Early Life
Dr Tilak Ranjan Bera was introduced to traveling by his parents as a child. His father, a senior officer in the Indian Railways, facilitated his obsession for traveling. By the time he completed school, he had seen major parts of India and developed an addiction for traveling further to discover the mysteries of his motherland.
During his adolescent years, he managed to escape occasionally from his rigorous routine while pursuing medical studies to explore nature. He developed a parallel passion for wildlife photography, trekking and nurturing his love for nature.
Life as a doctor made him quite successful, taking him to places and meeting new faces. As a doctor in the Army and Navy, he was exposed to the remotest areas of India. During this period, he came across myriad archaeological marvels, ancient artifacts, indigenous stone-age tribes, geological puzzles, unique genetic identities, pieces of evidence of mythological events and most importantly, traces of missing events related to the ancient period of India. A strong desire to delve deeper into and to know more about the pre-recorded past of India made him explore further, leaving him with more unanswered questions, puzzles and a somewhat inaccurate written history of India.
Profession
The Quest
Dr. Bera started to explore with a new mission to deal with the unexplained and introduced never-thought-of possibilities. He says “Ancient prehistoric puzzles need to be solved, explained and interpreted with tools like anthropology, genetics, animal symbols, understanding geo-physical coastal changes related to glacial period, early human migration from India and much more, to come to a possible understanding”. He claims that comprehending ancient Indian history cannot be complete unless we study “within India” and “out-of-India” movement of anatomically modern humans on a macro level. He says, “Geological events, like glacial maximum, need to be looked at seriously while researching on early human migration.”
Dr Bera was posted in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, where he came across different tribes who are very different from one another in culture, language, food habits and practice a very primitive lifestyle. He conducted extensive research about various fraternities and detected glaring anomalies that made him question our existing knowledge of Indian history of the pre-recorded period. His endeavour is to arrange the sequence of events of ancient India as best as possible, taking several scientific factors and geological events into consideration, and document them in his books.
In the meantime, tsunami devastated the Nicobars and transformed the archipelago into a completely new place. He documented this geo-physical and social transformation in a remarkable manner. This is possibly one of the rare efforts by an individual to follow the process over a long time, record and publish such an event of transformation of an archipelago. He was profusely applauded by the highest local administrative authorities for this meticulous work and his books were accepted as historical record. His work was appreciated at the national and global level.
Dr Bera’s books on Andaman and Nicobars gained popularity as his documentation was immaculate. At this juncture he felt an urge to dedicate his life to arrange the pre-recorded period of India. He replaced the scalpel with a pen as his profession and Indology as his subject. The explorer in him wanted to pen down his experiences and explorations. Never-thought-of concepts and notions triggered him to travel more, write more and publish more. “I find the Himalayas fascinating and larger than life,” he often says. His researches are mostly based in India, which played a pivotal role in arranging the history of the arrival of the anatomically modern humans and, more importantly, their spread to faraway lands from India. He made an attempt to arrange the process genetically, anthropologically, ethnically, linguistically and culturally. He says, “Ancient Indians interacted with other global ancient fraternities. The majority of this migration occurred through trans-Himalayan routes. Understanding the geo-physiology of the Himalayas and finding the alignment of the ‘Uttarapath’ is of utmost importance to understand the migration paths leading to ethnic connectivity of early human beings”.
Reflections
Dr Bera, born and brought up in Kolkata, did his schooling from Ballygunge Government High School. He is a recipient of the National Scholarship from the Govt. of India and went on to graduate from Calcutta Medical College and did his post-graduation, in ophthalmology, from the University of Mumbai. He joined the Indian Armed Forces in 1984 and took early retirement in 2007. He pursued his passion for exploring the history of ancient India.
He has been awarded the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship by the United States-India Educational Foundation. He was affiliated to Yale University, Connecticut, USA during his Fulbright Fellowship. He has also received the Senior Research Fellowship from the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. Several books authored by Dr. Bera have reached libraries all over the world.
Accolades
Over a period of time he realized that India is a unique territory of the world and the events related to the place needs to be arranged in a different manner than the rest of the world. A number of geo-physical events during the glacial and interglacial periods resulted in genetic fusion of fraternities which is unique to the territory. He embarked on a mission to understand the following events essential to arrange the pre-recorded period of India in a scientific manner:
Mission
-
Anatomical modern humans from Africa, following their “out of Africa” movement reached India about 65,000 years back, much before they reached any other region of the world.
-
India is possibly the only region where evidence of their continued existence is available. It is possible that in many other regions of the world they lived only intermittently and became extinct during the Glacial maximum.
-
​During the last glacial period newer genetic identities formed on the Bengal coast, as, the Indian gene pool interacted with the Southeast Asian gene pool.
-
Ancient Indian fraternities became culturally refined, developed languages and gradually went on to become technologically advanced.
-
During the interglacial period as the coastal landmass submerged, Indian-origin fraternities were compelled to migrate to distal lands like Egypt and Europe.
-
They interacted with other ancient world civilizations and trans-Himalayan migration played a significant role in this.
Finally, he also feels that -
-
There is a need to establish the alignment of the ‘Uttarapath’, which served as the northern highway for such migrations.
He kept on exploring every corner of the subcontinent for almost two decades. It took him several years to extensively explore the ethnically complex, culturally rich and geographically difficult terrain of the Northeast India. His journeys, photographs and experiences are well-documented in his publication of more than a dozen books under his name. He has collected amazing evidences while exploring Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh which he intends to document in his future publications.
Publications
As he was convinced that the ancient Indian civilization had interacted with the Egyptian civilization, he embarked on a journey to record the evidences present there. His experience is documented in a book published recently titled ‘India In Egypt’. This book is based on ground evidences present both in India and Egypt. This is the story of interaction of ancient India with a ‘hidden country’ or ‘Gupta Desha’, Aiguptos in Greek, and now Egypt. This book has the potential to alter the history of India and that of the world.
