You would think that a mountain range from a time period scientists know little to nothing about, would be treated as the treasure chest of all the earth’s wonderful secrets. So technically speaking, the Aravallis are as old as life itself! Existing life forms during this time were no more than single celled organisms like bacteria. This is significant because scientists do not know much about this period, which is also known as the ‘Pre Cambrian period’. All of the earth’s land was, in fact, one giant khichdi supercontinent called ‘Rodinia’, comprising of all the world’s continents. This led to the modern theory of plate tectonics. His theory suggested an explanation to a problem which had perplexed map makers and scholars, who had noticed that all the land masses of the world seemed to fit together in a very neat jigsaw puzzle. He suggested that a very long time ago, all the continents formed a single land mass that drifted apart like icebergs. So, everyone presumed that the position of the continents was fixed because if tectonic plates were only moving up and down, they were, essentially, fixated in the same place.Īlfred Wegener in 1912 in his book “The Origin of Continents and Oceans” published the same in 1915. Till the early 20th Century the world always believed that all of the little bumps and cracks on the Earth were because its tectonic plates moved vertically. As long as we continue to cling to dharma, we shall overcome. In fact, our history has been one of conquest over our circumstances. He reminds us how we survived (and even thrived) greater calamities and invasions.

He first evokes, in the reader, a sense of fear of the old ways disappearing with urbanisation and industrialisation and quickly pacifies the same by narrating the exciting epic, so to speak, of Bharat, which has been through much worse before. Sanyal looks out his window and describes the concrete jungle before his eyes. This is because most scholarly work around the aforementioned hotly debated aspects of India’s history is not written for the common man. While it is ideal for people to access such works directly, one must deal with practical difficulties incurred while accessing and deciphering them. It informs the reader, without her having to to go through verbose, albeit important, scholarly works. If you wish to know about India’s civilisational identity and procure answers to questions surrounding the Aryan Invasion Theory, establishment of the caste system, whether there was an idea of India before the British or the Mughals, then this is the book for you. It ties together India’s history and geography past and present in a seamless read, making it easy for the common man to understand. The Land of Seven Rivers is the kind of book you wish you had been handed in school.

Land of seven rivers sanjeev sanyal