Underworld Page 28
All in all, therefore, even in the absence of direct evidence of flooding of the type described in the Rig Veda, the indirect evidence from the ocean cores does suggest that such floods must have occurred and that they could have followed a period, however brief, when the main rivers of northern India had in fact dried up. So the hypothesis that the Vrtra story in the Rig Veda might be describing glacial outburst floods remains a reasonable one.89
Conveniently, the ambiguity over Vrtra’s character is also removed. Now he is at one and the same time an ice dragon blocking the flow of the mighty rivers and a rain-withholding demon whose period of grim enchantment over the Himalayas is brought to an end not only by the freeing of the rivers but also by the abrupt return to heavy rains and warm, wet conditions that we know followed the Younger Dryas.90
All this is speculation, of course, and implicit in it is a deeply heretical assumption – the assumption that the sages who composed at least some of the verses of the Vedas could have been in the Himalayas 12,000 years ago to witness the end of the Younger Dryas cold advance and to commemorate it as Indra’s victory over Vrtra. This does not fit at all with the much later date that scholars habitually assign to composition of the Rig Veda – but then neither do the accounts of a full and turbulent Sarasvati that the Rig provides us with and that also seem to sketch out the archaic geography of 10,000 or more years ago.
Mehrgarh’s yogic ethic
Growing up in the industrialized and now the electronic world, dominated as it has been by the rival material philosophies of capitalism and communism, we automatically imbibe from schools, peers and parents the idea that civilization is something that man invented in order to meet his material and economic needs. This is why, when archaeologists look for the origins of civilization, they look for the material and economic forces that might have driven hunter-gatherers to become farmers and to create the first permanent village communities.
But India, with its vibrant spiritual culture, its armies of ragged pilgrims and its remarkable Vedas raises the possibility that the real origins of civilization could be very different – not driven by economics but by the spiritual quest that all true ascetics of India still pursue with the utmost dedication. Such a quest does not deny that the basic material requirements of the human creature must be met but seeks to limit our attachment to material things and in general to subordinate material needs to mental and spiritual self-discipline.
In the sparseness, understatement and efficiency of Mehrgarh’s most ancient period could it be that we are seeing the imprint of this essentially yogic ethic – which the Vedas anyway tell us was the ethic of most ancient India?
And since archaeologists are now in universal agreement that there is an unbroken continuity of culture from Mehrgarh I around 9000 years ago all the way down to the great cities of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization around 4500 years ago, shouldn’t we expect signs of the same yogic ethic to turn up there?
PART THREE
India (2)
9 / Fairytale Kingdom
If Dwarka could be located and identified, well the personality of Krishna is not a myth but a fact.
S. R. Rao, discoverer of the Dwarka underwater ruins, 29 February 2000
I stood in the Harappan Gallery of the National Museum in New Delhi peering through security glass at a small steatite seal from Mohenjodaro. Dated to approximately 2700 BC,1 the seal depicts an ascetic seated in difficult posture of highly advanced yoga known as mulubandhasana.2 Lean-waisted, bearded, half-naked, phallus erect, the figure wears a head-dress of buffalo horns over long, unkempt hair. His face might be a mask. It is powerful, almost hypnotic, and there is the suggestion of two further faces (or masks?) in profile looking to either side. He is surrounded, but clearly unthreatened, by dangerous big-game animals – wild buffalo, rhinoceros, elephant, tiger. His arms are covered with bangles and stretched out so that his hands rest loosely on his knees – the traditional signal of a state of profound meditation.
Pasupati seal (2700 BC) from Mohenjodaro, showing a god in a yogic posture.
It is often said that we can never hope to learn much about the religious beliefs or the guiding philosophy of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization because we cannot read its script – a line of which appears above the meditating figure. Yet even though the inscription is opaque to us this enigmatic seal from Mohenjodaro does provide some definite and indeed rather intriguing information.
It tells us that at least the outward appearances of the ascetic mind-body disciplines of meditation and physical self-control which still lie at the heart of the spiritual lifestyle in Hindu India in the twenty-first century were being practised 4700 years ago in the Indus-Sarasvati cities.
It tells us specifically that yoga, one of the six orthodox schools of Vedic philosophy,3 was already known 4700 years ago as a fully evolved system – since mulubandhasana cannot be achieved by beginners but requires the prior mastery of numerous intermediate postures.4 Unless we are to imagine that yoga was miraculously conjured into being all at once as a complete system 4700 years ago, it tells us that the origins of the system must be much older even than that. And since variants of the lean, unkempt yogic figure performing mulubandhasana are ‘amongst the most common motifs in Indus ritual art’,5 it tells us that the classic image of the rishi, the yogic sage or seer, that is summoned up again and again in the Vedas, was also ubiquitous amongst the Indus-Sarasvati people in the third millennium BC.
Moreover, if scholars are right in their universal consensus that the Mohenjodaro seal ‘depicts the figure of a god seated in yogic posture’6 then we are witness to an amazing continuity in religious iconography – for to this day the Hindu god Siva is ‘the Lord of Yoga’ and is to be seen depicted on temple walls throughout India as a lean, almost naked, meditating ascetic with shaggy hair and sometimes even with a similarly erect penis (the latter feature not meant to imply unconstrained lust but rather its opposite; in Tantric Hinduism Siva’s erection symbolizes complete yogic control of bodily desires).7 Siva, too, is called Pasupati, the ‘beastmaster’ or ‘Lord of animals’, because of his ability to tame ferocious beasts with his yogic powers – exactly in the manner in which the figure on the Mohenjodaro seal seems to be portrayed.8 Even the phallic lingam symbol (the butter-smeared stone column erected in the inner sanctum of every Siva temple in India and regarded by worshippers as an embodiment of the god himself) is prefigured in the Indus-Sarasvati cities by conical sacred stones or ‘proto-linga’.9
For all these reasons the yogic god on the steatite seal has been known as ‘proto-Siva’, and also routinely spoken of by archaeologists as ‘the Pasupati figure’, since its discovery during excavations in the DK area of Mohenjodaro in 1928/9.10 Yet Western scholars like Jonathan Kennoyer attach little significance to the comparisons that invoke such epithets:
The figure has been referred to as ‘proto-Siva’ because of its similarity to later iconography of the deity Siva from the Hindu pantheon. Whereas many later Hindu deities may have had their roots in earlier beliefs of the Indus Valley or other indigenous communities living in the subcontinent, we cannot confirm specific connections between the horned figure on the Indus seals and later Hindu deities. There are similarities in the iconography but the meaning relayed may have been significantly different.11
The Vedas and archaeology
I left the Harappan Gallery deep in thought and walked across the corridor into the Museum’s circular central garden. I realized that I felt irritated by Kennoyer’s caution. And it wasn’t just because he was downplaying the many interesting iconographic links between Siva and the Mohenjodaro figure. Unspoken behind this was the larger problem of the Vedas, which also describe a Siva-like or ‘proto-Siva’ deity – the Vedic god Rudra12 – and which bestow the utmost respect, even awe, upon seven rishis with yogic powers.
I found a shady spot to sit down, opened my notebook and scrawled the words Summary of Vedic traditions about the origins of civilization in India at the top
of a blank page:
Summary of Vedic traditions about the origins of civilization in India:
An earlier civilization, which knew the Vedas and practised yoga, existed before the great flood and was destroyed by it.
Manu and the Seven Rishis (Saptarishi) were yogic adepts who survived the flood.
The role of the Seven Rishis was to preserve the Vedas through memorization and to repromulgate them amongst post-diluvial humanity.
The role of Manu was to re-establish agriculture after the flood, using a cache of seeds and plants that he had brought with him for this purpose, and to become the progenitor of future civilized humanity by fathering a dynasty of kings.
The Vedas and the traditions that descend from them depict the Saptarishi as a lineage of ascetics. After the flood their primary abode was in the Himalayas, where they would retreat to meditate and perform austerities, but they also played decisive roles in running and ordering secular affairs, and in the making and guidance of kings.
The so-called Saptarishi calendar of ancient India, which of course cannot be separated from the traditions of the Seven Rishis, has a start date around 6700 BC – almost 9000 years ago.
Summary of archaeological evidence about the origins of civilization in India:
Fully functional Village farming communities’ like Mehrgarh in the foothills of the Himalayas appear suddenly in the archaeological record somewhere around 9000 years ago. It’s a bit of a mystery. No clear antecedents have yet been found. The original settlers came with seeds and already knew how to farm.
This happened in the midst of an epoch of cataclysmic global floods that saw huge areas of India’s continental shelf inundated. The possibility, therefore, cannot be ruled out that the founders of Mehrgarh had previously lived on lands swallowed up by the rising seas.
There is an unbroken archaeological continuum between Mehrgarh 1 A around 7000 BC and the upsurge of Mohenjodaro and Harappa as great cities after 3000 BC. For some reason the rate of growth and development became particularly rapid between 2600 and 2500 BC – the mature phase of incredibly vigorous urban expansion – but you can see the roots even of this phase in many small and large details more than 4000 years older exposed in the excavations of the first habitation layers at Mehrgarh.
The paramount ritual image to have come down to us from Mohenjodaro and Harappa, and therefore likely to be connected in some way to this ancient heritage, recognizably portrays a rishi seated in an advanced yogic posture and seemingly deep in meditation.
Question:
Why should the people of the largest and most sophisticated urban civilization of antiquity have specially venerated the figure of a half-naked ascetic meditating in a rural setting surrounded by ferocious animals?
If the Vedas were the scriptures of Mohenjodaro and Harappa, then an answer immediately suggests itself.
They would have venerated the image because they would have been taught from childhood that their civilization had been founded, and that it continued to be guided, by rishis looking exactly like this.
I closed my notebook and returned to the Harappan Gallery for another look at the cross-legged, three-faced, buffalo-horned rishi of Mohenjodaro. Well, not exactly cross-legged, in fact – because to perform mulubandhasana you first have to sit down and bring your heels together with your feet pointing forward whilst placing your knees flat on the ground. Next, with your feet still pointing forward, you tuck your heels in under your perineum. Then you turn your feet a full 180 degrees under your body so that they now point excruciatingly backwards – a manoeuvre that will disclocate the ankles of an inexperienced practitioner. Then you meditate.
How long, I wondered again, does it take to perfect a system like yoga? And if it was already perfect 4700 years ago, then how many thousands of years before that must its roots go back, what are we to conclude about the level of development of the supposedly Stone Age people who created it, and why is there no archaeological trace of them?
Return to the diving quest
February 2000
From Delhi I flew to Goa to meet marine archaeologists at India’s National Institute of Oceanography, whose research, I hoped, might provide me with some answers. I had already been in contact with them by e-mail and telephone for more than a year, trying to arrange to dive at Dwarka – which still fascinated me, as it had since 1992, with its ancient legends of a flood at the end of a world age and its mysterious underwater ruins. The archaeologists seemed friendly enough, even enthusiastic, but answered to higher authorities in the Indian government whose blessing they needed before they could agree to let me dive with them.
By this stage, early February 2000, I still didn’t have a clear chronology in which to place the underwater structures at Dwarka. Nor, it seemed to me, did the NIO. As I’ve reported in previous chapters, there was a general assumption that the ruins had been submerged by relatively recent land subsidence (not rising sea-levels) and that they belonged to a very late period of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization – 1700–1500 BC. But the marine archaeologists had not recovered any datable artefacts that could confirm or deny this theory.
All the more I wanted to look for myself and form my own opinion.
Legacy of a lost civilization
February 2000
On the flights to Goa, and the long stopover in Mumbai, I went back over some of the evidence on the origins of civilization in India I’d been considering in recent months, reread the notes I had made in the National Museum in Delhi, and then, in large letters, wrote the word Hypothesis at the top of an empty page:
Hypothesis:
The Indus-Sarasvati civilization, the development of which archaeologists have already traced back 9000 years, has an earlier episode of hidden prehistory. It was founded by the survivors of a lost Indian coastal civilization destroyed by the great global floods at the end of the Ice Age.
Such floods occurred many times between 15,000 and 7000 years ago, but a particularly bad episode is attested in high salinity levels in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago.13
The convergence of archaeological evidence is that the first food-producing villages like Mehrgarh were established immediately after the worst flooding between 10,000 and 9000 years ago. For example, Gregory Possehl: There is no entirely satisfactory chronology for the Indus Age, especially for the internal stages and phases of prehistoric life. Present estimates, based on radiocarbon dates, suggest that it arises at 7000 or 8000 BC with the earliest villages, the domestication of plants and animals and the beginnings of farming and herding societies.’14
The survivors who established the early villages practised a ‘proto-Vedic’ religion that they had brought with them from their inundated homeland and probably spoke an early form of Sanskrit.
The survivors were experienced farmers, as the archaeological record confirms, and their cultural level was high, but religious and philosophical considerations (perhaps even a reaction to the supposed ‘judgement’ of the flood on their former lifestyle?) led them to create a sparse, utilitarian and ascetic new world – even as they moved gradually towards ever larger and more complex urban communities.
There were secular rulers but the real leadership of the new communities remained vested down the generations in the brotherhood of sages whose forefathers had escaped the deluge – the lineage of Vedic masters whose task it was to preserve and transmit a precious body of antediluvian knowledge. For thousands of years, from Mehrgarh to Mohenjodaro, it was the policies set by these great rishis in pursuit of that objective – rather than in response to economic or other material forces – that shaped the steady, peaceful, modest material development of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization.
It was a hypothesis – just that, nothing more. But I’d already been playing around with it in my mind for months as my research on India had progressed and it was time to set it down on paper. Nothing in it contradicted the archaeological evidence. It made sense of the sudden and
fully formed appearance of village-farming communities like Mehrgarh between 10,000 and 9000 years ago. It took proper account, as other theories did not, of the latest science on the end of the Ice Age. It provided a rational basis in real events for the Indian flood myth. And it explained the phenomenal longevity and continuity of the Indus-Sarasvati civilization from the simplicity of its sudden beginnings at the end of the Ice Age until its equally sudden boom and collapse in the third millennium BC.
There was one way to prove the hypothesis very quickly. All I had to do was find ruins more than 9000 years old underwater on India’s continental shelf. And that was the private hope I had for Dwarka.
Gatekeepers of the fairytale kingdom
The headquarters of the National Institute of Oceanography are in Dona Paula, Goa, in a pleasant university-style campus of trees and lawns. As well as occupying a modern block on the highest point of the campus, the Institute’s many divisions, sub-divisions and laboratories sprawl outwards into a suburb of old-fashioned bungalows set beneath the trees. The Marine Archaeology Centre is in one of these, identifiable by a display of stone anchors and other stone objects mostly retrieved from depths of 5–10 metres amongst the underwater ruins at Dwarka.
My appointment was with Kamlesh Vora, the NIO’s head of archaeology, with whom I had been corresponding. I appreciated that he had taken the trouble to process my proposal at all, since he could perfectly easily have dismissed it out of hand or just ignored it, but the fact was that many months had passed and there was still no sign either of approval or disapproval from the higher authorities – in Delhi as it happened – to whom he had submitted it.