Eraly - Gem in the lotus: the seeding of Indian civilisation

IN THE BEGINNING THERE was no India. All the landmass of the earth then lay huddled together in protocontinents in the lap of the idling primeval sea. Around 170 million years ago this cluster of continents began to break up and drift apart, because of the movements of the crustal plates jacketing the semi-molten interior of the earth, a geological process called plate tectonics. In the process, some 100 million years ago, a huge and roughly triangular chunk of land broke off from the eastern flank of Africa above Madagascar, and, pivoting slightly anticlockwise, began a millennially slow, 4000-odd-kilometre-long slide north-north-eastward across the ancient Tethys Sea, bearing a stark, crystalline massif like a granite sail. Eventually, after about a forty-million-year-long ocean journey, it docked into the soft underbelly of the sprawling Asian landmass, to become the land that would be known many aeons later as India.

The underthrust of that impact, sluggish but relentless, penetrating through the sedimentary flesh of the Asian belly, upheaved, in the course of several million years, rocks from the depths of the sea and the land, and reared the Himalayas, the youngest, largest and highest mountain range on earth. At the same time, as the land heaved and rose in a sort of earth wave, it left, along the entire length of the mountains, an immense marshy trough, which slowly sank under the sea. Then, as the snows and glaciers that covered the Himalayas melted, great rivers with hundreds of tributaries, bringing millions of tons of silt daily, descended from the mountains into the lagoon, gradually, over millions of years, filling it with detritus and alluvium, and building up, layer by layer, the Indo-Gangetic Plain, a gift of the Himalayas.

All this happened in very recent geological times, long, long after the formation of the earth some 4.6 billion years ago, and it all happened in a wink of the cosmic time, though over many millions of earth years. It was only during the Pleistocene Epoch, between a million and ten thousand years ago, that the present broad physical features of India became finally established. Even then the geodynamic forces involved were not entirely exhausted. Kashmir, once a vast lake, has since turned into a garden valley. Many centuries later, the forestland off Bombay subsided into the sea, and as recently as 1819, an extensive tract of land in Gujarat, including the fort of Sindree, slid under the sea in an earthquake. It was presumably in some such cataclysm that the ancient and renowned port city of Poompuhar on the Coromandel Coast slumped into the sea, probably around the sixth century AD. Calamitous earthquakes still occasionally convulse northern India, as the Indian plate continues to push and grate against Asia. The Himalayas are still rising.