Book Review: Gods, Giants and the Geography of India

I often found geography a tedious subject that requires hand-paining tasks of drawing maps and many confusing theories about how the continents were formed, tectonic plates? Or continental drift? I don’t know. Geography is related to science as all the events that happen to the earth have a scientific and logical explanation. But before humans ever discovered science or geography, what did they think was the reason behind geographical events? This book has the answer.

This book, The Gods, Giants, and the Geography of India, focuses on geomythology. Geomythology is a different point of view when mythological stories are used to explain many events that come under geography. In this book, you will come across asparas, rakshasas, avatars of gods like Vishnu and Shiva, kind and cruel kings and other divine beings of the vast Indian mythology. Before humans discovered science, they used geomythology to find out answers on how things around us came to be.

In the beginning, before I read this book, I found geography a little confusing and didn’t really understand what was behind these happenings of geography. This book gives the scientific explanation for geographical events along with the mythological one too. The stories makes it easy to remember geography better. Let me give you an example through one such tale.

Science suggests two theories for continent formation - Alfred Wegener’s continental drift and the Tectonic Plates theory where giant plates that make up earth’s crust are constantly hitting each other or moving away. In this book, a small tale tells how the earth which was once a huge landmass (supercontinent) was split into the seven continents we know today. In Indian mythology, the continents or dvipas were once a single continent created by Brahma. His grandson, Priyavarta, rode his chariot across the earth; the chariot wheels broke the continent into seven dvipas. Interesting, right?

If you are looking for a book with a lot of trivia, this one is for you. While I was reading this book, I came across some cool things-to-know such as: Does the horn of a comet have anything to do with Vishnu’s first avatar – Matsya (fish)? Or Do you know which of our Indian rives is called the ‘unseen river’? These little story-facts were so mind-blowingly cool!

At the end of the book, there is a one-page poem that summarizes all the previous chapters. I do think the poem is a bit too long, but it does make sense.