Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography Read online

  From Delhi, the Aravallis extend into Haryana. As I write, I can see the low rocky ridges holding out against an onslaught of Gurgaon’s modern buildings. Sadly these ancient hills are now being destroyed by indiscriminate mining. One of the worst examples of this can be seen on a side branch of the range near Jodhpur, Rajasthan. Ask to be driven to Balsamand Lake, an eleventh-century lake on the outskirts of the city. The lake is often dry these days due to the wholesale destruction of its water-catchment area. 3 Along its banks is an area of several square kilometres where the terrain has been gouged out by stone quarrying (some legal, some illegal). The air is filled with the sound of drills and dynamite, the dust and smoke of trucks laden with stone. Not a single tree stands against the glare of the relentless desert sun. It is a vision of hell.

  Farther south, near the Gujarat–Rajasthan border, the Aravallis briefly lay claim to being mountains rather than mere hills. The Guru Shikhar peak at Mount Abu rises to 1722 metres above sea level. This is a sacred place of temples and legends. The Rajput warrior clans claim that their ancestors arose from a great sacrificial fire on this mountain. Not far from Abu is the beautiful lake-city of Udaipur. This was once the capital of the kingdom of Mewar, which bravely fought medieval invaders against impossible odds. The hills and valleys still ring with ballads of how Rana Pratap and his army of Bhil tribesmen refused to surrender to the Mughals. Long before all these events, however, the Aravallis witnessed a major shift in the evolution of life on this planet.

  Fossil records suggest that around 530 million years ago, there was a sudden appearance of a large number of complex organisms. This is called the Cambrian Explosion although it still took millions of years. Over the next 70-80 million years, we see an astonishing array of life forms evolve. Meanwhile, the continental land masses began to reassemble and, around 270 million years ago, they fused into a new supercontinent called Pangea. 4 It is now thought that this cyclical assembling and breaking up of supercontinents has always been a part of the geological history of the earth.

  A map of Pangea would show the Indian craton wedged between Africa, Madagascar, Antarctica and Australia (see map). It was on Pangea that the dinosaurs appeared 230 million years ago. However, the earth remained restless and Pangea began to break up around 175 million years ago during the Jurassic era. It first split into a northern continent called Laurasia (consisting of North America, Europe and Asia) and a southern continent called Gondwana (Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia and India). Note that the name Gondwana is itself derived from the Gond tribe of central India.

  We now see a sequence of rifts that separate India from its neighbours. First, India and Madagascar separated from Africa around 158 million years ago and then, 130 million years ago, they separated from Antarctica. Around 90 million years ago India separated from Madagascar and drifted steadily northwards. 5

  A large number of dinosaur remains have been found in Raioli village of Balasinor taluka, Gujarat. The site was identified in 1981 and appears to have been a popular hatchery as thousands of fossilized dinosaur eggs have been found there. Fossilized bones have also been found including those of a previously unknown predator that was 25–30 feet long and two-thirds the size of the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The animal has since been named Rajasaurus Narmadsensis (means Lizard King of the Narmada). The site is now protected and is being converted into a Dinosaur Park. 6

  As the Indian craton drifted northwards towards Asia, it passed over the Reunion ‘hotspot’, which caused an outburst of volcanic activity. Most of these eruptions happened in the Western Ghats near Mumbai and created the Deccan Traps. This is not the type of volcanic eruption that one associates with the perfectly conical Mount Fuji in Japan. Rather, it was more like a layer-by-layer oozing that created the stepped, flat-topped outcrops that geologists call Traps. The term is apt for, in the late seventeenth century, Shivaji and his band of Maratha guerillas would use this unique terrain to trap and wear down the armies of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. The volcanic episode did not last very long—perhaps just thirty thousand years—but it was a dramatic phenomenon and there are some scholars who feel that it may have contributed to the extinction of dinosaurs. Looking out from Lord Point at the hill station of Matheran, one can clearly see the geological impact of all the volcanic activity.

  Meanwhile, India kept up its relentless northward journey and, 55–60 million years ago, it collided with the Eurasian plate. This collision pushed up the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau. What are now tall mountains were once under the sea, which is why marine fossils are quite common high up in the mountains. The process is not over—the Indian plate is still pushing into Asia. As a result the Himalayas are still rising by around 5 mm every year (although erosion reduces the actual increase in height). Given the lack of vegetation, Ladakh is a good place to visually appreciate the geological impact of this process. Not surprisingly, the resulting tectonic pressures make the Himalayas seismically unstable and prone to frequent and powerful earthquakes.

  The northward drift of the Indian land mass

  The broad contours of the above narrative of India’s geological history are generally accepted. However, there remain many unresolved issues and several findings that do not neatly fit into the story. One puzzle relates to the discovery of a large number of insects preserved in amber found in Vastan, 30 km north of Surat, a geological zone called Cambay Shale. It is a big finding that includes 700 species, representing 55 families. These insects are not unique to India, but very similar to those found in other continents and as far away as Spain. The problem is that the currently accepted view about the northward drift of the Indian craton would mean that the subcontinent would have been an isolated island for tens of millions of years at the time when these insects emerged. So, how did these insects get to India? It is possible that there were islands that allowed them to hop across to the subcontinent. Perhaps, the date of the Indo–Asian collision was earlier than generally accepted. Frankly, we really do not know. 7

  Nonetheless, India’s relentless push into Asia continues, making the subcontinent tectonically very active. As we shall see in the next chapter, it is very likely that a tectonic event diverted the course of a major river and, with it, the course of Indian civilization. The danger still lurks. The 2005 earthquake in North Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir registered a magnitude of 7.6 on the Richter scale and claimed eighty thousand lives. However, much more powerful earthquakes have been recorded along the mountain range. The Assam earthquake of 1950 registered a magnitude of 8.6; it is one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded. Fortunately, the epicentre was in an area that was then relatively sparsely populated and so it killed only 1500 people. A similar earthquake in a densely populated area today would kill hundreds of thousands if not millions. Given tectonic pressures, it is only a matter of time before this happens. This is why the Himalayan range is one of the most dangerous places to build large dams.

  With the Indian plate wedged into Asia along the Himalayas, the stage was set for the formation of the youngest of India’s geological features—the Gangetic plains. They started out as a marshy depression running between the Himalayas and an older mountain range called the Vindhyas. Silt brought down by the Ganga and its tributaries slowly began to fill up this hollow to create a fertile alluvial plain. Note that this process is so recent that early humans would have witnessed it. We know that the Ganga repeatedly changed its course and shifted southward leaving behind oxbow lakes that can still be seen.

  The Ganga’s southward drift was arrested only when it nudged into the Vindhyas near Chunar (close to Varanasi). It is the only place in the plains where a hill commands such a view over the river, making Chunar fort a coveted strategic location. It was once said that he who controlled Chunar fort also controlled the destiny of India. A walk through the fort is a walk through Indian history. The walls resonate with tales of the legendary King Vikramaditya, the Mughals, Sher Shah Suri and Governor-General Warren Hastings. There ar
e remains here from each era including an eighteenth-century sundial. Do not miss the neglected British graves below the walls. Their headstones make for interesting reading. Just south-west of the fort are the quarries that, in the third century BC, supplied the stone used by the Mauyans to carve the lions of Sarnath, now the national symbol. We will return to them in Chapter 3.

  POPULATING INDIA

  When India collided with Asia, it rejoined the broader ecological milieu of the rest of the world. Many people assume that the similarities between present-day Indian and African mammals (elephants, rhinos, lions, etc) are due to the fact that India was once attached to Africa. As we have seen, this cannot be the case because India separated from Africa during the age of the dinosaur. 8 The entry of large mammals into India was due to its geographical re-attachment to Eurasia and the shifting climatic zones that allowed or forced these animals to migrate into India. Take for instance a genetic study of the frozen remains of a Siberian mammoth that died 33,000 years ago. The scientists of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig found that the Asian elephant is more closely related to the mammoth than to the African elephant. It appears that the genetic lines of the Asian and the African elephant separated six million years ago whereas the Asian elephants and the mammoths diverged only 440,000 years ago. 9

  Moreover, many Indian animals came into the subcontinent from the east. The tiger is one such example. There is some disagreement about the exact origins of the big cat. Some scholars claim a Siberian origin while others prefer to locate it in South China. Two-million-year-old remains of the tiger’s ancestors have been found in Siberia, China, Sumatra and Java. However, the animal is a relative newcomer to India. The genetic data as well as fossil finds suggest that the Bengal tiger came to inhabit India fairly recently, perhaps no more than 12,000 years ago.

  Meanwhile, where were the humans? There is now general consensus that, anatomically, modern humans evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago. This fits both genetic data as well as archaeological remains. Genetic studies show that the San tribe of the Kalahari (also called the ‘Bushmen’) are probably the oldest surviving population of humans. Members of this tribe show the greatest genetic variation of any racial group and are therefore likely to be direct descendants of the earliest modern human population. 10

  Modern humans, of course, were not the first hominids to have walked the earth. More than a million years ago, pre-modern humans like Homo erectus used stone tools and had wandered as far as China and Java. At the time that modern humans were evolving in Africa, their close cousins, the Neanderthals, were already well established in Europe and West Asia. In other words, we are the last survivors of a large family tree and, in the early stages, it would not have been obvious that we would emerge as the most successful species. Indeed, there is evidence that our first attempt to leave Africa was a failure. Archaeological remains in the Skhul and Qafzeh caves in Israel show that modern humans may have made their way to the Levant about 120,000 years ago. Their passage may have been helped by the fact that the planet was enjoying a relatively wet and warm inter-glacial period that allowed them to wander up north. However, this climatic period did not last and a new Ice Age started. The early settlers either died out or were forced to retreat. Neanderthals, better adapted to the cold, probably reoccupied the area.

  For the next 50,000 years, our ancestors remained in Africa. Around 65–70,000 years ago, a very small number, perhaps a single band, crossed over from Africa into the southern Arabian peninsula. 11 It is amazing that despite all their superficial differences, all non-Africans are descendants of this tiny group of wanderers. 12 This means that non-Africans have very little genetic variation. This has important implications for our susceptibility to global pandemics.

  Climate and environment had a very significant impact on the expansion of modern humans. 13 Our planet goes through natural cycles of cooling and heating. When early humans made their way out of Africa, the earth was much cooler and much of the world’s water was locked in giant ice-sheets. As a result, sea-levels were as much as 100 metres lower than today and coastlines and climate zones would have been very different. Thus, the early band of humans migrating from Africa to southern Arabia would have had to make a relatively short crossing across the Red Sea. Furthermore, they would have found an Arabian coastline that was much wetter and more hospitable.

  It appears that modern humans next made their way along the coast to what is now the Persian Gulf. The average depth of the Persian Gulf is merely 36 metres. 14 With sea-levels 100 metres below current levels, this area would have been a well-watered plain—a veritable Garden of Eden. The groups of early humans would have found this a very attractive location and probably enjoyed a significant population increase. Expansion into Central Asia and Europe would have been difficult at this stage because of the Ice Age. However, they would have spread out along the Makran coast into the Indian subcontinent. Note again, that the Indian coastline would have been different from what we see today and, in many places, the shore would have been 25–100 km out from current contours.

  At some stage, branches of the Persian Gulf people pushed their way farther into the Indian subcontinent. The landscape being traversed by these early migrations had supported other hominid populations. 15 In Europe, we know that the Neanderthals steadily withdrew westwards till one of the last bands died out in a cave in Gibraltar. However, it is unclear what happened to the pre-modern hominids of Asia. The eruption of the Toba volcano in Sumatra 74,000 years ago may have played some role in their extinction as excavations in Jwalapuram show that peninsular India was covered in volcanic ash from the eruptions. Experts still disagree on the impact but it is possible that the eruption may have decimated the population of pre-modern hominids that lived in the subcontinent at that time. This would have cleared the way for new immigrants, who appear to have spread quickly through the subcontinent and then through to South East Asia. Some scholars believe that the indigenous tribes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands may be remnants of the earliest migrations into the region.

  One branch eventually reached Australia around 40,000 years ago and became the ancestors of the aboriginals. Genetic studies confirm that the Australian aboriginals do have a genetic link with aboriginal tribes in South East Asia. However, for a long time researchers could find no direct genetic link between present-day Indians and native Australians. Some scholars even argued that this group may have avoided India altogether and used a route through Central Asia. 16 A study published in 2009 by the Anthropological Survey of India finally found genetic traces to link some Indian tribes with native Australians. 17 Note that these are very tiny traces—966 persons from twenty-six tribes were tested but only seven individuals showed possible genetic links. Still, we have a possible solution to the puzzle. The researchers also suggested that the Indian and Australian groups had separated about 50–60,000 years ago.

  Meanwhile, a sizeable population remained in the vicinity of the Persian Gulf and the subcontinent for several thousand years. Scientists think that many important genetic lineages emerged from this area at this time. During the relatively warmer inter-glacial periods, sub-branches would have spread farther out into Europe, Central Asia and so on. However, note that temperatures would have still been far lower than present-day levels and that there would have been several climatic cycles. This means that we are not dealing with a landscape that is static. Research into the Persian Gulf people is still relatively new and hindered by the fact that the area is now mostly underwater. Nonetheless, scholars like Jeffrey Rose are painstakingly reconstructing the history of what they call the ‘Gulf Oasis’.

  This is a stylized and simplified account of what happened over tens of thousands of years. We are dealing with very tiny Stone Age bands of 50–100 individuals over vast expanses of time and space. Their movements would not have been systematic or linear. There would have been random wanderings, retracements and dead ends. Just as there were groups coming into the subcontinent, there
were groups going out. Indeed, geneticists feel that India may have been the source of a number of important genetic lineages that are now found worldwide. Natural calamities, hunger, tribal wars and, most importantly, disease would have decided who survived and who did not. It is important to remember that a tiny difference in the constellation of circumstances in the Stone Age could show up as a dramatic difference in the genetic make-up of today’s population.

  There are plenty of remains of these early humans in Stone Age sites scattered across India. Bhimbetka in central India is one of the most extensive sites in the world although it was only discovered in the 1950s. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. The hilly terrain is littered with hundreds of caves and rock shelters that appear to have been inhabited almost continuously for over 30,000 years.

  The country’s climate and wildlife would have gone through a lot of change over this long period. For instance, the finding of beads and ornaments made from ostrich-egg shells show that the bird was once common in India. It is possible that the Stone Age fashion industry pushed it into extinction by targeting the eggs. Bhimbetka has rock paintings of animals and hunters from the Stone Age as well as of warriors on horseback from a later time (perhaps the Bronze Age). The paintings provide intriguing glimpses of the ancient origins of Indian civilization. As the BBC’s Michael Wood puts it, ‘Looking at the dancing deity at Bhimbetka with his bangles and trident, one can’t help but recall the image of the dancing Shiva’. 18