Was the Ramayana actually set in and around today’s Afghanistan?
An
examination of a book by physicist Rajesh Kochhar debunks the notion
that the events of the epic took place in modern-day India.
Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons
History
is said to be the original discipline in the faculties today known as
humanities. This is owing to the fact that every discipline in knowledge
discourse has a history – even abstract disciplines like mathematics or
astronomy – and every piece of history has a geophysical contextuality.
Ever
since Herodotus (484 BC - 425 BC, Greek-occupied Turkey) started the
discipline, he recorded events during the reign of four Persian kings
and chronicled life and society in their times. These were times of
conflict between Greece and Persia and had a geographical contextuality.
Herodotus also speaks of “India”, where he saw the
Himalayan marmot bathing in gold dust. Much later, deconstructing his
text led to the conclusion that the great father of historical praxis
must have passed through the North West Frontier province and reached
the base of Hindu Kush.
This posed a question, which
Herodotus did not ask himself: if he had indeed travelled to “India”,
which “India” was this? For that matter, if he was “Greek”, which
“Greece” did he live in? Similarly. if Ram of the epic poem Ramayana was
an “Indian”, where was this “India” situated?
The so-called Ram Setu
A
ship that wishes to sail from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal has
to pass through the Indian Ocean to the south of Sri Lanka. The voyage
would have been 30 hours shorter if it could have travelled along the
Gulf Of Mannar, which separates India and Sri Lanka, but this isn’t
possible. For there are thousands of small submerged rocks beneath its
surface, stretching like a bridge across 47 km between the two
countries. As a result, the sea is between one and 30 metre deep here,
which isn’t favourable for sailing.
The British government of
colonised India as well the government of independent India had often
planned to dredge the channel to make it suitable for sailing; but the
plans have remained elusive for various reasons. At present, for
instance, Hindutva followers believe that this is the bridge built by an
army of monkeys, as described in the Ramayana, which Ram and Lakshaman
crossed to conquer Sri Lanka.
Their demand is that, far from
dredging, let the Archaeological Survey of India declare this bridge a
national monument. Not that the colonisers were any less fundamentalist.
In 1804 a certain British cartographer named the structure Adam’s
Bridge – according to him this was the bridge described in the Bible
which Adam crossed to scale a mountain peak, where he meditated for
1,000 years while standing on one leg.
Even before this, we have
seen Marco Polo describe the structure as a bridge, as did Al-Biruni in
the book he wrote in 1030 CE. In other words, it has long been held that
this row of rocks beneath the surface of the water is a bridge.
Not exactly a bridge
According
to geologists this structure is actually a limestone shoal, the outcome
of natural processes. Between 300 and 30 million years ago, a portion
of the Indian subcontinent is believed to have broken off because of
continental drift to form the island of Sri Lanka. The debris that this
fragment of land left behind at birth in the water as it drifted away
led to the creation of this so-called bridge.
It may have jutted
out of the water at some point in history, in which case it might have
been used as a bridge. But there is considerable doubt whether the users
belonged to the age of the Ramayana. This is because the inhabitants of
Sri Lanka went directly from the Stone Age to the Iron Age; the use of
copper was not very prevalent here. On the other hand, the Ramayana is a tale from an advanced Copper Age – an epic in verse from a period two or three thousand years before the Iron Age.
Where was Ramayana set?
Let
us drop the preamble and get to the point now. If the Lanka mentioned
in the Ramayana was not the Sri Lanka of today, where was it located?
Where did Ram belong, for that matter? Wherever he may have lived, he
was certainly not an inhabitant of what is the Ganges valley today, or
of “Ramjanmabhoomi” Ayodhya. For, civilised man did not live in the
forest-infested Ganges valley before the Iron Age, since there were no
axes with which to clear the vegetation before iron was discovered.
There were no swords either, which proves that the Ramayana, unlike the Mahabaharata, is not an epic of the Ganges valley. It makes no mention of swords – the bow and arrow are the primary weapons in it.
The
primary objective of this essay is to point to the geographical
location of the Ramayana. It is not the writer who has arrived at the
answer, nor an Indologist like Max Mueller or even a historian or
archaeologist. The person in question is Rajesh Kochhar, a physicist
with an inclination for history, who has broken through the traditional
techniques of history in his work The Vedic People – Their History and Geography.
How the Ramayana is different from the Mahabharata
The
primary difficulty of discussing the ancient history of India lies in
the necessity of first demolishing several well-established
inaccuracies, such as the Aryan Invasion Theory, for instance. Spun by
white men and broadcast by colonial historians, this old wives’ tale is
still taught in schools and colleges, with half of any written work –
measured in terms of paper, ink and effort - being expended on it. We
shall not entertain it. We will only examine whatever can be determined
through the social and geographical pointers available in the Ramayana.
There are two other fundamental differences between the Ramayana and the Mahabharata
– in the rivers and in the divine pantheon. In the Mahabharata the
Ganga and the Yamuna are almost ubiquitous, but they’re completely
missing from the Ramayana. In the Mahabharata we see the powerful presence of the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwar – but they’re absent from the Ramayana. We do not find these two rivers and these three gods together in the Rig Veda.
However, the rivers and gods that are to be found in the Rig Veda are also to be found in the Ramayana – the rivers Saraswati and Sarayu, and the original trinity of Agni, Varun and Pavan. From this it is easy to surmise that the Ramayana
is a Rig Vedic epic. Which period was this? It would not be correct to
estimate this using our current calendar: it would probably not be
possible either. An approximation can be made from the sequence of
events.
The somras clue
Vedic nomads
travelled from the Eastern Europe to Bactria (present day Afghanistan).
From here they went to Persia (today’s Iran). During their migration to
Persia there was probably a battle for power amongst the gods, which led
to the birth of the Avestan religion. As a result, Indra, the king of
gods, became an inferior figure in the Avesta, while Yama, the
god of death, turned into the finest of the gods. Worshipping Agni is a
prominent practice within the Parsi community, but Hindus do not worship
this ancient god. This indicates that the Rig Vedic age predated
Persia. Kochhar has provided clues to whether this was the Afghan branch
of the Vedic journey.
The first such clue that Kochhar alludes to is the Vedic drink somras. It was so important in ancient Vedic life that an entire mandala
or chapter of the Rig Veda has been devoted to it. The importance of
soma is evident in the Avestan Zend scripture – it is referred to as
haoma in Persia. It is seen that the closer the Vedic nomads get to the
Indian peninsula, the more they seek continuously new alternatives to
the soma plant; that was how important somras was.
But the
original soma plant was to be found only in what is modern day
Afghanistan and Persia or Iran. In 1951 the German historian Karl
Friedrich Geldner proved that the ephedra plant was what was described
as soma in the Rig Veda. Ephedrin or somras is not alcohol – this
intoxicant is an alkaloid. Kochhar’s investigations led to the discovery
of four varieties of ephedra, found in Afghanistan, Iran, the northern
Himalayas, and the Hindu Kush.
What we learn from summer solstice
There
are 49 cosmic hymns in the Rig and the Yajur Vedas whose meanings have
not been explained. But one particular hymn from Vedanga Jyotish informs
us that the longest day of the year, or summer solstice, comprised 18
periods of daylight and 12 of night. Day and night are of equal length
on the Equator; in the higher latitudes, summer days are longer than
nights.
The latitude at which the proportion of daylight and
darkness is 3:2 is 34 degrees North. It is worth noting that the cities
to be found around this latitude today are Herat and Kabul in
Afghanistan. In other words, the place and time of the composition of
the Vedanga Jyotish is the same as that of Vedic Afghanistan and Iran.
This second piece of evidence offered by Rajesh Kochhar further
strengthens the perception of the location and time of the Rig Veda.
In search of the rivers
Kochhar has deconstructed the Rig Veda
in search of the Saraswati and the Sarayu, the two rivers also
mentioned in the Ramayana. Here too our current history has come in the
way.
There is a tiny river named the Sarayu in Uttar Pradesh,
which flows into the Ghaghara, which in turn merges with the Ganga. Many
people consider the rainwater-fed Saraswati in the Aravallis, flowing
along the Ghaggar (not to be confused with the Ghaghara) basin the
mythical Saraswati. On viewing the scans of North-Western India made by
the Russian Landsat satellite between 1972 and ’79, it is natural to
assume that the Ghaggar was a wide river. It flows into the Rann of
Kutch.
The scan reveals the basin of a dried up older river,
which is up to 8 km broad in some places. It was this that led to the
hasty conclusion of this basin’s belonging to the original Saraswati.
From Neil Roberts’s The Holocene
it is clear that the basin of this river widened to the north of the
Rann of Kutch because of the accelerated movement of a glacier during
the previous Ice Age. But deconstructing the Rig Veda doesn’t
suggest any of this. The Saraswati has been referred to as non-perennial
towards the end of the Veda. The original stream of the Ghaggar enters
India from present-day Pakistan, drying up in the Thar desert. Kochhar
believes this is the non-perennial Saraswati.
However, the Saraswati of the Rig Veda is extremely powerful, grinding rocks with sheer force. Its roar subsumes all other sounds. And the Sarayu of the Rig Veda
is immensely wide and deep, the mother river. None of these
descriptions matches the actual rivers in present-day India with those
names.
Hymn No. 5 | 53 | 9 of the Rig Veda says, “May
the Rasa, Krumu, Anitabh, Kuva or Sindhu not be able to stop you; let
the deep Sarayu not be an obstacle.” The order of the rivers clearly
moves from east to west. So the Sarayu undoubtedly flows to the west of
the Indus.
Kochhar believes it is the 650-km river known as the
Hari-Rud in Afghanistan, whose source is in the Hindu Kush mountains. It
flows past the city of Herat and then for 100 km along the
Iran-Afghanistan border before disappearing in the Karakom desert of
Central Asia.
In the Avesta we find the Saraswati as the
Harahaiti – the similarity in sound is noticeable – which enters Iran
along the combined basin of the river Arghandar on the Afghan-Iran
border and the river Helmand. According to Kochhar, it is this Helmand
that is the Vedic Saraswati river.
The source of the Helmand is
in the Koh-i-Baba mountain range. Flowing for 1,300 miles through the
heart of Afghanistan, the Vedic Saraswati joins the Vedic Drijadbati or
Arghandar. The Avesta identifies this wide river as the Hetumanta (or,
in varations, as Setumanta). In Iran the Saraswati is named the
Harahaiti, which flows into the inland lake Hamun-e-Sabari in the
Saistan area of northern Iran.
The conclusion
The
political map of the ancient world, of the Copper Age, provides an
extraordinary realisation. The kingdoms of the two main political powers
– the Persians and the Greeks – all lie between and around the Red Sea
and the Mediterranean Sea. None of these is a coastal civilisation,
however.
This raises a question. What did ancient man refer to as
a sea? The Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, and the Campian Sea are all
saltwater lakes, and not seas in the way we understand them today. This
make us wonder: perhaps the Lanka of the Ramayana was an island in the Hamun-e-Sabri.
The
one thing that’s obvious: wherever it was that Ram and Lakshman went
from Afghanistan, it could not have been to present-day Sri Lanka, for
that would have meant crossing the Indian peninsula. And since Ravana,
the lord of Lanka, was also partial to somras, it is unlikely that he
went very far from the land of soma after abducting Sita.
Although
it is not possible to prove archaeologically, there is considerable
reason to assume that the lineage of Dasarath (and of Ram), the
Ikshvakus, were from western Afghanistan. For the Puranas say that King
Kubalasa slayed a demon on the shore of the Sabari. Vishwamitra received
his second birth where the Saraswati met the sea. And Valmiki
discovered Sita on the shore of the Sarayu. Which is why there is little
room for doubt that today’s Hamun-e-Sabri is the sea mentioned in the Ramayana, one of the islands in which was the kingdom ruled by Ravana, lord of the rakshases.
The
focus of attention for those studying the lost history of India is the
contentious issue raised by Hindutva historians, who have repeatedly
asserted that western historians have been unable to identify the roots
of ancient India. We find these assertions in the writings of Bal
Gangadhar Tilak, as well as in those of certain lesser known right-wing
historians. It is surprising how easily conclusions unsupported by the
array of Vedic texts can be arrived at because of mindless adherence to a
popular brand of politics.
The rock formation between India and
Sri Lanka could well be preserved, but not as Ram Setu or Adam’s Bridge.
Let it be protected as a geological feature. For no matter how far one
looks, no relationship is evident between this Lanka and the Lanka of
the Ramayana.
