Saraswathi Civilization

 My Review on the book named "The Sarasvati Civilisation - A Paradigm Shift in Ancient Indian History" Written by Major General (Dr.) GD BAKSHI SM, VSM

A wonderful and a very informative book 

Major General (Dr.) GD BAKSHI SM, VSM is an author of over thirty books and over three hundred research papers in major journals. He is a graduate of the National Defense Academy. He has a PhD from the University of Madras. 

I genuinely appreciate the tremendous amount of effort that the author has taken in order to research and compile the enormous data on Sarasvati civilisation. 

The book is about a lost river that once sustained a civilisation spread over a vast area of about two million sqare kilometres. The Sarasvati river was mighter than the Brahmaputra. It ran for 4,600 kms from the Himalayas to the sea. It was in its prime around 5-6000 years ago. Around 1,900 BCE, it vanished due to a combination of tectonic plate shifts and a monotonic weakening of the monsoons. 

The Indic civilisation is synonymous today with the Ganga River, its most sacred stream of consciousness, its most historic river. Yet buried in the collective racial unconscious of the Indic civilisation are the memories of an even greater river than the Ganga. The memory of this river has been preserved in the Indian oral tradition for almost 4000 years after it had dried out completely and vanished from the face of this earth. 

Scores of satellites launched by ISRO have confirmed the course of a once mighty river that dominated the  civilisational landscape in the Indian subcontinent. It was the cradle river of the Indian civilisation. More than 60% of the sites of the so-called Indus Valley civilisation were located along the dried-out course of the Sarasvati and not the Indus. It was an amazing civilisation spread over a vast landmass of around 2 million sq. kms. 

References to the Sarasvati are scattered all over India's sacred literature - the later Vedas, the Brahmans and the epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. 

The Sarasvati was the true cradle of the Harappan civilisation that dwarfed the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations in sheer size and scale of its spread. The Sarasvati was also the most important stream mentioned in the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda defined a sacred geography of the Land of Seven Rivers. The principal river amongst these was the Sarasvati. It was called Sindhu Mata - the mother of the Indus. 

The author has adopted a multidisciplinary approach to address various seminal questions of Ancient Indian History. In this book, the author has examined the imposed narratives of the colonial historiography to point out the blatant bias and prejudice of the so- called Left Wing Liberal Academicians and American postmodernist scholars who are trying to de-sacralise our ancient scriptures and attempting to impose new meanings to demonise the Indian civilisation. 

The book is divided into thirteen chapters and each chapter contains detailed information on the lost Sarasvati river. 

The most significant new finding today stems from the rediscovery of the lost Sarasvati river. The author has marshalled the remote sensing data provided by satellite imagery to empirically confirm the existence of a once mighty river that flowed from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea and was the source river and cradle of the Indian civilisation per se. The author has next examined the voluminous evidence provided by the discipline of geology to record the vicissitudes in the life and flow of this mighty river and establish the chronology of events that led to its dessication and demise. The author has then superimposed this geological chronology about the death of the Sarasvati River on to the historical chronology of events in ancient India. This enormous exercise provides us with new insights. 

The most significant of all findings however, come from the discipline of archeology. The author has examined the archeological studies in considerable detail to understand the true nature and identity of the Indus-Sarasvati valley civilisation. Even though the Indus Valley script has not so far been deciphered, the vast assortment of terracotta figurines, dolls and pictures on tablets and seals provide a graphic visual language so to speak, which provides deep insights into that ancient civilisation. 

Then there are the tropes of scriptural and linguistic evidences. The author has tried to cover each of these aspects in fair detail to adopt a truly multidisciplinary approach to answering the seminal questions and debates in Indology. There is also the exciting new field of DNA mapping studies that is casting a new light on those ancient conundrums. 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this marvelous book. I would definitely recommend this incredible book to anyone who is interested in crystallizing  the historical truth about the Sarasvati civilisation. 

I'm very glad to be a part of the 1000 Reviewers club. 

Thanks so much Indic Academy  Indic Book Club  for gifting me with this fabulous book. Looking forward to reading more such books and also reviewing them.