A New Narrative of Ayodhya as the Nanihal of Humanity

Ayodhya Nanihal Series. I

– Prof. Bal Ram Singh

It is my intention to narrate the best possible way that I understand the origin of our ancestry. The point I mean by our ancestry today is my own family, which comes from a village near Ayodhya and their ancestors. The first thing to discuss about this is that we are from the Avadh kshetra, which is somewhere from around Kanpur, perhaps a little bit west of Kanpur up until Banaras, Gorakhpur, Deoria. So, there are a number of districts, I think a total of over twenty-six districts, which are known as Avadh kshetra. They were at one time the Kaushal Pradesh, which at some time, it had been the seat of the Aryabrata.

In British as well as Muslim ruler’s time or Mughal times, it used to be known as Avadh Province or area. There used to be actually a Navab of Avadh, who ruled at one time a large part of India also. To understand the value of Avadh kshetra in the history of humanity we may have to just to go to the beginning of this area, there is a story of this area that connects us to the world. How did this all start?

There is the Western point of view in which the world stated with Adam and Eve who are the origin of the humanity. The humans are supposed to come from Adam and Eve as described in Genesis of the Old Testament of Bible. And, so even today, whenever they find in their Research, especially in archaeological research, any kind of human skeleton, they date them. When they consider the skeleton to be normally the oldest one as a male, they name as Adam, and if it is a female as Eve. In some form scientists have located both of them, although there was a research paper recently to show that it seems the male and female progenitors of humans were not exactly in the same place. But that’s just the current research, and future research could change all that.

Currently, they have located oldest humans somewhere in Africa. Adam and Eve both have been located in Africa. From the Old Testament of the Bible in which the Adam and Eve are considered the origin of humanity, there is also the story of Noah’s Ark, who are the later descendants of Adam and Eve. They are the surviving race, which apparently is the origin of humanity today. In Arabic world, actually, the Muslim world or Islamic world also uses the same story of them and they call it Adam and Houva, the Houva being the mother. Adam is the same as Adam in Bible, and the word ‘Admi’, at least in the Indian subcontinent, I believe comes from the same story.

From the Indian perspective there is no Adam and Eve, obviously, although different rulers of India that included the Muslim rulers and British rulers tended to superimpose their story of origin of human beings on Indian narrative as well. One example of that is that the bridge between India and Sri Lanka, which is now named as Ram-Setu, because it is supposed to have been built to go to Sri Lanka during the Ram-Ravan yuddha (war). Officially for a long time it was known as Adams Bridge because they perhaps thought that all this structure represents Adam, either very sincerely thinking that Adam was the original man, thus it must be named after him, or they must have played some kind of mockery of the Indian culture and they wanted to appropriate the culture anyway. That is just only one instance where Adam’s bridge has been used, as a place in the Indian context, and was mostly done by the British.

Source of Image: https://www.thefactresearch.com/ram-setu-bridge-history/

However, what is the story of the Indian cosmology? How do the Hindus look at the origin of humanity? They have a story of Manu and Satarupa. According to them, this Manu is the origin of humanity, so one can just imagine how much impact that can have on rest of the world. Interestingly, the word ‘man’ comes from Manu. ‘Human’ word comes from Manu. ‘Woman’ word also related to the man, Thus Adam is not actually used in the Western world to refer to a man, even though they linguistically use that origin as Manu.

So, who was Manu? There are epochs of Manu, each of being 306,720,000 years, and are referred to as Manvantaras that consists of 71 yuga cycle. There is a total of 14 Manvantaras in a day of Bramhā, the creative force, with the current Manvantara being the 7th of 14. Calculations of times in yugas vary and are subject to interpretations. However, currently 14 Manvantaras make one Kalpa, and that follows a pralaya time of equal length. When these are computed, the Kalpa comes out to be 4.32 billion years, remarkably close to the current age of Earth calculated geologically and astronomically. This contrasts with the 4,004 years of the age of Earth mentioned according to some interpretation of the Bible (Bression, 2013).

Manu and Satarupa are thus the origin of the humanity which could meet the scientific criteria of at least the length of time. The current Manu, also known as Vaivasvata was the apparently a king of Dravida or southern India, and was rescued by the Matsyavatar of Viṣṇu during the apocalyptic flood or deluge. This flood story is similar to Noah’s Ark story of Genesis in the Old Testament of the Bible.

Vaivasvata Manu is supposed to have established Aryabrata at the bank of Saryu river, and his son Ikshavāku, the progenitor of the Suryavansha, established his capital in Ayodhyā. After renunciation of the kingdom, Manu and Satarupa are stated to have performed tapasya at Naimisāraṇya, a place between Lucknow and Kanpur within the Avadh region, and received the darśan of Bhagvān Viṣṇu, who granted their wish to become their son as Rām when they were to be born as Dasharatha and Kaushalya. Thus, the origin of the humanity as Manu-Satarupa, and later as Ikshavāku was in fact Ayodhya, about 2 billion years ago. That timeframe for human existence does not exactly match with the current view of human evolution of about 2 million years, which, however, is certainly older than about 6,000 years believed by the people of the Book (meaning Bible). An opinion similar my view outlined here was expressed by the Nobel laureate Francis Crick (1995). He writes:

“Most of the religious beliefs we have today originated in a time when the earth, while a small place by our standards, was then thought of a being very large, even though its exact extent was unknown. …It was not implausible to believe the earth was less than ten thousand years old. The stars seemed far away, fixed perhaps in the spherical firmament, but that the universe extended as far as it does – more than 10 billion light years – was almost inconceivable. (An exception has to be made here for certain eastern religions, such as Hinduism, that take pleasure in inflating times and distances for the sheer joy of it)”  

Although Crick makes fun of Hinduism for the inflation of time, that timeframe is, in general, closer to the scientific estimate of the time on Earth. Interestingly, a human geographic project of National Geographic Society (see the map below) and other population genetics studies (Oppenheimer, 2012) have shown that human population initially migrated from Africa to the Indian Subcontinent, and then everywhere else from that route, making India as the main source of human migration some 60,000 years ago, which may in fact have cultural consequences. This may indeed supplement the Manu story of human origin, and use of the word ‘man’ referring to the Homo sapiens, may be one of such consequences. India, particularly, Ayodhyā, where Vaivasvata Manu established Aryavrata at first at the bank of Saryu river, thus becomes the nanihal (maternal grandmother’s place) of the entire humanity, after Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa.

It will be fascinating to explore this line of novel narrative that combines cosmology and genetics in its support. Further analysis of linguistics, art, music, rituals, and philosophical connections need to be explored and examined. For example, the word ‘Adammay’ have been derived from Adi Manu, or progenitor Manu.

References

Bression, D. (2013) October 23, 4004 B.C.: Happy Birthday Earth! October 23 is (in)famous as supposed earth’s birthday – this date is mentioned in many textbooks retelling the life of Irish Archbishop James Ussher (1581-1656).  Scientific American October, 2013.

Crick, F. (1995) Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul,  Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.

Oppenheimer, S. (2012) Out-of-Africa, the peopling of continents and islands: Tracing uniparental gene trees across the map. Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society B Biological Sciences 367(1590):770-84

– Prof. Bal Ram Singh, School of Indic Studies, Institute of Advanced Sciences, Dartmouth, MA, USA