Land of the Seven Rivers : A Brief History of India's Geography

At the core of the Rig Veda landscape was area called Sapta-Sindhu (Land of the Seven Rivers). This is clearly the heartland of the Rig Veda, but the problem is that text does not clearly specify the seven rivers. It is almost as if it was too obvious to be worthy of explanation. The hymns repeatedly describe the Saraswati as being of "seven sisters", so the sacred river was certainly one of the rivers, but the others are uncertain. The conventional view is that the seven rivers include de Saraswati, the five rivers of Punjab and the Indus. This would mean that the Sapta-Sindhu region included Haryana, all the Punjab (including Pakistani Punjab) and even parts of adjoining provinces. This is a very large area.

Most people tend to be overwhelmed by the poor living conditions that prevail in Indian slums. The usual reaction is to treat this as a housing problem. Over the decades, we have seen many well-meaning slum re—development projects that have attempted to resettle Slum-dwellers into purpose—built housing blocks (often on the outskirts of the city). Yet, almost all these efforts have failed. More often than not, the former slum-dwellers sell, rent out or abandon the new housing blocks and move back into a slum. The problem is that these
schemes view slums as a static housing problem whereas slums are really evolving ecosystems that include informal
jobs inside the slum, information about jobs outside the slum, social networks, security and so on. Thus, slums play an
important role as 'routers’ in the urbanization process. They absorb poor migrants from the rural hinterland and naturalize them into the urban landscape. In doing so, they provide the urban economy with the armies of blue-collar workers—— maids, drivers, factory-workers—who are essential to the
functioning of any vibrant city. As we have seen, slums existed in Harappan Dholavira, Mughal Delhi and in colonial Bombay.
Slums are not unique to India. The slums of New York and London were legendary in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century. We need to distinguish here between urban decay and slums. Urban decay describes the condition of blight and abandonment that one sees in Detroit, New Jersey, and northern England. In contrast, as writers like Jeb Brugmann have pointed out, Indian slums are full of enterprise and energy,“ Indeed, Indian slums are remarkable in how safe and cohesive they are. Most readers of this book will be able to walk through the average Indian slum even at night without fear of being harmed. This cohesion comes from the fact that migrants do not view slum life as a static state of deprivation but as a foothold into the modern, urban economy. Life may be hard but, in a rapidly grong economy, there is enough socio-economic mobility to keep slum-dwellers hardworking, enterprising and law-abiding. I am not glorifying slums or arguing that they do not need help. Clearly, we need to provide the urban poor with better sanitation, public health, education and so on. The point I am making is that real slums are not the places of static hopelessness portrayed in popular movies like Slumdog Millionaire.

One of the unfortunate aspects of urban growth between the mid-fifties and the mid-eighties was the influence fo "brutalist" modernism. To socialists and fascists alike, the industrial starkness of reinforced concrete had a great attraction that is difficult to understand. Yet, the architects were somehow able to design builidings that are simultaneously unfriendly to the user, difficult to maintain and astonishingly ugly. Thus it came to be that India, land of the sublime symmetry of the Taj Mahal and the organic orchestra of Palitana, as if also home to some of the ugliest buildings in the worlde. Every major city has them - Nehru Palace and Inter-State Bus Terminal in Dehli, the Indian Express Building in Mumbai and the Haryana State Secretariat in Chandigarh.
Fascists and socialists have another thing in common - the urge to impose rigid master-plans on cities. In 1950, Prime Minister Nehru invited Le Corbusier, a French fascist, to design the new city of Chandigarh. Although the new city was built at the Saraswati-Ghaggar, Corbusier (sis) was specifically asked by Nehru to create a city that was 'unfettered" by India's ancient civilization. Enormous resources in land, material and money were poured into building the new city. At the same time, rigid master plans were imposed on existing cities. Dehli was master-planned in 1962 into strict zones according to use. However, the static master plan is to the city what socialist planning is to the economy. Both cities and economies are organic and rapidly evolving eco-systems. Just as the Mahalonobis model of central planning damaged the Indian economy, the country's urban thinking was severly damaged by Le Corbusier's philosophy that buildings were machines for living.

A lot can be discerned about a people from the way they remember their darkest hour. When New York observes an anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, there is a sombre service and speeches by leading political figures. Contrast that with how Mumbai commemorated the terrorist attacks of 26 November 2008. A day after the fourth anniversary, a flash mob of 200 young boys and girls suddenly appeared in the middle of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminal, a busy train station that had witnessed on the massacres on that night of horror. The flash mob then proceeded to dance for five minutes to a popular Bollywood number "Rang de Basanti" (roughly translates as "The Colour of Sacrifice"). Then, when the music stopped, the mob disappeared into the crowd. In any other country this would have been considered sacrilege but in India it was widely seen as appropriate. The whole episode was filmed and became an instant hit on the Internet. But, why do Indians remember a horrible event by dancing?
The Key to resolving the paradow is to realize that Indians view history not in political but in civilaztional terms. When Americans raise their flag at the 9/11 sites, they reaffirm the resilience of their nation state. When Indians dance at the site of the 26/11 massacre, they celebrate the triumph of their civilization.

The history fo India's geography and civilization reminds us of the significance of each generation in the vastness fo time. The greatest of India's monarch and thinkers too felt it. So they left behing their stories and thoughts in ballads, folktales, epics and inscriptions. Even if these memories are not always literally true, what matters is that they carry on the essence of India's civilization. On the island of Mauritius, descendants of Indian immigrants have tranferred their memories of the river Ganga to a lake, Ganga Talao, that they now hold as sacred. A very long time ago, their distant ancestors would have similarly transferred the memory of the Saraswati to the Ganga. Geography is not just about the physical terrain, but also about the meaning that we attribute to it. Thus, the Saraswati flows, invisibily, art Allahabad.