Friday, April 16, 2010

review of michel danino's "Lost River" in Business Standard

apr 16th, 2010

i have ordered my copy of the book online. looking forward to getting it. danino is a brilliant author, gently persuasive. 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michel 

http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/weharappans/391917/


BUSINESS STANDARD
Thursday, Apr 15, 2010

We the Harappans

Rrishi Raote / New Delhi April 15, 2010, 0:11 IST


There is a terrific photograph on page 131 of this book. It shows, in the
foreground, the small figure of a man walking from left to right across the
picture, along the edge of a high ground. Beyond him is a broad, flat
depression, sparsely dotted with desert shrubs. And beyond that, in the
distance, is another long slab of even higher ground. It looks dry, sandy
and windblown.

The caption, however, informs us that this is "A view of the Ghaggar's wide
bed at Anupgarh", taken in 1950. The Ghaggar is a seasonal river whose
course passes mostly through Rajasthan. Anupgarh is a tiny town not far from
the Pakistan border.

A century earlier, a British army officer named F Mackeson was looking for a
direct route between Sirsa and Bahawalpur (now in Haryana and the Pakistani
Punjab, respectively) for the movement of colonial troops. In 1844, he
identified this same dry riverbed as a natural highway. He reported that
"camels may march by it fifty abreast on either side of a column of troops",
adding that along his chosen route, the wells yielded sweet water; on either
side, the wells were brackish. The highway was never laid, because the
British annexed the Punjab in 1849 and no longer needed the desert route.

But why - since it is a seasonal stream that starts in the Shivaliks and not
the snow-supplied Himalaya, and even in colonial times never flowed as far
as Anupgarh - does the Ghaggar have such a wide bed? Well, says Michel
Danino, because thousands of years ago it was a major river.

There's no escaping that conclusion, if one looks at the terrain. The vast
northwest plain of our subcontinent is scored with the tracks of defunct
rivers. Some of these palaeochannels are the abandoned courses of existing
rivers. But others - notably the Ghaggar and its downstream extension, the
Hakra - are the remaining traces of a large, perennial river, once probably
fed by the combined waters of the Sutlej and the Yamuna - before those two
rivers turned away to join the Indus and the Ganga.

Danino summarises the scientific evidence very nicely. Channels have been
mapped, soil sediments studied, groundwaters analysed and earthquake history
investigated. And not all of this is recent work. European colonial
surveyors, agents and adventurers of all kinds who travelled at ground
level, as it were, observed, measured and recorded what they saw. They also
noticed that this arid, thinly populated wasteland was densely peppered with
the remains of ancient, permanent settlements - many of them city-size,
which could never have existed without abundant year-round water. In some
cases, these pioneers recorded what they heard too, such as folk traditions
which told of a time when a great river flowed through the region.

Those past observers, few of them specialised academics, did not hesitate to
make the leap from physical to cultural evidence. The Rig Veda, the earliest
Indian literary source, spoke particularly of a great river called the
Sarasvati between the Sutlej and the Yamuna. Well, the Ghaggar-Hakra was the
only serious contender. So, it must have been the Sarasvati.

Naturally, this identification is a little contentious - though not so much
among archaeologists, who describe what they actually find in the ground, as
among historians. Danino, who is an amateur scholar in the good, old sense
(he has also done copious translations of writings by Sri Aurobindo and the
Mother; and he lives and works in Tamil Nadu), is attentive but practical.
To him, the identification is secure.

Once the fact of the Sarasvati is settled, Danino turns to the implications.
Part 2 is about the Harappan civilisation. This is because most Harappan
sites are located not along the Indus but in clusters along the course of
the expired Sarasvati. Some later sites are in the bed of the river, and
this helps archaeologists map the slow decay of the river as it gradually
lost its waters.

One wonders at the detailed survey of Harappan sites in a book on the
Sarasvati - until Part 3 dispels the mystery. Here Danino argues, very
precisely, that many things we know about the Harappans and their culture
did not vanish. There are, he says, no gaps in the archaeological record and
no facts in or on the ground which point to a separate people - namely, the
Aryans - driving in from the west. Harappan tropes recur in the Vedic
civilisation centred on the Ganga, from architectural proportions to weights
and measures, imagery and iconography, even (though here the evidence is
weak) the script.

This is the crescendo to which the book rises - and though the facts are too
few to settle the matter, they are eye-opening stuff. Are we, in fact,
Harappans?

All this may be well-debated in specialist circles, but rarely outside.
Danino's book is so well written as to be almost a thriller, and it is
beautifully produced.

THE LOST RIVER
On the Trail of the Sarasvati
Michel Danino
Penguin
X + 358 pages; Rs 399



3 comments:

Unknown said...

This is indeed a great book: well-researched & logically persuasive. I am still reading the book but I would recommend to anybody who has any interest about our (Indian sub-continental) past and the centrality of the Saraswati (or rather the Indus-Saraswati) heritage.

Anu said...

I too loved reading this book.

Subarna Ghoshal said...

I loved this book and more so because this echoed with a underlying feeling I had about Harappan Culture. The first time I read about Indus Valley Civilization/Harappan Culture in school history book, I always wanted them to be a part of us (the current Indian civilization). As this book points to that thought and kind of assures that Aryans are not invaders, I emotionally bonded with it. After reading the book, I wanted to know more about Vedas and what it tell us about our culture. So I went ahead and bought Sri Aurobindo's 'The Secret of the Vedas'. Currently reading this and its mind boggling.