The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati

by Michel Danino

  Writing in 1886 in the Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal38 (Fig. 1.4), he rejected theories of the days that attributed the loss of the Sarasvatī to diminished rainfall, pointing out that this would have affected all rivers equally. Instead, he proposed that the ‘Lost River of the Indian Desert was none other than the Sutlej, and that it was “lost” when the river turned westwards to join the Bias [Beas]’.39 This explanation has been broadly endorsed since then, especially in view of the Sutlej’s sharp westward bend near Rupar (or Ropar, or Rupnagar, in India’s Punjab, not far from Chandigarh), and the existence of a palaeobed that connected it long ago with the Ghaggar, which flows hardly 50 km away to the east.

  Oldham also believed that part of the Yamunā’s waters might have flowed into the Ghaggar-Hakra bed in Vedic times: ‘It may have been . . . that the Jumna [Yamunā], after leaving the hills, divided its waters . . . and that the portion which flowed to the Punjab was known as the Saraswati while that which joined the Ganges was called the Yamuna.’40 In his opinion, that double desertion of the Sarasvatī, by the Sutlej and the Yamunā, which brought about ‘a considerable change in the hydrography of the region’,41 was caused by the well-known waywardness of north India’s rivers. As a more recent example, he cited the case of the Brahmaputra changing its course in the early nineteenth century, a little upstream of its confluence with the Ganges (in today’s Bangladesh). That waywardness is nothing but the effect of the very flat flood plains of the entire Indo-Gangetic basin: here, the phenomena of erosion and sedimentation, which would hardly be noticeable in the Deccan’s rivers, get greatly amplified and trigger frequent shifts in the watercourses.

  In fact, Oldham might have just as aptly quoted Strabo, a Greek savant of the first century BCE whose Geography of the ancient world remained unsurpassed for centuries. For his description of northwest India, Strabo relied on the work of several Greek historians, among them Aristobulus who had accompanied Alexander the Great on his campaign to India. Strabo noted, for instance:

  He [Aristobulus] says that when he was sent on some business, he saw a tract of land deserted which contained more than a thousand cities with their villages, for the Indus, having forsaken its proper channel, turned itself into another on the left much deeper, into which it burst like a cataract, so that it no longer watered the country on the right, from which it receded, for this had been raised by the inundations not only above the level of the new channel but even above that of the new inundations.42

  What could have uplifted this strip of land on the right bank of the Indus? Strabo shrewdly assumed that ‘India is liable to earthquakes as it becomes porous from the excess of moisture and opens into fissures, whence even the course of rivers is altered’.43 While the explanation for earthquakes is, of course, fanciful, Strabo’s assumption that northwest India’s seismic activity might cause changes in the course of major rivers was surprisingly prescient; in fact, this phenomenon has been invoked by geologists in recent years in the context of the Sarasvatī (and witnessed in the case of the Indus).

  At this point, it is worth stressing that the three currently minor rivers that we have focused on—the Ghaggar, the Sarsuti and the Chautang, along with their tributaries such as the Dangri or the Markanda—flow down from the Shivaliks in the strip of land between Chandigarh and Yamunanagar, which is hardly more than 80 km in breadth. A few more kilometres to the west, we find the Sutlej flowing towards the Indus and the Arabian Sea; and a little to the east, the Yamuna winding her way to the Ganges and the Bay of Bengal. In other words, these seasonal rivers are located on a narrow and fairly flat** watershed between the two vast river systems of the 3000 km-long Indus and the 2500 km-long Ganges: it is easy to visualize how a slight uplift of the sort reported by Strabo, or else erosion caused by powerful spates, could have triggered the diversion of the Sutlej or Yamuna waters westward and eastward, respectively, away from the Ghaggar-Hakra system, a diversion cogently explained by Oldham for the first time.

  That explanation apart, R.D. Oldham’s work was valuable because it established that the landscape of today’s Punjab and Haryana must have been radically different at some remote time.

  THE RANN

  Five years later, a monumental paper on the hydrography of the Indus basin appeared under the pen of Henry George Raverty, a British major of the Indian Army who had acquired first-hand knowledge of the Punjab during the military campaigns that culminated in the subjugation of the state. But there was a scholarly side to this army officer, as he authored in 1849 a gazetteer of Peshawar, perhaps India’s first district gazetteer. He also learned the Pashto language of Afghanistan so well that he went on to author a grammar book and a dictionary of it, and translated into English selections from Afghan poetry.

  Our poetic major’s paper, published in 1892, dealt not with the Sarasvatī, but with the identity of the ‘Mihrān of Sind’, a river reported by the eighth-century Arab invaders to be flowing east of the Indus in a course parallel to it.44 We need not go into Raverty’s intricate analysis of historical evidence and discussion of the relative shifts in the beds and confluences of this river system, especially as many important details remain disputed.45It will be enough for our purpose to highlight some of his conclusions : ‘Sursuti [Sarsuti] is the name of a river, the ancient Saraswatī . . . Sutlaj [Sutlej] was a tributary of the Hakrā or Wahindāh’, which was nothing but the bygone Mihrān, and flowed down to the vast salty expanse of the Rann of Kachchh through the Eastern Nara. The Nara (see Fig. 1.7), now a dry channel, has often been assumed to have been an ancient outlet of the Indus, whether a perennial or a seasonal one; it splits into two channels on either side of the Rohri Hills of Sind, and is the eastern branch that would have received the Hakra’s waters. The Hakra’s drying up, which according to Raverty took place in the fourteenth century CE, ‘reduced a vast extent of once fruitful country to a howling wilderness, and thus several flourishing cities and towns became ruined or deserted by their inhabitants’.

  Raverty also traced the name ‘Hakra’ to the Sanskrit sāgara or ‘ocean’, an etymology that has been largely accepted and explains variants such as Sankra and Sankrah, terms used in Islamic chronicles.

  Raverty’s work in the lower reaches of the Hakra was supplemented by that of Robert Sivewright, an officer from the Public Works Department (PWD), who spent a few months exploring the Rann of Kachchh and its geological features, trying in the process to reconstruct some of its history from the days of Alexander’s campaign in the Indus Valley to the Arab conquest of Sind in the eighth century and beyond. In 1907, having retired and returned to Britain, Sivewright presented a paper on ‘Cutch and the Ran’ at the Royal Geographical Society, a lecture which R.D. Oldham also attended.46

  One of Sivewright’s important observations on this forbidding region was the ‘silting up of the Greater Ran by the Hakra’;47 in his opinion, this silting caused the gradual build-up of the Rann, which, he observed, was still navigable even for some time after the Arab conquest.48 But a tectonic uplift of the region may well have been a contributory factor to the drying up of the Rann, as a 1967 study of the uplift of the nearby Makran coast suggests.49

  Be that as it may, Sivewright’s conclusion that ‘the Ran is the delta of the Hakra, the lost river of Sind’50 is of greater relevance to us. Sivewright thus agreed with Raverty that the Hakra river kept its name all the way to its estuary north of the Rann, and his map (Fig. 1.5) makes this even more explicit.

  ‘RUINS EVERYWHERE’

  In his 1887 paper, R.D. Oldham had frequently referred to an article published anonymously in the Calcutta Review (Fig. 1.6) thirteen years earlier,51 from which he borrowed the idea that the Hakra-Nara had been the Sutlej’s original bed. The anonymous paper’s author, Oldham informed us,52 was a namesake (though probably no relative): C.F. Oldham, a surgeon-major in the Indian Army. The surgeon-major distinguished himself by medical notes (on malaria in particular), but, like Raverty, is remembered for his varied scholarly interests: among t
hem, the origins of serpent worship in ancient cultures, including India’s, and the Sarasvatī river.

  In 1893, almost two decades after his anonymous article, C.F. Oldham examined the whole issue afresh in a comprehensive and erudite paper entitled ‘The Saraswati and the Lost River of the Indian Desert’,53 which included a detailed map (Fig. 1.7). He also started off with mentions of the Sarasvatī in the Rig Veda, and noted that one of its hymns clearly places the river ‘between the Yamuna and the Satudri [Sutlej] which is its present position’.54After a brief description of the present course of the Sarasvatī, Oldham stressed that even after its confluence with the Ghaggar, ‘it was formerly [known as] the Saraswatī; that name is still known amongst the people . . .’55 He had no doubt, therefore, that the lost Rig Vedic river flowed in the bed of today’s Ghaggar. And he added valuable details:

  Its ancient course is contiguous with the dry bed of a great river which, as local legends assert, once flowed through the desert to the sea.

  In confirmation of these traditions, the channel referred to, which is called Hakra or Sotra, can be traced through the Bikanir and Bhawulpur [Bahawalpur] States into Sind, and thence onwards to the Rann of Kach.

  The existence of this river at no very remote period, and the truth of the legends which assert the ancient fertility of the lands through which it flowed, are attested by the ruins which everywhere overspread what is now an arid sandy waste.

  Throughout this tract are scattered mounds, marking the sites of cities and towns. And there are strongholds still remaining, in a very decayed state, which were places of importance at the time of the early Mahommedan invasions.

  Amongst these ruins are found not only the huge bricks used by the Hindus in the remote past, but others of a much later make.

  All this seems to show that the country must have been fertile for a long period . . . Freshwater shells, exactly similar to those now seen in the Panjab rivers, are to be found in this old riverbed and upon its banks.57

  These observations of Oldham’s concurred broadly with those of his precursors. None of them could have guessed that some of those ‘ruins everywhere’ and ‘scattered mounds’ were the mute signs of a long-vanished civilization.

  C.F. Oldham agreed with his namesake that the main cause for the disappearance of the Sarasvatī must have been the Sutlej’s shift away from the Ghaggar-Hakra. As a known example of the river’s mobility, he remarked, ‘great changes in the course of the Sutlej have occurred in comparatively recent times. Indeed, only a century ago [that is, in the late eighteenth century], the river deserted its bed under the fort of Ludiana, which is five miles from its present course’.58

  He then traced the dry bed through the Bahawalpur state, into Sind, and finally through the ‘old riverbed generally known as Narra. This channel, which bears also the names of Hakra or Sagara, Wahind, and Dahan, is to be traced onward to the Rann of Kach59 . . . The name Hakra . . . is also applied to the Narra, as far as the Rann of Kach, so that the whole channel is known by this name, from Bhatnair [Hanumangarh] to the sea’.60

  According to C.F. Oldham, there was thus a single river from Rajasthan to the Arabian Sea, bearing a single name Hakra. This view finds confirmation among Raverty and Sivewright, both of whom, as we saw, used the name ‘Hakra’ for the river’s terminal stage north of the Rann of Kachchh. Let us also note here another tradition recorded by C.F. Oldham in his earlier article: ‘a tradition prevalent, on the borders of Bikaner,†† to the effect that the waters of the Hakra spread out in a great lake at a place called Kak, south of the Mer country’.61 The Mers were a tribe formerly living to the north of the Rann of Kachchh, a clue that the ‘great lake’ of Kak was nothing but today’s Rann of Kachchh.

  Again, a local legend narrated by Oldham evoked the time when the Sutlej ‘flowed southwards from the Himalāya . . . and onwards, through Sind, to the sea’—until, for some reason, a prince-turned-ascetic named Puran, a hero of many Punjabi legends, cursed the river to leave its bed and move westward. ‘The stream, in consequence, changed its course more and more towards the west, until, six hundred and fifty years ago, it entered the Beas valley . . .’, which would take us to the thirteenth century CE; but leaving aside the date, the consequence was ‘a terrible drought and famine in the country on the banks of the Hakra, where [large] numbers of men and cattle perished. The survivors then migrated to the banks of the Indus, and the country has ever since been desert’.62

  In Oldham’s judgement, this tradition—the same, he assumed, as the one James Tod had recorded decades earlier—made perfect sense on the ground. He also noted that ‘the traditions of all the tribes bordering upon it [the Rann of Kachchh] agree that this expanse of salt and sand was once an estuary’,63 the combined estuary of the Indus in the northwest, the Nara-Sarasvatī in the north and today’s Luni in the northeast, of which only the last still flows there. It must have been a huge delta, as its topography bears out.

  The view held by the two Oldhams and by Raverty that the Sutlej earlier flowed into the Hakra was endorsed by the Imperial Gazetteer in its 1908 edition: ‘In the year A.D. 1000 it [the Sutlej] was a tributary of the Hakra, and flowed in the Eastern Nara . . . Thus the Sutlej or the Hakra—for both streams flowed in the same bed—is probably the lost river of the Indian desert, whose waters made the sands of Bikaner and Sind a smiling garden.’64

  This view became, in time, the standard one, though with some variations. In the meantime, C.F. Oldham was satisfied that

  The course of the ‘lost river’ has now been traced from the Himalaya to the Rann of Kach . . . We have also seen that the Vedic description of the waters of the Saraswatī flowing onward to the ocean, and that given in the Mahabharata, of the sacred river losing itself in the sands, were probably both of them correct at the periods to which they referred.65

  What is this ‘Vedic description of the waters of the Saraswatī flowing onward to the ocean’, and how does the Mahābhārata come into the picture? We must now turn to those and other ancient texts, and extract whatever information they can give us on what brought ruin to this region—a region which, far from a desert, was regarded in Vedic times as teeming with life.

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  The Mighty Sarasvatī

  We have seen what early topographic surveys and local traditions have to say on the evolution of the watershed dividing the two great river systems of north India, those of the Indus and the Ganges—the homes of India’s first two civilizations. A third stream of evidence comes to us from early sacred texts, and although much of it flows through a jungle of myths (again, in the true sense of the word), we are faced with a surprising internal consistency.1

  THE BEST OF RIVERS

  In forty-five of its hymns, the Rig Veda showers praise on the Sarasvatī; her name appears seventy-two times, and three hymns are wholly dedicated to her. She is often invoked in the company of two sister-goddesses, Ilā and Bhāratī. Sarasvatī’s waters are lauded as a ‘great flood’,2 she is ‘great among the great, the most impetuous of rivers’, and was ‘created vast’.3 ‘Limitless, unbroken, swift-moving’, she ‘surpasses in majesty and might all other waters’4 and ‘comes onward with tempestuous roar’.5 Sarasvatī, indeed, is the ‘mother of waters’ or of rivers (sindhumātā6). At least one of the Vedic clans, the Purus, is said to dwell ‘on her two grassy banks’.7

  Many Sanskritists take the word sarasvatī to mean a ‘chain of pools’ or ‘full of lakes’ (saras), and draw various conclusions regarding the river’s initial condition; but the word saras originally means ‘water’ or ‘flow’ (from the root sr, ‘to flow’), and the river’s name may equally be rendered as ‘she of the stream, the flowing movement’,8 to quote Sri Aurobindo’s translation. Both renderings are legitimate, so it would be hazardous to attempt a physical description of the Sarasvatī on the basis of its name alone. (Both renderings may even be correct: a flowing river, especially if its plain is fairly flat, may form oxbow lakes when it abandons a meander.)

 
; From being an impetuous river, Sarasvatī acquires a powerful image in Vedic symbolism, embodying the flood of illumination or inspiration. She is the ‘impeller of happy truths’ who ‘awakens in the consciousness the great flood and illumines all the thoughts’.9 Sarasvatī is ‘the best of mothers, best of rivers, best of goddesses’,10 and we see here the origin of the traditional deification of rivers, from Gangā to Kāverī. A few centuries later—in the Yajur Veda, to be precise—Sarasvatī, additionally, becomes the goddess of speech, the Word (vāch or vāk).

  Some scholars have wondered why this particular river—not the Indus or the Ravi—came to embody inspiration and speech. A few found a simple explanation in the geographical location of the Vedic poets on its banks, with the river gurgling past their ashrams : its sounds, poetically described in the Rig Veda, were soon taken to a metaphorical level. Others observed that right from the beginning the river was praised as an ‘inspirer of hymns’,11which makes the connection with speech natural. Developing this line, Catherine Ludvik, a Canadian Indologist who recently authored a fine study of Sarasvatī as a ‘riverine goddess of knowledge’,12 highlights the goddess’s constant association with dhī or inspired thought. Speech and inspiration being the vehicles of knowledge and learning, the river’s transformation is complete—although not quite: somewhere along the way, Sarasvatī became the ‘mother of the Vedas’ and Brahmā’s consort (sometimes daughter), added the arts to her field, and entered the pantheons of Buddhism and Jainism: to Jains, Sarasvatī is the chief of the sixteen Vidyādevīs or goddesses of knowledge, and a special festival, Jñāna Pañchamī, is dedicated to her. The river-goddess then burst her Indian banks to flow to Southeast Asia and as far as China and Japan (she bears the names of ‘Thuyathadi’ in Myanmar, and ‘Benten’ or ‘Benzaiten’ in Japan).