The-Hindus-An-Alternative-History---Wendy-Doniger

from somewhere else. So much for “immemorial.” Even the ancient “Aryans” probably came,ultimately, 5 from Africa. India itself is an import, or if you prefer, Africa outsourced India.This prehistoric episode will serve us simultaneously as a metaphor for the way thatHinduism through the ages constantly absorbed immigrant people and ideas and as the firsthistorical instance of such an actual immigration. (It can also be read as an unconscious satire onhistories that insist on tracing everything back to ultimate origins, as can the E. M. Forsterpassage cited at the start.) The narratives that Hindus have constructed about that stage and thoseactors, narratives about space and time, form the main substance of this chapter. The flood myth,in particular, is about both space (continents sinking) and time (periodic floods marking theaeons). Often unexpressed, always assumed, these narratives are the structures on which all othernarratives about history are built. We will then briefly explore the natural features ofIndia—rivers and mountains—that serve not only as the stage on which the drama of historyunfolds but as several of the main actors in that drama, for Ganga (the Ganges) and Himalayaappear in the narratives as the wife and father-in-law of the god Shiva, respectively.GONDWANALAND AND LEMURIAFrancis Bacon was the first to notice, from maps of Africa and the New World firstavailable in 1620, that the coastlines of western Africa and eastern South America matchedrather neatly. Scientists in the nineteenth century hypothesized that Antarctica, Australia, Africa,Madagascar, South America, Arabia, and India all were connected in the form of a single vastsupercontinent to which an Austrian geologist gave the name of Gondwana or Gondwanaland.(He named it after the region of central India called Gondwana—which means “the forest of theGonds,” the Gonds being tribal people of central India—comprising portions of the present statesof Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Andhra Pradesh, 6 the latter a region famous for itsenormous rocks, the oldest on the planet.) Scientists then suggested that what were later calledcontinental shifts ai began about 167 million years ago (in the mid- to late Jurassic period),causing the eastern part of the continent of Gondwana to separate from Africa and, after a while(about 120 million years ago, in the early Cretaceous period), to move northward. It broke intotwo pieces. One piece was Madagascar, and the other was the microcontinent that eventuallyerupted into the Deccan plateau and crashed into Central Asia. aj Australian Indologists joke thatthe Deccan is really part of Australia. 7The Gondwanaland story takes us to the farthest limit, the reduction to the absurd, of themany searches for origins that have plagued the historiography of India from the beginning(there, I’m doing it myself, searching for the origins of the myth of origins). Bothnineteenth-century scholarship and twenty-first-century politics have taken a preternaturalinterest in origins. Nineteenth-century scholars who searched for the ur-text (the “original text,”as German scholarship defined it), the ur-ruins, the ur-language carried political stings in theirtales: “We got there first,” “It’s ours” (ignoring the history of all the intervening centuries thatfollowed and other legitimate claims). They viewed the moment of origins as if there were a kindof magic Rosetta stone, with the past on one side and the present on the other, enabling them todo a simple one-to-one translation from the past into the present ever after. But even if theycould know the ur-past, and they could not (both because logically there is no ultimate beginningfor any chain of events and because the data for the earliest periods are at best incomplete and atworst entirely inaccessible), it would hardly provide a charter for the present.Other scientists in the colonial period agreed about the ancient supercontinent butimagined its disintegration as taking place in the opposite way, not when land (proto-India)