Surviving the null hypothesis
Could there really be ‘science’, in the hard, empirical, modern sense, in the ancient Indian scriptures?
According to Dr Richard L. Thompson, who received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Cornell University, where he specialized in probability theory and statistical mechanics, the answer to this question is ‘yes … probably’! In his impressively researched and thoroughly documented study Mysteries of the Sacred Universe Thompson takes a particularly close look at the Bhagvata Purana (a later compilation of oral traditions than the Rig Veda but one that nevertheless belongs, as we have seen, to the same body of knowledge).76 In it he draws attention to a curious word picture called Bhu Mandala that the Purana conjures up and that consists of circles and internested spheres of precise, very large, dimensions. He argues that Bhu Mandala is a complex and cleverly designed cosmological model serving at one and the same time as an accurate map of the solar system and as a planar projection map of the earth.77
Thompson’s arguments must be considered on their own merits backed up by the detailed evidence that he sets out in his book. But the centrepiece of his case is the electrifying correlation, to which he is the first to draw serious attention, between the dimensions given for the various circles of Bhu Mandala in the Bhagvata Purana and the actual dimensions of the planetary orbits within the solar system as determined by modern science.78 Since the correlations turn out to be extremely close, Thompson concludes:
The Bhu Mandala shown as a tilted ring in relation to a local horizon on Earth. Based on Thompson (2000).
Orbits of Saturn and Uranus around Earth.
It is clear that Bhu Mandala, as described in the Bhagvatam, can be interpreted as a geocentric map of the solar system out to Saturn. But an obvious and important question is: Did some real knowledge of planetary distances enter into the construction of the Bhu Mandala system, or are the correlations between Bhu Mandala features and planetary orbits simply coincidental?79
Being a mathematician interested in probability theory, Thompson is better equipped than most to answer this question and does so through computer modelling of a proposed ‘null hypothesis’ – i.e.,
that the author of the Bhagvatam had no access to correct planetary distances and therefore all apparent correlations between Bhu Mandala features and planetary distances are simply coincidental.80
However, the Bhu Mandala/solar system correlations proved resilient enough to survive the null hypothesis. ‘Analysis shows that the observed correlations are in fact highly improbable.’81 Thompson concludes:
If the dimensions given in the Bhagvatam do, in fact, represent realistic planetary distances based on human observation, then we must postulate that Bhagvata astronomy preserves material from an earlier and presently unknown period of scientific development … [and that] some people in the past must have had accurate values for the dimensions of the planetary orbits. In modern history, this information has only become available since the development of high-quality telescopes in the last 200 years. Accurate values of planetary distances were not known by Hellenistic astronomers such as Claudius Ptolemy, nor are they found in the medieval Jyotisa Sutras of India. If this information was known it must have been acquired by some unknown civilization that flourished in the distant past.82
Needless to say, a civilization that could make accurate maps of planetary distances, a hypothetical civilization of the distant past that had approached to within 200 years of our own level of development in astronomy, would have had no great difficulty in observing and measuring the precession of the equinoxes, or in dividing up the earthly and celestial spheres into degrees of longitude and latitude, or in consecrating a series of sacred sites at specific longitudes, and, in the process, exploring and mapping the globe.
Neither do I find it at all difficult to imagine how the geodetic and cartographic works of such an elder culture might have been remembered in much later and more superstitious times as gifts that had been handed down by the gods.
Had some stone pillar, now venerated as the self-generated lingam of Siva, been set up by prehistoric geodecists at Arunachela, for example, to mark the auspicious longitude of the Red Hill? The same symbolism of the lingam is, of course, found all over the temples of Angkor in Cambodia. And in ancient Egypt the conical Ben Ben stone, perched atop a stone pillar, was the symbol of the Heliopolitan priesthood that built the Pyramids of Giza.
Same symbolism in all three places.
Same gnostic quest for immortality.
Same use of precessional numbers in their architecture and their myths.
And there are 48 degrees of longitude between Giza and Arunachela, 24 degrees between Arunachela and Angkor, and 72 degrees between Giza and Angkor.
Coincidence?
Design?
Take your pick.
Madurai
A few hours later, well after dark, the Ambassador rolled smoothly across the thin membrane that separates rural from urban life in India, and we found ourselves in Madurai. As the reader will recall, Captain Naryan had told me that this city, with the great Meenakshi temple residing at its heart, was the site of the third and last Sangam, or Academy, of Tamil poets and philosophers – an institution that traced its origins back to the antediluvian civilization of Kumari Kandam.
While we drove through the crowded streets blaring with sound and lights I remembered that the First Sangam was said to have been established many thousands of years ago in an earlier ‘Madurai’ – Tenmadurai – that lay far to the south on lands subsequently swallowed up by the sea.
It is astonishing how little attention has been paid to these Tamil myths, and how little has been written about them outside the subcontinent. Even David Schulman, who has done more than most to fill this gap in knowledge, is dismissive of the significance of the traditions:
The story of the three Cankam [Sangams] as it appears in our sources is suspect on many counts, and there is no geological evidence of any deluge affecting the area in historical times.83
Though I respect Dr Schulman’s work, which offers a lucid exposition in English of the Tamil flood myths, he is dead wrong to consider only whether deluges have affected the area in historical times when massive geological corroboration exists for multiple deluges at the end of the last Ice Age – well within the time-frame of more than 10,000 years that is set out in the Sangam tradition itself.
Could it be the ruins of Kumari Kandam that are lying in 23 metres of water 5 kilometres off-shore of Poompuhur? And could those mythical antediluvians remembered by the ancient Tamils have been the source of the fragments of high cartographical and astronomical knowledge that seem to have been fossilized in the ancient Indian texts?
11 / The Quest for Kumari Randam
The river Prahuli, and the mountain Kumari, surrounded by many hills, were submerged by the raging sea.
Silipathikaram xx: 17–20
With reference to the first two Sangams I may say that the account is too mythical and fabulous to be entitled to any credit and I do not think that any scholar who has studied the histories of the world will be bold enough to admit such tales within the pale of real history.
Professor Sesagiri Sastri, Essay on Tamil Literature, Madras 1897
February 2000-January 2001, south India
Madurai is an ancient city but it has little to show, other than a few texts of disputed antiquity,1 to back up its claim to have been the headquarters of the third and last of the great Tamil Sangams (‘Academies’). It can produce no evidence in support of its further claim that the Third Sangam was the direct-line descendant of two earlier Sangams, dating back thousands of years into prehistory, located in antediluvian Tamil cities that had once existed far to the south of Madurai but that had been swallowed up by the sea. The very word ‘Sangam’ turns out not even to be derived from the Tamil language (it is Sanskrit) and does not appear in any of the texts that tradition attributes to the Third Sangam period.2 Last but not least, the e
arliest surviving written account of the so-called ‘Sangam Age’ is not thought by scholars to be older than the sixth century AD.3
By his use of such arguments the late K. N. Shivaraja Pillai – whose highly regarded but rare Chronology of the Early Tamils I was able to consult at a research library in Madurai – stands out as the most persuasive opponent of the alluring notion of lost Tamil lands and a lost Tamil civilization in the Indian Ocean. He wags an admonishing finger at those tempted to wonder if there might be even a drop of the truth anywhere in the story of Kumari Kandam and the first two Sangams, and proclaims the whole thing to be
one of the most daring literary forgeries ever perpetrated. The incredibly high antiquity with which Tamil literature comes to be invested by this legend, and the high connection with divinity it brings about, were more than enough to secure for it a ready acceptance by a credulous public.4
The historical annals of most cultures contain examples of this kind of manipulation of the past in order to annex some dignity or aura of the divine to a fledgling royal dynasty, or to dress up a new cult in a cloak of antique venerability – or, for that matter, to render arriviste philosophies or literary works more acceptable to traditionalists by attaching them to existing or imagined traditions.5 It is therefore easy to see the force of Pillai’s arguments, and, since he published his Chronology in 1932, his view that Kumari Kandam is nothing more than a ‘preposterous story’6 has been the dominant one amongst serious scholars of Tamil history.
This, of course, by no means guarantees that his view is correct. On the contrary, as I continued my research in Madurai, the potential significance and implications of what the NIO had found in 1993 off the south-east coast of Tamil Nadu at Poompuhur began to weigh more and more heavily on my mind.
Lost lands and flooded cities
From the photographs and descriptions that I had by this time seen and read, everything about the U-shaped structure appeared to be strikingly anomalous. Yet equally striking was the way in which it had thus far attracted zero attention or interest outside the rather closed world of the NIO (which had been unable to do anything further about it because of insufficient funding). I found this lack of interest and knowledge to be almost unbelievable.
After all, the fully qualified Indian marine archaeologists who had dived on the structure in 1993 had not hesitated in their official report to pronounce it to be man-made with ‘courses of masonry’ plainly visible – surely a momentous finding 5 kilometres from the shore at a depth of 23 metres? But far from exciting attention, or ruffling any academic feathers, or attracting funds for an extension of the diving survey to the other apparently man-made mounds that had been spotted near by on the sea-bed – and very far indeed from inspiring any Tamil expert to re-evaluate the derided possibility of a factual basis to the Kumari Kandam myth – the NIO’s discovery at Poompuhur had simply been ignored by scholarship, not even reacted to or dismissed, but just widely and generally ignored.
All the more I felt it was my role to be proactive and to stir things up around this matter. Because if the U-shaped structure was indeed man-made and more than 10,000 years old (remember at this stage I still did not have Glenn Milne’s inundation maps that would later push the age of the ruins back to 11,000 years old or older) then things were going to have to change in south Indian history. Despite all the question marks that had been raised over it on literary and philological grounds, the myth of Kumari Kandam and of the two antediluvian Sangams would suddenly clamour to be taken seriously.
After all, it is one thing for scholars like Shivaraja Pillai, David Schulman and others, to belittle the historical significance of a myth for which there seems to be no substantiating evidence, but it is quite another to try to sustain such a posture among a growing community of scholars and interested members of the public with access to inundation data like Milne’s.
14. The Temple of the Sea Lord, Dwarka, overlooking the underwater ruins.
15. View of Dwarka from the sea. The ruins are directly beneath the small boat.
16. Marine archaeologists of the NIO at Dwarka.
17. S. R. Rao, the founder of marine archaeology in India.
18. Technical divers of the NIO entering the water at Dwarka.
19. Underwater Dwarka, large blocks scattered on the sea-bed.
20. Circular stone anchor amidst underwater structures, Dwarka.
21. Part of a curved bastion, underwater Dwarka.
22. Treasure trove of man-made artefacts brought up from two mysterious submerged cities discovered in 2001 in India’s Gulf of Cambay.
23. Detail of artefacts and human remains from the lost cities in the Gulf of Cambay.
24. The author with NIO experts, examining plans of the two deeply submerged cities in the Gulf of Cambay thought to be more than 8000 years old.
25. Pilgrims flocking to a Siva temple on the seashore at Dwarka.
26. Siva temple, Dwarka. Although Dwarka is sacred to Krishna, the cult of Siva is also celebrated there.
Reproduced here and in chapter 7, the Durham geologist’s maps of south India between 17,000 and 7000 years ago have an eerie effect on me. Incorporating Sri Lanka in the south-east, extending southward, below Cape Comorin, and enhanced off-shore by the enlarged Lacadives/Maldives archipelago running all the way to the equator and into the southern hemisphere, the maps portray the region as no culture of the historical period is supposed to have known it: yet when I look at them through half-closed eyes I can almost imagine that someone has tried to draw, at various stages of its supposedly mythical inundation, the much bigger Dravidian homeland of thousands of years ago that is described in the Kumari Kandam tradition.
Coincidence? Or mystery?
With its dominant motif of a once much larger Dravidian homeland, the opening of the Kumari Kandam flood myth is set in remote prehistory between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago.
The work of Glenn Milne and other inundation specialists confirms that between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago India’s Dravidian peninsula and its outlying islands would indeed have been far larger than they are today – but were in the process of being swallowed up by the rising seas at the end of the Ice Age.
With its descriptions of flooded cities and lost lands, the Kumari Kandam myth ‘predicts’ that prehistoric ruins more than 10,000 years old should lie underwater at various depths and locations off the Tamil Nadu coast.
The NIO’s discovery of a large and apparently man-made structure at a depth of 23 metres off Poompuhur seems to confirm the accuracy of this prediction.
If the myth is right about the flooded cities, then what else might it be right about?
If there is anything at all to the story of the First and Second Sangams orchestrating a golden age of literary, artistic and musical creativity amongst the Tamils of 10,000 years ago and maintaining an archive of written records, then it means not only that an as yet unidentified culture of the last Ice Age may have flourished in the lost lands of the Indian Ocean, but also that we seem to be dealing with a civilization here that had reached a high level of development, organization and self-awareness.
The teachings of illustrious men
The sources for all that is known today about Kumari Kandam are limited and it is true, as the detractors of the myth point out, that the oldest written version dates from no earlier than the sixth century AD – some would even make it as young a document as the tenth century AD. Supposedly the work of the renowned medieval commentator Nakirar, this version appears in a learned gloss to the Iriyanar Agapporul, a grammar of classic Tamil love poetry in sixty sutras.7 Our concern here is not with the Agapporul, but strictly and exclusively with Nakirar’s gloss, which is itself said to have been ‘handed down orally for ten generations before it was put into writing’.8
Other medieval commentators who support Nakirar by speaking of Kumari Kandam and of the first two Sangams not as myths but as historical entities are Nachinarkkiniyar, in his gloss to the Tolkappiyam Poruladikaram, th
e distinguished Per-Asiriyar in his commentary upon the Tolkappiyam, and Adiyarkkunelar, in his commentary on the Silipathikaram.9
As my research continued in Madurai, therefore, I was not surprised to learn that long before something looking very much like underwater ruins had been found off the south-east coast of India in exactly the depth/age-range that is predicted by the Kumari Kandam myth, the credibility lent to the flood and Sangam tradition by the illustrious men who passed it down to us had clearly begun to worry some otherwise sceptical modern historians:
Three commentators of no mean scholarship and repute have unreservedly accepted the version of the commentator of the Iriyanar Agapporul. Though it is easy to dismiss these valuable works as unhistorical and uncritical and hence worthless to students of history, still we cannot afford to credit commentators with such ignorance of the subject which they were handling. When they quote with approval it means they were satisfied of the veracity of the tradition behind the account.10