The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati

by Michel Danino

  It is striking that Colvin should agree with Tod (whose work he seems to have been unaware of) on two crucial points: the region was once (‘long since’) populated, as ruins of ‘towns and villages’ show, and it ceased to be so when the Ghaggar somehow lost much of its water.

  Those two observations were corroborated a decade later by Major F. Mackeson, ‘Officiating Superintendent on Special Mission to Seersa and Bahawulpore’. His 1844 report on the route between those two cities (Sirsa in today’s Haryana and Bahawalpur on the Sutlej, now in Pakistan) makes it clear what this ‘special mission’ might have been: it had to do with commerce and, probably more so, with military preparations. Both required a more direct route between Delhi and what is today Pakistan’s southern province of Sind: ‘Whether viewed with reference to the march of troops, or to the dispatch of military stores from the heart of our Upper Provinces at Delhi to Scindh [Sind], or to a direct line of dāk [station on a post route] from Delhi to Sukkur [on the Indus, in Sind], the advantages of the new road are too obvious to require to be dwelt on. The saving of time in marching troops by this road [between Sirsa and Bahawalpur] instead of by Ferozepore [that is, through Punjab] would be ten days.’9

  At the time of Mackeson’s exploration, the British had not yet acquired control over Punjab in the north; they would do so a few years later, taking advantage of the disarray that followed Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s death in 1839. Access to Sind, which had just been annexed, was therefore limited, and a new route could prove useful in case of turmoil there. In addition, the Bolan Pass, at the top of Sind’s Kachi plains, offered access to Afghanistan via Quetta; in fact, with Ranjit Singh refusing passage through Punjab, that was the pass the British had had to use in 1838, when they launched their first and disastrous onslaught on Afghanistan, after years of playing cat-and-mouse with Russia (the famous ‘Great Game’).

  But how could Mackeson’s ‘new road’ to Sind be so advantageous when it ran through what appeared to be an arid and hostile terrain?

  Between Sirsa and Suratgarh, Mackeson, like his predecessors, found that ‘the country bears traces of having once been well inhabited. At no very distant period, the waters of the Guggur [Ghaggar] river reached as far as Sooratgurh, and old wells are numerous as far as Bhatner [Hanumangarh]’.10 Moving further westward, he noted ‘one remarkable feature in the country traversed to Bahawalpore, which is the traces that exist in it of the course of some former river’. And ‘it is to the forsaken bed of this river that we are indebted for the opening to us of a road through the desert’.11 Indebted because only along this ‘deserted channel’ was there ‘a continuous line of villages . . . for the reason that wells dug in it are generally found to have sweet water, while the water of wells dug at a distance from it either North or South, is usually brackish’.12 This important observation has since been corroborated by scientific studies.

  In fact, Mackeson opined that beyond Anupgarh, which today stands close to the Indian side of the international border,

  the breadth to which the bed of the Slakro [Hakra] attains in this part of its course is such as to favour the idea that it was a larger river than the Sutlej . . . Ages have elapsed since this river ceased to flow, and I shall leave to those who care to prosecute the inquiry to establish the permanency or otherwise of its character, merely observing here, that . . . I traced to my entire satisfaction the deserted course of a large river as far as the Kalipahar¶ wells . . . From that point its course was reported to me to continue . . . passing Delawur [Derawar Fort] and other forts in the desert, built on its channel . . .13

  What mattered to Mackeson was that the route was not only clear, it was serviceable. Indeed, should the need arise, ‘camels may march by it fifty abreast on either side of a column of troops’. And although, as he noted above, ‘ages have elapsed since this river ceased to flow’, they would have no worry on account of water: ‘the present supply of water from wells would suffice for the passage of a kafila [caravan] of three hundred camels, and we have only to increase the number of wells on the road to admit of large bodies of troops moving by it.’14

  This strategic angle apart, Mackeson dwelt at length on the promising trade openings the new route would offer, and ended with a zealous expression of his ‘sanguine hopes of one day seeing the neglected rivers to the North West of the Indian Continent vie with those to the East, as channels of commerce and civilization’.15 In that order, if you please.

  Major Mackeson might have been surprised to learn that his proposed ‘new road’ was not that new. It lay precisely in the Multan-Delhi alignment, and many an invader with an eye on Delhi had used it in past centuries. So had Masud I, son of Mahmud of Ghazni, when in 1037 he decided to expand his empire beyond the Punjab, reaching Hansi (on the Chautang) and conquering its fort before pushing on to Sonipat and beyond.16 Or Timur who, leaving Samarkand in 1398 on his Indian expedition, rode through Afghanistan and crossed the Jhelum below its confluence with the Chenab; from Multan, Timur’s army reached Bhatnir, whose population of 10,000 it massacred; the scene was soon repeated at Sarsutī (today’s Sirsa, also on the Ghaggar), at Delhi, and all along Timur’s northward thrust to the Shivalik Hills and on to Jammu.17 If we can disregard the macabre side of the invaders’ chronicles, we will note, at least, that the Ghaggar-Chautang interfluve was then more populated and richer than at any time thereafter: six decades before Timur left his trail of devastation, the well-known Arab traveller Ibn Battutah, reaching Delhi through the same route, had found the region abounding in paddy fields,18 and even earlier it was renowned for its sugarcane. In contrast, the Gazetteer of Western Rajputana19 of 1901 noted that in the stretch from Anupgarh to Hanumangarh, less than one-tenth of the land was under annual cultivation.

  A FRENCH GEOGRAPHER BUTTS IN

  About the same time as Mackeson was surveying his promising ‘new’ route, a very different kind of exploration of Indian lore was going on, which would soon get entangled with our explorations of the topography of the Northwest.

  In the eighteenth century, European travellers to India, especially French ones such as A.H. Anquetil-Duperron or Antoine Polier,20 had been hunting for a copy of the mysterious Rig Veda—a text which, they were told by their Indian informants, contained the oldest records of the Hindu religion. Their quest for this oriental Grail was in vain, though otherwise fruitful of precious travelogues and testimonies. Unknown to them, and with a wholly Indian irony, the object of their pursuit was all along patiently waiting in Paris, in the form of a full manuscript received by the Royal Library (today’s Bibliothèque Nationale) as early as in 1731.21 With no one knowing Sanskrit at the time, the manuscript could not be identified, much less deciphered, and soon fell into oblivion.

  Half a century later, a few British scholars, including the famous William Jones, finally managed to master the sacred language. This newly acquired knowledge soon spread, and so did the first translations of Hindu and Buddhist texts: in just a few years, a new yet tantalizingly ancient world opened up before a bemused Europe. In Paris, the Collège de France opened Europe’s first chair of Sanskrit in 1814. In 1830, the first excerpts of the Rig Veda were published in Latin by Friedrich A. Rosen, a German Orientalist, followed posthumously eight years later by his translation of the first of the Rig Veda’s ten books (mandalas). Sitting in Oxford, the formidable German linguist and Orientalist Friedrich Max Müller, whose path we shall cross again, started publishing his monumental edition of the Vedic text in 1849; the following year, H.H. Wilson released the first volume of his complete English translation.

  Across the English Channel, a French scholar who had pored over Tod’s, Colvin’s and Mackeson’s accounts was now going through those translations (including French ones) with the keenest interest. Louis Vivien de Saint-Martin had been a founder member of the prestigious Société de Géographie in 1821, when he was just nineteen; through maps and travellers’ accounts, he explored the sources of the Nile and other parts of Africa, the Caucasus and Mexico, even
tually becoming a much-published geographer, author of atlases as well as historical studies of the progress of geography in many parts of the world. His History of Geography and Geographical Discoveries from the Remotest Past to Our Times (1873) is a landmark of the genre. In 1864, Vivien de Saint-Martin sponsored the admission of his friend Jules Verne to the Société de Géographie; the latter readily acknowledged his debt to the great geographer—by making him a principal character in his novel In Search of the Castaways: Jacques Paganel, the erudite but absent-minded ‘Secretary of the Geographical Society’, was drawn on Vivien de Saint-Martin’s model.

  Whether the real-life geographer was flattered or not, we do not know, but in his work he was anything but absent-minded. Inspired by a programme proposed in 1849 by another learned society, the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres, for ‘the reconstruction of India’s ancient geography from the most primitive times to the epoch of the Muslim invasion’,22 Vivien de Saint-Martin planned a series of twelve major studies of India’s geography. He was aware of ‘the immensity of the task’ and wondered ‘whether I am destined to fulfil it. Human life is brief, and its necessities often painful; the number of days we are granted is rarely sufficient to the realization of the projects nurtured by our mind with the greatest love’.23 He completed three of the planned volumes, all of which had a considerable influence on generations of scholars. The last two, published in 1858, dealt respectively with Greek accounts of India’s geography and with Hsüan-tsang’s** travels through Central Asia and India.24

  The first of these three thick tomes is the one of interest to us here: A Study on the Geography and the Primitive People of India’s North-West, According to Vedic Hymns proposed the first-ever synthesis between the Rig Vedic hymns and British surveys of their newly acquired territory. Presented to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres in 1855 (and published in 1860), it was awarded a prize. In his introduction, Vivien de Saint-Martin explained how ‘our first labour had to be dedicated to Sanskrit geography, a truly immense field of investigation, which we found to be almost virgin. Ten years of almost uninterrupted diligence hardly sufficed to explore every part of it. Nevertheless, we dare hope that historical and archaeological researches will henceforth find solid support in the very extensive work we dedicated to India’s ancient geography’.25

  His hopes would be fulfilled. Among the many riddles his book delved into, while trying to match the Veda’s locales with the Northwest’s geography, was that of the Sarasvatī. Where should the lost river be located on the map? Vivien de Saint-Martin’s approach to the problem that concerns us was straightforward. He observed, correctly, that the Sarasvatī river is ‘the one which the hymns mention most frequently, whose name they utter with the highest praise and predilection’. It was also ‘the first river wholly belonging to the Veda’s historical arena’.26 And it was, according to tradition, on its banks that the Vedic hymns were collected and compiled by Vyāsa into the four Vedas.27

  He then noted the existence of today’s stream called ‘Sarsuti, . . . a rather insignificant river . . . which rises at the foot of the last steep slopes overlooking the plain [that is, the Shivaliks] in the rather narrow corridor between the Djemna [Yamuna] and the Satledj [Sutlej].’28 That is also correct: there is indeed today a seasonal stream called ‘Sarsuti’, an obvious corruption of ‘Sarasvatī’ (we saw above how the city of Sirsa was also ‘Sarsuti’ in medieval times); the stream had been noted by Rennel in 1788 and marked on his ‘map of Hindoostan’ as ‘Sursooty (or Seres-watty)’.29 The Sarsuti, then, rises in the Sirmur hills that are part of the Shivaliks; it touches the plains near Ad Badri,†† flows past Thanesar and Kurukshetra, receives the waters of the monsoon-fed Markanda near Pehowa, and joins those of the Ghaggar near the village of Rasula, close to today’s Haryana-Punjab border—to be precise, halfway between the towns of Kharak (Kaithal district, Haryana) and Shatrana (Patiala district, Punjab). Fig. 1.3 shows a map of 1862 clearly marking the bed of the Sarsuti (nowadays, most maps simply call it ‘Sarasvatī’‡‡). Till recently, maps of the Survey of India marked the stream as ‘Sarasvati Nala’ or ‘Sarasvati Nadi’, probably because the same names are still found on decades-old rail and road bridges crossing the dry bed, as a team from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) noted.30

  Vivien de Saint-Martin showed a geographer’s insight when he remarked, ‘The ancient designation of Sarasvatī very much appears to have embraced, apart from the chief watercourse flowing far to the west, the totality of the streams flowing down from the mountain close to each other before they unite in a single bed.’31In other words, he regarded all the streams we have seen so far—from west to east, the Ghaggar, the Markanda (and we should add the Dangri or Tangri between these two), the Sarsuti and the Chautang, and their smaller tributaries—as being, collectively, the relic of the Rig Veda’s Sarasvatī. (The Chautang, as we will see, was later identified with the Vedic Drishadvati river.)

  Vivien de Saint-Martin added the Veda’s description of the Sarasvatī as a river ‘flowing to the sea’, which, to him, indicated that ‘its course then extended through the now arid and waterless plains extending between the Satlej and the gulf of Kotch.§§

  The study of the region fully confirms the Vedic piece of information. The trace of the ancient riverbed was recently found, still quite recognizable, and was followed far to the west’,33 a reference to the explorations of Tod, Colvin and Mackeson. Vivien de Saint-Martin summarized their findings, which, to him, ‘confirmed the correctness of the tradition’.34 His own conclusion was, ‘This positive recognition of the locale is crucially important for a full understanding of Vedic geography’,35 a clue later scholars made ample use of.

  He was probably the first scholar to spell out the problem in such clear terms : the Rig Veda refers to a mighty river called Sarasvatī, and the topography of the Yamuna-Sutlej interfluve is scarred by a now dry river system, one of the streams of which still bears the name of Sarsuti (Sarasvatī). Can the two be equated? His answer in the affirmative was accepted by generations of Sanskritists and Indologists, some of whom we will talk about in the next chapter.

  PUNJAB’S ‘SACRED RIVER’

  The same answer soon made its way into the gazetteers published by the colonial powers. In 1885, under the entry ‘Ghaggar’, the encyclopaedic Imperial Gazetteer of India described the river’s course, and noted: ‘In ancient times the lower portion of the river seems to have borne the name of its confluent the Saraswati or Sarsuti, which joins the main stream in Patiala territory. It then possessed the dimensions of an important channel . . . At present, however, every village through which the stream passes has diverted a portion of its waters for irrigation, no less than 10,000 acres being supplied from this source in Ambala District alone . . . During the lower portion of its course, in Sirsa District, the bed of the Ghaggar is dry from November to June, affording a cultivable surface for rich crops of rice and wheat.’36

  Let us turn to the entry ‘Saraswati (Sarsuti)’, defined as a ‘sacred river of the Punjab, famous in the early Brahmanical annals’. We learn that the river rises ‘in the low hills of Sirmur State, emerges upon the plain at Zadh Budri [Ad Badri], a place esteemed sacred by all Hindus’, and, before joining the Ghaggar, ‘passes by the holy town of Thanesar and the numerous shrines of the Kuruksetra, a tract¶¶ celebrated as a centre of pilgrimages, and as the scene of the battle-fields of the Mahabharatha’. The Gazetteer repeats, ‘In ancient times, the united stream below the point of junction appears to have borne the name of Sarsuti, and, undiminished by irrigation near the hills, to have flowed across the Rajputana plains . . .’

  Correlating geography with early literature, the Gazetteer adds, ‘Some of the earliest Aryan settlements in India were on the banks of the Saraswati, and the surrounding country has from almost Vedic times been held in high veneration. The Hindus identify the river with Saraswati, the Sanskrit Goddess of Speech and Learning.’37

  We will come to the
reasons for this identification in due time; for the moment, we must turn to fresh explorations of the region’s topographical features, which sought to pinpoint more precisely how the river came to be ‘lost’.

  CHANGING COURSE

  Richard Dixon Oldham, a British geologist, joined the Geological Survey of India (GSI) in 1879 at the age of twenty-one; it ran in the family: his father, Thomas Oldham had been the GSI’s first director. But scientific posterity remembers the son more than the father: apart from reference works, memoirs and numerous research papers on India’s geology, R.D. Oldham specialized in seismology; when a terrible earthquake struck Assam in 1897, destroying Shillong (which was then part of that state), his study of the seismographic records led him to deduce the existence of the earth’s molten core. Ill-health forced Oldham to leave the GSI and India at the age of forty-five, though he continued to contribute to the discipline from his retreat in England and later southern France.

  It is his lesser-known research that concerns us here : his upstream (rather, ‘upbed’) survey from the Bahawalpur region to the Hissar district, in his capacity as deputy superintendent of the Survey. Understandably, his professional competence gave him an edge over his military predecessors.