ABSTRACT
When the tide recedes from a sandy beach, the many small rivulets that form and drain the small springs and rock pools shift their courses many times in an afternoon, capturing each other, forming braided patterns and deltas, and leaving abandoned courses etched on the flat surface. Indra, the God of the rains, from his loftier vision of time, must have watched such a ceaseless patterning of the plains of India. In the mythology of India the Holy River Sarasvati ran to the sea, and there is little doubt that once there was a river that left the Punjab and reached the sea at the Rann of Kutch. The divide between the Indus and the Ganges is so slight that it may well have been the Yamuna (Jumna), which was later captured by a tributary of the Ganges. At any rate, there are marks left on the landscape, and the dry bed of the misfit Ghaggar peters out after it has left the Punjab, now in places
Figure 1.3 The Natural Vegetation of South Asia and Principal Mountain Ranges
reinvigorated by the canals of modern man, like streams on the beach reinvigorated by scheming children with spades and buckets. In Pakistan the Hakra marks a continuation of the old course. The rivers soak into the plains, and provide the ground water for the wells of time immemorial. Upon the rivers and their waters and their silt, so much of life depends and has so long depended, but always subject to their wanton floods and shifting moods, that it is no wonder that they have become revered and holy in themselves. And the land whence they originate is truly the abode of the Gods. That so many of them issue from sources so close to each other must surely show where
barbaric power, which must by definition be alien, and because during Europe's renaissance the great powers of Islam had driven a wedge between far Asia and Europe. The 'otherness' of the East is of course the basis for Said's (1978) critique of 'Orientalism' - the implicit disparagement of the East in much western scholarship.
