Defining a Civilisation and its Roar

I am very online.

I am not ashamed of it, because for me it’s also quite strategic.

I want to gauge public opinion online.

I have watched how monetisation has pushed for narratives to fly perhaps without accuracy, and why a voice like mine wants to invest in platforms, but also find her own voice amongst the noise.

Within this, recently, has been a tug of defining a civilisation.

And I have noticed the West is, again, trying very hard to set the narrative around a civilisational culture I belong to and my roots are trying to reclaim the narrative.

I have grown up in the West reciting mantras as soon as I could understand how to.

I pray in a certain way and my mum also prays but in her own way.

I know I belong to oral traditions of faith with a vast cyclical civilisational thread ensuring that I can claim a duty to my ancestors.

So when the likes of historian Dr. David Miano keeps asking for certain evidence-based proof so he feels better, I know he still doesn’t get it.

The template created in the West to analyse Hinduism, or Sanatan Dharma, doesn’t really work.

We’ve seen what has happened in the past through missionary endeavours and empires who tried to make sense of the diverse way in which we all handle this label.

So when, after two days of back and forth (and admittedly a lot of sarcasm on my part), he asked:

“Do these oral traditions tell you explicitly the year that these traditions began?

And do these oral traditions talk about the Harappan culture explicitly?”

My response was at first quite blunt.

I explained that no oral tradition - not the Vedas, not Homer, not the Epic of Gilgamesh - gives anyone ‘explicit Gregorian years’ or archaeological labels like ‘Harappan.’

When I pray I don’t even use the Gregorian calendar to handle it.

In Britain. I am a Londoner born and raised using Choghadiya to find auspicious times to do anything new, or understanding when we can hold certain prayers.

The Vedas don’t need to say ‘Harappa city, 2600 BCE’ to be rooted in the same northwest Indian geography.

They obsess over the Sarasvati as the greatest river (nadītame, ambitame), with dozens of hymns in a region where the vast majority of Harappan sites cluster along the exact Ghaggar-Hakra paleochannel.

That’s not coincidence - it’s the landscape memory of the people who lived there as the urban phase declined and Vedic composition overlapped.

There were fire altars (Yajna Kundas), at sites like Kalibangan (in Rajasthan) and Lothal (in Gujarat), ritual bathing, found at Mohenjo-daro (in Sindh), symbolic continuity, measurement systems (from Harappa to Lothal), and genetic/archaeological evidence of deep roots in the same population, specifically at Rakhigarhi (in Haryana), which sits right along the dried-up Sarasvati paleochannel region.

The Western template, of which he kept saying was a global one, has somewhat been forcing a total disconnect for colonial reasons for decades.

I say ‘colonial’ without there being an actual empire in existence because the behaviour is the same.

A colonisation of definition.

This is why there is now pushback, and a very justified one, of those who are the custodians.

The roar has started.

And despite me living, being born and raised here in London, I too have a responsibility to my own ancestors to ensure the sanctity of our civilisational heritage isn’t lost in foreign definitions and rhetoric.

Especially when they are so narrow.

We are a skeptical bunch of people precisely because this has happened numerous times before.

He responded with a claim that ‘I appealed to oral tradition, not him. That I appealed to it when he suggested I don’t add characteristics to the Harappan culture that no one has found yet’.

And this was the moment for me to breathe.

Why?

Because I am responsible for this civilisational thread that has run for centuries, if not millennia.

I explained we are a hybrid civilisational culture.

I said this knowing I had said it the day before but it was dismissed.

We are not just one book, but a whole library of scripture and sacred text. We can understand the geography and handle the oral traditions like heirlooms of responsibility.

The Vedas describe a major river (nadītame) in a region where archaeology has identified dense clusters of Harappan settlements along the Ghaggar-Hakra palaeochannel.

This is physical geographical data - not just tradition.

I then shared a verse from the Rig Veda.

RV 2.41.16:

अम्बितमे नदीतमे देवितमे सरस्वति । अप्रशस्ता इव स्मसि प्रशस्तिमम्ब नस्कृधि ॥

Ambitame nadītame devitame sarasvati | apraśastā iva smasi praśastim amba nas kṛdhi ॥

‘Best of mothers, best of rivers, best of goddesses, Sarasvātī! We are, as it were, of no repute; dear mother, give us high renown.’

There are other verses in this sacred text to tell us about the Sarasvati too.

Now, a Western scholar would need to figure out and have to explain how a massive river and a massive civilisation ended up occupying the exact same space described by the oral tradition.

The Vedas were unscripted for thousands of years prior to becoming a written sacred text in their original language.

They had to survive that long oral journey just to evolve into a form we can read in English today.

And this is where we must go deeper into the verse and the words.

For example, where we say ‘nadītame’ in the verse above, it doesn’t just translate to the English word ‘river’ directly.

It comes from the root word ‘nad’, which means ‘to roar’, ‘to sound’, or ‘to vibrate’.

A nadī is not just a body of flowing water; it is a ‘roaring, resonant force’.

When paired with the superlative -tame, it means the absolute loudest, most roaring, and dominant force on the landscape.

It is the greatest.

Sanskrit therefore encourages a philosophical outlook to each word.

There is a civilisational roar in response to a few historians in the West trying to explain to us, the custodians of this civilisational culture, what our culture is.

We are becoming that ‘nadītame’ to ensure the rhetoric is with us to explain, not to have it explained.

This was one verse, and one word, that had to be taken to its root in a language which was spoken way before it was written.

The evidence-based, data-driven need for constant proof before accepting it is very much one drop in the vast river that is this civilisation.

And I encourage anyone trying to make sense of it, to approach it as we do.

With the utmost humility, and not with an aim to redefine it to suit a template that doesn’t fit.