE

Besides the above examples of Indian contributions to the very foundations of so-called 'western' science, another category of Traditional Knowledge Systems is non-literate folk science. Western science as a whole has condemned and ignored anything that it did not either appropriate or develop, as being magic and superstition. However, in countries such as India that have cultural continuity, ancient traditions survive with a rich legacy of folk science. In North America and Australia, where original populations have been more than decimated, such continuity of folk tradition was disrupted. In Western nations with large colonies in the Old and New Worlds, such knowledge systems were looked down upon. It is this prejudice that subverts the importance of folk science, and ridicules it as superstition. The process of contrasting western science with folk knowledge systems extends to the demarcation of knowledge systems in different categories of science versus religion, rational versus magical, and so on. But we need to insist that these western imposed hegemonic categories are contrived and artificial.

Western science seldom realized that non-literate folk science preserves the wisdom gained through millennia of experience, direct observation, and has been transmitted by word of mouth. Development projects based solely on new technologies are pushing the Traditional Knowledge Systems towards extinction. This traditional wisdom of humankind needs to be preserved and used for our survival.

Westernized 'experts' go to non-literate cultures assuming them to be 'knowledge blanks' which need to be programmed with modern science and technology. Ramkrishnan, the renowned ecologist, humbly admitted that the ecological management practiced today by the tribes of the northeastern states of India is far superior to anything he could teach them. A good example in this regard is the alder (Alnus nepalensis), which has been cultivated in the jhum (shifting cultivation) fields by the Khonoma farmers in Nagaland for centuries. It has multiple usages for the farmers, since it is a nitrogen-fixing tree and helps to retain the soil fertility. Its leaves are used as fodder and fertilizer, and it is also utilized as timber. One could cite numerous such examples. Unfortunately, many plants which the tribes traditionally cultivated for specific benefits have now disappeared in the name of progress.

The vast majority of modern medicines patented by western pharmaceutical firms are based on tropical plants. The most common method to select candidates for detailed testing has been for western firms to scout tropical societies, seek out established 'folk' remedies, and to subject these to 'western scientific legitimizing'. In many cases, patents owned by multinationals are largely for isolating the active ingredients in a lab, and going through rigorous protocols of testing and patent filing. While this is an important and expensive task, and deserves credit, these are seldom independent discoveries from scratch. Never has the society that has truly discovered it through centuries of empirical testing and trial and error received any recognition, much less any share of royalty. India's recent fights in international courts, over western patents of its traditional intellectual property in agriculture and medicine, have brought much needed publicity for this arena.

Colin Scott writes: "With the upsurge of multidisciplinary interest in 'traditional ecological knowledge', models explicitly held by indigenous people in areas as diverse as forestry, fisheries, and physical geography are being paid increasing attention by western science specialists, who have in some cases established extremely productive long-term dialogues with local experts. The idea that local experts are often better informed than their western peers is at last receiving significant acknowledgment beyond the boundaries of anthropology."

But in too many cases, western scholars reduce India's experts to 'native informants' destined to live below the glass ceiling: the pandit as native informant to the western Sanskritist; the poor woman in Rajasthan as native informant to the western feminist seeking to cure her of her tradition; the herbal farmer as native informant to the western pharmaceutical firm appropriating medicines for patents; etc. Given their poverty in modern times, these 'native informants' dish out what the western scholar expects to hear in order to fit his/her model, because in return they receive gifts, rewards, compensation, recognition, and even trips and visas in many cases. Rarely have western scholars acknowledged India's knowledge bearers as fellow scientists and equal partners, as co-authors or as co-panelists. This competitive obsession to make 'original' discoveries and to put one's name on publications, has exacerbated the tendency to appropriate with one hand, while denigrating the source with other hand so as to hide the plagiarism. We have referred to this as 'academic arson'.
RITUALS AS KNOWLEDGE TRANSMITTERS

Villagers in remote areas like Uttaranchal have events called 'Jagars', in which the Jagaria sends the Dangaria into a sort of trance. The Dangaria then helps sort out problems, provides remedies for ailments, resolves social conflicts of the village society etc. One could dismiss this as superstition; but this is also considered a traditional method of reaching the unconscious. Does the Jagaria use his spiritual powers to reach and tap the unconscious region of the mind of the Dangaria? Or, as propounded by Vaclav Havel, did these rituals represent the attempts of ancient humans to come to terms with the unknown, the non-rational, and the unconscious parts of our beings? Were these devices useful to invoke lost memories of the ancient past?

We are, therefore, not willing to dismiss Jagar as some mumbo-jumbo, but a phenomenon worth scientific investigation. This should be an important scientific research connecting Traditional Knowledge Systems to Inner Sciences. Ironically, from Jung onwards, many westerners have studied and appropriated these traditional 'inner sciences', renamed and repackaged them. Meanwhile, the original discoverers and practitioners have been dismissed as primitive societies awaiting cure by westernization.
Myths & Legends

Myths and legends sometimes represent the attempts of our ancestors to explain the scientific observations that they made about the world around them and transmitted to the future. They chose different models to interpret the observations, but the observations were empirical. Let us compare some of the old legends with modern scientific observations about the geological history of the Indian subcontinent. We will discuss three examples, and each could be seen as fiction or hard fact or some combination of both:
1. The geology of Kashmir (India)

The geology of Kashmir (India) has been studied for more than 150 years now. As a result of these studies, it is now known that due to the rise of the Pir Panjal range around 4 million years ago, a vast lake formed, blocking the drainage from the Himalayas. Subsequently, the river Jhelum emerged as a result of the opening of a fault near Baramula, draining out the lake about 85,000 years ago. This is accepted as the geological history of the Kashmir valley.

Now let us compare this to the old legend: In Kashmir there is a very old tradition which describes a vast lake, called Satisara, in the valley in very ancient times. Kalhana, a poet chronicler, wrote his book Rajatarangini, or 'The River of Kings', in 1150 AD. In this book, he mentions an ancient lake (Satisara) giving a reference from a still earlier text, Nilamata Purana. Aurel Stein (1961), who translated Rajatarangini, describes the legend of Satisara in these words: "This legend is mentioned by Kalhana in the Introduction of his Chronicle and is related at great length in Nilamata.... The demon Jalodbhava who resided in this lake was invisible in his own element and refused to come out of the lake. Vishnu thereupon called upon his brother Balabhadra to drain the lake...". Ignoring the mythical struggles between gods and demons, the legend does depict an account resembling the draining out of the primeval lake.
2. The sea level on the West Coast of India

The sea level on the West Coast of India, as elsewhere during the Ice Ages, was about 100 meters lower than today and started rising only after 16,000 years ago. This is the accepted eustatic history.

The related legend says that when Parasurama donated all his land to the Brahmins, the latter asked him how he could live on the land that he had already donated away. Parasurama went to the cliff on the seashore and threw his Parasu (hatchet) into the sea and the sea receded, and then he occupied the land that thus emerged. This is possibly a reference to the regression of the sea and the newly emerged land.
3. The river Satluj

The third example is of the river Satluj, a tributary of the Indus today. In finding its new course, the Sarasvati braided into several channels. This is the accepted geology.

The relevant legend says that the holy sage Vashista wanted to commit suicide by jumping into the Sarasvati, but the river wouldn't allow such a sage to drown himself, and broke up into hundreds of shallow channels, hence its ancient name Satadru. Unless the early author of such a legend observed the braiding process of the Satluj, he could not have imagined such a legend. This is another instance of legends coinciding with a modern geological observation.

Theorizing the possible role of myths, Scott says: "The complimentarity of the literal and the figurative help us to realize that the distinction between myth and science is not structural, but procedural.... Myths in a broader, paradigmatic sense are condensed expressions of root metaphors that reflect the genius of particular knowledge traditions.... Numerous studies have found that the "anthropomorphic" paradigms of egalitarian hunters and horticulturalists not only generate practical knowledge consistent with the insights of scientific ecology, but simultaneously cultivate an ethic of environmental responsibility that for western societies has proven elusive."

The Israelis have been very successful in rediscovering many lost technologies relevant to their environment and culture by investigating their ancient myths and traditions. Through this, they have become pioneers in many processes of economic value that conventional European technology lacks.
INTERCONNECTIONS WITH OTHER GATES OF THE MANDALA
Inner Sciences

The Inner Sciences of India have been on the one hand appropriated by the west, and on the hand have been depicted as being in conflict with the progressive, rational, and materialistic west. In fact, inner and outer realms are often viewed as opposites, that can at best be balanced because one contradicts the other. This assumes that Inner Sciences make a person and society less productive, creative, and competitive in the outer realm. However, India's TKS are empirical evidence to demonstrate that Inner Sciences and outer development did coexist in a mutually symbiotic relationship. This is a major reason to properly study India's TKS. Without removing this tension between inner and outer, it would be difficult to seriously motivate the modern world to advance in the Inner Sciences in a major way. Inner progress without the outer would be a world negating worldview, which India's TKS record shows not to be the case in classical India. Outer progress without inner cultivation results in societies that are too materialistic, too selfish to the point of genocides and holocausts, eco-unfriendly, and dependent upon force and control for social harmony.
History

Until the 1800s, TKS generated large scale economic productivity for Indians. It was the TKS based thriving Indian economy that attracted so many waves of invaders, culminating with the British. Traditionally, India was one of the richest regions in the world, and most Indians were neither 'backward' nor uneducated nor poor. Some historians have recently begun to come out with this side of the story, demonstrating that it was massive economic drainage, oppression, social re-engineering, and so forth at the hands of colonizers that made millions of 'new poor' over the past few centuries. This explanation yields a radically different reading of the poverty in India today. Upon acknowledging India's traditional knowledge systems, one is forced to discard accounts of its history that essentialize its poverty and the accompanying social evils. The reality of TKS contradicts notions such as:

* India was less rational and scientific than the west.
* India was world negating in its outlook (which is a misreading of the Inner Sciences), and hence did not advance itself from within.
* India's civilization was mainly imported via invaders, except for its problems such as caste that were its own 'essences'.
* Indian society was socially backward (to the point of being seen as lacking in morality); hence it depends upon westernization to reform its current problems.

Society Today

Is India a 'developing' society, or is it a 're-developing' society? Without appreciating the TKS of a people, how could anthropologists and sociologists interpret the current condition of a society? Were they always poor, always living in polluted and socially problematic conditions as today, in which case these problems are essences? Or is there a history behind the present condition? This history should not, however, excuse the failures of fifty years of independence to deal properly with the economic and social problems that persist. Going forward, Traditional Knowledge Systems are eco-friendly, symbiotic with the environment, and therefore can help provide a sustainable lifestyle. Since the benefits of heavy industries do not trickle down to the people below the poverty line or to so-called developing countries, a revival of traditional technologies and crafts must complement the modern 'development' schemes for eradication of poverty. In this regard, the distinction between elite and folk science was non existent in ancient times: India's advanced metallurgy and civil engineering was researched and practiced by artisan guilds