Great Rann of Kutch

The Great Rann of Kutch is a salt marsh in the Thar Desert in the Kutch District of Gujarat, India. It is about 7500 km² in area and is reputed to be one of the largest salt deserts in the world. This area has been inhabited by the Kutchi people.

Quotes

• The U.S. archaeologist Louis Flam summed up those studies thus: ‘Terrestrial Kachchh would have consisted of an island, or islands, completely surrounded by a tidal and seasonal sea.’
  • Flam, ‘The Prehistoric Indus River System and the Indus Civilization in Sindh’, p. 61.
  • quoted from Danino, M. (2020). Climate, Environment, and the Harappan Civilization. R. Chakrabarti, Critical Themes in Environmental History of India, 333-377.

• The Rann was, according to U.B. Mathur, a ‘shallow arm of the sea’.
  • Mathur, ‘Chronology of Harappan Port Towns of Gujarat in the Light of Sea Level Changes during the Holocene,’ p. 64.
  • quoted from Danino, M. (2020). Climate, Environment, and the Harappan Civilization. R. Chakrabarti, Critical Themes in Environmental History of India, 333-377.

• More recent work by Gaur et al. suggests that it was ‘an extended Gulf and must have been navigable at least up to the early centuries of the Christian era, [while] the Little Rann of Kachchh was navigable even as late as 16th century AD.’
  • Gaur et al., ‘Was the Rann of Kachchh navigable during the Harappan times (Mid-Holocene)?’, p. 1490.
  • quoted from Danino, M. (2020). Climate, Environment, and the Harappan Civilization. R. Chakrabarti, Critical Themes in Environmental History of India, 333-377.

• It is, I believe, a space without a counterpart on the globe ; differing as widely from what is termed the sandy desert as it differs from the cultivated plain; neither does it resemble the steppes of Russia, but may justly be considered of a nature peculiar to itself. No where is that singular phenomenon the mirage or sirab of the desert, or, as the natives most aptly term it, dulchan (smoke or vapour), seen to greater advantage than on the Runn. The smallest shrubs on it have at a distance the appearance of a forest ; and, on a nearer approach, assume sometimes that of ships in full sail, at others that of breakers on a rock. In one instance, I observed a cluster of bushes, which looked like a pier with tall-masted vessels lying close up to it, and on approaching, not a bank was near the shrubs to account for the deception. From it, too, the hills of Cutch seem more lofty, and to have merged into the clouds, their bases being obscured by vapour. The wild ass, or khar gada, is the only inhabitant of this desolate region.
  • A. Burnes, 1835 quoted in [1] quoted in Chakrabarti, D. K., & Saini, S. (2009). The problem of the sarasvati river and notes on the archaeological geography of haryana and indian panjab. Aryan Books International.