Mark Twain once famously said that India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great-grand mother of tradition. Albert Einstein went one step further in acknowledging India’s contribution to world civilization, “we owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made,” he is believed to have said.
The words of the great Indologist Max Mueller reflect a similar strain: “If I were asked under what sky the human mind has most fully developed some of its choicest gifts, has most deeply pondered on the greatest problems of life, and has found solutions, I would point to India.” The vedas and upanishads and puranas are full of references to nature. The early vedic hymns are replete with the external world, with the beauty and mystery of nature.
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Nature and art
When art developed, this love of nature played a great part in it. The beautiful carvings of flowers and leaves and animal forms on the Sanchi gates, near Bhopal, are among the earliest discovered artistic remains that narrate a tell-tale story of the artists who made them, of their love and understanding of nature. The vivid natural sights and sounds of the Himalayas and its munificent rivers render these places into veritable edens and are closely connected with myths and legends.
The mighty rivers of India flowing from the Himalayas point to the many phases of India’s history. The greatest gift of the Himalayas is the Ganga, a symbol and memory of the past of India, running into the present, and flowing into the great ocean of the future. Dancing in the morning sunlight, dark and full of mystery as night falls, a graceful stream in winter and a roaring crescendo during monsoons, broadbosomed as the sea, Ganga is the heart of India.
The great Indus or the Sindhu is no less, from which the country came to be called India, and across which races and caravans entered for thousands of years. So is the Brahmaputra, though rather cut off from the mainstream of history but living in old story, swirling its way into India through deep chasms cut in the heart of the north eastern Himalayas and then flowing calmly in a broad sweep between mountain and wooded plains. So also is the Yamuna, round which cluster so many legends of dance and fun and play concerning Krishna’s dalliance with Radha and the gopis.
Place of pilgrimage
There is that fullness of rapture in the nature worship of Indians who chose their hallowed places of pilgrimage in the midst of natural surroundings such as Kailash Mansarovar (now in Tibet); Kedarnath, Gangotri, Yamnotri, Badrinath (all in Uttarakhand); the icy caves of Amarnath in Kashmir; the temple of virgin goddess in Kanyakumari at the southern tip of India; the holy Varanasi; Hardwar, nestling at Himalayan foothills, where Ganga flows out into the plains; Prayaga, where Ganga meets Yamuna; Mathura and Brindaban of Krishna legends; Bodh Gaya where the Buddha is attained enlightenment; and many places in Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
However, the true reasons for this special charm of India cannot be only because of its magnificent woods and its life-giving rivers, the limpidity of its lakes, the splendour of its snow-capped mountain peaks, or the mesmerizing murmur of its myriad brooks gurgling in the cool soft air. This special charm of India does not come merely because of the combination of art and landscape, but in the grouping of these two kinds of beauty in the midst of a nature still animated with a mysterious life.
Romain Rolland, the French savant, paid the most eloquent tribute to India, “If there is one place on the face of earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India.”
