In today’s mini-episode, we’re going to encounter one of the largest creatures that ever lived on Earth! It’s a Timingila or Timingilam!
In most mythology and fiction around the world, there are reports of extra extra large sea creatures. There’s the Kraken from Scandinvaian folklore. There’s Nessie, the Loch Ness Monster. From literature, there’s the Terrible Dogfish from Pinocchio which was a kilometer long, and the whale from the Seven Voyages of Sinbad which was so huge that Sinbad’s ship parked there thinking it was an island. You may also recall the scene from Jurassic World that showed a supersize Mosasaur jumping out of the water to eat the teeny tiny looking great white shark.
Well, the Timingila is the Indian mythology equivalent of all of those.
The name literally means whale swallower. Timin means a whale, and Gila is swallower.
Whales are this creature’s favorite snack.
Considering most whales are endangered, it’s maybe a good thing we don’t have the Timingilas around anymore, or they’d be hunted down to extinction.
Generally Timingilas like to keep to themselves in the Ocean deep.
But they do appear in many different stories, including the Ramayan and the Mahabharat.
In the Ramayan, Ram encountered these whale eaters as he crossed over from India to Sri Lanka on the way to rescue Sita.
There’s a passing reference to these in the Mahabharat as well.
One major encounter was with the Rishi Markandeya. We’ll definitely do a separate episode on Markandeya, but the short story about his life is that he was a Rishi who was meant to be killed at a young age. But Shiva intervened, and since then Markandeya is immortal.
Markandeya, being immortal has experienced and survived the destruction of the entire world! Do you remember Episode 1 – Unicorn Fish which coincidentally featured a much bigger fish than the Timingila? Well, in that episode King Manu the Merciful had rescued Markandeya as well.
But remember there are many cycles of destruction and great flood. During one of those other ones, Markandeya encountered a Timingila as well as a Makar that were trying to eat him. A Makar is another cryptid, more like a crocodile fish. Which might be one way to describe a shark.
Now you might wonder – is the Timingila just Megalodon, the legendary mega shark?
The answer is simple. No. Megalodons went extinct at least a couple of million years ago, long before the first humans.Besides, Megalodons though big werent big enough to swallow whales. Though that part is admittedly exaggerated.
If you think about it, one reasonable explanation is that Timingila and Timin are both just whales. Given the wide variety of whale subspecies in the Indian Ocean, there’s a huge possibility that people simply mistook two widely varied subspecies of whales to be two different creatures altogether. The smallest whale, a dwarf sperm whale is small enough by whale standards at least, to easily fit inside the mouth of the largest whale – the blue whale. Though if the Blue whale actually tried it, it would probably choke. Its mouth may be large enough but its throat is not.
That’s all for this mini-episode.
Next Time
In this weekend’s full episode we’re back to the Ramayan! We’ll continue where we left off. In the forest that was to become Ram and Laxman and Sita’s home for a long time