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

Geographical and Mythological Map of India.Ancient Indian cosmology imagined a flat earth consisting of seven concentriccontinents, the central one surrounded by the salty ocean and each of the other roughly circularcontinents surrounded by oceans of other liquids: treacle (molasses), wine, ghee (clarifiedbutter), milk, curds, and freshwater. (This prompted one nineteenth-century Englishman’snotorious tirade against “geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.” 44 ) In thecenter of the central mainland (the “Plum-tree Continent” or Jambu-Dvipa) stands the cosmicmountain Meru, from which four subcontinents radiate out to the east, west, north, and south,like the petals of a lotus; the southernmost petal of this mainland is Bharata-varsha, the ancientSanskrit name for India. If you bisect the lotus horizontally, you see India as a kite-shapedlandmass with mountains in the north and (salt) oceans on all other sides, much as it appears onany Rand McNally map. ao The watery world under the earth, which the cobra people (Nagas)inhabit, is also there, in the water table that we encounter every time we sink a well anywhere inthe world.Cosmography and cartography overlie each other, as do the rabbit and the man in themoon, myth and history. It has been rightly remarked that texts are just maps, and map is notterritory; 45 but when the maps are big enough, they become territories of their own. There is ashared core underlying both maps and territories, from which myths and political narrativesspread out in different directions. There was a flood, and now there is a politically useful mythabout it; there is an arrangement of water and land, and there is a politically inspired diagram ofit (for different countries draw the borders of Kashmir, to take a case at random, in very differentways). The map of the Plum-tree Continent is to a Rand McNally map as the flood myth is to thegeological record. The natural layout of water and land serves as the basis of the myth of a floodand the diagram of the cosmos, which in turn support the construction of a politically usefulchart of time and space.TERRITORY: MOUNTAINS, RIVERS, MONSOONMany people have imagined the Himalayan Mountains as posing an impregnable barrier,but this image of Inaccessible India is simply a part of the Unchanging India package. India