Synopsis
Whatever begins must end, that is the law of the universe. It was predetermined that Naru's cerebral journey would end when it began. Even though the end of any journey is predetermined, it does not always reach the desired destination. In order to complete his main journey, Naru successfully ignored the temptation to embark on many interesting new journeys along the way. Whether his entire journey was completed or not, only time will tell, but it is undeniable that the mythical part of his cerebral journey had come to an end.
For any important topic related to Indian Subcontinent and different spheres of human knowledge, many scholars try to make connections from the Ramayan and the Mahabharat to that topic. Many good reasons are there for such an approach. Whether the broader human society agrees or not, or if the speaker himself harbours some doubts, the importance of the Mahabharat in shaping the contours of the understanding of India’s past cannot be denied.
The Ramayan and the Mahabharat provide accounts of various events that took place in India at some forgotten time. Those accounts are called ‘Itihas’ in Sanskrit, mother of most of the Indian languages. The Ramayan and the Mahabharat are now known as epics. To date, it has not been possible to find any factual evidence to support those events or any evidence that can logically relate them to known reality. There is an unresolved period between the time of the Mahabharat war and the most distant past of authentic history in the present day. Current authentic history suggests that geographically, the history of the Gangetic Plain cannot be more than five thousand years old, because prior to that period, there was no habitable land there. It took another couple of thousand years for the Bengal Basin region to start becoming habitable, meaning that a large human society was not possible to be formed in the Bengal Basin until three to four thousand years before the present.
The structure that the current human world follows to record various details of the present is called ‘history’ in English. There is no real synonym for the word ‘history’ in Sanskrit or Bengali. According to that tradition, the people of India did not record the daily events, at least not at the present phase of human history. European scholars, as well as scholars of the Bengali Renaissance, were convinced that Bengal had no history. Bright scholars of the Bengali Renaissance, the wise men of the Asiatic Society and the scholars of the present day, have all made a concerted effort to create a coherent narrative from the time of the Mahabharat to the present day. It has not been possible to connect the validated history of India with the ‘Itihas’ of the Mahabharat period as one continuum, neither on the basis of physical evidence nor in a logical way. Even in prehistoric Indian literature, which is now considered to be fictional, no clue has been found to establish that connection.
Naru’s intellectual journey showed him that only Bengal, and for that matter, India, can boast of having ‘Itihas’. No other place on earth has ‘Itihas’. As far as Naru could manage to gather, there is only one clue for connecting the Itihas of India and its history, and that clue is embedded in the legend of another human society, far away from the land of Bharat. Above all, that clue is related to Bangla, alias, Bengal. This book presents a brain-generated, hypothetical link that emerged at the end of Naru’s mythical journey. The description presents a syllogistic schema of that connection that emerged at the end of Naru’s mythical voyage.
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