A brief of India’s physical features
A tangerine-hued semi-molten core, jacketed by a mantle and a crust. The smudged image that forms in one’s mind when asked of the cross-section of earth. Indeed, it’s a retreat to sixth grade geography lessons but nevertheless insignificant. For as we embark on this seemingly pallid journey gliding by the contours of the Indian subcontinent’s less-than-mundane past, it beckons that we run our eyes over the genesis of this landmass.
Now, coming back to the point. Owing to currents that emanate from the aforesaid core, the crust fractures into plates which jostle against each other; in precise terms the geological process named tectonic shift.
As one whole, the plates are called Pangea which consists of two parts– the Laurasia and Gondwanaland, India being a scrap of the latter. She slid north-eastwards through the Tethys sea, to finally lunge beneath the Eurasian plate, the push leading to the bulge of the Himalayas, ‘the youngest, largest and highest mountain range on earth.’ Note that these tenacious movements spanned millions of years.
The Himalayas, running along the northern periphery is home to the highest fourteen peaks in the world, the most prominent one among them being the Mt. Everest (roughly 8.8 km). Parallel to the Great Himalayas are its less taller counterparts, the Middle Himalayas and Outer Himalayas. In the north-west we encounter troughs in the mountainscape, which marks the many passages to India – the Khyber Pass , the Bolan pass and the Gomal Pass.
Though writers contest that the Himalayas bear a significant influence in the subcontinent, in all its sententious aspects, Basham opines that the point has been a tad too much overstated. No more than shaping the climate of the region should she be accredited for. That the Himalayas gave India an advantageous seclusion may seem geographically and even politically appealing yet the truth lies in that these ranges were cut through by travellers, traders and settlers of different sorts for many years. The guard hasn’t always been up.
The precipitate of the moisture-laden clouds that drifts over and the melting snow of the Himalayas birthed the rivers Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra, rolling down to its foot and forth, sedimenting a broad strip of alluvium that would become one of the most fertile regions in the world, the Indo-Gangetic plain. Naturally, it was here that humans and their aspirations blossomed.
The Indus springs in the Tibet near the Manasarovar lake, traverses along the north-west and sheds into the Arabian sea. The Ganga, alongside Yamuna, both of which rises from Himalayan glaciers (Gaumukh and Yamunotri respectively) wade together to finally wed at Allahabad and join its mate, the Brahmaputra, before gushing into the prodigious Bay of Bengal.
Nestled between the Indus and the Northern plains is the Aravalli hills and to its left, the Thar desert.
The Unsaturated Reader 