Sands of Sarasvati

Indian scientists discover a vast stretch of underwater ruins at West Coast of India. Have they found Atlantis, the fabled sunken continent? Marine archeologist Amrita Desai and Ukrainian submarine expert Sergei Savelnikov investigate the underwater ruins, and discover a mysterious field of human skulls and skeletons. At the same time scientists realize that a huge meltwater lake has formed inside the Greenland ice sheet. Is the ice sheet about to slide into the ocean? Are our own cities in danger of becoming the New Atlantis?

Sands of Sarasvati has been translated from Finnish to more than ten other languages. It was a bestseller in Germany at the time when the country was wondering whether it should start promoting solar energy via an extensive price guarantee system.
Sands of Sarasvati has inspired debates and votes in the European parliament, theatre plays, international TV series, a feature film project, a comic album, multimedia installations, other types of art installations including sculptures, paintings and glass art, music, a foundation, short radio plays, numerous climate fiction books and several serious research projects.

The novel contains a serious warning related to global warming and the polar ice sheets. According to Sands of Sarasvati melting of ice sheets could, at some point, accelerate exponentially, if so much ice melts that the black dust particles buried inside the ice will be exposed. This would make the surface of the ice much darker, so it would suddenly absorb most of the solar radiation, instead of reflecting it back to space like pure snow.
This could lead to a vicious cycle, creating numerous meltwater lakes on top of the ice sheets. If the meltwater lakes then become glacier wells or moulins, which essentially are high waterfalls through the ice sheet, meltwater can accumulate under the ice sheets and act like a lubricant, accelerating the flow of glaciers.
Melting of the ice sheets can raise the sea level. Besides, ice sheets weigh so much that the crust under them has been depressed downwards, often by more than a kilometer. When the weight of the glaciers is reduced by melting and by the increasing production of icebergs, the crust has to rise up. When the weight is lifted suddenly, the process will be extremely violent, creating huge earthquakes and large tsunamis hitting the shores of whole ocean basins as high walls of rapidly moving water.

Sands of Sarasvati is, above all, a thriller, but it is also a love story and a tribute for Indian, or South Asian, civilization.
Besides, the novel introduced a new theory of Atlantis, the sunken continent.

DID INDIAN MARINE SCIENTISTS DISCOVER THE RUINS OF ATLANTIS?

The story of Atlantis, the sunken continent, is one of the most well known legends on Earth, especially in the West. In one survey British journalists ranked the discovery of Atlantis as the fourth biggest possible news story. Even before the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
The legend is based on the writings of the Greek philosopher Plato, who lived during 427 – 348 before Christ.  According to Plato Egyptian priests told Athena’s former ruler, Solon, that there is a whole sunken continent in the West, called Atlantis. Atlantis had once been densely inhabited by people. It had consisted of fertile lowlands. Two huge rivers flowing through its lands had provided water for complex irrigation systems. There was a large mountain range relatively close to the shore. Atlantis had had cities and shipyards, coconut trees and elephants. Then, roughly eight thousand years ago, Atlantis had been submerged under the sea.
Since then, Atlantis had been searched from the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and the Caribbean, but nothing has ever been found. Which should not come as a surprise: in the Atlantic or in the Mediterranean or Caribbean there simply aren’t any places that would match Plato’s description.

However, in 2001 Indian marine scientists found, from the West Coast of India, something that looked like underwater ruins. The side-scan sonar images taken above the bottom of the Gulf of Khambhat by the scientists of India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology contain squares, rectangles and long, straight lines. Some of the forms were very similar in shape to the 9,000-year-old buildings dug up in Pakistan’s Mehrgarh. They were rectangles divided into smaller segments by five longitudinal and one crosswise wall. The largest individual structure on the seabed was a 200-metre-long and 45-metre-wide rectangle, lying on the hill that could be at least partly artificial.

According to the theory presented in Sands of Sarasvati, the underwater ruins discovered by Indian marine archeologists are the remnants of the cities that also gave birth to the legend of Atlantis.
What if the Egyptian priests had heard, from Indians, that there is a sunken continent in the West?  What if the Egyptian priests had then repeated the story, as such, to Solon, without understanding that what lies West from India might no longer be in the West, when looked from Egypt or Greece?
Sands of Sarasvati points out, that the only place on the planet that would really have fit Plato’s description 10,000 years ago was the West Coast of India. At that time there were still two great rivers flowing through the coastal plain: Indus and Sarasvati. Since then River Sarasvati has dried, completely, because it got its waters from an ice sheet that had formed on the Himalayas during the Ice Age, but then melted.
Today, only Indus remains. The only thing that reminds us of the Mighty Sarasvati is the Saurashtra, or the Kathiawar Peninsula, shaped like an elephant’s ear. Kathiawar, home of Mahatma Gandhi, is ancient delta of the River Sarasvati.
In Indian mythology Sarasvati – or Vidya – is also Goddess of wisdom, learning, literature and science.
Symbol of Sarasvati is a white swan, which is also the sacred bird of many northern peoples.

So it might be that the Indian marine archeologists found, even in the real world, Plato’s Atlantis in May, 2001.
Pasi Malmi, Ranajit Pal and Tommaso Iorco have since then developed the theory further in their book Atlas and Herakles, in which Risto Isomäki is also mentioned, as the father of the hypothesis, and as an honorary writer.

THE CRADLE OF HUMAN CIVILIZATION?

According to Plato, Atlantis was, before it was submerged under waves, the most advanced civilization on Earth.
It is possible, that Plato’s story was only meant as a symbolic moral story. However, the civilization that existed in present-day India, Pakistan and Iran 9,000 years ago and perhaps even earlier might really have been a cradle of human civilization.
In India there is a legend about god Manu and Saptarishi, the seven sages accompanying him.  Numerous words meaning “man” or “human” in the various Indo-European languages are derived from Manu’s name, but he is also a sort of Hindu Noah. According to Veda Books, Manu and Saptarishi preserved the seeds of civilization after Deluge, the Biblical Great Flood.
Interestingly, ancient Sumerians, the first major civilization of Mesopotamia, also had a legend about Oannes and Seven Sages accompanying him. According to the legend Oannes and his companions brought the seeds of agriculture, architecture and construction, as well as many other skills to Mesopotamia. A similar legend also exists Egypt.
The first civilization of Mesopotamia – the one that constructed Eridu and Uruk and invented writing and numerous other things – was probably established by people who spoke unknown ptoto-Dravidian language, related to Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam and other modern Dravidian languages. What if the story about Manu or Oannes has something to do with reality, and Eridu and Uruk were established by immigrants from the present-day Pakistan and India?
Another very interesting thing is that the oldest ruins in Pakistan and India, including ruins at the bottom of the Gulf of Khambhat – as well as the ruins of Eridu and Uruk in present-day Iraq – all bear a rather similar middle-class signature, a signature of relatively equal society, with no palaces and no slums, with almost everybody living in roughly similar houses. Today, when both India and Pakistan are torn by huge and growing inequality, it is inspiring and encouraging to know that the oldest India (and Pakistan) was very different, equality-wise, maybe more like Iceland or Norway than the South Asia of today.