BAY OF BENGAL was a high-land once!

No Aryan - Dravidian divide - it was one Aryavartha - (10)

The narration from Valmiki Ramayana and other texts

give us enough clues

on a range of issues and where to look for such issues,

such as tectonic movements, disturbances in the sea bed

and the periodic upheavals in the present day Bay of Bengal.

The waters of the Bay of Bengal was lost in a very remote past.

A demon by name Kalakeyas was frequently tormenting the people

living on the shores of this sea (by means of terrific cyclones?).

He could not be controlled as he used to run back to the sea

and hide inside the waters.

All attempts to control this demon failed.

So the gods approached the sage Agasthya, to come to their help.

The sage told that he would drink up all the waters of the sea,

so that the demon hiding inside could be exposed.

It would be then easy for the gods to kill him.

The sage came to the sea shore in the east and started drinking the waters,

which was seen with awe and fear by all celestials.

Because such a happening was rare.

The sea was emptied and Kalakeyas was killed.

Now the gods wanted Agasthya to fill up the sea again.

But Agasthya said that he had digested all the waters and could not bring them back.

But he said that there would come a time when Sagara’s sons would dig up that sea

which would be eventually filled by the river Ganga!

This story is narrated by sage Lomasa to Yudhistira in Mahabharatha.

Outwardly this story and even the story of digging the Bay of Bengal

would sound absurd.

But all these have some symbolism or secrets hidden in them.

Sage Agasthya emptying the sea is symbolic of

elevation of the sea bed due to which the waters had run into the south sea.

We must recall Puranic narration that

the South rose up when Shiva- Parvathy marriage was taking place in the Himalayas.

Sage Agasthya was summoned by Shiva

to go to the South and balance the South with the North.

One specialty about Agasthya is that

his name is generally associated with cataclysmic changes

with reference to land and water.

Whenever water rises in deluge or is lost forever,

Agasthya would have been somewhere there in the picture.

The story about capturing the river Kaveri in his Kamandal is one.

There is also proof in Tamil texts about his presence

at the time of the DELUGE at Dwaraka,

after which what he did was a MOMENTOUS turn of history

which further unified Aryavartha.

This will be written in the course of this series

while unraveling the mystery of what really constitutes

DRAVIDA or DRAVIDIAN!!

At the moment let us explore the secret of Kalakeyas story.

The South grew up when the Himalayan region experienced a push-down.

This seems to indicate the period when the Himalayas,

after rising,

started to dent or fold due to the compression exerted

by the North- moving Gondwana lands.

This was in a very remote past, when the Indian plate joined the Eurasian plate

giving rise to the elevation of Himalayas.

This legend of Agasthya seems to indicate the leveling of the South with the North.

The Kalakeyas story seems to coincide

with such an upheaval of land and

the pushing up of the sea bed

at the place of the present day Bay of Bengal.

This area, according to Agasthya would be dug up and filled by the Ganga.

So this Kalakeyas episode is about a time before the birth of the Ganga.

It is also inferred from Kalakeyas story

that this part of the earth was not the same in the past.

It was a high land, which came to be excavated by the Sagaras and

filled by the Ganga as soon as she erupted out of the glacier.

The mound of ashes that she immersed was the first act of her

in helping the dead to reach salvation or release from sins.

Though the 60,000 Sagaras did a remarkable feat,

theirs was not without the accompanying sins.

Valmiki Ramayana expresses

the numerous troubles and pains caused to the organisms living in the land

and mother earth herself,

when they were digging.

Added to this was the insult they heaped on the sage Kapila.

Their death and the mode of dying was unnatural.

All this constituted a situation which can be remedied only if

celestial waters were used for oblations.

And therefore the need to bring the Ganga.

The birth of Ganga whose sole aim was to wash off the sins of people

and deliver them to higher worlds,

also indicates that the world to come after her birth is going

to witness sins of sorts!

Bhageeratha not only brought her to the world,

he also did the first ever water-obsequies at the Ganges.

The information that I want stress again and again is that

the first place to get that honour was not anywhere in the North,

where the Ganges flows abundantly.

It was in the South -

what people think as a place called Dravida, that is different from Arya vartha!

There was no Dravida then,

only Aryan practices were there.

This episode on Ganga happened even before Rama’s times!

Ganga connected North and the South.

Ganga connected Himayam (Himalayas)

and

Simayam (another name for Podhigai mountain),

Ganga became the lifeline of Aryavartha,

stretching from Hiamalayas to deep South!

The much Aryanised Thiruvalluvar –

the one person of stature,

in whose name the self-proclaimed Dravidians would not hesitate to swear,

has passed a stricture on TarpaNam

in the very 5^th Adhikaaram (in the beginning itself)

(after prayer to God, to Rain god, to ascetics, and insistence on Dharma)

that paying obsequies to ancestors is the foremost duty of a family man (grihastha).

The practice has been there in this part of India.

The Ganga reached this part of India to immortalize this practice!

Sethu and Rameshwaram are nodes where this practice is done for ages!

( to be continued)