Introduction
On 28 September 1844, at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in York, its members gathered to listen to an extempore lecture by Hugh Falconer (1808–1865) on the Colossochelys atlas or the giant tortoise, a fossil he had discovered with his colleague Proby T. Cautley (1802–1871) in the sub-Himalayan Siwalik hills of northern India. A temporary screen, erected in front of the orchestra recess, was covered with diagrams and maps. The most prominent illustration was a life-size drawing of the Colossochelys by George J. Scharf (1788–1860), made under Falconer's supervision. The extinct tortoise was indeed colossal in size; the animal was more than seven feet high, its shell measured 18-and-a-half feet in diameter, and its legs were believed to be as large as those of an Indian rhinoceros.Footnote 1 Falconer described the search for and discovery of the fossil, as well as its physical features, before ending his talk by referring to the five species of Mastodon fossils found with the Colossochelys in the Siwaliks.Footnote 2
Significantly, Falconer addressed the question of determining when the Colossochelys became extinct. First, he argued that several fossils that he and Cautley had found in the Siwaliks bore striking similarities to species now living in India. He then narrated how, according to the Puranas (post-Vedic texts), the deity Vishnu assumed the form of a tortoise in his second avatar (incarnation) in order to sustain the world on his back. The legend, Falconer added, had left a permanent mark on Indians: ‘So completely has this fable been impressed on the faith of the country, that the Hindus to this day even believe that the world rests on the back of a Tortoise.’ Falconer cited further vignettes from Indian mythology in which the giant tortoise features prominently; for example, the bird-demigod Garuda was said to have once appeased his hunger at a lake where a tortoise and an elephant were fighting. Falconer suggested that the dimensions given for the tortoise in these stories reflected the ‘extravagant style of cosmogony’. However, he argued that while the giant tortoise also figured in Greek and Persian mythologies, the Indian representations of these had an ‘image of congruity’ whereas the other two traditions were ‘composed of wild and fanciful combinations of different portions of known animals into impossible forms’ and were ‘merely the progeny of uncurbed imagination’. In fact, the vivid description of the tortoise in Indian traditions suggested to Falconer that the Colossochelys—ostensibly congruous with the Kurma (tortoise) avatar—would have been ‘coexistent with man in the East’.Footnote 3 To palaeontologists, then, Indian mythology could be a credible source of information about fossils recently unearthed in India, such as that of the giant tortoise.
Falconer's presentation at York was not an isolated event; earlier that year, he had read a series of papers in London, at the Zoological Society and at the Royal Asiatic Society, with very similar content. At the high noon of science, and in its metropolis, Falconer mixed European geology with Indian mythology. Why did this leading exponent of palaeontology in early Victorian Britain refer to the Puranas as evidence for his theories regarding the age of Indian fossils?
The Siwalik fossils found by Falconer and Cautley constituted the first major collection of fossils from the tropics. Falconer had brought many specimens back with him to London, where they aroused great scientific interest, and by the 1840s he had become one of the foremost India informants for Charles Darwin (1809–1882). At the same time, Indian mythological texts such as the Puranas were largely considered unreliable as historical evidence. Famously, the British historian James Mill (1773–1836) had passed a damning verdict on Indian mythology, describing it as comprising little more than ‘the playsome whimsies of monkeys in human shape’.Footnote 4 Equally vigorously, Christian evangelicals (the Church Missionary Society in particular) rejected the Hindu idea of avatars as products of the superstitious Hindu mind.Footnote 5 How, then, could Falconer have used such traditions in explaining his geological specimens, and on what intellectual conventions was he drawing in making such connections? After all, his presentations took place before the heady days of Indology, which started in the 1870s, when the Puranas came to be venerated as sources elucidating Indian history and civilization, through the works of Keshub Chandra Sen (1838–84), Madame Blavatsky (1831–91), and others.Footnote 6
In exploring such questions, this article traces the consilience of science and mythology in Indian history. This is a narrative in which Indian fossil research met the Orientalist discovery of the Indian past—an encounter which historians have largely failed to note. The two main readings of Falconer's work have focused on two important metropolitan debates in science—Falconer's engagement with Darwin's evolutionary theories and his contestation with Charles Lyell (1797–1875) over the question of the antiquity of man—rather than his engagement with Indian mythology.Footnote 7 Moreover, such approaches tend not to contend with the deep and complex intellectual trajectories that influenced Falconer and other geologists in India. Kenneth A.R. Kennedy, in his broader study of palaeoanthropology in South Asia, argues that early palaeontological research in India was conceptually linked with Eastern philosophical traditions.Footnote 8 Yet he stops short of critically analysing the links between fossils and mythology. Savithri Preetha Nair does consider this connection, noting Falconer's ‘ability to “translate” the sacredness that the natives attributed to fossils into his own scientific concerns’ and showing that Falconer ‘incorporated elements of Hindu mythology’ in his naming of Indian fossils.Footnote 9 However, as we argue, the engagement between geology and mythology went deeper than fossil nomenclature.
Most importantly, this article identifies in Indian geology a simultaneous engagement with the field and the text. In order to elucidate the discovery of fossils in the Siwaliks, we must also explore the intellectual discourses of Orientalist scholars associated with the Asiatic Society, established in Calcutta in 1784 by William Jones (1746–94). Indeed, we contend that the rise of philological studies of ancient mythology by figures such as Jones established critical methodological and interpretive frameworks for researches in stratigraphy and, more saliently, palaeontology in colonial India. It was Jones and other Orientalists who developed a tradition of mythological hermeneutics, examining ancient Indian texts for clues to the past. In time, Falconer picked up on this approach, but whereas the likes of Jones emphasized a symbolic reading of scriptures, Falconer's fossil researches reflected a markedly realist interpretation. In analysing this interesting link between science and Orientalist philology, this article thus uncovers a hitherto obscured historical trajectory regarding the making of geology in colonial India.
Orientalism and sacred geography
To understand the use of Indian mythology in the European exploration of India's geological past, we have to begin with Orientalism. Martin J.S. Rudwick reminds us that although ‘geology’ was a term used by ‘savants’ in the late eighteenth century ‘as a synonym for Theory of the Earth’, at that time it was still not used in the modern sense we recognize.Footnote 10 However, the discourse within the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, and more generally among British naturalists in India, placed a new onus on what we now recognize as geology in the discovery of the natural history and antiquity of India. Through its search for Hinduism's supposed Judaeo-Christian roots, eighteenth-century Orientalism in India developed strong geographical orientations. Jones and his contemporaries used Indian mythology, as narrated in ancient texts, as evidence of ante- and postdiluvian history (for which the book of Genesis was the ultimate authority) and, in the process, derived an important spatial motif that was fundamental to reconstructing India's sacred geography.Footnote 11 While that in itself was an important influence on geologists seeking to understand Indian strata, Jones's suggestion of allegorical links between the avatars described in texts such as the Puranas as well as Biblical accounts of the deluge opened up a further prospect. If ancient texts could in fact be understood literally as opposed to just figuratively, then it was possible that those avatars could provide more information about fossils discovered in India.
Though the term ‘Orientalism’ tends now to be associated more with Edward W. Said and others, and is used as a category of analysis for characterizing Western perceptions of an inferior and fundamentally different East and elucidating the nexus between knowledge and power in the age of empire, ‘Orientalist’ scholarship was complex in its methods and motivations.Footnote 12 The tendency of some historians is to characterize the likes of Jones favourably. Garland Hampton Cannon insists that ‘Jones was always the humanitarian’, and that ‘Despite his own occasional ethnocentrism’.Footnote 13 Michael J. Franklin also alludes to Jones's ‘delight in the sensuousness of India’ and ‘passion for India’.Footnote 14 Early Orientalists such as Jones did not necessarily see Europe as superior to, or even fundamentally different from, Asia. Indeed, Jones and his peers searched for commonalities, anchoring their standpoints in supposed equivalences across Indian and Classical culture.Footnote 15 Nevertheless, as Jenny Sharpe demonstrates, Orientalism in late-eighteenth-century India—its ‘predisciplinary moment’—is also open to critique.Footnote 16 She suggests that the tracing of British heritage to ancient India—notwithstanding its broken trajectories—provided a convenient historical continuum for a colonizing power, as well as associating European civilization more with Aryan rather than Semitic culture.Footnote 17 Orientalist philology could therefore be about both characterizing a world distinct from the Occident and seeking connection with its people, history, and languages. Moreover, in the course of their enquiries, directed towards ‘MAN and NATURE; whatever is performed by the one, or produced by the other’, Orientalists often turned their attention to both tropical geography and ancient mythology.Footnote 18
The eighteenth century marked the beginning of European discourses on non-Abrahamic religions, focusing first on Japan and China before gradually moving on to India. From the second half of the eighteenth century, discussions about the antiquity of Hinduism took place. Jones's work was the first sustained reading and translation of Sanskrit texts by a European scholar. He found similarities in European and Indian languages, which to him reflected the similarity in the origins of the people who spoke these languages: this was the basis of his comparative philology. Still, while Jones believed that all great civilizations had common roots, history had a clear Judaeo-Christian telos. Jones believed that the discovery of a common place of human origin in the Middle East was a vindication of the Mosaic history as told in Genesis, and his studies of Sanskrit and Hinduism followed the same rationale. P.J. Marshall shows that Jones sought to assuage European doubts by showing that Indian antiquity did not begin before 2000 BC, safely after the dispersal of the people in Genesis. He even claimed that certain Hindu myths were simply versions of Genesis.Footnote 19 Urs App confirms that Jones's project was not primarily linguistic nor ethnological, but theological.Footnote 20 So, while some claimed that religions such as Hinduism were older and had independent roots, Jones and other Orientalist scholars sought to reassert the universal and global antiquity of Abrahamic religious culture.
In 1783, travelling on board a ship to India to take up his position as a judge in the Calcutta Supreme Court, Jones drew up his memorandum of ‘Objects of Enquiry during my residence in Asia’.Footnote 21 The list included topics such as ‘The History of the Ancient World’ and ‘Traditions concerning the Deluge, &c’. Here, Jones drew inspiration from A New System, or, An Analysis of Ancient Mythology (three volumes, 1774–6) by the classical scholar Jacob Bryant (1715–1804). This was an attempt to write a history of the world, using mythology, based on the grand scheme of the deluge and the subsequent distribution of the human race, through Noah's three sons. In one of his earliest works on Hindu religion—‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, published in the Asiatick Researches in 1788—Jones asserted his belief that all ancient religions had common origins in Mosaic history. He suggested that ‘we may infer a general union or affinity between the most distinguished inhabitants of the primitive world, at the time when they deviated, as they did too early deviate, from the rational adoration of the only true GOD’.Footnote 22 However, his article was also significant in demonstrating his determination to read mythology through the lens of what was to him rational—meaning Judaeo-Christian—history:
I am persuaded, that a connexion subsisted between the old idolatrous nations of Egypt, India, Greece and Italy, long before they migrated to their several settlements, and consequently before the birth of MOSES; but the proof of this proposition will in no degree affect the truth and sanctity of the Mosaick History, which, if confirmation were necessary, it would rather tend to confirm.Footnote 23
In fact, Jones started his enquiry by describing the ‘four principal sources of all mythology’ as ‘Historical, or natural truth . . . perverted into fable by ignorance, imagination, flattery, or stupidity’; ‘a wild admiration of the heavenly bodies, and, after a time, the systems and calculations of Astronomers’; ‘the magick [sic] of poetry’; ‘the metaphors and allegories of moralists and metaphysicians’.Footnote 24 The ‘true history of the world’ was the Mosaic one, and it alone was the benchmark for evaluating mythology; some mythologies were ‘truer’ than others, with ‘the true history of the world’ being anchored in Biblical accounts of the deluge.
In using Hindu mythology to confirm the ‘true history’ of Genesis, Jones depended heavily on the Puranas, and he appreciated what he considered to be their symbolic and figurative modes of writing. In a later article—his ‘Discourse on the Origin and Families of Nations’, written in 1792—he suggested that rather than seeing the Puranas as a ‘mere assemblage of metaphors’, it was necessary to acknowledge the ‘symbolical mode of writing adopted by eastern sages, to embellish and dignify historical truth’. The adherent of Judaeo-Christian religion would then find ‘the same account of the creation and the fall, expressed by symbols very nearly similar, from the Puránas themselves, and even from the Véda, which appears to stand next in antiquity to the five books of MOSES’.Footnote 25
Alongside Jones, the military engineer and Sanskrit scholar Francis Wilford (1761?–1822) was another who asserted the elucidative potential of Hindu mythology. In the 1792 edition of the Asiatick Researches, Wilford explained his attempt to build a geographical picture of India and other countries such as Egypt:
My original design was to compose a dissertation, entirely geographical, on Egypt and other countries bordering upon the Nile; but, as the Hindus have no regular work on the subject of Geography, or none at least, that ever came to my knowledge, I was under a necessity of extracting my materials from their historical poems, or, as they may be called more properly, their legendary tales; and in them I could not expect to meet with requisite data for ascertaining the relative situations of places: I was obliged, therefore, to study such parts of their ancient books, as contained geographical information, and to follow the track, real or imaginary, of their Deities and Heroes; comparing all their legends with such accounts of holy places in the regions of the West, as have been preserved by the Greek Mythologists, and endeavouring to prove the identity of places by the similarity of names and of remarkable circumstances.Footnote 26
This method was described by Jones, critically reflecting on the article as president of the Asiatic Society, as ‘conjectural etymology’—that is, Wilford's picture was based more on conjecture regarding similar names and places across cultures.Footnote 27 However, there was that problem of historical credibility. Wilford's approach was similar to that of Bryant, whose work was of course an inspiration for Jones. But a few years before his cautious endorsement of Wilford's work as being in ‘good faith’ and of ‘general accuracy’, Jones had in fact questioned Bryant's emphasis on etymology. He suggested that ‘Etymology has, no doubt, some uses in historical researches: but it is a medium of proof so very fallacious, that, where it elucidates one fact, it obscures a thousand, and more frequently borders on the ridiculous, than leads to any solid conclusion.’ The solution was, as we have seen, to take Mosaic history as a benchmark: ‘it [etymology] rarely carries with it any internal power of conviction from a resemblance of sounds or similarity of letters; yet often, where it is wholly unassisted by these advantages, it may be indisputably proved by extrinsick evidence’.Footnote 28 Wilford clearly agreed with Jones that Hindu mythology as a whole was shorn of historical credibility. He submitted that ‘The Mythology of the Hindus is often inconsistent and contradictory’ and that their ‘History’ was ‘involved in allegories and enigmas, which cannot but seem extravagant and ridiculous’. However, he qualified this by suggesting that these allegories and enigmas ‘have a recondite meaning’.Footnote 29 And so, he got to work exploring such meaning, with the help of an Indian pundit paid to assist him.
This symbolic (and selective) reading of the Puranas opened up almost unlimited (and in some respects fantastic) possibilities for Jones and his fellow Orientalists. Jones now found that an entire Purana was dedicated to the description of antediluvian history. He discovered stories referring to ‘eruptions from burning mountains, territories laid waste by hurricanes, and whole islands depopulated by earthquakes’ as well as ‘the first propagation and early dispersion of mankind in separate families to separate places of residence’. Jones described how ‘three sons of the just and virtuous man [Noah]’ dispersed and populated the world: the children of Japheth became the Tartars, those of Shem became the Arabs, and those of Ham became the Indians.Footnote 30 Similarly, Wilford claimed that the Sanskrit ‘Padma-puran’ detailed the story of Satyavrata and his three sons Jyapeti, Charma, and Sharma, mirroring the Genesis account of Noah and Japheth, Shem, and Ham. Mount Caucasus was in the Hindu Kush, with the terrestrial paradise of Adima and Iva being beneath Mount Meru in Kashmir, while Satyavrata indeed steered the ark to Kashgar in the Hindu Kush, known in the Puranas as ‘Aryavarta’ or ‘Aryawart’, which is similar in sound to Ararat.Footnote 31
Jones also turned to the Puranas—such as the Matsya [fish] Purana, which he called the ‘epitome of first Indian history’—for his exploration of Vishnu's avatars and the theme of the deluge.Footnote 32 As well as comparing the Puranic depiction of a great flood to the deluge associated with Noah, he found resemblances between Zeus or Jupiter and the triple divinity of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva.Footnote 33 In an article ‘On the Chronology of the Hindus’, written in 1790, Jones described Vishnu's first three avatars—fish, tortoise, and boar—as allegorical representations of the ‘universal deluge’.Footnote 34 Each of the avatars supposedly carried at least one reference to the deluge, with Vishnu making critical interventions as the globe was subjected to violent assaults by demons; the tortoise Kurma, for example, sustained the Earth on his back. Later, Jones confirmed his belief that the first three avatars, or ‘descents of Vishnu’, related to ‘an Universal Deluge’, in which only eight people were saved. He deduced that the second or ‘silver’ age of the Hindus was subsequent to the dispersion from Babel.Footnote 35
Such philological enquiry regarding the deluge was also becoming evident among scholars more directly concerned with natural history; however, while Jones remained committed to the temporal framework outlined in Genesis, others were more open to the possibility that textual accounts from ‘other’ civilizations attested to a different chronology of the Earth. For example, though Egyptian hieroglyphs remained a mystery even after the capture of the Rosetta stone in the late eighteenth century, it was thought possible that Egyptian history considerably predated the deluge, with the supposed antiquity of Egyptian zodiacs providing further evidence of extreme antiquity.Footnote 36 Still, Jones retained his belief in Mosaic chronology, and his reading of Indian mythology was also different from most European theological and geological engagements with Genesis, in which various attempts were made to prove or disprove the text.Footnote 37 Jones was interested in Indian mythology only in so far as it was relevant to the contemporary debates on Christianity and philology. His faith was in Genesis, not Hinduism or the Puranas, and he was simply seeking to prove its authenticity by using Indian texts as evidence. Indeed, while ‘there was no question in Jones's mind that Christianity was the only true religion’, Jones also ‘showed that Sanskrit literature was not an enemy but an ally of the Bible, supplying independent corroboration of the Bible's version of history after the flood’.Footnote 38 Jones's invocation of the Puranas and the avatar concept in his comparative theology was an astute conceptual manoeuvre, allowing for both the plurality and singularity of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It placed Indian classical texts adjacent to the European enlightenment, with avatarism allowing Hinduism to be situated as part of Christianity.Footnote 39 Moreover, Jones was the first to unravel the mutative possibilities of the Puranas and avatars. The symbolism of the Puranas enabled different meanings to be extracted and different ideological purposes to be served.
The supposed links between avatars and the Biblical flood were explored by other Orientalist scholars as well. Thomas Maurice (1754–1824) dedicated the first volume of The History of Hindostan (1795–8) to Indian accounts of the ‘general deluge’ as well as antediluvian and postdiluvian history.Footnote 40 He closely followed Jones's narrative and sources while offering a longer and more elaborate discussion of each of the first four avatars, noting their references to the deluge of Noah and remarking on the supposed Judaeo-Christian origins of Indian antiquity. The book remains a fascinating collection of Indian religious iconographies, including depictions of Vishnu's avatars and supposed evidence of the deluge.Footnote 41 Edward Moor (1771–1848), who had served in the military in India, also found references to the flood in narratives associated with the second avatar. In his Hindu Pantheon (1810), he wrote that Vishnu assumed the form of the tortoise in order to sustain the mountain Mandara on his back; the mountain served as an axis on which the gods and demons, using the great serpent Vasuki as a rope, churned the ocean for the recovery of Amrita, the drink of immortality.Footnote 42
Though Jones suggested that symbolic references to Noah and the deluge could be found in all civilizations, not all writers expressed the same sense of cross-civilizational congruity. William Ward (1769–1823)—one of the famous Baptist missionary triumvirate based at Serampore—included a summary of Vishnu's ten incarnations in his famous ethnographic work on Indian history, literature, and mythology, but he described the traditions as ‘contemptible ideas’, with no sense of the narratives encoding any sort of deep historical truth. Ward wrote that ‘Mŭtsyŭ’ [fish] appeared following a ‘periodical destruction’ of the universe, when the Vedas ‘remained in the waters’ and needed retrieving. As ‘Kŭchyŭpŭ’ [tortoise], Vishnu ‘took the newly created earth upon his back, to render it stable’, with Ward adding that ‘The Hindoos believe to this hour the earth is supported on the back of a tortoise.’ Then, ‘Vŭrahŭ’ [boar] came after a further ‘periodical destruction’ of the world, when the earth ‘sunk into the waters’ and required drawing up. Ward's brief sketch was inflected, as one might expect, with disparagement. He ridiculed the ideas of ‘The earth, with all its mountains, &c. made fast on the back of a turtle, or drawn up from the deep by the tusks of a hog.’Footnote 43
While Jones's standpoints on Indian mythology remained largely unchallenged, Wilford's reputation was, ultimately, tarnished when it emerged that his ‘conjectural etymology’ rested on bogus stories. Wilford himself discovered, to his horror, that his pundit had taken a little creative licence. In his introduction to his essay on the ‘Sacred Isles of the West’ in the 1805 edition of the Asiatick Researches, Wilford ashamedly admitted that his assistant had substituted words in manuscripts, inserted pages into manuscripts, and even made up legends from scratch (though, incredibly, Wilford remained insistent that much of the overarching narrative remained authentic).Footnote 44 He was desperate to believe in a romantic and universalizing narrative bridging India and Europe, and his pundit was willing to provide it. However, this embarrassing episode did undermine the reputation of Orientalist scholarship, and Wilford remains best known for succumbing to this particular example of ‘pious fraud’.Footnote 45
Although Wilford's accounts and sources were discredited, mythology-focused philological and historical enquiry retained methodological credibility. For one, Wilford's researches remained a serious point of reference for geographical surveying activities across India (Wilford himself had been assistant to the surveyor-general between 1786 and 1790). Richard Wilcox (1802–1848), assistant to the Great Trigonometrical Survey between 1832 and 1835, expressed a desire that ‘some one [sic] adequate to the task would follow up Colonel Wilford's enquiry, now that we are possessed of much more accurate information . . . The continuation of Colonel W.'s discussion contains a singular mixture of what closely resembles the truth, with other matter which we cannot reconcile with what we know to be fact.’Footnote 46 Beyond that, Wilford and Jones established the conceptual validity of referring to mythology in prosecuting enquiries into man and nature in India, and in the early nineteenth century, geologists in India indeed reflected the sense that it was only possible to know the landscape by immersing oneself in the cultural traditions associated with its sacred geography.
Wilford's sacred geography seemed to prompt geologists to seek clues to the formation of landforms in Indian mythology. P.M. Benza of the Madras Medical Establishment encouraged the pursuit of geology in South India, drawing attention to the need to collect fossils there, and he alluded to the Puranas in contextualizing changing perspectives regarding the creation of natural features. He wrote: ‘These geological appearances seem to countenance what is said in the Puranas, “that it has been handed down by tradition, that the greatest part of the Coromandel Coast was suddenly elevated out of the sea”.’Footnote 47 G.R. Wilby was another who implied that geological facts could be discerned in ancient Indian texts, and also drew attention to the example of the Coromandel. He noted that ‘The Puranas assert that the whole of the Coromandel coast has been raised from the bed of the sea, and the position of many Post-pliocene [sic] beds along that coast gives credit to the story.’Footnote 48
In linking Hindu avatars described in ancient texts with the Biblical flood, Jones also opened up possibilities for geologists to associate these mythological figures with fossils. In India, fossil research started outside theological debates, in the various surveying and engineering projects. However, it ultimately turned to the Puranas and avatars, as demonstrated in Falconer's lecture at the British Association. There was thus not only a broad relationship between geology and Orientalist philology, as manifested in the aforementioned discussions about strata, but also a more direct link between Falconer's project and Jones's expositions. Still, there was an important twist: whereas Jones underlined the symbolic and figurative nature of ancient texts such as the Puranas, taking Indian mythology as evidence that proved other theological ‘truths’, Falconer imbued mythological hermeneutics with a more realist and secular interpretation.
The ‘noble fossils’ of the Himalayas
The story of Falconer and Cautley starts with British attempts to clear the Yamuna riverbed of deposits later referred to by Falconer as ‘the ancient alluvium’.Footnote 49 Cautley, of the Bengal Engineers, joined the project to dig the Doab canal from the Yamuna in 1830. Captain Edward Smith, also of the Bengal Engineers, was in charge of the project from 1828, and he found mammal fossil bones in ‘great abundance’, lodged in the bed of the river as he dredged through the kankar. Smith identified some of these as fossilised elephants, camels, buffaloes, horses, and alligators. He even believed that some were human bones.Footnote 50 Cautley's engineering project soon acquired archaeological and palaeontological significance. He was aware that he was working on a canal system that had been undertaken in the fourteenth century by Firoz Shah Tughlaq (1309–88), a Delhi sultan of the Tughlaq dynasty. Cautley and his fellow British engineers were not making new cuttings, but restoring old ones, and while digging the canal, Cautley repaired old Mughal monuments around Delhi.Footnote 51 He also found fossils amid historical ruins. At Behut, 20 miles north of Saharanpur, Cautley discovered an ancient town, 17 feet below the alluvial deposits, which the Orientalist James Prinsep (1799–1840) described as the ‘Herculaneum of the East’. Moreover, along with Indo-Scythian coins, Cautley found a fossilised tooth, which was similar to the Yamuna fossils.Footnote 52
Cautley met the surgeon Falconer in 1831, at the Saharanpur botanical garden where the latter served as deputy superintendent and then superintendent, and he showed him some of the ‘black cylindrical fossils’ that he had come across earlier during his engineering operations. Falconer himself then set out to find fossils in the Himalayan foothills, and he returned, as he wrote to J. Forbes Royle (the preceding superintendent at Saharanpur), ‘loaded . . . with noble fossils of the monsters of the deep!’Footnote 53 Between 1834 and 1839, Falconer and Cautley undertook explorations in the Siwalik region and made their most important discoveries of fossils. They found the Sivatherium, a four-horned extinct antelope. This new ‘Ruminant Genus’ in the Siwaliks filled the crucial gap between Pachydermata and Ruminanta in the sequence of animal species.Footnote 54 Falconer and Cautley also discovered fossils of mastodon, stegodon, rhinoceros, giraffe, camel, and hippopotamus.Footnote 55 The fossil remains of the hippopotamus helped to highlight the qualities that distinguished the Siwalik species not only from those that lived in Africa, but also from those of Europe.Footnote 56 Cautley discovered remains of ‘Camelidae’, which proved, he argued, that camels lived in India at the same time as the Sivatherium, Anoplotherium, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus; these, too, were a link between Pachydermata and Ruminanta.Footnote 57 In exploring these fossils, Falconer and Cautley depended on local intermediaries and informants. Indeed, the raja of Nahun, who possessed a large mastodon molar known as the ‘Tooth of Deo’, advised Falconer where to dig for specimens; on one occasion, 300 fossil bones were uncovered in six hours.Footnote 58
Two discoveries in particular changed the course of Falconer and Cautley's investigation. These transformed their project from a mere exploration of fossils into a comparative analysis of India's past and present, in turn linking Indian fossils with Hindu mythology. The first major discovery was that of the Colossochelys atlas, in the Timli pass of the Siwaliks, in 1834.Footnote 59 The detailed account of it was not published until a decade later, when Falconer was in England and his communication was included in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London of 1844.Footnote 60 The second major discovery was that of primate fossils in 1836. Falconer and Cautley found the fossil teeth and jaw of a primate in the Siwaliks, a discovery which would acquire much greater significance in later years in Falconer's work on human evolution in India.Footnote 61 They were in fact pipped to the post by Cautley's assistants W.E. Baker (1787–1853) and H.M. Durand (1812–71), who had found the first fossil of a primate only months earlier.Footnote 62 Falconer and Cautley found that theirs was the first discovery of a fossil of an animal ‘so nearly approaching man’.Footnote 63 Moreover, what appeared significant to them was that these remains were found alongside other fossils such as the Colossochelys (at that point known as Megalochelys sivalensis).
In a paper written in November 1836 and published in the Transactions of the Geological Society of London in 1840, Falconer and Cautley referred to their discoveries of further primate bones, including facial and leg bones. This helped them to make bolder claims about human origin in India.Footnote 64 It also marked the birth of their grand theory. Falconer and Cautley highlighted that the primate fossils, which resembled closely the living species of monkeys or Hanoomans, had been found alongside crocodile fossils, which resembled perfectly the living ones found in Indian rivers; the resemblances attested to stasis in the order of the Indian natural world. Falconer and Cautley's project was no longer just a palaeontological one; it marked the convergence of archaeology, geology, and mythology. Drawing from their experience of excavating monuments in the region, the pair invoked archaeological language to write about Siwalik fossils. The fossils represented the archaeological juxtapositions of the past with the present: ‘The Sewalik fossils abound in monuments of this sort. There is a mixture of the new and the old, of the past and of the present, of familiar with surprising forms . . . such as no other explored region has exhibited within so comparatively limited a space.’Footnote 65 Then, referring to the Colossochelys, along with other fossils found in the same beds, they pointed out: ‘As the Pterodactyle more than realized the most extravagant idea of the Winged Dragon, so does this huge Tortoise come up to the lofty conceptions of Hindoo mythology: and could we but recall the monsters of life, it were not difficult to imagine an Elephant supported on its back.’Footnote 66 This was their first tentative reference to Indian mythology, though they were not yet bold enough to make it a central part of their thesis; that assertion came in London, from Falconer.
Colossochelys in London
In May 1838, Cautley wrote to the governor-general of India, expressing a desire to ship the Siwalik fossils to England. Rather than breaking up the collection, he wanted to send it in its entirety either to the Geological Society, the British Museum or to the East India Company's museum at India House. He wanted the fossils to be displayed in glass cases in London, ‘the centre of all science open to all with free admissions to those desiring to study and compare’.Footnote 67 In September 1838, Josiah Forshall (1795–1863), secretary to the British Museum, wrote to Cautley to inform him that the trustees had accepted his offer of an ‘interesting and unique collection of fossil remains which your zealous and scientific exertions have enabled you to discover among the Sub Himalayan Mountains’.Footnote 68 In March of the following year, Cautley wrote to Falconer to break the news and to alleviate any doubts about parting with the collection. Though both believed that the fossils would receive greater attention in London, they were losing a critical resource for their own future research in India by giving them up. Cautley justified the move by arguing that it was the only way to keep the entire collection together: ‘I have no wish to get rid of the collection, if I had, I could easily have done so in this country, by giving it away in small portions—my object is to keep the whole together and as a whole it will to geologists at least be one of the most valuable collections that has ever been made.’Footnote 69
Over the next three years—through several accidents, delays, and miscommunications—the fossils, including the Colossochelys, were packed in chests in Saharanpur, taken by boat down the Ganges to Calcutta, and then shipped to London. The last and biggest batch, consisting of 70 large chests, reached London in 1842 with Falconer, who returned to Britain to recover his health. As Cautley despatched this last batch of fossils to the British Museum, he requested Forshall to allow Falconer full access to the collection, in order ‘to publish a full detail of all the Genera that we have found’.Footnote 70 In London—‘the centre of all science’, in Cautley's words—Falconer indeed started synthesizing his theories regarding the Indian geological collection. He remained in England until 1846, and worked tirelessly on the Siwalik fossils at the British Museum as well as the closely associated Perim fossils, which were held at the Geological Society. Ultimately, this led to his most important publication, the Fauna Antiqua Sivalensis (1846).
While Falconer and Cautley were both honoured for their contributions to geology with the award of the Wollaston Medal in 1837, even greater recognition from the scientific metropolis soon followed for Falconer. In 1845, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, and this was also the period in which he started to correspond with Darwin and Lyell. He even travelled to Paris to compare the Siwalik fossils with the collections held there. He also finally sent his report on the Indian fossil collections at the British Museum to the East India Company's Court of Directors.Footnote 71 As Falconer began to theorize on Indian fossils in London, the transfer of the Siwalik collection to the metropolis marked the end of Cautley's active involvement with fossil research. From the 1840s, he became increasingly preoccupied with the construction of the Ganges canal in India.Footnote 72 The relocation to Britain helped Falconer to gain recognition for his Indian researches; Cautley, in contrast, somewhat disappeared from palaeontological debates.
Falconer's analysis of Indian fossils in London between 1842 and 1846 had two important characteristics; first, his preoccupation with the gigantic tortoise fossil Colossochelys atlas and, secondly, the convergence of Hindu mythology with Indian geology. This is not the story usually narrated in the existing literature about Falconer. Instead, his research in this period tends largely to be framed within the dominant narrative of emerging Darwinian evolutionary theory. Stephen Jay Gould, in his magnum opus The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, locates in Falconer's work, and particularly in his correspondence with Darwin, the genesis of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. In short, Gould suggests that Falconer observed, in his Siwalik fossils, ‘stasis’ in evolution and the long-term stability of species, which contradicted Darwin's ideas of continuous evolution. In Falconer, Gould in fact sees the roots of his own speciation theory, according to which certain animal or plant species, as a result of certain geographical catastrophes, become isolated from each other to such an extent that genetic interchange is hindered or even prevented.Footnote 73
Falconer's real motive—and, critically, his intellectual debt to Orientalism—tends to get overlooked amid the preoccupation with his later disagreements with Darwin. From the time he started his research in Britain, Falconer's main objective was in fact to trace the origin of the human race in India. Falconer argued not just for evolutionary stasis but also for links between fossils and human evolution; stasis was a useful concept to him, but only in so far as it enabled him to associate Indian fossils with human evolution in the subcontinent. Charles Murchison (1830–79) wrote, in the biographical note accompanying Falconer's Palæontological Memoirs, that the similarity between fossils and current fauna in India led Falconer to ‘draw important inferences as to the antiquity of the human race’.Footnote 74 It was in this endeavour that Indian mythology became critical, with the concept of stasis enabling Falconer to identify the fossils that he discovered with the mythological animals; if humans had written about such species in their myths, they must have observed them in some form and thus must have lived at the same time.
It was in the quest for the origins of human evolution that Falconer turned to the Colossochelys atlas, and in asserting the significance of mythology to its scientific study, he marked an important link between geology and Orientalism. In April 1844, Falconer wrote to Cautley, who was in India, and commented:
Joining the indication given by the Hindoo mythology with the determined fact of the little Emys tecta having survived from the Fossil period down to the present day, I have put forward the opinion that the large Tortoise may have survived also, and only become extinct within the human period. This is a most important matter in reference to the history of man.Footnote 75
What Falconer and Cautley had hinted at in their paper on the Siwalik primates in 1836 (published in 1840) now developed into a theory. Falconer believed that the tortoise avatar in the Puranas was a real zoological creature, and not just an allegorical Hindu representation. Falconer's use of ancient texts to explain fossils had an important and rare precedent, which too had an imperial context. While studying mummified remains of the ibis bird—sacred to the ancient Egyptians—in the years following Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) depended not only on the analysis of bones and plumage but also descriptions of the bird by ancient writers such as Herodotus and Plutarch. Cuvier in fact insisted that fossil research would remain inaccurate without such comparative research.Footnote 76 The distinction between the methods of Cuvier and Falconer was that while Cuvier consulted texts widely regarded as the foundation of modern empirical history writing in Europe, Falconer relied on Hindu mythological texts such as the Puranas. At the same time, while Falconer clearly picked up on Jones's comparative philology and mythological hermeneutics, there was an important distinction in their approaches. Whereas Jones treated the Puranas as purely symbolic and figurative, helping to corroborate the authentic past represented in Genesis, Falconer presented the Puranas as serious historical materials in their own right. While Jones considered the avatars to be allegorical references to the deluge, Falconer adopted a more realist interpretation, asserting that the Colossochelys atlas (or Kurma avatar) lived in the time of humans. Falconer, never a diluvianist, was also much less concerned with any metaphorical allusions to a deluge. More generally, Falconer's engagement with Puranas occurred at the start of a new interest in the texts within Indological scholarship. For example, H.H. (Horace Hayman) Wilson (1786–1860) translated the Vishnupurana into English in 1840.Footnote 77 It is not known if Falconer was familiar with Wilson's translation, but both visited the Royal Asiatic Society in London at around the same time in the early 1840s.
In 1844, when Falconer first presented the theoretical synthesis of the Siwalik fossil research undertaken by himself and Cautley in Britain, the Colossochelys atlas, for its avataric associations, dominated his work. In the several talks that he gave in London, he discussed the fossils of the giant tortoise and repeatedly narrated stories from Indian mythology. In these presentations, he was seeking not to establish the thesis of speciation, but rather to link the fossil and human histories of India. In doing so, he appropriated but also reconfigured Jones's use of mythology. It is important to emphasize that Falconer's expositions on the giant tortoise and man in India came long before his explorations of the Brixham caves in 1858, which is often cited as the start of his interest in the question of human antiquity.Footnote 78 Moreover, we must emphasize the remarkable ease with which Falconer moved between Puranas and fossils in his talks to different circles of metropolitan scholarship.
On 26 March 1844, Falconer read a paper at the Zoological Society of London.Footnote 79 Here, he disclosed that the giant tortoise was first named Megalochelys sivalensis, based on its size and place of discovery in the supposed abode of Shiva, but was later called Colossochelys atlas, with ‘Colossochelys’ denoting the colossal size of the fossil and ‘atlas’ referring to the idea of the world resting on its back. The new taxonomic label was thus a clear allusion to ‘the mythological tortoise that sustained the world, according to the systems of Indian cosmogony’.Footnote 80 However, it also reflected the multiple settings from which Falconer was seeking to derive meaning and to which he was addressing his claims. While he took intellectual inspiration from Indian myths, the name ‘atlas’ was of course adopted from Greek myths, which would have been more familiar to his audience in Europe. The change facilitated Falconer's narrative strategy. Before an audience comprised chiefly of zoologists who had little interest in and knowledge of Indian mythologies, he first presented the Colossochelys atlas in order to propose his thesis of speciation. Only then did he bring in stories from the Puranas, in order to take the discussion towards the question of human evolution.
Falconer suggested that the Colossochelys atlas was associated with other major fossils found in the Siwaliks, such as the Sivatherium, Anoplotherium, and other species. Furthermore, several of these were described as being ‘absolutely identical’ with species still living in India. Falconer explained to the audience that the crocodile fossils resembled those living in the rivers of India, while the Colossochelys atlas was similar to the Emys tectum, a common species found in all parts of India.Footnote 81 Such perspectives had of course been previously expressed in the articles that Falconer had written with Cautley, as well as being considered in correspondence between the pair. However, there was a new, striking intimation of the capacity of Indian mythology to shed further light on these fossils. After Falconer suggested that other species contemporary to the Colossochelys were still living in the present time, he moved on to consider the possibility that the Colossochelys had at least lived to the human period. Though he found no direct geological evidence to suggest this, he proposed that a clue lay in the ‘traditions connected with the cosmogonic speculations of almost all Eastern nations’ in which ‘the infant world [was] placed on the back of an elephant, which was sustained on a huge tortoise’. In the context of such speculations, he then asked this vital question: ‘Was this tortoise a mere creature of the imagination, or was the idea of it drawn from a reality, like the Colossochelys?’Footnote 82
Falconer narrated in great detail the story of the Kurma avatar, as contained in Puranas, to the audience, largely made up of zoologists. He told them that at the time of the churning of the ocean, Vishnu assumed the form of the tortoise in order to sustain the world on his back. In the course of his narration, Falconer quoted from Jones's translation of Jaydeva's Gita Govinda, which itself was based on the Vishnupurana and Brahmapurana: ‘The earth stands firm on thy immensely broad back, which grows larger from the callus occasioned by bearing that vast burden. O Cesava! assuming the body of a tortoise, be victorious! Oh! Hurry, Lord of the Universe!’ Falconer then delved into other instances in Indian mythology in which the tortoise featured, considering Garuda's confrontation with a tortoise 80 miles long and an elephant 160 miles long (for this he in fact referenced William Ward).Footnote 83
What Falconer said next was even more intriguing; it demonstrated that whereas Jones considered such accounts as allegorical, Falconer took them to be literal. In the context of Indian mythological depictions of the giant tortoise, Falconer asked his audience: ‘Are we to consider the idea as a mere fiction of the imagination . . . or as founded on some justifying reality?’ In answering his own question, he compared Indian mythology favourably vis-à-vis Greek and Persian mythology. To Falconer the palaeontologist, Indian classical texts disclosed the coexistence of extinct and extant species in India:
We have the elephant, then as at present, the largest of land animals, a fit supporter of the infant world; in the serpent Asokee, used at the churning of the ocean, we may trace a representative of the gigantic Indian python; and in the bird-god Garuda, with all his attributes, we may detect the gigantic crane of India (Ciconia gigantea) as supplying the origin. In like manner, the Colossochelys would supply a consistent representative of the tortoise that sustained the elephant and the world together.Footnote 84
Based on ‘this congruity of ideas, this harmony of representation’ in Hindu mythology, Falconer suggested that references to the tortoise ‘as a symbol of strength’ could not have been based on the present, small species in India, but rather must have been inspired by the gigantic Colossochelys. He then presented his main thesis, based on his notion that the Colossochelys had actually been seen by the authors of Indian classical texts:
We have entered so much at length on them on this occasion, from the important bearing which the point has on a very remarkable matter of early belief entertained by a large portion of the human race. The result at which we have arrived is, that there are fair grounds for entertaining the belief as probable that the Colossochelys Atlas may have lived down to an early period of the human epoch and become extinct since.Footnote 85
On 1 and 8 June 1844, just prior to his address at the British Association in York, Falconer gave two more lectures at evening meetings of the Royal Asiatic Society in London. These too were focused on the Siwalik fossils, but the difference was that these presentations started with the question of human antiquity in India.Footnote 86 The lecture on 1 June was very Jones-ian in scope, imbued as it was with comparative mythology. Falconer referred to the spread of Indian mythology to Greece, Italy, and Egypt. In addition, he more overtly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Orientalist scholarship by beginning with a long tribute to the Asiatic Society:
The antiquities and literature of the East have been, from its commencement, the special field of investigation to this Society, and to the parent institution in Calcutta. A rich vein has been opened, branching in a thousand ramifications, and fertile in results of the deepest interest. The human race has been traced farther back into time in the East than in any other quarter of the globe; and the tendency of all inquiries has been to show that the civilization of at least a large section of mankind first dawned in the valley of the Ganges. The language or the mythology, the arts and the sciences of India, have all been found more or less engrafted on surrounding nations, and even that civilization which we now boast of—which has shot so far ahead of the parent stock—may be followed back to a spring-head in India, whence it travelled westward through Egypt, and spread over Greece and Italy.Footnote 87
Falconer thus linked the philological, ethnological, and cultural project of the Asiatic Society with his own palaeontological endeavours. However, his realism was an adaptation of the mythological hermeneutics of Jones and his peers, with Falconer suggesting that fossils and human history were linked not only metaphorically, but also in real terms; fossils were the ‘monuments and inscriptions constructed by nature’.Footnote 88 He went on to suggest to his audience that some of the Siwalik fossils attested to human life in India in ‘very remote times’, again claiming that the Colossochelys atlas fitted representations in Hindu (and Pythagorean) mythology of a tortoise supporting an elephant.
As well as demonstrating the intricate relationship between Orientalist philology and Indian geology, Falconer revealed a new theory regarding the geological formation of India. In his second lecture on 8 June, he evoked the conventional imagery of a changeless Orient to express the lack of evolutionary change in Indian fauna, extant or fossilised; each geological epoch had contributed to the formation of ‘one comprehensive fauna’ in ancient India, and thus the fossil species were very similar, if not identical, to existing ones: ‘Monkeys, Camels, Giraffes &c., were mixed up with Anoplotherium, Sivatherium, &c.’Footnote 89 By way of explaining this, Falconer proposed that the Indian subcontinent was, at an early tertiary period, a large island situated in a bight formed by the Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountains; the present valleys of the Ganges and the Indus were essentially long estuaries. After an upheaval, the plains of India were connected to the ancient continent, with the Siwalik (estuary) fauna spreading over the region from Burma to the Indus. This was followed by another upheaval, which uplifted a strip of the plains of India into the Siwalik hills and increased the height of the Himalayas by several thousand feet. This event and the subsequent change of climate led to the extinction (not evolution) of the Siwalik fauna, though similar fauna continued to survive without much evolution in the Gangetic plains of northern India.Footnote 90
Still, what is most striking about Falconer, in the context of European scholarship in India, was that he believed the Puranas could provide corroborating evidence to help ascribe a relative date to his Siwalik fossils. In the early nineteenth century, fossils were indeed dated in relative terms, but the principal points of reference tended to be stratigraphical and anatomical rather than textual. Cuvier and others realized that strata could help to date fossils, with fossils in older strata being older than fossils in newer strata; effectively, Cuvier combined catastrophism (encompassing the Biblical flood) with the vast timescale of uniformitarianism.Footnote 91 This approach of relative and comparative dating necessarily involved some circular processes, that is to say, while strata helped to date fossils, fossils in turn helped to date strata. While Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817) initiated the periodization of rocks through their chemical analysis, the paradigm of ‘characteristic fossils’ associated with William Smith (1769–1839) acquired its own prominence. In Britain, fossils more generally became intrinsic to the geological collection at the Geological Society from 1822, with minerals constituting a separate body of specimens.Footnote 92 Previously, the physical characteristics of strata had the more critical bearing on classification: take, for example, the Cambrian-Silurian (or Sedgwick-Murchison) dispute and Devonian controversy.Footnote 93 As for the actual identification of fossils, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) pioneered the study of comparative anatomy, by which extinct animals could be compared with extant ones. Cuvier extended these studies greatly in the field of vertebrate palaeontology.Footnote 94 Cuvier, as we have noted previously, was one of the few in Europe also to refer to textual sources in elucidating fossils. As well as using comparative osteology, he referred to ancient writings and even pictorial representations contained on ancient monuments in Egypt and Italy to show that the ibis was identifiable with the living species of curlew. This in fact enabled Cuvier to argue for stasis in faunal populations, challenging the theory of slow transmutation propagated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829).Footnote 95 Clearly, then, Falconer was not unique in seeking out ancient authority in dating his fossils. However, his intellectual debt to British Orientalism led him to the mythological domain of the Puranas, and thereby placed mythology much closer to science.
Falconer's peers in Britain were not particularly receptive to his analytical and narrative strategy of mixing Indian mythology with geological evidence. The audiences listened politely to his lectures, but comprehensively ignored their mythological content in subsequent discussions. Lyell, who was present at the meeting of the Royal Asiatic Society, provided an entirely climatic analysis of the stasis apparent in the Siwalik fossils in his response to Falconer's talk. He pointed out that the vertebrate fossils had been ‘procured from a country where the climate may be presumed to be as hot now, as at the period when the fossil animals flourished’, and suggested that the similarities Falconer found between extinct and living species could be due to India's ‘considerable similarity of temperature in ancient and modern times’. Lyell explained the extinction of the Siwalik fossils with reference to glacial movement. Furthermore, he suggested that the Siwalik strata could in fact to belong to the older Pliocene or even the Miocene period, which was much earlier than Falconer had presumed.Footnote 96
However, Lyell was not unaware of the significance of the ideas of Vishnu's avatars to geology and, like Falconer, he tended towards a realist interpretation of ancient Indian scriptures. In his Principles of Geology, Lyell referred to Puranic narratives of repeated destruction and revivification of the world and the recurring submersions of the land beneath a ‘universal’ ocean (Lyell, after all, was a uniformitarian), with Vishnu successively assuming the avatars of a fish, a tortoise, and a boar. Lyell contemplated that since the imprints of marine fossils on Indian rocks and stones were ‘so abundant’, the Brahmins who wrote about the avatars derived these ideas from the fossils; the suggestion, therefore, was that these Brahmins were early palaeontologists.Footnote 97 The difference between Lyell and Falconer was that, for Lyell, the significance of avatarism to geology was purely antiquarian—he saw the Puranas as sources of embryonic Hindu scientific ideas. Falconer, on the other hand, treated them as part of his modern palaeontological investigations.
There is no record of any other authorities having commented on Falconer's use of the Puranas to date the Siwalik fossils and to establish the antiquity of human life in India, and he was perhaps more guarded in his personal communications with other geologists. Falconer's widespread correspondence—traceable in the archive at Forres as well as in the private papers of other important figures in British geology—mostly relate to the period from the 1850s, and they reflect the more familiar narratives associated with his Brixham explorations and his disagreement with Lyell. In a letter to Adam Sedgwick (1785–1873) in February 1846, Falconer did allude to his Indian discoveries. For example, he compared elephant and mastodon fossils that he discovered in a crag at Norwich to ones that he had found in India, and he even referred Sedgwick to illustrations of the Indian fossil elephant in his Fauna Antiqua Sivalensis. However, he made no allusion to his interest in mythology.Footnote 98 The only substantive engagement with Falconer's expositions on Indian mythology from one of his peers came in the form of the two caricatures made by the amateur naturalist Edward Forbes (1815–1854), who became friends with Falconer and, in 1844, made an excursion with him to various localities in the Thames Valley in search of fossils.Footnote 99 One of Forbes's sketches showed an elephant borne by a tortoise, and supporting the world, while the other was of the elephant victorious over the tortoise, and supporting the world.Footnote 100
We end this particular exploration on the verge of a new phase in Falconer's work. In subsequent years, his theory about the Colossochelys having survived to the human period was undermined by Lyell, who showed that the giant tortoise had lived up to the Miocene period. Falconer had by then left the Colossochelys behind and become engaged solely with the question of human origin, though even then, his differences with Lyell regarding the antiquity of man endured. In England, he became deeply involved with the fossils in the Brixham Cave, asserting a link between flint stone implements and human evolution in the Pliocene age.Footnote 101 Although Falconer's suggestion that the giant tortoise in India had coexisted with humans was discredited—apparently undermining his views regarding the historicity of the Puranas—the suggestion by Falconer and even Lyell that the Puranas and Vaishnavic avatarism contained important clues for fossil research remained valid for many scholars. And so, while these historical trajectories were significant in their own time, they also enable us, in conclusion, to reflect critically on the ongoing interplay between mythology and science in India.
Falconer's avatars
This article has traced the birth of a distinct relationship between Orientalist philology and Indian geology, forged around the use of mythology. Through Jones, Falconer, and others, each of whom had their own objectives, Indian mythological texts were rendered hermeneutically flexible and mutative. The mutative hermeneutics that developed through the careers of these Orientalists and geologists subsequently had a critical influence on the way in which late nineteenth-century Indologists, geologists, and modern geomythologists (those who study how real geological events can supposedly be identified in myths or legends) engaged with modern science and mythologies. The Bengali scholar Sarat Chundra Mitra, writing in 1890, echoed Falconer in suggesting that certain descriptions of animals discernible in ancient Indian texts corresponded to the ancestors of living creatures, actually seen by humans. He noted that ‘All the zoological descriptions of the ancient Indians are of fabulous creatures, of animals of gigantic dimensions and prodigious strength, of which no living representatives exist at the present day.’ Mitra proposed that Airavata was the ‘prototype’ of Elephas ganesa and that the giant tortoise was the ‘progenitor’ of Testudo colossochelys, referring to the fossils unearthed by Falconer and Cautley.Footnote 102 Lyell's implication that ancient Brahmins had seen fossils of extinct creatures, on the other hand, was echoed in efforts to show that ancient Hindu thought, with its concept of avatars, foreshadowed Darwinian theory. C. Mackenzie Brown considers how Indian elites picked up on the ‘hermeneutical strategies’ that gave rise to the idea of ‘avataric evolutionism’, first articulated by Madame Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled (1877).Footnote 103 The Marathi nationalist Narayan Bhavanrao Pavgee, in The Vedic Fathers of Geology (1912), offered an exposition of avataric evolutionism that was particularly strident in identifying notions of organic evolution in Sanskrit texts, and significantly, his position was associable with nascent Hindu cultural nationalism. Pavgee wrote that ‘in all probability, the fossils of such an anthropoid primate were found by our older ancestors’. He even suggested the Narasimha avatar or man-lion—‘one of the lost types of the anthropoid primates’—was the ‘connecting link between the brute intelligence and the reasoning powers of man’. Even if that was not the case, Pavgee saw no reason to doubt the palaeontological knowledge of his ancestors, asking: ‘Who does not err in the crude state of the science?’ and insisting that the Vedic Hindus ‘were Evolutionists par excellence’.Footnote 104
Among Indians who continued to work at the interstices of philology and modern science, the historicity of the Puranas remained a point of contention. Whereas Mitra saw hermeneutic value in these particular texts, Pavgee actually deplored Hindu mythology as a bastardization of ancient Hindu geological scholarship, distinguishing it from older Vedic literature. He suggested that the Puranas ‘had but a dim vision and not very clear idea of the early geological formations’, the reason supposedly being that ‘they were not in touch with the geological investigations of the Vedic times’. Significantly, Pavgee believed that Puranic exposition of the process of ‘vital gradation’—through fish, tortoise, reptile, mammal, and man—consisted of ‘grotesque ideas of incarnations and Mythological legends’, adding that ‘the original scientific geological theory seems apparently to have been all lost in the dim mist of religion’.Footnote 105 Still, while Pavgee also claimed that ancient Brahmins were genuine palaeontologists, Mitra had suggested otherwise. He emphasized that ‘Natural History pursuits, as intellectual recreations, have never been popular amongst the people of India, whether of past or of modern times.’ Though Mitra accepted that ancient Indians had some knowledge of zoology and botany, he insisted that ‘The science of geology dates only from the year 1790’, and so ‘this third branch of natural history was unknown to the ancient Indians’.Footnote 106
For modern scholars who insist that ancient civilizations were familiar with the observation and collection of fossils, ‘geomythology’ has indeed become a key concept.Footnote 107 There have been suggestions that knowledge of the Earth's history commensurate with modern geological theories existed in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as in pre-Columbian America, with ‘fossil legends’ linked to fossil discoveries and enduring through oral traditions.Footnote 108 These arguments have also been applied to India, where scholars have claimed that the great epics contained geological truths belatedly uncovered by modern science: ‘geological events and processes became entangled in these epics’.Footnote 109 Such ‘ethnobiological research’, seeking to identify the ‘ancient scientific thoughts conveyed within the Sanskrit hymns of legendary epics’, has focused particularly on the supposed geological meaning of Vishnu's incarnations.Footnote 110 As with Pavgee, much of this scholarship is shaped by the interests of an identifiably Hindu cultural nationalism.
There is, in such an approach, an assumption of continuity in ways of knowing, of an intellectual continuum; scholars project present approaches into the past, rather than analysing each episteme through its own trajectory. This also leads to the determination of the essence of mythologies itself becoming a scientific exercise, with some myths judged to be truer than others. In that sense, then, modern geomythology is part of the same intellectual trajectory that shaped the works of Jones, Falconer, Lyell (to an extent), and Pavgee.
In seeking to problematize the link between science and mythology, this article has demonstrated that mythological hermeneutics was from the early nineteenth century a crucial part of fossil research in India. Ralph O’Connor shows that in Britain, mythology was an important component in the popularization of fossils through ‘spectacular and theatrical forms’. In this ‘semi-scientific mythology’, as he describes it, ‘“Facts”, already richly freighted with conjecture, were brought into the arena of fancy, clustered about with poetic quotation, allusion, simile, and metaphor, entwined with myth, history, and folklore, and infused with the growing legendary stature of their discoverers and the quest images surrounding the science.’Footnote 111 However, in the context of the making of geology in colonial India, mythology was not simply a device for the popularization of fossils; rather, it served as a methodological tool for interpreting fossils. The likes of Falconer and Lyell, picking up on approaches propagated by Orientalist scholars such as Jones and Wilford, treated ancient Indian texts as serious points of reference. Moreover, though the minutiae of particular arguments could be undermined at length, the overarching approach retained significance, as demonstrated in the later work of Mitra and Pavgee. The relationship between mythology and science in India is constantly being reconfigured, with various parties—some more controversially than others—seeking to unravel the complex entanglement of truth and allegory. By recovering an unexpected example of such an engagement at the heart of British scientific enquiry in the nineteenth century, this article offers an important context to this enduring association.
