Michel Danino
THE LOST RIVER
On the Trail of the Sarasvatī
Contents
Dedication
Preface
Prologue
Part 1: The Lost Sarasvatī
{1}: The ‘Lost River of the Indian Desert’
{2}: The Mighty Sarasvatī
{3}: New Light on an Ancient River
Part 2: India’s First Civilization
{4}: A Great Leap Backward
{5}: The Indus Cities
{6}: From the Indus to the Sarasvatī
{7}: New Horizons
{8}: When Rivers Go Haywire
Part 3: From Sarasvatī to Gangā
{9}: The Tangible Heritage
{10}: The Intangible Heritage
{11}: The Sarasvatī’s Testimony
Epilogue: Sarasvatī Turns Invisible
Suggested Further Reading
Copyright Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Maps
Notes
Footnotes
Prologue
{1}: The ‘Lost River of the Indian Desert’
{2}: The Mighty Sarasvatī
{3}: New Light on an Ancient River
{4}: A Great Leap Backward
{6}: From the Indus to the Sarasvatī
{8}: When Rivers Go Haywire
{9}: The Tangible Heritage
{10}: The Intangible Heritage
{11}: The Sarasvatī’s Testimony
Follow Penguin
Copyright
To the many archaeologists,
noted or forgotten,
who have diligently dug India’s soil
To my parents,
with deep gratitude
Preface
The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvatī attempts to popularize, in the best sense of the term, the present state of research into the legendary river. Understandably, the Sarasvatī has often burst its scholarly banks to spill out into the public arena. To tell my tale, I have used a lay person’s language as far as possible, but I have rested my case on the most authentic findings from a variety of disciplines.
Detailed references for all quotations—which, let me stress, do not necessarily present the whole viewpoint of the quoted author—are found at the end of the book. (They are referred to in the text by Arabic numerals, while footnotes are referred to by asterisks.) My interpolations are within square brackets, which means that any parentheses are those of the quoted author. Except when indicated, the English translations of French texts are mine.
As the lay reader may find diacritical marks for Sanskrit words bothersome, I have only indicated long vowels, except for current geographical names: thus ‘Yamuna’ is today’s river, ‘Yamunā’ is the one in Harappan or Vedic times (in quotations, the author’s usage has been left unchanged). Indian place names, once rendered into English, are often spelt with disconcerting variety; I have chosen the most common spellings, preferably official ones, mentioning alternatives when possible. For dates before the Common Era, I have used the now standard abbreviation BCE instead of BC, and CE instead of AD. Maps are important in this book; in those drawn by me, international boundaries, when they appear, are as close as possible to those found on maps approved by the Government of India, yet should be regarded as only approximate, not authentic.
While writing this book, I often felt that the Sarasvatī’s story has the potential to captivate non-Indian readers too; I hope the brief explanations I have inserted to enable them to follow details of India’s geography and history will be excused by those familiar with them.
The motif at the end of each chapter, a bunch of three pipal leaves, is found on Harappan pottery.
*
I wish to thank the Archaeological Survey of India for its gracious permission to reproduce many photographs in this book. I am grateful to a few distinguished archaeologists, including Prof. B.B. Lal, the late Dr S.P. Gupta, Dr V.N. Misra, Dr R.S. Bisht, Prof. K.V. Raman and Dr R. Nagaswamy, who, over the course of a decade, generously shared their vast experience and patiently answered my nagging questions on various aspects of India’s protohistory. Many Indian, American and French friends helped me gather the materials for this book or drew my attention to new findings; some of them are acknowledged in the Notes at the end of the book, but I cannot fail to mention here Dr S.P. Gupta, Dr K.N. Dikshit, Prof. R.N. Iyengar, Dr Kalyanaraman, Vishal Agarwal and V. Karthik.
I am greatly indebted to Ravi Singh, chief editor of Penguin India, for his warm interest in the story of the Sarasvatī; my thanks, too, to R. Sivapriya for her guidance and to Debasri Rakshit for her careful editing. The book could not have been written without the support of my parents, my companion Nicole, and a few close friends whom I need not name; they know my debt to them. Finally, I owe a special debt of gratitude to Dr Nanditha Krishna for her precious advice on the conception and plan of the book, and for her constant encouragement.
Prologue
India loves myths; they people every literature and every oral tradition of the land. By ‘myth’, I mean a complex, multi-layered legend that weaves together heroic deeds and divine miracles, and, through powerful symbols, imprints a set of values on the mind of a people. The myth becomes, in turn, inseparable from its people’s customs and traditions. Certain tribes of India’s Northeast enact till today scenes from the Mahābhārata or the Rāmāyana, the two great Indian epics, even if it means substituting bamboo huts for glittering palaces. The message is what matters, not the décor.
And whether or not a myth has some historical basis, it is ‘true’ as long as it lives—and works—in the minds it has shaped. The great flood, the churning of the ocean, the descent of Gangā, the construction of a bridge to Lanka by an army of monkeys, or Krishna’s lifting of the Govardhan hill are, in that sense, true. Whether they are ‘facts’ in our limited sense of the term is irrelevant: myths are something greater than facts. As long as we live life like a burden on our shoulders, Gilgamesh will pursue his quest for immortality, and Sisyphus will keep pushing his boulder uphill only to see it roll down again. Myths of creation, of origin or identity, myths of conquest and heroic defiance, all fulfil precise social, cultural and spiritual functions. Whether or not a myth has grown around a historical seed, it is a maker of history.
Our modern mind cannot easily grasp the role and impact of myths in ancient or traditional societies, whether Greek, Polynesian or Indian: today’s societies are ‘mythless’ ones; for better or worse, we have depopulated our inner worlds. In a bizarre reversal of meaning, the very word ‘myth’, which originally meant ‘word’ or ‘speech’ in Greek (much like the Sanskrit vāch), has come to evoke a web of lies, a concocted fable or a collective delusion.
*
Our story starts with a ‘mythical’ river that makes its appearance in the Rig Veda, the most ancient Indian text—’her’ appearance, rather, since the Sarasvatī was also a goddess, a mother, and soon came to embody sacred speech, the Word. Multi-layered, as I said. Later texts, including the Mahābhārata, described the Sarasvatī as a ‘disappearing’ river, until she became ‘invisible’, meeting Gangā and Yamunā at their confluence; by then, she was the goddess, as we know her today.
As it happens, this myth is rooted in more than a vague historicity : we will discover how the Rig Veda’s ‘mighty river’ has been identified by most experts with the now dry bed of a river that once flowed through northwest India,* in a course roughly parallel to the Indus, a little to the south of it. The story of the quest for the ‘lost river’ has never been told in full, and there is a frequent misconception that the Sarasvatī’s red
iscovery is a recent one to be credited to satellite photography. Rather, we will see how, in the early nineteenth century, British geologists, civil and military officials started surveying the region, which today includes parts of the Indian states of Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan and the Cholistan Desert of Pakistan; the river’s bed apart, they found its banks strewn with countless ruined settlements, mute evidence that this desolate landscape had once known better times. Indeed, by the 1850s, Indologists were in no doubt about the location of the ‘mythic river’. Decades later, hundreds of those sites were found to have belonged to the Harappan or Indus civilization, which we will visit at some length. We will discover, in particular, considerable evidence that much of its culture survived the collapse of its cities, some of which is still surprisingly alive today.
At this point, we might expect a relatively simple story—as simple as, say, the rediscovery of Troy by Schliemann and its correlation with Homer’s Iliad—since the ancient literature also refers to numerous sites along the Sarasvatī. But the river got embroiled in a thorny issue, that of the Aryan invasion or migration theory, leading a few scholars to locate the Vedic Sarasvatī elsewhere, or deny its physical existence altogether. We will hear diverse viewpoints, learn from every one of them, and I will present my own, while weighing and trying to reconcile inputs from a variety of disciplines, including geology, climatology and archaeology. In the Indian context, a synthesis of archaeological and literary evidence has generally proved so elusive that archaeologists have often given up the attempt as a bad job, while scholars of literature rarely try to integrate archaeological data into the picture they construct from the texts. I hope to show that in the case of the Sarasvatī, we find a surprising number of echoes reverberating between the two disciplines, and can venture to exploit the correlations beyond what has been done so far.
Whatever perspective my readers will choose to adopt in the end, I will be rewarded if they feel enriched by insights on the dawn and early development of the Indian civilization—a civilization watered not only by the Indus and its tributaries, but also, in the view of most archaeologists, by a second river system that has since vanished.
Let us set off on our journey, attentive to every clue on the trail of the lost river.
Part 1
THE LOST SARASVATĪ
‘The trace of the ancient riverbed was recently found, still quite recognizable, and was followed far to the west. [This discovery] confirmed the correctness of the tradition.’
Louis Vivien de Saint-Martin, 1855
‘Although the river below the confluence [with the Ghaggar] is marked in our maps as Gaggar, it was formerly the Saraswatī; that name is still known amongst the people.’
C.F. Oldham, 1893
{1}
The ‘Lost River of the Indian Desert’
A few years ago, the BBC ran a story on what it called ‘India’s miracle river’. The Sarasvatī river’s dry bed, it announced, had been traced in the Rajasthan desert, and there was ‘startling new evidence that it may not have been a myth after all’.1 Such articles had been regularly appearing in the Indian press since the 1990s, prompting the public to believe that this ‘mythical river’ had just been rediscovered. While some of the evidence in question is indeed two or three decades old, in reality the search for the river goes back almost two centuries.
The British Raj may rightly be blamed for many sins, but not for a lack of thoroughness in documenting the features of the newly acquired ‘jewel of the Empire’. From the latter part of the eighteenth century onward, surveyors, geologists, naturalists, educators, administrators and army officers criss-crossed the Indian land mass and produced a commensurate mass of reports, papers, gazetteers, thick tomes and treatises, many of which remain invaluable documents of the time. From the humblest herb to the highest peak, little escaped their painstaking inventories.
We have, thus, a few early accounts of explorations of the region that concerns us: in the east, the Himalayan foothills known as the Shivalik Hills, with an altitude of 900 to 2300 m; moving westward, we cross India’s states of Haryana and Punjab, the northwestern fringes of the Rajasthan desert, its Pakistani counterpart called the Cholistan Desert, finally reaching the Indus river system (Fig. 1.1). Most of the scenes in this book will unfold in this setting, a vast and largely arid plain that was the theatre of many historical developments—and protohistorical ones, as its explorers soon realized.
FIRST SURVEYS
With the collapse of the Maratha confederacy in 1818, the Rajput chiefs, who had placed themselves under its protection, were forced to accept British suzerainty. One of the agents in that collapse was Lieutenant Colonel James Tod, who in 1812 had been deputed as the East India Company’s ‘political agent in Rajpootana’ (today’s Rajasthan). When he was not busy gathering intelligence, the post gave him ample opportunity to explore this vast region and meticulously document its geography, history and culture; he would also send emissaries to remote parts if he could not personally visit them. Tod’s interest in the culture of the land was not a mere eyewash; he became something of an ‘Orientalist’ and an amateur numismatist. From the eleven folio volumes of notes he submitted to the Company, he extracted a two-volume Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, which remains a reference in the field. Tod died in 1835 at the age of fifty-three, three years after the publication of his work, and perhaps exhausted by it, as a side remark he wrote on his poor health suggests.
The part of interest to us is titled ‘Sketch of the Indian Desert’. In Tod’s description, the ‘Marusthali’,* as it was then called, consists of ‘expansive belts of sand, elevated upon a plain only less sandy, and over whose surface numerous thinly peopled towns and hamlets are scattered’. He also records ‘the tradition of the absorption of the Caggar river, as one of the causes of the comparative depopulation of the northern desert’.2 This tradition was transmitted in the form of a ‘couplet still sung among Rajputs, which dates the ruin of this part of the country back to the drying up of the Hakra.’3 Although Tod could not recall the exact text of the said song, he acknowledged ‘the utility of these ancient traditional couplets’.4 ‘Folk history’, as we would call it today. A little later, we will meet a young Italian scholar who also got prodigiously interested in the bardic lore of Rajasthan.
But what are these ‘Caggar’ and ‘Hakra’ rivers? They are, in fact, one and the same (with a few variants, such as Guggur, Sankra, Slakra, Slakro, etc.) and had been marked on British maps since 1788 at least, when James Rennel, Surveyor General of Bengal, published his Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan.5 The first name, today spelt ‘Ghaggar’, refers to a largely seasonal river that rises in the Shivalik Hills near Dagshai and touches the plains close to Pinjore, some 20 km northeast of Chandigarh; it then flows north of Ambala, through Sirsa in Haryana, and Hanumangarh and Suratgarh in Rajasthan. The Ghaggar crosses today’s Indo-Pakistan border near Anupgarh and continues, under the name of ‘Hakra’, through Fort Abbas, Marot, Derawar Fort (where it is also known as Wahind,† Sotra, etc.), until it loses itself in the sands of the Cholistan Desert—its bed, rather, since its waters never reach that far; although they occasionally flowed down to Hanumangarh till the early twentieth century, today the monsoon-fed river exists only in its upper course, and, even there, is never more than an average stream. Yet, James Tod finds worthy of mention a tradition alive in the 1810s that blames the region’s ‘depopulation’ on the Ghaggar’s ‘absorption’ or disappearance; he even notes how ‘the vestiges of large towns, now buried in the sands, confirm the truth of this tradition, and several of them claim a high antiquity.’6 This tradition can only mean that the river once had much more abundant waters than in Tod’s time—but let us not anticipate.
The etymology of the word ‘Ghaggar’ is interesting (and there are several rivers in India bearing kindred names, such as the Ghaghara or Gogra flowing through Ayodhya). We find a few candidates in Sanskrit texts: the word gargara occurs in the Atharva Veda (4.15.12) in the
sense of a stream or a water body; the Mahābhārata (12.59.111) mentions a tīrtha‡ on the banks of the Sarasvatī called ‘Gargasrota’, where Garga, a yogi versed in astronomy, lived; ‘Ghargharikā Kunda’ is the name of a tīrtha in the Brahma Purāna (25.64).7 In the same line, we find the word gharghara, of obvious onomatopoeic origin: it is cognate with the English ‘gurgle’, and the river’s music must have suggested it.
Major Colvin is our second witness. In 1833, as Superintendent of Canals, he submitted to the government a report ‘On the Restoration of the Ancient Canals of the Delhi Territory’, a title that aptly summarizes his mission. In order to suggest how best to revive some of those ‘ancient’ canals, generally dating to medieval times (such as the Western Yamuna Canal), Colvin first had to document every important watercourse and channel, natural or man-made, in the region extending from Punjab to northern Rajasthan. He followed the bed of the Chitang (or Chitrang, today generally called Chautang), a small river flowing alongside the Yamuna at first, then veering westward and continuing south of the Ghaggar before uniting with it a little above Suratgarh in Rajasthan (see Fig. 1.1). But it is a junction of riverbeds only, since ‘the Ghaghar river . . . does not in the heaviest season pass in force beyond Bhatnir§ . . . and the period when this river ceased to flow as one is far beyond record, and belongs to the fabulous periods of which even tradition is scanty.’8 Those ‘fabulous periods’ will be the subject of our own exploration.
Some of Colvin’s careful observations of the region deserve to be noted in some detail:
What the country about and west of Raneah [Rania, near Sirsa in Haryana] . . . has been, may be inferred from the numerous sites of towns and villages scattered over a tract, where now fixed habitations are hardly to be met with. I allude only to the vicinity of the bed of the Ghaghar, with which I am personally acquainted;—when the depopulation took place, I am not prepared to say; it must have been long since, as none of the village sites present[s] one brick standing on another, above ground,—though, in digging beneath it, very frequent specimens of an old brick are met with, about 16 inches by 10 inches, and 3 inches thick, of most excellent quality: buildings erected of such materials could not have passed away in any short period. The evident cause of this depopulation of the country is the absolute absence of water . . .
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