Chapter One Introduction

Naru dived into in the depth of his inner self. That place is like an archive with no guiding lights. Somehow, he felt fairly confident that the information he needed was stored there. It proved impossible for Naru to consciously create a chain-linked set from the information that he stored in that archive. A chain-linked set of clues was what he needed to take his journey forward. He managed to realise that it was impossible for him to perform that action through his conscious efforts.

 

He remembered that he had encountered a similar situation in the early part of his journey too. In the present phase of his journey, in the situation that was present in front of him, he intended to adopt the same strategy that he had resorted to on the earlier occasion. He opened the doors of all his senses and tried to understand what relevant clues nature presented before him.

 

It was a full moon night in the month of July. Though it does not give a feeling of biting cold, the month of July in Sikkim feels like a winter month for a person from the southern part of West Bengal state of India. For such people, wearing a sweater becomes a compulsion even in the daytime in the higher elevations of Sikkim. From the month of March up to the end of September it rains in Sikkim, in general. It rains heavily. A cloudless evening is quite a rare experience during that part of the year. If the sky is cloudless on a full moon evening during that part of the year, then the surrounding environment created on the hills enchants any sensitive heart. Amongst many other things, there were two things worth mentioning that used to fascinate Naru strongly during those days. The first was the view of jet-black shadows, especially the shadows of the trees, and the second was the bright red color of the poinsettia leaves under dazzling white moonlight.

 

That evening, the sky was spotlessly blue. The size of the moon appeared to be quite larger compared to other full moon occasions. A similar experience can be had several times a year in Sikkim, but it is not often possible to have that experience in an uninterrupted manner on a full moon evening under a clear, rain-washed sky. In the hilltops of Sikkim, several full moon evenings every year become great occasions to bask in the majesty of the moon. That evening began with the prospect of becoming just such an evening. Having enjoyed the scenery outside for a while, Naru became preoccupied with the regular domestic chores of his solitary life. Although the residence was located near the top of a hill, Naru used to cover the glass windows of his flat with curtains.

 

A little while later, when the power suddenly went out, Naru could realise that the world outside was being flooded with bright moonlight. It was almost nine at night and it was time for Naru to go to bed. Fortunately, the power connection was not restored for quite some time. The first thing Naru did was reach the open space outside the building. That day he was the sole occupant in that building. The splendour of moonlight had not dimmed at all from what he had seen earlier in the evening. On most full moon nights, the moonlight begins to be blocked by clouds appearing in the sky in no time. That day he saw that the sky became clearer and everything in the atmosphere became crispier. The usually light, chest-filling breeze of Sikkim had become even lighter. The trees of the small forest to the north-west of his residence had assumed a black colour and the Kanchanjungha became clearly visible through the gaps in that forest cover. The holiest and most revered mountain in Sikkim assumed an enchanting pale white color. As always, Naru bowed his head in respect. He decided to go inside his flat. Being a hilltop building, no other man-made light was likely to interfere with his immersion in the brilliant moonlight. He removed all the window curtains in his flat and took a position on his king sized bed where his whole body was exposed to the moonlight and at the same time he could see Mount Kanchanjungha directly.

 

Next three hours or so he spent in a state of euphoria. He failed to realise when he fell asleep. The biggest surprise of that night was waiting for him. When that brief sleep was suddenly broken, he tried to have a glimpse of Kanchanjungha once more. The sky was still cloudless. The surrounding environment was bathing in the bright moonlight. That holy mountain was still as visible as the last time he had seen it a few hours ago. But the colour?

 

That mountain is not just an individual peak, but a remarkably broad structure extending between two major peaks. There are about half a dozen prominent peaks on that mountain. It is a broad structure with a concave shape between the two ends. Naru saw that concave part of the mountain was glowing like a volcanic crater. Only that part of the mountain was glowing like the inner chamber of a burning coke oven. Naru's half-awake brain couldn't take too much of the load and fell back asleep. His half-conscious mind roused him again shortly after, urging him to observe what was happening on that mountain. He could no longer see that bright red glow. The entire mountain took on a pink hue, but that was a regular occurrence that Naru often saw.

 

In that slumber, that thunderous voice roared inside his brain once more — 'Duloak'. The Sanskrit word 'Duloak' means the world based on bright light.

 

Later, he started feeling that the direction of his cerebral journey began to change from that day. He began to feel confident that he would find a way to progress his journey. He needed to keep faith and wait. He was directed to search the region of his inner self where he had collected descriptions of prehistoric Indian literature.

 

As far as a journey towards the past of the Bengal Basin is concerned, that comes to a screeching halt reaching a phase that is around 5000 years before the present. Earlier, Naru experienced a virtual reality show in his mind that a tall mountain that was once present in the central area of that basin gone under the watery land when calamity struck that area. The tale of a tall mountain going down the water has been immortalised by the Greek philosopher Plato. The mountain he described in his narrations had a name, Atlantis. He said, that mountain was the home of an advanced civilisation.

 

The drowning of that island mountain in Plato’s description, named Atlantis has a great physical puzzle associated to it. How a big mountain can be sent to the belly of the Earth without leaving any trace of it on the surface of the Earth? Common understanding about the structure of the Earth and the functioning of the geological forces fail to provide an acceptable explanation of that event of drowning.

 

It has been said that Gods and other divine beings can play with the forces of nature; they know many tricks that are unknown to other lesser beings. They can kill animals; they can smash to smithereens natural structures like mountains, etc., but are they capable of arbitrarily slicing the many kilometers deep strata of the crust of the Earth that hold the oceans, mountain ranges, and continents? There are not many references to such incidents in prehistoric Indian literature.

 

Despite extensive searching undertaken by the modern-day human beings, it has not been possible to find the remains of a mountain like Atlantis anywhere in the world. It is logical to assume that a mountain that has not been found in any apparently visible part of the ocean, on the surface of the earth or on the seabed, must have been slid down underground. From the clues present before him, it appeared to Naru that if the centre of the Bengal Basin was accepted as the location of that mountain mentioned by Plato, then there was a real possibility for it to sink underground during the destruction and immediately disappear from public view. He has already published detailed account of his related understandings of that situation in a couple of books.

 

Naru was inspired to delve deeper into prehistoric Indian literature. He decided to look at significant events that occurred on Earth in which divine beings were said to have been involved. Gradually, over a long period of time, a desired orderly arrangement of the necessary information began to take shape in his mind.

Chapter Two Prehistoric Indian literature and the mystical world

 

Like many other old civilisations, in Indian civilisation too, it is believed that some created beings are there, which belong to a much higher level of existence than the level where human beings exist. The strata of the creation where those beings exist are different from the stratum where human beings exist. Understanding the descriptions that are available in the prehistoric Indian literature regarding those strata of the creation may prove to be a quite complicated process. Though maintaining track of progress while going through the unimaginably tangled details described in various such old texts is a possibility, a few people find it difficult to remain calm in that situation. Naru finds himself in the second group of people.

 

As those literatures describe creatures, which dwell at a much higher level of existence than humans do, those literatures also contain descriptions of sub-human creatures, which have somewhat similar basic physical structures to those of humans. Deities occupy the highest level of embodied creatures with stable physical forms that are superior to humans.

 

Descriptions are available of other entities who are superior to the deities, but in the proper sense of the word, they are not creatures, i.e., they are not biologically born. Naru decided to collectively refer to beings that exist at a much higher level of existence than humans by the term ‘Pauromaanob’. In English that term may be translated as suprahuman.

 

The tales related to the Gods and supra human beings are so numerous, voluminous, and varied that a human being can easily spend a few lifetimes just to learn those tales at their surface level. For many, the language in which those descriptions were originally written poses a real difficulty. Understanding or explaining those details properly would be a different game for an ordinary human being.

 

When Naru was in his teens, he heard a story of a boy. Upon being advised reading his textbooks thoroughly, that boy used to start reading one of his school textbooks from the outer cover every day. In that way, at the end of the academic session, he could finish the first chapter of only one of his textbooks. Naturally, he was unable to pass the exam. Naru faced a similar situation when he tried to read some of the main books related to prehistoric Indian literature.

 

In the absence of any credible central authority that could have preserved the earliest written forms of those texts, they have lost the credibility of remaining uncorrupted. The situation became much worse when the main cultural centres of traditional Indian society were destroyed by invading military forces. In support of this observation, it may be mentioned that the earliest known piece of written Bengali literature, ‘Charjapad’, often spelled as ‘Charyapada’ was found not within the territory of Bengal but in the neighbouring country of Nepal, nestled mainly in the inaccessibility of the Himalayas. It is a territory within the Indian subcontinent that the foreign military powers that conquered most of the other parts of the subcontinent were unable to fully subordinate.

 

The last undivided political entity Bengal was a much larger region than Nepal and this type of literature found no reliable haven to survive within that land. During that period of foreign invasions, before the advent of Western powers, no center of practice of traditional culture was able to survive within the geographical boundaries of undivided Bengal. When the name Bengal is used in this context, that name represents all of its currently chopped off parts, which were part of political Bengal at the time of the beginning of the Bengal Renaissance. Probably, the most important of such centres that could not survive the onslaught of foreign powers was Mahasthangarh, a place on the northwestern part of the core area of the Bengal Basin. After the passage of a millennium of its collapse as a cultural centre, even today, a person having any remote connection to that area is considered having superior social position by a section of Bengali society. That region is known as ‘Barendra’ region.

 

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when a large number of intellectuals tried to rediscover the ancient literature of Bengal, most of such discoveries took place in the remote, non-descript villages.

 

It took a business enterprise, a company, to be precise, the East India Company, run by the British, to undertake the task of collecting, compiling, and organising the literary treasures of Bengal as well of India. Some non-Indian scholars associated with that company's activities became very curious after catching a glimpse of those works. It was that time when prehistoric Indian works, especially the ones preserved in oral tradition or found in fragmentary written form, started to be collected and made public under that company's auspices. That project was initiated at a college at Fort William in Calcutta, Kolkata in Bangla alias Bengal. That enormously diverse initiative culminated in the creation of the ‘Asiatick Society of Bengal’. Sir William Jones was the main person behind that initiative. After the passage of a number of decades, taking over the control of India from the company, the British Government continued with the effort, and that institute was rechristened as the ‘Asiatic Society’. At that time, very few societies were there on Earth that could boast of such a treasure of literature that Bengal and India offered. Practice of that treasure of literature could not flourish in India in a centralised manner for about eight hundred years prior to the establishment of the ‘Asiatick Society of Bengal’.

 

It required a foreign power to establish a centralised repository of Indian literature, particularly, prehistoric Indian literature; such was the condition of the practice of traditional Indian culture in Bengal as well as India at that time.

 

Religious texts, what Naru prefers to call texts of faith are conceptually much heavier than school-level textbooks. Thus, if a person takes multiple births, at the end of every lifespan, when the memory is erased, on the experience parameter, that person comes back to the starting point once again. In that situation, how can a soul grasp all the literature that is available in the domain of faith in India? The answer to this question is very simple and obvious: it is not possible. It is generally accepted that there is no point in pursuing something that is impossible to achieve. In the public domain, this has been the general situation with respect to the pursuit of those texts of faith in India for a very long time. The process of widespread practice of those works in the world of ordinary people's thoughts has been lost from the larger stream of social life.

 

The basic ideas about common faith, tradition, etc. become incorporated into the lives of the inhabitants of a land through the social environment in which they grow up. The intellectual pursuit of such literature is a difficult proposition. And, naturally, very few people try to walk that path willingly. Moreover, the human beings of the present time do possess much more in their hands than they could handle in a lifespan. Those possessions are present in more direct, obvious, and manifested forms than the ideas reflected in the texts of faith. At present, not much time is available to the people at large to explore the domain of faith.

 

The indigenous people of India, particularly those who traditionally lived on that land during the last half of the last millennium, remained busy in a survival game. Their traditions came under attack by successive invading foreign military powers. In the modern era, possessing superior organisational and military powers has been generally interpreted as the reflection of a superior philosophical base of life. In a shallow understanding of materialistic life, that is an obvious interpretation. During the last half of the last millennium, the literature that contained and represented the traditional Indian philosophical world went into disarray.

 

It may be learnt from the book titled ‘Illusive Land of the Five Male Rivers’ that the invading foreign powers started to appear just after the time when the ancient knowledge base in India started to be given institutional support by the central rulers of that land. A central power that ruled India during that phase of history and rose to a level that has remained almost unmatched by any other ruler in documented history, save the British was that of Mauryan Empire. After the end of the rule of Emperor Ashok in particular, for about a millennium, the ancient knowledge base of India became devoid of any central guardianship. Instead of being evolved as a branched-out central flow, the practice of prehistoric Indian intellectual creations became confined to fragmentary practice centres, often hidden from broad public view, spread across the huge Indian geography. Rivalry among the fragmented practice centres was also noteworthy, and that negatively impacted the practice and interpretation of traditional texts and their practices in a significant manner.

 

Despite being an organ of a foreign, aggressive power, Western intelligentsia, especially the British intellectuals, became extraordinarily fascinated by prehistoric Indian literature when they came into contact with it.

 

The condition of the Indian traditional cultural world was deplorable when the westerners found the treasure trove of prehistoric Indian writings. None of those works survived in an unaltered and unanimously acceptable format in their entirety. Probably no single manuscript could be found that had reached modern people intact. No verbal account for such creations was available either, which seemed to be a flawless, unadulterated account.

 

When the westerners started reaching India in large groups in the middle of the second millennium, they landed on the west coast of India. It did not take them a long time to reach its east coast. Bengal is situated on the easternmost part of India’s east coast. Although the first printing press arrived in India in 1556, it took a long time to begin the process of unearthing, deciphering and documenting the original collection of prehistoric Indian literature. The Indian Renaissance began when that project gained momentum. Mostly, that project was undertaken under the stewardship of the British in Bangla alias Bengal.

 

As organised foreign powers, in the early stages of their presence in India in large numbers, the westerners did not become directly involved in political activities. In the initial stage of their en-masse presence in India, they started with commercial operations. They started sending various readily available items to Europe from the commercial centres of a very old society. At that time, the core of Indian society appeared like an isolated, closed water body to them. Many written accounts of the westerners of that time are available that vouch for this observation. In the initial stage of their interaction with the traditional Indian society, they, i.e., the westerners could not sense that some people in the isolated, deep parts of that society somehow managed to preserve a very ancient cultural heritage.

 

Today, it is difficult to comment on who helped whom when that discovery of cultural heritage was made by the British. Those ancient writings had the capability to pique interest and ignite new line of thought process in any logical mind. The westerners must have become extremely curious about those literatures, or the enthusiasm they showed for the job of exploring those literatures would not have grown. On the other hand, those ancient writings were so fragmented and geographically dispersed in the absence of a central controller, collecting them and giving them a meaningful form proved to be a very complex task. That was way beyond the capacity of the local scholars, considering either their individual or combined capability. For whatever reason, the westerners decided to embark on that task, obviously with the help of the local Indian pundits. As a branch of that initiative, the westerners toiled hard along with the local scholars to give various Indian languages acceptable forms through creation of vernacular dictionaries and ensured stable formats to ancient texts by printing them. They did not have to deal with Sanskrit language too much. The grammar of that language has been set in such a manner that whatever fragments survive, their character remains unchanged, almost. Even changes in

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Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 08.05.2025
ISBN: 978-3-7554-8077-8

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Late Hiranmoyee Chakraborty My Grandmother