Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c15.57

c15.57

The city of Gaṅgāsāgara seems to have been often encroached upon by the sea and affected by the occasional changes in the surface of the land caused by the silting up of one or other of the mouths of the Ganges and by the creation of new mouths. The same reason seems to have been at the root of the rise, in different ages in the neighbourhood, of such market-towns as the ancient Tāmralipta, the medieval Saptagrāma and Hooghly and the modern Calcutta. But some of the old temples and images at Gaṅgāsāgara survived as late as 1842 A.D. when the remaining part of the ancient city was finally and completely washed away by the waves of the sea.¹ Just a year before the remnants of the last temple were swallowed up, a very interesting account of the ‘Mela at Ganga Saugor’ appeared in the *Friend of India*, Vol. VII, 1841, p. 70 : “...a mere sandbank, about a mile in length and about a quarter mile broad, of a crescent form with the wide sea opening in front and the back covered by a dense jungle. At one corner stands the solitary temple of the celebrated Sanyasi Cupil Mani (Kapilamuni)....The temple is the last remnant of what has evidently been a large monastic institution for devotees, the ruins of which may be walked over at low water. These ruins show that the buildings must have been very extensive as well as massy...” The Kapila temple is said to have been ‘built of Concha stone brought from Orissa’ and was in a precarious condition ‘soon to moulder away’. It was inhabited by a number of mendicants, some of whom owed allegiance to a pontiff of distant Jaipur in Rajasthan. There were two stone images in the temple, one of Kapilamuni and the other of ‘Mahdeb’ (either Mādhava, i.e. Viṣṇu, or probably Mahādeva, i.e. Śiva). The correspondent of the *Friend of India* noticed an inscription in the temple, about the letters of which he remarks, “...yet are they like neither to things in heaven above or in the earth beneath, nor could the Sanyasis themselves decipher the hieroglyphics.” The epigraph was supposed to contain a date which was believed to correspond to 430 or 437 A.D.² The above shows clearly that the sea washed away the most important sacred place in Eastern India, associated with the names of an ancient Vaṅga king called Mādhava and the sage Kapila, just as Dvārakā, a West Indian *tīrtha* of all-India reputation, had been swallowed up by the waves of the Arabian Sea. But whereas an entirely new city, founded in the neighbourhood, was endowed by the people of the Pāścātya division of India with the name and sanctity of ancient Dvārakā, the inhabitants of the Bengal delta did practically nothing to preserve the sacred memory of Gaṅgāsāgara. The real purpose of pilgrimage to holy places in all the four extremities of India was to travel over the length and breadth of the whole land in order to know her properly and to feel the fundamental unity of the various elements in the Indian population. With the absence of Gaṅgāsāgara, there is no ancient *tīrtha* of all-India recognition in the eastern border of the country to attract pilgrims from other parts of India. This seems to be detrimental to the cause of the unity of the Indian people. The East Indians should think of rebuilding the great *tīrtha* at the junction of the Gaṅgā and the Sāgara in all its ancient glory.