The keepers of large herds, mostly the Gujjar clan in the subcontinent, were her most ardent believers: They could not afford to offend this powerful master of fertility so that their herds may multiply. She was invoked when the plough first broke the ground for the new season. Over the millennia, Dharti Mata came to be celebrated as the giver of sons and wealth. When the pious follower of the Sanatama Dharma rises from his bed, he invokes her, and when the cow is milked, the first five streams of milk are permitted to fall on the earth in her honour. As the goddess of the Sindhu Valley, Dharti Mata was the great bestower of fertility she was the rejuvenator of all living forms and of the earth itself. This was especially true in the case of the adoption of the ancient pantheon by the newcomers.Īmong others deities, the indigenous Mother Goddess became the model for the Aryan Dharti Mata or Mother Earth (Lord Shiva, too, is modelled after a pre-Aryan Sindhu Valley god). But the masterful work of Mark Kenoyer (Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilisation) shows that the influx was not all blood and gore and that there was a fair degree of integration and assimilation. From the 13 skeletons discovered in one building in the ruined city of Moen jo Daro, it was first surmised that the city had been sacked by the marauding newcomers. In the early years of the second millennium BCE, the Aryans displaced the ancient people of the Sindhu Valley. This distorted, even grotesque, imagery symbolises the goddess’ fecundity. The goddess wears fancy, sometimes even bizarre, head-dresses, but it is her extra wide hips and an equally large bust - the primary emblem of feminity and therefore of fertility - that are noteworthy. That was 6,000 years before the Egyptians built their pyramids, over which the world went crazy in the 19th century.
The most ancient of those peeking down at us from that far off time being Mehrgarh, at the foot of the Bolan Pass, in Balochistan. That was when the first cities of the valley of the Sindhu River began to take shape. The countless versions of the image of the Mother Goddess, the goddess of fertility, come down to us from no fewer than 10,000 years ago.