If you google for a woodblock print called ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ by Hokusai, you will see a terrifying image of a tsunami-like wave in blue and white with three helpless fishing boats caught below it and Mount Fuji in the background. This Japanese artwork from 1831 is described as “possibly the most reproduced image in the history of all art” and is said to have influenced Impressionist painters like Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet and French musicians like Claude Debussy in the 19th century. I happened to look again at the image recently and got to thinking that though our Eastern Seaboard is no stranger to tsunamis, I am not aware of any art or old stories on the subject in India. I wonder why that is so and would welcome any information on it from you to satisfy my interest.
I also wonder why a tsunami that hit coastal Tamil Nadu in ancient times does not figure in a list of historical tsunamis. This could possibly be because the text in which it is mentioned was discovered only in the late 19th century by the ‘Tamil Tatha’ or ‘Tamil Grandfather’ UV Swaminatha Iyer, which he published in 1898. The text is the Tamil epic Manimekhalai, which some scholars date back to the second or third century CE.
That ancient tsunami swallowed up the fabled port city of Kaveri Poompattinam, also known as Poompuhar or Puhar, the Blossom City. It was not far from present-day Nagapattinam, at the mouth of the river Kaveri. The discovery in recent times of submerged wharves and several metres of pier walls have reportedly corroborated the literary reference to what befell Poompuhar.
The tsunami belt stretches all the way from India to Japan, where Buddhist monks once sailed, taking their stories with them. To my mind, this story from Japan that sounds so much like a Jataka in its mood and message stands in for Puhar’s tsunami stories that appear to be lost to time.
It seems there was once a misanthropic old man in Japan who lived alone. He had been married once and had had children but they had all died young. After some years the man retreated to the top of the hill above his village, which was by the sea. He had fallen very comfortably into the habit of solitude and went down to the village only when he absolutely had to go, to trade and shop for things like salt, oil, spices and ropes.
The villagers were used to him and accepted his taciturn ways with a shrug. Two generations grew up meanwhile and when someone asked how long the old man had been up there on the hill, the villagers answered, “Always.”
The old man felt he had good reason to despise his fellow beings. Their stupid, vain chatter about unimportant things, their petty quarrels and jealousies, their mean thefts and malicious tongues made them ugly in his eyes.
The old man preferred his own company by far. He caught fish in the little mountain stream near his hut, harvested his precious, carefully tended peach trees, grew enough rice for himself in a few terraces beneath his backyard, and made sure to grow plenty of vegetables.
He wove his own cloth and dried his homemade noodles on a wooden frame that he had made himself. He ate his simple meals from a wooden bowl with chopsticks that he carved with his own hands. Afterwards, he would sit and stare contentedly out to sea while sipping tea, remembering always to thank the Lord Buddha or Daibutsu as he is called in Japan, for his health and good life. He liked listening to birdsong and watching the clouds shift shape and colour. Like all those who spend a lot of time outdoors and absorb many impressions of light and shade, he could instinctively tell you to the half-hour what time of day it was.
One morning when he looked out at the sea, his eye was caught by a new rock far out from the shore. The water seemed to have rolled back from the shore all the way to this rock. The old man frowned, trying to recall a tale that his grandfather had told him long ago of his own youth. Just so, had the
sea receded far back until a submerged rock had suddenly revealed itself. Soon after that, the sea had sprung back in an unimaginably gigantic wave that had swallowed the village and miles of the countryside around.
Many helpless villagers had been taken by surprise and drowned in the vast wave of water. Their homes had broken apart and floated away and their crops were ruined while many old trees had crashed down under the weight and force of the water. It had taken the village five years to recover from the devastation.
The old man suddenly remembered with a start of horror that the annual fair for which the whole village gathered on the beach was on that very day. He forgot about being misanthropic and anti-social. A greater power called human duty had seized him. He wondered frantically what he could do to save the villagers. He was too far away to run down and warn them in time. And then he had an idea.
Taking a deep, steadying breath, he began to swiftly and systematically collect every dry and wooden thing lying about and piled them all inside his hut. He then set fire to his hut, which, being made of wood, with a straw thatch, soon blazed up into a big fire.
Seeing the smoke and the blaze on top of the hill, the villagers cried out in alarm. They ran uphill in a body: men, women and children scurried to rescue the old man. Barely seconds after they reached the safety of the hilltop, the sea threw itself up into a gigantic wave and rushed in, engulfing the beach and everything below.
RENUKA NARAYANAN
(shebaba09@gmail.com)