‘Sethu doesn’t exist’: Govt relied on archaeologists, geographers

The following News Item has appeared in today's (29/07/2008) Times of India :-
http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Daily/skins/TOI/navigator.asp?Daily=TOICH&quo t;lo gin=default

‘Sethu doesn’t exist’: Govt relied on archaeologists, geographers

Akshaya Mukul | TNN

New Delhi: The government’s view that Ram Sethu did not exist is largely based on extracts from works of renowned archaeologists and geographers, including pro-RSS historian B B Lal, who had studied material evidence to dismiss the claim of a bridge built by Ram’s army.
The culture ministry had asked HRD ministry to seek the views of Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR) to form its opinion. Culture ministry sources said ICHR cited works of archaeologists like H D Sankalia, B B Lal, H Parker, geographer O H K Spate and Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1909, to prove that talk of a bridge was fictional with no historical evidence.
Sankalia’s seminal work ‘The Ramayana in Historical Perspective’ quotes Ramayana stating how Ram first used burning arrows to subdue the sea, resulting in the sea coming up in human form and promising to build the bridge. Later, Sankalia quotes Ramayana, “Vanaras began to fill up the ocean with all sorts of trees without roots — sal, asvaparna, kutaju, arjuna, tada, tiloaka, timita, bilvaka, sataparna, karnikara, chuta ashoka. Later, huge slabs of stone were thrown. Thus a long bridge (mahasetu), ten yojanas broad (vistarna), and a hundred yojanas long (ayata) was built by Nala…�
With this as evidence, when Sankalia looked for them on the ground, he said, “At Rameshwaram, there is nothing but sand dunes known as teris. These are again of three types — copper-red, brown and grey or white — the first being the oldest and indicate in no uncertain terms what the nature of the country, say 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, was.�
He also said except a few palm trees and one or two others, nothing else grows there even today. Also, “no stone is available there, unless one goes several miles inland, and brings slabs after breaking the rocky hills�.
Sankalia also pointed out, “Whatever the exact connotation of the length (100 yojanas) and breadth (10 yojanas) of the bridge given in the epic, anyone who has actually visited the spot or knows the present distance between the two points, will have to say that this bridge was the longest ever to have been built anywhere in the world, just with tree trunks and stone slabs. Indeed, the whole thing is one of the grandest feats of imagination, and so is the description of Lanka which follows.�
Lal was clinical in his view. In his ‘The Earliest Civilization of South Asia’, Lal wrote, “The northern end — the Jaffna peninsula — is hardly 30 km from the mainland.
The intervening sea is shallow and it is not unlikely that even during a mild Ice Age when some of the sea-water got locked up as ice in the Himalayas, a few land-strips may have surfaced, hoppingly connecting the mainland with Sri Lanka.�
Parker, while denouncing the theory of bridge as “poetic fiction�, said, “Such a slight foundation for it as the spread of the Hindu religion, or Aryan civilisation, among the tribes of the south must be swept away so far as Ceylon is concerned, since the descendants of the original inhabitants of the island, the Vaeddas of the interior, have never adopted the worship of the Hindu gods, nor, until historic times, the civilisation of the Aryans.�
Spate said, “Adam’s bridge itself is basically a coral reef killed by an uplift and consolidated into coral rock.�