Mythology and geography

Many researchers don’t believe in its existence because they feel there isn’t enough proof but several archaeologists suggest that Saraswati isn’t just a mythical river. They say that a seasonal river, Ghaggar-Hakra, which comes alive only during the monsoon, originating from the Shivalik hills in Himachal Pradesh and flowing through Punjab and Haryana, before making its way to the Thar desert, is indeed the Saraswati.

Legends have it that when a mani  in Parvati’s earring got lost, Shiva pleaded the connoisseur of gems Sheshnag to help him find it. The thousand-mouthed snake hissed, resulting not only in a shower of  manis  in the Parvati River in the Parvati Valley, where the couple lived, but also the formation of the hot springs at Manikaran. Locals had reported seeing gems in the hot springs, but they disappeared after an earthquake in 1905. Also, in the boiling waters of the Parvati Valley, Guru Nanak and Bhai Mardana cooked meals. There’s a Sikh shrine called Manikaran Gurudwara, where to date food is cooked the same way.

Also, do you know that a British engineer, Captain Proby Thomas Cautley, who “came to India to work on the construction of the Ganges Canal and the repairing of the eastern Yamuna Canal,” discovered fossil remains weighing 40 tonnes in the 1830s, earning the moniker “Fossil Wallah”?

What do such stories say about the interconnectedness of mythology and geography? If not facts, aren’t these stories fascinating? However, many geologists and archaeologists have found evidence to substantiate such mythological stories.

It’s this thin line between “mythology”—the world of stories—and “geography”— an evidential field, heavily based on scientific rigour and fact-checking—that the author and storyteller Nalini Ramachandran traces in her delightful book Gods, Giants & the Geography of India. 

Richly illustrated by Sharanya Kunnath, this book is divided into 27 chapters and a poetic summary “Pause and Play” towards the end, and is structured in a way that it helps readers visualise the narrative, which flows frame by frame.

First, either a quick conversation or an intriguing feud is presented, and the frame changes swiftly, diving deep into the story only to be interrupted by “Connecting the Dots”, which makes an apples-to-apples comparison between the story and scientific evidence. There are several “Do You Know” type boxes as well, which reminded me of my school days NCERT books. I remained aloof to such interesting stories that form the core of Ms Ramachandran’s book while learning geography in school, however.

 In the introduction, she writes that she “dug around for stories that the myths and legends tell us about the geography and geomythology.” A term she mentions was first coined by geologist Dorothy B Vitaliano in 1978. Interestingly, many English dictionaries haven’t included it as a “valid” word. But perhaps if the editors of those dictionaries read this book, they will be tempted to add it without delay.

There’s a story about Silathoranam, which was designated a National Geographical Monument in 1981 by the Geographical Survey of India. Silathoranam, which is documented to have been a result of weathering, “is one of the only three natural stone arches in the world, and the only one in Asia.” According to a myth, “the miraculously balanced stone arch, Silathoranam, marks the place where he took his second step and walked through the rocks that broke apart to let him through.”

There’s another interesting tale that informs us how Shraddhadeva Manu’s kingdom, Manu Aalaya, for brevity’s sake came to be called what is present-day Manali. And why Majuli Island in Assam came to be called second Dwarka. It’s the place where Krishna and Rukmini halted after their marriage.

One of the most bewildering but charming stories was the one in which the sisters Nanda and Sunanda— now twin peaks—were embraced by the mountain ranges when the sisters pleaded with the hills to save them from Prince Rohilla, who after murdering the King of the Chand dynasty wanted to marry Nanda against her will.

Once a government expedition undertook to set up a “plutonium-powered remote sensing device atop Nanda Kot to watch over neighbouring regions”. Due to a blizzard, the team hurriedly returned and when they got back everything was gone. 

Ms Ramachandran remarks: “Perhaps the mountain took in the capsules too, just as it had accepted the two sisters as its own!”

In the same way, I believe, we should embrace such stories, as Ms Ramachandran has done, to use them as a tool to make learning fun — but not as a substitute to history. Geography, perhaps.