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India Time Interview
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Tuesday, Feb 16, 2010
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India Time Interview
Interview
Gidwani tells story of Indus and Saraswati civilizations
By Jyotirmoy Datta
Many of the customs in practice in India today date from the Indus Valley civilization of the 3rd/2nd millennium B.C., such as the use of vermilion bindis and the use of water in ritual bathing, as do deities such as Shiva Pashupati. Models of bullock or ox carts like the one seen above, featured in the exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum in 2000 and seen in a related link at the American Institute of Sindhulogy (AIS) Web site, are clearly ancestors of carts used in the region today.
Dial V. Gidwani, who is working on a project for an exhibition on the Indus and Saraswati Valley civilizations at Chicago's famed Field Museum. Dial V. Gidwani, who grew up as a child in Sindh, and has lived in many countries as regional manager for Air-India, has a story that he feels driven to tell: The story of the Indus and Saraswati civilizations.
"At one time it seemed that the Indus Valley civilization was entirely lost," Gidwani, who founded the American Institute of Sindhulogy, told News India-Times in an interview last week.
"No one has so far authoritatively deciphered the script. There is no trace on the earth's surface of any river answering to the descriptions of the Saraswati of the Vedic hymns. And the Partition of 1947 sent us wandering over the face of the earth from our home in Sindh where we felt, as Ram Jethmalani, the former law minister of India, put it, "there was something special about that part of the country... There was a strange air of spiritual and cultural unity which one missed elsewhere." Now, I see my life's work as making the world aware of the great city civilization that flourished in India when not a thatched hut existed in Athens or Rome," said Gidwani.
A resident of the beautiful Chicago suburb of Wilmette, he is in communication with Robin Groesbeck, Manager, Exhibition Coordination, The Field Museum of Chicago, to promote the idea of an exhibition on the Indus and Saraswati civilizations on the lines of the Early Cities exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Indus Valley exhibition in Japan.
Gidwani, who speaks fluent Japanese and spent the latter half of the 1970's as Air-India's manager for Japan, Korea and Hong Kong, said that there appears to be a greater awareness in Japan than in India of the contribution of Indus-Saraswati to world civilization.
"The exhibition was in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation)," Gidwani said. "Titled "The Indus Civilization Exhibition," it was on view at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum from Aug. 5, 2000 to Dec. 3, 2000, where more than 420,000 visitors saw it. Then it traveled to Nagoya City Museum (Jan. 20, 2001 to March 11, 2001) where 92,000 visited the show."
Indeed, Gidwani has been an unofficial ambassador of India wherever he went. While in Japan, he helped organize funds to install an Indian statue of Gautama Buddha's mother, Lady Maya, at one of the earliest temples in Japan, Tenoji, built in 646 A.D. He also organized in February 1976 a mass climb of Mt. Futatabi, near Kobe, with pioneer Everest conqueror Tenzing Norgay.
While in Paris (where he was Air-India's manager for France, Spain, Portugal, the Canaries and North Africa), he organized an India evening, with the screening of Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" simultaneously at two theaters and a dinner at Maxim's prepared by star chef V. Satyanarayan Bakshi flown specially out of India for the occasion attended by Attenborough and India's legendary sitarist Ravi Shankar.
Gidwani's group has also been sending out free copies of the groundbreaking book by his brother, Bhagwan S. Gidwani, " The Return of the Aryans," an epic based on archeology and history, to 500 university libraries and individual opinion makers in the United States.
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