More than one lost civilization?
Then there is the whole complicated question of the obvious but ancient role of Dravidian and south Indian culture in the prehistory of the Maldives and the way in which the enlarged Ice Age footprint of the Maldives dovetails with the Kumari Kandam myth of the Tamils.
On the other hand, there is the obvious Sanskrit and north Indian influence that is also present in the Maldives and that dominates its language, Dhivehi.
It is too easy, in my view, to argue, simply because Dhivehi belongs to the Indo-European language family, that it therefore must be derived from Sinhalese, the Indo-European language of Sri Lanka – which itself only became entrenched in that island around the sixth century BC following an invasion of settlers from northern India.30 Thor Heyerdahl’s hypothesis of a prehistoric maritime connection between the Maldives and Gujerat – and let us not be too hasty to put an upper limit on the antiquity of that connection – is an equally effective means of supplying the Maldives with an Indo-European language.
Behind all of these questions and problems is the wider issue of the relationship between the Dravidian culture of south India, the traditions and religious ideas of north India and the distinctive manner in which the Vedic and the Tamil flood myths intertwine, sharing gods, sharing sages, and sharing the same underlying story-line built up around the theme of recurrent cataclysms and the preservation of antediluvian knowledge.
Not for the first time I found myself wondering if we could be dealing in India with not one, but two different and yet intimately interrelated lost civilizations of the Ice Age – one predominant but not exclusive in the antediluvian north-west, with its own individual character, style and language, the other predominant but not exclusive in the antediluvian south, again with its own individual character, style and language.
Because of the spectacular land-losses that India had suffered at the end of the Ice Age, it was not difficult to imagine how both could have flourished along the subcontinent’s coastal margins and outlying island chains at roughly the same time, both could have been swallowed up by the sea over roughly the same period, and both could have left survivors to repromulgate the antique system of knowledge that they shared – which claimed, through self-discipline, meditation and the asceticism of yogic austerities, to have marked out the straight and narrow path of spiritual transcendence in the material world.
14 / Ghosts in the Water
The great deluge took place in 16,000 BC … The second one in 14,058 BC, when parts of Kumari Kandam went under the Sea. The third one happened in 9564 BC, when a large part of Kumari Kandam was submerged.
N. Mahalingam, Chairman, International Association of Tamil Studies
Poompuhur coast, south India, 26 February 2001
The ancient religious teachings of India may be directed towards spiritual transcendence but the morning that we were going out to dive at Poompuhur I felt no inner peace. Instead, I was up brooding long before dawn, my head swirling with fears and anxieties, hopes and possibilities. I could feel the first leaden numbness and uneasy visual aura of an oncoming migraine – a perverse affliction with which I must deal whenever I am under great stress and am most in need of a clear head. I immediately treated myself with an injection in the thigh of the powerful drug Immigran, which will normally stop even a severe full-blown migraine in its tracks, but this time it only reduced and did not entirely eliminate the symptoms, leaving me feeling weak, drained and on edge.
I knew that these were going to be big dives for me, that there was a lot riding on them, and that the mysterious U-shaped structure that I had come to see would be filmed for the first time so that people everywhere, archaeologists and non-archaeologists alike, could make up their own minds about it.
What this meant was that I was being given the chance – the incredible opportunity funded by Channel 4’s money and prestige – to test the basic proposition of the Underworld hypothesis, i.e. that evidence which might shed significant new light on the mystery of the origins of civilization could be lying under the sea. I realized that if Glenn Milne’s inundation dating of ‘11,000 years old or older’ for the U-shaped structure was correct, and if the earlier NIO marine archaeologists’ reports that it was man-made rather than some natural outcrop of rock were also correct, then what was awaiting me on the sea-bed off Poompuhur was, quite possibly, the vindication of my quest.
It didn’t matter much what the structure turned out to look like. For example a ruined pyramid, or a corbelled archway, or broken columns – though archetypal antediluvian images in popular culture – were not in the least required. Irrespective of how dilapidated it might be, irrespective of how covered in marine growth and sediment it might be, even should it prove dull and unexceptional to the eye, all that I needed to prove my case were the remains of a structure that was monumental in scope, man-made and more than 11,000 years old, sitting on the sea-bed off the south-east coast of Tamil Nadu.
If the U-shaped structure was all these things, then it could not be explained by the orthodox model of history. And if it was all of these things, then the hitherto discredited Tamil myths of a great antediluvian civilization called Kumari Kandam that had once existed around the southern coasts and islands of India might very well be true. So in a way, I reflected, if the U-shaped structure really was what the NIO said it was, then I was about to come face to face with my own personal Holy Grail.
How very annoying, therefore, that my film producers had scheduled just one day for the diving. Having gone to great lengths to get the NIO to cooperate with us over filming the U-shaped structure at Poompuhur, and having paid out a very large sum of money to hire the NIO diving team and marine archaeologists full-time for six days, here we were making use of them for just one day!
It struck me as a crazy, misguided, self-contradictory policy which on the one hand had moved heaven and earth to make it possible for me to dive at Poompuhur at all and on the other would only allow me two or at the most three dives at the site – thus making it almost inevitable that I would not be able to do a proper job there. I felt like Moses being told that he could see the Promised Land but would not be allowed to enter.
No wonder I had a headache.
That gentleman is not well …
The coastal plains around Poompuhur are exceptionally flat with a gentle seaward slope – a characteristic of topography that continues unbroken underwater for a very great distance out from shore and that would have multiplied the effects of even relatively small sea-level rises into rapid and catastrophic floods capable of inundating very large areas.
We met up with our NIO friends on the beach – Kamlesh Vora, Gaur, Sundaresh, Gudigar, Bandodkar and others – and a scene was shot of me greeting them and walking with them. The scene required three takes.
Then we all piled into a small open launch to make the run through the big breakers that were lashing the shallows to the point about a kilometre off-shore where the fishing trawler that the NIO had chartered for the diving was moored.
Another hour or so passed while we did the launch-to-trawler run twice more so that it could be shot from different angles.
Then finally we all climbed on board the trawler – not so easy since its sides towered more than 2 metres above the bottom of the launch – stowed our equipment, and headed out into the open sea.
I was irritable, withdrawn – certainly not very conversational – and felt like lying on my back and closing my eyes to ease the ominous symptoms of my returning migraine. Instead, for the next half hour as we chugged the remaining 4 kilometres towards the dive site, basic good manners required that I stay on my feet, catch up on gossip with everyone from the NIO, and look cheerful, optimistic and positive. After all, I was a man being given an incredible opportunity. Shouldn’t that put a smile on my long Scottish face?
Position of the submerged U-shaped structure off Poompuhur coast. Based on Rao et al.
Sundaresh and Bandodkar had already buoyed the site so
me days previously and while the trawler manoeuvred into position to anchor next to the buoy I wandered off to an unoccupied corner of the deck and surreptitiously gave myself another shot of Immigran. That made two, the maximum permitted dosage in twenty-four hours. Praying that this horrible, increasingly blinding and ghastly headache would now please go away, I lay down with a towel over my eyes for the next ten minutes, only sitting up again when it was clear that the anchoring operation had been completed.
‘Feeling any better?’ asked Kamlesh with genuine concern.
‘Not sure,’ I replied.
‘That gentleman also is not well.’
I looked over to where Martin, our underwater cameraman, was indeed very definitely unwell, sprawled on the deck retching miserably …
It seemed unlikely that he would be going underwater any time soon.
Cornucopia
In the end it was decided that Stefan Wickham, the producer, would film the first dive. Hopefully, Martin would be well enough to shoot the second for us. There probably wouldn’t be time for a third, because we still had to interview Gaur, Sundaresh and Kamlesh on the boat and had already used up most of the morning shooting the scenes from the beach and just getting to the dive site.
As I was rigging my tank I noticed that half a dozen small local fishing craft had arrived here ahead of us and that the fishermen, oblivious to our presence in their midst, were cheerfully casting out their lines and hauling them in again with big silver fish attached. It seemed that here, as elsewhere along the Coromandel coast, the location of underwater ruins was part of the essential survival knowledge and folklore of fishing communities – just as they knew the tides and the monsoons – because an underwater ruin meant one thing for sure and that was a cornucopia of fish …
Stefan jumped in the water first – intending to have the camera rolling before I jumped in. Instead, he was carried off in a brisk surface current and began rapidly to recede from view. Fortunately, the trawler had a motorized rubber dinghy in tow which was dispatched to retrieve him and fifteen minutes later he was back on board. The trick, explained the NIO divers, was not to try to fight the current but to grab hold of the buoy-line the minute you hit the water and then use it to pull yourself down the 23 metres to the ruin.
Dive 1: descent
Although the sky is now overcast the water isn’t cold, not like Dwarka the year before. But compared to the life-giving iridescent blues of the Maldives, its sickly and unnatural green hue, through which light penetrates only dimly after the first few metres of the descent, has all the allure of radioactive fog after a nuclear disaster. Like blighted snowflakes, a blizzard of grey particles blows through the water on the current and I soon lose sight of the other divers on the line. I know that Sundaresh, my dive buddy today, is just a few metres below me, but I can’t see him. In conditions like this there is really nothing much to be done except check your gauges, relax, trust in your own competence and head for the bottom.
Five metres deeper and the visibility suddenly begins to clear – not dramatically, but still much better than before. The current seems to have slackened too, as sometimes happens at greater depth. Visibility continues to improve and at one point looking down the line I can see all three of the NIO’s divers spaced out at metre intervals below me, their yellow and blue tanks bright through the haze.
At about 18 metres I begin to get the first sense of something large standing out from the flat and sandy bottom. At this moment it’s just a looming mass of darkness contrasted to lighter surroundings and my eyes can’t resolve it into a definite shape.
The other divers above and below me leave the line, fan out and disappear from view. Gaur is working with Santha, who will be shooting stills. Gudigar is working with Stef on the video camera. Gaur, Gudigar and Sundaresh were all part of the team of marine archaeologists who first dived on the structure during the NIO’s initial surveys in 1991 and 1993.
Sleeping with the fishes
Sundaresh, who is waiting for me at the bottom, wants to show me courses of masonry that he has noticed on his previous dives – but before I join him for the guided tour I let go of the line, establish neutral buoyancy and just drift about 2 metres above and 2 metres to the side of the structure. There’s no current now at all, the visibility has gone very foggy again – probably sediment kicked up by some of the other divers – and I rest completely still in mid-water, adjusting my eyes to the gloom, trying to understand what I’m looking at.
The only thing I can tell immediately is that it’s a big, squat, powerful-looking structure. In order to get any useful idea of its shape, extent and general situation, and even to form a first opinion of whether it might be man-made or natural, I need to be quite a bit further away from it than 2 metres. But if I do that, in these conditions, it rapidly fades from view, becoming just a vague, undefined darkness on the sea-bed again, and then disappearing entirely into the fog.
I swim around a bit, now closer, now further away, trying to get perspective, looking for an angle. And then unexpectedly the whole scene in front of me brightens – the sun must have broken through the clouds – and for thirty seconds I am confronted by a massive wall of deeply eroded and pitted stone. Although much broken and ruined, and incorporating a number of jagged vertical protrusions and step-like changes in level, I can see that the wall in general rises about 2 metres above the sea-bed to form the outside edge of an extensive platform.
It comes home to me, in this moment of illumination, that the structure has its own character – as many buildings do. It seems menacing but also forlorn, eerie but also sad. For as well as thick growths of unusually leprous marine organisms all over it, the shaft of sunlight shows it to be draped and tangled across its entire length in a strangling web of fishermen’s nets – some made of old rope, ancient and rotting away, others in the sinister colours of indestructible modern synthetics – which seem to tie it down like the body of a Mafia victim sleeping with the fishes.
I find myself suppressing an involuntary shiver, as though reacting to an apparition, or a ghost, and swim back to find Sundaresh still patiently waiting for me at the bottom of the line.
Walls … passages … entrances
We begin by swimming slowly south along the upper outside edge of the platform wall – if indeed it is a platform, which I’m now beginning to doubt. Rather than flat as I’d initially assumed, its surface at this point seems to be slightly concave – or dish-like – and to be paved with a mosaic of small stones. I find myself wondering if it’s possible that I’m looking at the retaining wall of an enclosure – I know its supposed to be U-shaped – filled up almost to the rim with some kind of sandy, stony aggregate.
The wall at this point is aligned north-south but soon begins to bend to the east to form the base of the ‘U’. In another one of those little flashes of illumination as the sun breaks through the clouds I can see that we must have started our swim at the open end of the ‘U’ – the end spoken of in some of the NIO reports as ‘the entrance’ – and that the length of the structure along this axis is therefore roughly the distance we have just travelled, about 30 metres.
Not far before the bend begins I pass an opening to my left which I pause to investigate. It is a deep, narrow cleft with parallel sides a little wider than my shoulders slicing vertically through the whole height of the outer wall to penetrate the platform (or the stony fill, or whatever it is) that lies beyond. And for the first few metres at least, this gully, or unroofed passage (or whatever it is!) follows a curving path that seems to duplicate, from within the structure, the distinctive outer curve of the ‘U’. Swathed everywhere with snagged and rotting nets, it is rough and broken in places, flat-floored and clean-edged with an almost quarried look in others.
Making a mental note to spend more time here before the end of the dive I turn back and resume my original course along the outside wall where it bends to the east, trying to catch up with Sundaresh. Looking for me, he meanwhile has swum all the
way round and made his way back to the entrance where I eventually join him.
But is it really an entrance?
As though understanding my perplexity, Sundaresh points to a gap in the wall about a metre and a half wide to one side of which I can now see that the buoy-line is tied. Holding his hands up he reassuringly signals ‘this is the entrance’.
I take a closer look.
What’s confusing things once again is the stony aggregate that fills most of the structure – although I’ve noticed that it does so quite unevenly. Its presence here makes it hard to see the gap as an entrance because it doesn’t seem to lead anywhere much. At the same time the thick retaining wall, generally in the range of 2 metres high, is at least a metre higher than that on either side of the gap – resembling a pair of gateposts. It also has a pronounced lip standing proud of the aggregate infill by almost half a metre – weighting the scales ever more in favour of the idea that the U-shaped structure must originally have been designed not as a platform but an enclosure, and that it certainly cannot be a natural formation.
But is the enclosure wall hewn out of living rock, like the great carved shore temples of Mahabalipuram, or is it a built structure made of bricks or stone blocks?
We use up the rest of the first dive searching for the courses of masonry that Sundaresh is convinced he saw in 1993. Yet how are we to find them under the thick and tenacious armour of marine organisms that coats the wall? Several times reaching into shadowy eroded hollows to see what’s inside we must work our hands carefully around resident scorpion fish which flutter their poisonous spines as though to taunt: ‘Go on, touch me – make my day.’