Flood Myths of South Asia

Manu ties his ship to a tree

The oldest flood in India is also the most domestic. It begins with a man washing before breakfast, and the whole cosmic apparatus — the destruction of every living creature, the survival of one — arrives inside a bargain struck between him and a fish that is small enough to hold. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa tells it without a wasted word. Julius Eggeling’s 1882 translation, whole:

In the morning they brought to Manu water for washing, just as now also they (are wont to) bring (water) for washing the hands. When he was washing himself, a fish came into his hands.

It spake to him the word, ‘Rear me, I will save thee!’ ‘Wherefrom wilt thou save me?’ ‘A flood will carry away all these creatures: from that I will save thee!’ ‘How am I to rear thee?’

It said, ‘As long as we are small, there is great destruction for us: fish devours fish. Thou wilt first keep me in a jar. When I outgrow that, thou wilt dig a pit and keep me in it. When I outgrow that, thou wilt take me down to the sea, for then I shall be beyond destruction.’

… and when the flood had risen, he entered into the ship. The fish then swam up to him, and to its horn he tied the rope of the ship, and by that means he passed swiftly up to yonder northern mountain.

It then said, ‘I have saved thee. Fasten the ship to a tree; but let not the water cut thee off, whilst thou art on the mountain. As the water subsides, thou mayest gradually descend!’ Accordingly he gradually descended, and hence that (slope) of the northern mountain is called ‘Manu’s descent.’ The flood then swept away all these creatures, and Manu alone remained here.

Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa I.8.1.1–6, abridged, trans. Julius Eggeling, Sacred Books of the East XII (1882), pp. 216–218

Two things in that passage do work the later versions cannot. The first is Manoravasarpaṇam, Manu’s Descent — a piece of ground with a name on it. Somebody, at some point, was walking on a slope in the northern mountains that was called after the man who came down it out of a flood. Nobody can now say which slope. What matters is that somebody could, and the impulse to fasten a universal deluge to a particular hillside is exactly what the rest of this map is made of.

The second is what Manu does when he gets down. He is alone, and he wants offspring, and the method he chooses is not the obvious one:

Being desirous of offspring, he engaged in worshipping and austerities. During this time he also performed a pāka-sacrifice: he offered up in the waters clarified butter, sour milk, whey, and curds. Thence a woman was produced in a year…

Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa I.8.1.7, same translation, p. 218

The woman is Iḍā, and through her Manu begets “this race, which is this race of Manu.” The first act of the new world is a ritual, correctly performed, and the human line comes out of the offering rather than out of a pair of survivors. That is a very unusual answer to the flood. Everywhere else on this map a man and a woman are left; here one man is left and he cooks.

By the time the story reaches the Mahābhārata it has acquired a crew. The seven sages are aboard, and the seeds of every living thing, and the fish is Brahmā; the ship is made fast to the highest peak of the Himalaya, and that peak is thereafter called Naubandhana, the Binding of the Ship. These are not two tellings of one text but two stages of an argument: the older has a solitary man and a named slope, the epic a rescued biosphere and a named summit. What survives both is the naming. The flood is over when a piece of the Himalaya is called after what happened on it.

Two lakes let out to make two countries

Twice in South Asia the tradition says that a country people are standing in used to be under water, and that somebody opened the rim and let it out. Both times the geology agrees that there was a lake.

Kashmir was Satisar, and the water-born demon Jalodbhava held it. Ananta broke the enclosing mountain with his plough; the lake ran out through the gap; the demon was killed on the exposed floor, and the drained valley took its hermitages and its villages. Stand on the Kashmir valley floor and the wall of mountains goes all the way round. It is a lake bed and it is shaped like one, and the Nīlamata Purāṇa is describing what is in front of it. The Karewa deposits confirm a long-lived lake; Shah and colleagues say directly that the geological studies agree with the local tradition. The catch is the clock. Those lake sequences run from the Pliocene into the middle Pleistocene, which puts the draining of Satisar far outside the window this Atlas is testing.

The Kathmandu Valley is the same story with a better date. It was a lake full of nāgas, with a light standing over the water where Swayambhu now stands, and Mañjuśrī came to see the light and cut the southern rim of the valley with his sword so the water could get out. The cut is Chobhar Gorge, and you can walk to it. The lakebed became the valley floor, which is the most fertile ground in Nepal and holds more of its people than any other patch of ground its size.

There really was a palaeo-Kathmandu lake, and unlike Satisar it did not disappear in deep geological time. Sakai and colleagues put the end of it at roughly twelve thousand years ago — inside the window this Atlas is built to test, and inside the range of things a population can in principle remember. Prabin Pranod Khatiwada makes the comparison between the Mañjuśrī account and the palaeolake record explicitly, and then adds the correction that matters: the Chobhar fault was real and mattered to the basin, but the final drainage went out farther south, near Danuwargaun. So the tradition has the event, and has it at close to the right time, and has put the door in the wrong place. That is about what ten millennia do to a memory of a landscape, and it is a great deal closer than it had to be.

Set the two side by side and the difference is instructive. Kashmir has the better story and no possible witness; Kathmandu has the drier story and a lake that drained while people were living around it. Neither is a myth of destruction. Both are deeds of title: this valley is a country, and here is the moment it became habitable, and here is the being who signed it over.

The gourd, and the earth brought back up

In Middle India the ark is a bottle gourd, and the flood’s real business begins after the water has gone.

Among the Bison-Horn Maria of southern Bastar, in Chhattisgarh in central India, Gajabhimul shuts Kawachi and Kuhrami inside a gourd when the first world drowns. It drifts until it grounds on a burning rock; a crow finds it, a crab searches it, and it is opened under a banyan. Then the world has to be made again from the bottom up — a boar finds a tortoise’s mound of mud, rolls in it and shakes it out over the rock until there is earth, and in some tellings the hills are the ridges a bear and a tiger leave behind them as they work the new ground over. Only then do the two survivors wander, meet without recognising one another, marry, and become the parents of the people. What arrives with them is the whole apparatus: the crops, the marriage rule, the descent groups, and what people owe each other.

Verrier Elwin collected these in the 1930s and 1940s and printed them with their tellers, and the versions do not tidy each other up. That is what makes the pattern visible: whatever varies, the ending does not. The Muria at Kanhargaon have the earth sink under the great waters until only the seven Koroho-Lingo brothers are left, and when the water drops they are cold and there is no fire; the story ends with Lingo sitting unburnt in the furnace, playing his instruments, and fire and cooking and music belong to the world that starts afterwards. The Lanjia Saora of the Odisha hills have the Dead pack a gourd with earth, seed, a brother and a sister; a crab brings up dirt for the new ground, and the Dead teach the survivors to clear forest and sow — and the story is explicit that the Saora were the first people, before castes and clans divided humankind. The Agaria of the central Indian iron-working belt, who smelt it, provision twelve gourds the size of houses before the water comes. On the new earth Bhagavan goes along tapping them, and nine are empty. One opens on twelve boys, a girl and every kind of iron tool; the next on bronze, the next on bell-metal, and those three become the Lohasur, the Tamesur and the Kansasur brothers. Most of the gourds hold nothing, which is the point: the metals are handed out, not inherited.

Four peoples, three gourds and an ark of brothers, and four different institutions carried through the water: kinship, fire and music, agriculture, and metal. The flood is a delivery mechanism. It is how the world’s furniture arrives.

There is no drowned coast in any of them, no lake basin, no river that changed its course. Bastar is two hundred kilometres of hill country from the sea, and the water in these stories never once behaves like the sea. What they are is the clearest statement anywhere in South Asia of the thing the deluge is actually for.

The country south of Kumari

Tamil literature remembers a country the sea took. The Silappadikāram names the Pahruli River and mountainous Kumari — the southern tip of India, Kanyakumari on a modern map — as what the sea took; the commentators add the extent, and add that it took the first Sangam at Tenmaturai and the second at Kapatapuram, so that the academies of Tamil learning had to be reconvened at a third Madurai. The loss is written into the history of the poetry itself: the literature is a survivor of the water.

Offshore, in the Gulf of Mannar, the sea floor really does carry the drowned valleys of rivers that used to run there, mapped and staged by S. M. Ramasamy and colleagues at roughly fifteen, eleven, nine, eight and seven thousand years ago. That is a genuine drowned country, and it is the right kind of age. Ramasamy went on to name Kumari Kandam in connection with it; C. P. Rajendran answered that ordinary submerged valleys are not evidence of a lost continent. Both are right about their own half. There was a real coastal plain south of the Tamil country and the sea took it; there was never the continent-sized landmass that nineteenth-century Lemurian theory grafted onto the tradition and that modern popular writing still carries. Sumathi Ramaswamy has traced that graft in detail. The medieval Tamil texts contain no such continent. They describe a lost stretch of Pandyan coast, which is a modest claim, and which happens to be true.

Two hundred and fifty kilometres up the same shore is the chain of shoals between India and Sri Lanka, Rama Setu. Here the geology is at its strongest and the epic is looking the other way. Quaternary work by Dubey and colleagues shows land and freshwater conditions across the connection through parts of the late Pleistocene, marine encroachment around 8,500 years ago, and the channels buried by roughly 7,500 to 7,000 — a walkable link, drowned inside the window. But the Rāmāyaṇa does not describe a land bridge sinking. It describes an army building one: Ocean grants a passage, Nala directs the work, trees and stones go into the water. The epic remembers a crossing being made where the geology remembers a crossing being lost. Two accounts of the same strip of seabed, pointing in opposite directions, and both of them right about what they saw.

Bain carries the fire uphill

The Akar-Bale of the Andaman Islands tell it of the first ancestors. A great storm rises over the ancestral land and the water comes over it. Sir Monitor Lizard, Duku, tries to carry a burning log up a tree and cannot manage it; his wife Lady Civet-cat, Bain, takes the fire from him and carries it to the top of a hill, and keeps it alight there until the rain stops and the water goes away.

What is saved is not people and not seed. It is a fire, and the hill it was saved on carries her name: Bain l’it-čapa, Bain’s fire, to the present day. In the related versions the flood is the hinge on which the world sorts itself out — human beings on one side, the animals and birds and fish on the other.

Whether the islands were once bigger is a separate question, and the answer in the record is a contested one. Portman reported that a larger Andaman broke up and its peoples were sent off into separate territories; A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who prints him in 1922, dismisses that as a tidied-up version of the islanders’ own accounts and reads the variants he collected as being about storms, fire and social order. The shelf, for its part, really was far larger at low sea level, and the islanders are among the longest-isolated populations on earth.

What the story plainly has is enough. A named landmark, a preserved fire, and a flood that separates the categories of the world — and a hill in the Andamans that is still called after the woman who carried the fire up it.

The hills the water cut

In the northeastern hills the flood does something it does almost nowhere else on this map: it does the landscaping.

The Lushei say the earth was smooth. The Water Huai pursued the girl Ngai-ti and drove all of humankind up onto the hill Phun-lu-buk, and to save themselves the people threw Ngai-ti into the water. The flood began to fall, and as it ran off it tore the smooth earth apart. The valleys and the high ridges of the country are the shape the retreating water left. Mizoram is a country of parallel knife-edge ridges. It looks drained rather than built.

On the Siang the landscaping is done by hand, and the builder has a name. There is a great flood and it covers the earth, and when it goes down the fish are left lying on dry ground. Shile Shido takes the hills and piles them along both sides of the river to shut it in for all time, and the fish fall back into the water and live. The Siang runs through one of the deepest cuts on earth on its way to becoming the Brahmaputra — and in the Minyong Adi account, that gorge is a wall somebody stacked, two hills at a time, to keep the flood from ever spreading again.

Around it the same water founds villages. At Leng Hill, in the Anal country on the Manipur–Mizo border, one man and one woman reach the summit and climb into a tree, and by morning they have turned into a tiger and a tigress; Pathian sends a second pair out of a cave, and it is they who ask for the strength to kill the tigers and start the world properly — so the first survivors are disqualified rather than rewarded. At Maram in Manipur, Medungasi and Simoting come through the flood and are permitted to marry on one condition — that their descendants never eat pig. Their sons become the ancestors of the village and its clans, and the rule is still kept. That is the whole machine in one sentence: a flood, a permission, a prohibition, and a village that exists because of all three.

Further west the Khasi tell it as a defeat. They had come down to Sylhet when a great flood drove them back up into the hills, and swimming the current the Khasi lost the book that carried writing, while the Bengali got his across. He came back to the hill country without it, and that is why one people has writing and the other does not. It is a flood that explains a homeland and a humiliation at once, and it is the only one on this map where what the water takes is a text.

And on the Zungki, a river in Nagaland in India’s far northeast, the water speaks. The water had swallowed the fields and was at the villages, and no sacrifice would stop it, when a voice came out of the flood calling Thra, Thra. The old woman Thrasipi walked into the river and it drew back from every step she took. At the confluence she left her bamboo staff, which became a grove, and the grains from her meal, which became wild rice; both are still pointed out, and the junction carries her name. In scale this is a river flood and not a deluge, and the Sangtam tell it as one. But it is the only story in South Asia where the flood has a voice and someone answers it by walking in.

The water shut in among the hills

Along the eastern Himalaya, in the hill country between Assam and the Tibetan border, the flood arrives in a form that belongs to the mountains. There is no sea within a thousand kilometres and no coast to lose. What these traditions have instead is standing water held in by rock, and the moment it gets out.

The Apa Tanis say that when they first came into their country at Ziro they found it mud and water inside a ring of forest. They cut the forest, dug the water into channels and drained the swamp until there was ground to make fields on, and while they were draining it three buru came up out of the mud — great striped pig-like spirits, not animals — and were killed and buried. The valley they farm now, with the rice and the fish grown in the same water, is the swamp they emptied. Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf, describing the place on its own account and not the story, wrote that Ziro had once been a lake standing far above the gorges on either side, silted up from the mountains around it and now drained by the Kele.

Northeast of there the Moklum tell of a great mass of water shut in among the hills, with people living on two summits only: Rangokan, which is the Patkai, and Moklum. The great cock Lang sits on the one and the great snake Pu on the other, and the two of them agree to let the water out and dig through the hills by two different ways. The water goes down to the plains of Assam by both cuts, and the two cuts are the Tirap and the Namjin. The Bori have a pond at Tunker-Siddo with nothing running out of it until a spirit falls in and breaks the bank, and the water that goes out is the Siyom. The Idu Mishmi have Tallao shut in a lake at Nimtubram while everyone else faints for want of water, until a wild cat cuts a channel and a trickster gets the dam-builder away from his dam — and Tallao goes down through the mountains into Assam, and she is the Brahmaputra.

The western Himalaya keeps the shut-in water too, and twice it is let out as a weapon. At Bari in Kinnaur the village god Nag — the serpent — rains until a lake stands in the valley, and Durga of Taranda dams the outlet with her own garment; when she takes the garment away, the departing floodwater flushes out the Thakurs who had been harassing the villagers. A goddess impounds the flood and releases it, and the release is the remedy. In the Katyur valley of Kumaon the lake has a demon in it who preys on the villagers, and Indra’s elephant Airavata bursts the embankment with its tusks; the water runs off, the demon can be beaten, and the valley is settled. And at Lamayuru in Ladakh the draining is itself the founding act: Naropa empties the lake, and the monastery stands on the floor the water gave up — in a basin geologists read as a genuine former lake.

Four peoples, four enclosed waters, four named rivers that are what is left when the water got out. It is the same event as a drowned coast turned inside out: instead of the sea arriving and taking the land, the water leaves and the land is handed over. And the Marring say the same thing about a valley rather than a river — that the Kabaw was almost all a lake when their seven men and seven women came up out of the earth at Mungsa, and that they went into the hills rather than live by it. R. Brown, who wrote it down in 1874, said the ground bore them out. The Manipur valley next door is a known Pleistocene and Holocene lake basin, and Loktak is what is left of it.

What the water leaves

Read the thirty-seven together and the shape is unmistakable. The South Asian flood is not an ending. It is a founding, and what it founds is the law.

Manu is the case in its purest form, because the coincidence is not a coincidence: the man who survives the flood is the man whose name is on the Manusmṛti, the lawbook, and he is called Manu because manu is man. The first human being, the flood survivor and the lawgiver are one figure, and the first thing he does on dry ground is perform a sacrifice correctly and get a lineage out of it. The tradition did not have to arrange things that way. It could have had him find a wife. Instead the human race restarts as a ritual result, which makes the flood the boundary between a world without procedure and a world with one.

Everything else on the map is that idea in local materials. In Bastar the water goes down and leaves the marriage rule and the descent groups; among the Agaria it leaves iron and the rank of the men who work it; among the Saora it leaves cultivation, and the claim that the Saora were there before there were castes to belong to. At Maram it leaves a prohibition on pork that people observe today. In the Khasi Hills it takes literacy away and leaves the hills. Along the eastern Himalaya it leaves the rivers themselves, and at Ziro a valley to farm. In Kashmir and Kathmandu it leaves the ground itself, drained and habitable and signed over by a named being with a tool — a plough in one, a sword in the other, an elephant’s tusks in Katyur, and at Lamayuru a monastery standing on the drained floor. On the Zungki it leaves a grove and a stand of wild rice and a place name.

Off the map’s southeastern edge, on Car Nicobar, it leaves a people, and the arithmetic of the leaving is the barest in the region. A great flood covers the whole earth. One man survives in a partly submerged tree, and as the water falls he rescues a bitch from another tree. Their offspring are human, and they are the ancestors of the Car Nicobarese — a whole island line run through one man and a dog, with the account extending to the distinctive dress the islanders wear. And on Kari Hill in Kerala the sequence runs backward: the Ocean in the West rises up through the earth until it reaches two holes high on the hill, and Malavay and Malakuratti come out of their underground dwelling through them. Everywhere else the rising water drives people up a mountain. Here it is what drives the first people out of the ground — the visible world begins because the water is rising.

This is why the region belongs on a map of Ice Age floods. Ask of any of these traditions whether the world as we know it was set up when the water went down, and nearly every one of them says yes — more consistently than anywhere else in this series. And in two places the answer arrives with a landscape attached: a lake in Nepal that drained around twelve thousand years ago and a tradition that says a lake was let out to make the country; a coastal plain in the Gulf of Mannar that the sea took between fifteen and seven thousand years ago and a Tamil literature that says the sea took a country there.

The fish told Manu the year the water would come. It is a small detail and it is doing something large: it makes the flood an appointment rather than an accident, a thing the world was scheduled to pass through on the way to becoming this one. That is what all thirty-seven of these traditions are for. Not to record a disaster — to explain why the arrangement holds.

Mapped traditions