That’s right! Not only did Indians — like everybody else — originally come from Africa, but the landmass too, which we today call India, moved from Africa. In fact India, Australia, South America, and even Antarctica were once not just neighbours, rather, they were joined together. It is only in the last three or four decades that we have begun to piece together a better understanding of the supercontinent ‘Gondwana’ and how it might have broken up.
So, what is Gondwana?
Interestingly, the name Gondwana comes from the Gond tribe of India. It was coined by a professor of geology at the University of Vienna, Dr Eduard Suess. Dr Suess, in 1885, was among the first people to hypothesise that all the major land masses of the world were once fused together in a supercontinent or, at the very least, connected by land bridges and he borrowed the name ‘Gond-wana’ from British explorers’ accounts of this remote jungle-dwelling Indian tribe. The supercontinent was ruptured by a number of volcanic eruptions over millions of years, thereby creating various continents as we see today.
The first of these eruptions pared off Africa and South America from the rest of the Gondwanan land mass 180 million years ago. The second eruption, 118 million years ago, prised Australia and Antarctica away from Greater India (comprising modern-day India, Sri Lanka and Madagascar). Around 88 million years ago a third major volcanic even sundered India from Madagascar. The subcontinent then moved eastwards and crashed into Asia, to form the great Himalayas around 40 to 50 million years ago.
Wait… this gets more interesting, as Pranay Lal tells us in his book Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent.
Even after Greater India parted ways with Australia and Antarctica, Madagascar still remained attached to it as part of the Dharwar Craton, the oldest rocks in the Indian subcontinent. Due to the violent magmatic force of Kerguelen plume in the southern Indian Ocean, Madagascar reached its current position. Since India was still attached to it, various plants and animals could hop from India to Madagascar. That is the reason why Malagasy life forms show closer affinity with India (and even more with Sri Lanka), Malaysia and Australia than Africa.
Once Madagascar separated from India, the latter continued its journey. As it inched closer to the Eurasian Plate, pressure began to build all along its northern boundary as well as in Eurasia. Eventually the stress became so elevated that one of the land masses had to give in. India had travelled some 6000 kilometres northward by this time and, being lighter in density, was the one that literally buckled under the more dense Eurasian Plate and slipped under it. This had the effect of hoisting higher a plateau that already stood 300-400 metres above sea level on the southern edge of Eurasia which created the Tibetan plateau. Its elevation continued to increase by another 200-300 metres over the next 10 million years or so, and therefore you see some of the world’s highest peaks in this region.
It is important to understand that the entire Himalaya was not all created together or at once. There were several minor shake-ups that fashioned this process. Because of these tectonic upheavals we got the Great Himalaya, the Middle Himalaya and the Lower Himalaya. It is in the Lower Himalaya that I finish writing this piece, hoping to find you wherever you are in the world.
Kalampedia 