Ancient Indians called the Other Hemisphere Pataladesa

by Jyoti Prakash on Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 4:12pm
Ancient Indians called the Other Hemisphere Pataladesa

Dr. Balaram Chakravarti author of The Indians And The Amerindians has written:
It will be evident from a close study of the texts of Indian Astronomy that Latin America was known to ancient Indians, who called it Pataladesa. The Surya Siddhanta, a textbook of Astronomy, composed before 500 A.D. identifies and describes Pataldesa in very clear and definite terms in the chapter of geography (chapter xii).
The Surya Siddhanta categorically says that the Devas and Asuras live on the earth. The Devas live in the northern hemisphere while the Asuras live in the Southern hemisphere and have a tradition of enmity against each other. It further says that the ocean which surrounds the poles of the earth has divided the planet into two great continents, viz. the continent of the Devas and the continent of the Asuras. The Brahmanas of India write the epithet Deva-Serman after their names thus describing themselves as the Devas.
When the Sun is in the northern hemisphere eg. in Aries, he appears first to the Devas, and again when the Sun is in the southern hemisphere, he appears first to the Asuras. When the Sun is on the Equator both the Devas and the Asuras find the Sun in the middle and the days and nights are equal. As the Sun proceeds to the northern hemisphere, the Devas experience summer because of the directness and intensity of the solar rays, the Asuras do not get the rays so directly then and its intensity is also less, the sun being in the northern hemisphere. Hence they experience winter during this time. This obviously indicates that Pataldesa was South America.
The Surya Siddhanta explains how the people living on opposite ends of the globe consider themselves, wrongly, as living on the upper and lower part of the globe, though there cannot really be an upper or lower part, of the globe, which moves in vaccuum.
Maya, the author of Surya Siddhanta, also mentions the four great cities situated on the opposite ends of the world, equidistant from one another. 1. Yamakotipura in Bhadrasvavarsa (Indonesia?) in the east, Lanka in Bharatvarsa (India) in the south and 3. Rome in Ketumalavarsa (Europe) in the west and Siddhapura in Kuruvarsa (America?) in the north.
The celebrated astronomer Bhaskaracarya mentions the time difference between the important cities situated in different parts of the world in his Siddhanta Siromani(Goladhyaya) thus:
"When the sun rises at Lanka, the time as at Yakakotipura to the east of Lanka, will be midday. Below the earth at Siddhapura, it will be twilight then, and at Romakadesa in Europe, the time will be midnight."
From such location of places round the globe and the movement towards the east, it appears that many Indian merchants used to sail frequently and some even settled down in Indonesia and Indochina, who used to relay on to Polynesia and then further on to South or Middle America, may be not a single ship and in a single effort, but after stopovers at the important ports on the other islands-chain of which seems to have existed then and some of which submerged later because of tectonic movements. It seems that some contact with the cities mentioned by Bhaskaracharya might have existed till his time.

Baron Robert Freiherr von Heine Geldern (1885 - 1968) and Gordon F. Ekholm (1909 - 1987) the world's leading anthropologists, have strongly supported the claim that Indian ships went all the way to Mexico and Peru centuries before Columbus.

In the "Civilizations of Ancient America" they state:
"There appears to be little doubt but that ship building and navigation were sufficiently advanced in southern and eastern Asia at the period in question to have made trans-Pacific voyages possible. In the third century, horses were exported from India to the Malay Peninsula and Indo-China, an indication that there must have been ships of considerable size."
(source: India: Mother of us All - Edited by Chaman Lal p. 43-44).

US Government recently adopted the ancient Indian catamaran-making technology to construct fast ships. The ships, built with technology adapted from ancient Tamil methods to make catamarans, can travel over 2,500 kms in less than 48 hours, twice the speed of the regular cargo ships. Refer to chapter on Seafaring in Ancient India.
For more refer to chapter on Greater India: Suvarnabhumi and Sacred Angkor and Seafaring in Ancient India. Refer to India once ruled the Americas! – By Gene D Matlock and Who Discovered America? - By Ricardo Palleres.

Dr. Robert Heine Geldern anthropologist, has written that:
"Those who believe the ancient peoples of Asia were incapable of crossing the ocean have completely lost sight of what the literary sources tell us concerning their ships and their navigation. Many of the peoples of Southeastern Asia had adopted Indian Hindu-Buddhist civilizations. The influences of the Hindu-Buddhist culture of southeast Asia in Mexico and particularly, among the Maya, are incredibly strong, and they have already disturbed some Americanists who don't like to see them but cannot deny them." "Ships that could cross the Indian Ocean were able to cross the Pacific too. Moreover, these ships were really large. The Periplus of the Erythraean sea mentions the large ships of Southern India which engaged in trade with the countries of the East. A Chinese source of the third century A.D. describes vessels from Southern Asia which were 150 feet in length, and had four masts and were able to carry six to seven hundred men and one thousand metric tons of merchandise when the Buddhist Pilgrim Fahien returned from Sri Lanka to China, in 414 A.D."

Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) who spent fifty years doing research on Ancient America, said:
"It is surprising to find, toward the end of the fifteenth century, in a world that we call "New" the ancient institutions, the religious ideas, the forms of edifices which, in Asia appear to belong to the first dawn of civilization."
Those Indian ships that carried Fahien, the Chinese historian and scholar through stormy China waters could without difficulty proceed all the way to Mexico and other countries. A thousand years before the birth of Columbus Indian ships could carry hundreds of passengers.

Accurate time difference of places around the world found in ancient Sanskrit texts

(image source: The Indians And The Amerindians - By Dr. B. Chakravarti p. 34-110)