Rewind: Myths of Lands, Words of War
As wars of extermination and displacement continue, we see that the justification for such acts is often shrouded in words of myth and mystery, and have been so since the ancient world
By Pramod K Nayar
Myths, legends and beliefs, some dating back to antiquity’s scriptural traditions and religious beliefs, about the right, possession and control over land have energised cultures, peoples and nations. Some of the myths have geological evidence, but in many cases, geological and geographical features of territories — real, imagined or claimed — are reinterpreted through and in myths. Thus, archaeological and geological discoveries are ‘read’ in the light of fictional, mythical and other texts.
What is frightening is the imposing of the myths, legends and stories over the land to facilitate wars and genocides. Words project and promote wars for territory, resources and people. What we see unfolding around us today, from Gaza to Ukraine, dates back to the languages of territory that have inspired people to go to war.
Myths and Colonialism
Myths, concepts, and stories have very strong geographical and geological consequences, and geography and geology are both subject to human-generated myths and histories.
• Archeological ‘discoveries’ of monuments, memorials and buried sites are read within the framework of myths, legends, stories and religious texts, and geology is used as evidence for the texts and vice versa
The term terra nullius, meaning ‘nobody’s land’, was a useful linguistic and conceptual tool for Europeans to colonise what came to be called ‘the new world’, or America, from the 15th century. Dismissing the simple fact that the lands were lived-in by indigenous people, the Europeans declared the land as free for occupation. Later, the idea of ‘manifest destiny’ served the task of expansion because it suggested that the United States was preordained to expand westwards.
Attributed to Richard Watson, a British clergyman in the early 19th century, the phrase ‘For a people without a land, a land without a people’ has been emotionally leveraged to underscore Zionist aspirations, although its exact iterations have been disputed. It energised ideas of the Israeli return to their land.
The Nazis effectively employed the idea of ‘Lebensraum’, or ‘living space’, whose origins date to an 1860 review of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. The reviewer, Oscar Peschel, a biologist and geographer, used it to describe physical geography as a factor that influences human activities. The Japanese idea of Hakkōichiu gave their emperors a legitimate right to unite the eight corners of the world under their flag, and was a credo in operation from the 1940s.
Closer home, we have the prehistoric landmass of Central India. Here, the British geologists of the 19th century believed they had found the oldest rock systems of the subcontinent. These primitive forests and rocks gave rise to theories of a prehistoric southern supercontinent, which the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess (who never came to India) named Gondwanaland. This mythic land then became emblematic of tropical primitivism. The Karoo region of South Africa was identified as geologically and ethnologically primitive. The Victoria region of Australia was likewise associated with primitivism by anthropologists such as Alfred William Howitt.
And now for the obverse of the link between geography and myths.
Geomythology
The Cyclops Islands off the east coast of Sicily are supposed to be the rocks that the one-eyed giant hurled at Ulysses and his crew after they had blinded him and escaped. Kerala is explained as an outcome of Parashuram, an avatar of Lord Vishnu in texts within the Hindu belief systems, throwing his axe into the ocean.
• The terra nullius, the 15th century doctrine of ‘nobody’s land’ , came in useful for Europeans to claim the ‘new world’ because it dismissed indigenous populations and their rights
The lost island of Atlantis, Noah’s story, and the volcanoes of Iceland have all been interpreted, from Plato to the present, in terms of the scriptural traditions, from the Bible to folklore. The mythical land of ‘Lemuria’, a vast continent proposed by the zoologist Philip Sclater in 1864, became a key element in the Theosophical Society’s work and belief systems in the late 19th century.
The geologist Dorothy B Vitaliano proposed the term geomythology in a 1968 essay in the Journal of the Folklore Institute. The geomythologist ‘seeks to find the real geologic event underlying a myth or legend to which it has given rise; thus he helps convert mythology back into history’.
Besides Atlantis, the destruction of Crete, the formation of islands, the tsunamis and other events, she argues, are read through the literary, philosophical and religious texts so that it becomes difficult to disentangle the evidence: ‘These ancient geologic events also may engender myths, but only in an inverse way. People have always tended to make up stories to account for striking landform’.
Stories make up earth histories, and explain, justify and inspire actions ranging from worship (of ‘sacred’ spaces) to occupation (as rightful heirs to the spaces). Stories, however, require some material ballast, and the discipline of archaeology has often served this purpose.
As the historian Thomas Trautmann and anthropologist Carla Sinopoli observe about 19th century colonial archaeology: ‘The role of archaeology was to confirm the texts — through identifying sites, monuments, and other features …. various kinds of written records provided a frame through which the archaeological data could be understood’. That is, geographical features, buried cities, monuments were framed within the stories, including travellers’ tales, in circulation.
As the historian Pratik Chakrabarti writes in the journal Past and Present: ‘The discovery of the classical antiquity of India, predominantly from Sanskrit texts, was reinforced by excavation of its ancient cities and exploration of its mythological rivers, and also of fossils that were interpreted as Hindu avatars’.
Lost Lands, Reclamation Wars
For the colonials, sites like Gondwanaland were spaces in which time had frozen somewhere in deep antiquity. Fossil records, archaeological ruins, ethnographic and demographic features were framed within ideas of indigenous primitivism and ancientness. Some nostalgia informed the construction and imagination of these supposedly pure ancient worlds, but that were lost to the modern era.
• Sacred histories often “explain” landforms and events, from Noah’s flood to Gondwanaland, the “lost” lands of Atlantis and Lemuria while even the language of “region” and “province” carries roots in conquest and war
In a distinct but parallel development, vast stretches of land in interior Africa and Central India were termed terra incognita by European explorers. Thus, the Gazetteer of the Central Provinces of India in the late 1860s wrote of the people inhabiting the region: ‘[they] ‘live in trees, and . . . there were whispers of “anthropophagi”’.
There was a fascination with these lost people and worlds, all of which awaited the discovery, description, classification and pronouncements by the white man! The fear of such vanishing populations informed the 19th century colonial imaginations, as the critic Patrick Brantlinger has argued in Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930. The white man’s imagination shaped, in other words, the primitive and lost lands. In Pratik Chakrabarti’s words, ‘themes of human evolution, mythological geographies, Aryanism, and tribal aboriginality defined Indian antiquity’ in 19th century colonial writings.
But is it just the imagining of lost lands? The historian Sumathi Ramaswamy writes about the glorification of the lost land of Lemuria:
Lost places do not exist as such in our life-worlds. They are summoned into existence and their being shaped through our labors of loss. A place declared as lost does not precede our labors of loss. It is instead their product and outcome. This is not to say that a lost place cannot (or does not) exceed the labors of loss that generate it; this happens time and again. Nonetheless, a lost place is fundamentally constituted as such through labors of loss that are performed around it.
But what if these ‘labours of loss’ are not simply about imagining but include displacement of people, genocidal extermination and war?
The Zionist phrase ‘for a people without a land, a land without a people’ could be read as a forerunner of the ‘Greater Israel’ campaign and sloganeering – accompanied by genocide– by contemporary Israel. The current expansionist rhetoric is rooted in religious-Biblical narratives about the Promised Land and a thousand-year utopia, which explicitly links the story with the land.
The German idea of Lebensraum justified the genocides by Germans in South West Africa between 1904 and 1908, and, of course, inspired Nazi Germany’s war-and-extermination effort across Europe from the late 1930s.
• The Zionist phrase ‘for a people without a land, a land without a people’ could be read as a forerunner of the ‘Greater Israel’ campaign and sloganeering — accompanied by genocide — by contemporary Israel
Two terms repeat across the century, from Nazi Germany to the current acts of genocide in Palestine: region and province. ‘Region’ comes from the word regere, meaning conquered territory and ‘province’ comes from vincere meaning conquer.
‘Territory’ is, as Stuart Elden defines it in his magisterial The Birth of Territory, ‘a distinctive mode of social/spatial organisation, one that is historically and geographically limited and dependent’ and ‘“territory” needs to be thought of in its specificity’. Social and military acts make the land the site, and the community on that site.
Informing earlier and current acts of extermination and war is the mythic and legendary stories of, say autochthony — the idea that men sprang up fully formed, born of the earth (khthôn: earth; autos: one’s homeland). But more important, economic reasons underwrite the myths of territoriality. Commentators note that when agriculture was the major mode of food production, land was needed to ensure the practice. The military then was tasked with not only defending agricultural land but also acquire more of it. Thus ‘agriculture … led to the birth of the territorial community of the polis’ (Elden).
The language employed to speak of lands and people – autochthonous, primitive, ancient, lost, home, terra incognita, terra nullius — is a political act. It establishes rationale, justification, aspirations for murderous rage and murderous acts that are then given righteous connotations and a sense of rightful ownership. The wars and genocides we watch as we speak originate in adventure tales, myths, scriptural traditions that ‘read’ the land in the ways that suit the moment, whether as sites of discovery, recovery or right.
Words shape military conquest, the land for which the conquering forces are launched, the people killed in name and then in the flesh. The definition of ownership, territory and populations finds origins in myths, which are then taken as true. The meaning of territory, homeland, ‘our’ people or ‘living space’ is inscribed into the actions of conquest, extermination and displacement.
Nations quarrel not over land, they quarrel over meaning.
(The author is Senior Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)
