India and Jambu Island

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India, i.e. Bharatavarsa and Jambudvipa are sacred lands known from very early times. Their sacredness is accepted in Brahmanic, Buddhist and Jain religious literatures. Jambudvipa is some times identified with the whole of Asia, including India as a part of the continent. Very few people know that India, our sacred motherland, was not the same topographically, in ancient times, as she stands now. The courses of many rivers, very sacred as they have been, have radically changed, giving an entirely new shape to the face of the land. Many islands have either been joined to the mainland or submerged in the sea. The geographical changes have made the identification of places mentioned in ancient literature extremely difficult, if not impossible.

The author of this volume, an irrigation engineer by profession, has made a laudable attempt to trace the history of such topographical changes in India, which have taken place since a few centuries prior to the Christian era.

The author has used, as his source material, ancient Indian literature-both Brahmanic and Buddhist and accounts of the Greek, Chinese, Arab and Western travellers and geographers. He has started with Ptolemy (140 A.D.) whose is the first complete and reliable account of India and then compared Ptolemy's data with those available from the Puraņas, the Mahabharata, and the Buddhist literature.

The author has arrived at startling conclusions about ancient geography of India. He claims to have been able to ascertain the ancient coast lire of penninsular India, correct ider.tification of the Taprobane island (Tamprapaiņi), the old courses of the rivers like Ganga, Sindhu, Brahmaputra, Narmada, etc., the locations of the scenes of the Malällärata and the Rāmāna, and the areas of Gautama Buddha's birth and travels.

It is true that all the conclusions arrived at by the author may not be acceptable to present day sholarship, nor all his arguments and inter-pretations are convincing, but the new lights thrown on ancient India and South East Asia and the material compiled by the author are of immense value to future research.

THE informations contained in this book were originally intended as an appendix to a book on Rivers and Irrigation that I was writing. I realised however that mere dogmatic assertions of the conclusions as regards the very great changes that India has undergone will not be accepted by many; there will be others who would refuse to accept identifications of ancient places, quite different from what they hitherto have been, without sufficient proof. An attempt to amplify the account of the changes, giving very short reasons in support of the identifications, was found to be too long a note to go as an appendix; the idea also struck me, that these proofs will not be of interest to the readers of River engineering. I have therefore thought it best to release these notes as a separate volume.

As will be seen, the outcome of the investigations, has been to show from Ptolemy's account, and confirmed by other Greek writers that in the 2nd Century A.D.,

(a) Southern India was an island, known as Taprobane island and separated from the mainland by a shallow sea;

(b) the Ganges river flowed through the Vindhyas, passing by Palamau, and entered the sea through the Mayurbhanj States, at some distance to the west of the present outlets;

(c) the Indus river flowed by a channel, at some distance east of the present channel and emptied into the sea, at the north-eastern corner of the Rann of Cutch;

(d) the Guzerat peninsula did not exist;

(c) the Narmada river, crossed the Tapti river and fell into the sea which at that time intervened between the mainland of India and Taprobane island;

(f) the southern end of Malay Peninsula was an island, named by subsequent European travellers as Java, the Less, separated from the mainland of Burmah;

(g) Central Siam was an inland sea, the Great Gulf (Magnus Sinus) of Greeks, and the ""Red South"" of the Chinese.

(h) the Irrawadi flowed into this Great Gulf.

Going back to an earlier stage, to the accounts given in the Pur anas, the nine-island stage of Bharatvarsha (India) has been speculated upon, and it has been shown that Jambu-dvipa island was Burmah, at one time an island separated from India and China. The subsequent changes involving the changes of courses of the Brahma-putra to India, and of Irrawaddy to its present course into the Gulf of Martaban have also been described.

Further, from the accounts in the Mahabharata, and R am ayana, supported by those given in the Pur anas, it has been shown that the theatre of Mahabharata episode was in Burmah, whereas that of R am ayana was in Lower Burmah and Western Siam, Lanka being represented by the Thaton and Amherst districts and an area to their west which have subsequently gone under the sea.

The discussion of Buddhist accounts of the neighbour-hood of Palamau, which was necessary in tracing the course of the Ganges in the beginning of the Christian era, brings out the fact that Gautama Buddha's birth place and travels lay within a comparatively small area; Palamau being Palibothra, Kapilavastu being Rajakheta lying 60 miles west of Palamau, Kusinagara being Kerwa near Paharbula (Pava) lying 100 miles south-west of Palamau, Mahabodhi site being about 40 miles south-southwest of Palamau or 20 miles west of Netarhat, Varanasi-nagara of Buddhists being Barwenagara lying 20 miles south of Netarhat, and Bimbisar's capital Rajgriha lying close to Daltonganj.

The object in view in the following notes is to trace as far as possible the remarkable changes that have taken place in the configuration of India during the course of the last twenty centuries, and in particular to the changes in the course of the river Ganges during that period. The minor changes in the course of rivers in the delta of Bengal during recent years of which we have greater details, will not be discussed here.

The information regarding the geography of India, and casual references to location of places, rivers etc., are contained in

(1) Greek accounts,

(2) Early Buddhist literature, which found its way outside India, to Tibet, China, etc., at an early period.

(3) Chinese travellers' accounts.

(4) Accounts by travellers from Arabia, Italy, etc.,

(5) Hindu literature, e.g., Vedas, Puranas, Mahabharata, Ramayana, etc.

(6) Local literature, and accounts by European travellers from about the fifteenth century A.D.

Ordinarily one would expect that the Hindu religious books would furnish the most ancient accounts and should thus appear first in the list, but I have put them fifth in the list because of the fact, that, except the Vedas which contain meagre geographical information, the other books, viz., the Puranas, Mahabharata, Ramayana, etc., were revised and rewritten at a fairly recent period, probably 11th to 18th century A.D., with so great changes and additions that they have depreciated their value as reliable ancient accounts. Though it is certain that some of the Puranas at any rate, were extant, long before the Christian era, the later additions and changes introduced as the colonization of Aryans in India extended, and added to this the purpose of assimilating the identity of places in their new colony, named after places of hallowed memory in their previous colony, have made the accounts so obscure that it has rendered it very difficult, and in some cases impossible to sift the old accounts from the new.

The Greek accounts have their value in the fact that, they have not been tampered with to any extent. Then again the outstanding work of Ptolemy, who has given not only the account but a regular map, has given us material for a complete geography of India in his day; the verification of this map and account, by that given in the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, puts its value and accuracy beyond any doubt. The failure of proper appreciation of the changes which the configuration of the country has undergone, and their possibilities, has led the antiquarians to depreciate the value of Ptolemy's work, and to identifications in directions very wide of the mark, as they have all started on the assumption that India was always, what it is today.

With the reascendency of Brahmanism in India after Buddhism, the Buddhist literature seems to have been gradually destroyed in the country of its origin, but some of the books found their way to other countries, notably to Tibet and China, at an early date. Some of these books were extant in the country to which they were exported, even before the 1st Cent. A.D. and have escaped chances of interpolation and have thus their great value as unchanged authentic records of the time they were written. It is for this reason that I have placed them second on the list.

The Chinese and Arabian travellers made their appearance in the field later, and it is after them that the European travellers came in.

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