The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati

by Michel Danino

  To return to her Vedic origins, the Sarasvatī’s early symbolism clearly rests on a physical fact: the existence of an actual river. The Rig Veda makes this clear in one of its very rare geographical descriptions, the Nadīstuti sūkta, a hymn (sūkta) in praise of rivers (nadī), which invokes turn by turn nineteen major rivers of the Vedic world. Let us hear its fifth and sixth verses (mantras), with each river’s modern name in parentheses when it is not in doubt:

  Imám me gaṅge yamune sarasvati śútudri stómaṃ sacatā páruṣṇy ā́ |

  asiknyā́ marudvr̥dhe vitástayā́rīkīye śr̥ṇuhy ā́ suṣómayā ||

  tr̥ṣṭamayā prathamáṃ yā́tave sajū́ḥ susártvā rasáyā śvetyā́ tyā́ |

  tváṃ sindho kúbhayā gomatī́ṃ krúmum mehatnvā́ saráthaṃ yā́bhir ī́yase ||

  (10.75.5-6)

  O Gangā, Yamunā, Sarasvatī, Shutudrī (Sutlej), Parushnī (Ravi), hear my praise! Hear my call, O Asiknī (Chenab), Marudvridhā (Maruvardhvan), Vitastā (Jhelum) with Ārjīkiyā and Sushomā.

  First you flow united with Trishtāmā, with Susartu and Rasā, and with Svetyā, O Sindhu (Indus) with Kubhā (Kabul) to Gomati (Gumal or Gomal), with Mehatnū to Krumu (Kurram), with whom you proceed together.

  Table 2.1: Principal rivers listed in the Nadīstuti sūkta, with their respective Greek and English names.

  Sanskrit Greek English

  Gangā Gange/Ganges Ganges

  Yamunā Diamouna/Jomanes Yamuna

  Shutudrī (later Shatadru) Zaradros/Hesudrus Sutlej

  Vipāsh Hyphasis Beas

  Parushnī (later Irāvatī) Hydraotes/Hyarotis Ravi

  Asiknī Akesines Chenab

  Vitastā Hydaspes Jhelum

  Sindhu Indos Indus

  Kubhā Kophen Kabul

  This remarkable hymn thus starts from the Ganges and moves westward to the Indus and three of its tributaries flowing down from Afghanistan through the Sulaiman mountain range—a bird’s-eye view sweeping across more than a thousand kilometres, which, at the very least, reveals the poet’s intimate knowledge of the region’s geography (Fig. 2.2). Even Max Müller, who made a virtual dogma of the ‘savage phase of thought which we find in the Veda’, was compelled to grant that in this hymn, ‘the rivers invoked are . . . the real rivers of the Punjāb, and the poem shows a much wider geographical horizon than we should expect from a mere village bard’.13 We may wonder what the said village bard would have thought of this left-handed compliment . . .

  However, of central interest to us is the hymn’s plain statement that the Sarasvatī flows between the Yamunā and the Sutlej—precisely the region where our British explorers found a wide, dry bed and ruined cities, the region where local traditions assert that a large river flowed once upon a time. A picture is certainly taking shape.

  We can glean a few more clues from the Rig Veda. The Sarasvatī is ‘seven-sistered’ or ‘one of seven sisters’,14 which, if not purely metaphorical, would indicate that she had several tributaries; this is also hinted at in a hymn that invokes her as ‘the seventh’.15Once, she is mentioned in conjunction with another river, the Drishadvatī.16 She ‘breaks through the ridges of the mountains with her strong waves’,17 which points to a mountainous origin; this gets confirmed when, besides being ‘unbroken’, the Sarasvatī is hailed as ‘pure in her course from the mountain to the sea’18(giribhya ā samudrāt). This was the verse that C.F. Oldham had in mind when he spoke of ‘the Vedic description of the waters of the Saraswati flowing onward to the ocean’.

  THE RIVER’S DISAPPEARANCE

  The other three Vedas (Yajur, Samā, Atharva) do not significantly add to the Rig Veda’s descriptions of the Sarasvatī, except for a mention, in the first, of the Sarasvatī having five tributaries,19an echo of her ‘seven sisters’.

  However, something must have happened before the next generation of Vedic literature, the Brāhmanas.* In a few of those ancient texts,20 we read for the first time that the river disappears at a place called Vinashana, a word meaning ‘loss’ or disappearance: the Sarasvatī’s previously ‘unbroken’ flow to the sea was no longer so.

  Some Brāhmanas locate the river’s source near a place called Plakshaprāsravana,21 named after a giant fig tree (plaksha) that grew there.22 The Mahābhārata makes it clear that this spot was somewhere in the Shivalik Hills.23 The distance from this spot to the river’s point of disappearance is stated to be forty-four āshvinas, or days on horseback, but there is a hitch: even at a slow pace of 40 km a day, the distance would be more than from the Shivaliks to the Arabian Sea! In reality, the Pañchavimsha Brāhmana makes it clear that the stated distance is notional and not to be taken literally, for it adds, ‘This is the same distance as from the earth to the heaven.’24

  Indeed, it seems as if this place where the river disappeared or became invisible (Vinashana is also called Adarshana or ‘invisible’) came to be looked upon as a metaphor for the transition from the physical to the non-physical. Vinashana thus became a sacred spot: the same text and several later ones25 report how consecration rites were conducted at Vinashana at the start of a pilgrimage, which consisted in following the Sarasvatī upstream, crossing on the way its confluence with the Drishadvatī. The last detail is of importance: Sanskritist O.P. Bharadwaj, author of a series of erudite papers on the Sarasvatī,26 showed how, in later literature Vinashana moved eastward, eventually reaching Kurukshetra in the Bhāgavata Purāna. This can only mean that the river’s drying up was gradual, not a sudden vanishing act—a significant point that archaeology will bear out.

  The Sarasvatī, as Bharadwaj again demonstrated, appears in the Rāmāyana as ‘the sacred Ikshumatī, Brahmā’s daughter’, which messengers from Ayodhyā cross on their mission to fetch prince Bharata.27 But it is the Mahābhārata that best illustrates the drastic change alluded to in the Brāhmanas. Although it gives prominence and sanctity to the Ganges (which figures only twice in the Rig Veda), the Sarasvatī remains important, all the more so as she flows through the Kurukshetra plains, the arena of the terrible war that forms the core of the epic. Vyāsa, the legendary compiler of the Vedas and traditionally the Mahābhārata’s author, lives in a forest near the Sarasvatī. When the five Pāndavas go into exile, ‘performing their ablutions in the Sarasvatī, the Drishadvatī and the Yamunā’, they keep ‘travelling in a westerly direction’28 and finally take refuge in a forest near the Sarasvatī. The rishi (seer) Vasishtha has his ‘high abode’ at a tīrtha on the river’s ‘eastern bank’,29 while his irascible rival Vishvāmitra dwells on the opposite bank; as a result, the poor river gets caught in one of their famous confrontations—but that is another story.

  What we must note for now is that several of the epic’s descriptions of the river are direct echoes of the Rig Veda. For instance, the Sarasvatī ‘of swift current flows from the sides of the Himavat [Himalaya]’.30 It has seven forms, reminiscent of the Veda’s ‘seven sisters’; those forms are actually named (the one appearing at Kurukshetra being the Oghavatī), and they ‘mingled together at . . . that tīrtha known on earth by the name of Sapta-Sarasvatī [the seven Sarasvatīs].’31 The Drishadvatī is once again paired with the Sarasvatī: ‘They that dwell in Kurukshetra which lies to the south of the Sarasvatī and the north of the Drishadvatī, are said to dwell in heaven.’32 And in a significant passage, goddess Uma, prompted by Shiva, explains, ‘The sacred Sarasvatī is the foremost river of all rivers. She courses towards the ocean and is truly the first of all streams.’33 Elsewhere, the river again ‘mingles with the sea’.34

  SARASVATĪ GOES TO THE DESERT

  Thus, we still find a river flowing ‘from the mountain to the sea’, as the Rig Veda puts it—but with a crucial difference now : ‘In some parts (of her course) she becomes visible and in some parts not so.’35 As in the Brāhmanas, at the spot known as Vinashana the Sarasvatī became ‘invisible’: it ‘disappeared’36 and was ‘lost’37—rather broke up into separate segments, since the places of her reappearance are named and regarded as es
pecially sacred.

  The Mahābhārata does not miss the opportunity to weave a few legends around the theme of the Sarasvatī’s disappearance. In one of them, the wife of Utathya, a rishi, was snatched away by god Varuna while she was bathing in the Yamunā. In order to pressurize Varuna, who dwelled in the waters and ruled over that element, to return his wife, Utathya caused 600,000 lakes of the region to disappear, and commanded Sarasvatī ‘to become invisible’, to ‘leave this region and go to the desert’.38 The epic never expects its readers (or listeners) to take its numbers literally, whether those of arrows flowing from Arjuna’s bow or of elephants standing on the battlefield; nevertheless, this legend, if it rests on a fact, seems to hark back to a time when lakes dotted the region. And at any rate, the Sarasvatī did ‘go to the desert’. And curiously, an astonishing number of names of towns and villages in western Rajasthan (the heart of the Thar Desert) have names ending in the word ‘sar’, such as Lunkaransar, with ‘sar’ meaning ‘lake’ (from the Sanskrit word saras). I counted over fifty of them on an ordinary map,39 and there must be many more. Why should all those places be named after non-existent lakes? An unwary tourist reading a map of western Rajasthan might as well assume that the region is some kind of a Lake District!

  The Mahābhārata also recounts in some detail Balarāma’s pilgrimage along the banks of the Sarasvatī. Balarāma, Krishna’s brother, started from Prabhasa (a tīrtha near what is today Somnath in Saurashtra) and proceeded upstream, that is, ‘towards the east, and reached, one after another, hundreds and thousands of famous tīrthas . . . [located] along the southern bank of the Sarasvatī’.40 While ritually bathing in every one of them, he exclaimed, ‘Where else is such happiness as that in a residence by the Sarasvatī? . . . All should ever remember the Sarasvatī! Sarasvatī is the most sacred of rivers!’41 Indeed, ‘the whole region seemed to resound with the loud Vedic recitations of those Rishis of cleansed souls, all employed in pouring libations on sacrificial fires’.42 At length, Balarāma reached a spot where ‘although the Sarasvatī seems to be lost, yet persons crowned with ascetic success . . . and owing also to the coolness of the herbs and of the land there, know that the river has an invisible current through the bowels of the earth’.43 This ‘coolness’ of the vegetation is significant, and we will return to the invisible current—also to a great drought of twelve years’ duration, which, the epic tells us,44 occurred in the vicinity of the upper Sarasvatī, and afflicted even the rishis, causing them to wander about.

  FIRE AND WATER

  While the Rig Veda did not explicitly define its own territory, late Vedic literature used Vinashana as a natural westernmost frontier of the Vedic world. Savants like Baudhāyana, Vasishtha (not to be confused with the Rig Vedic rishi) and Patañjali, who lived some time between the fifth and second century BCE, define Āryāvarta, the ‘Aryan land’, as the region east of Adarshana, west of a certain ‘black forest’ (located near Haridwar), south of the Himalayas and north of the Pāriyātra mountains, which were a part of the Vindhyas.45 A similar territory is the Madhyadesha (‘middle country’), the land south of the Himalayas, north of the Vindhyas, west of Prayāga (what is today Allahabad) and east of Vinashana.46 A third, more limited geographical entity is the region between the Sarasvatī and the Drishadvatī: ‘That land, created by the gods, which lies between the two divine rivers Sarasvatī and Drishadvatī, the (sages) call Brahmāvarta,’47 says the Manusmriti. What matters in these definitions is that all of them adopt the Sarasvatī and its western frontier as a major reference point.

  The Purānas, those encyclopaedic texts that constitute an important ingredient of Hinduism as we know it today, also have their say on the Sarasvatī, negatively at times: the Vishnu Purāna, for instance, does not mention the Sarasvatī at all in its lists of rivers, which suggests that it had become too insignificant to be noted. On the other hand, the Mārkandeya Purāna48 enumerates all the rivers flowing down from the Himalayas, beginning with ‘Gangā, Sarasvatī, Sindhu’—in other words, from east to west, just as we saw in the Rig Veda. Other Purānas provide long lists of the holy places to be visited along the Sarasvatī, from the Shivalik Hills to today’s Gujarat.

  The Padma Purāna narrates an intriguing legend: a reluctant Sarasvatī was persuaded by her father Brahmā to carry to the western sea an all-consuming fire that was threatening to engulf the whole world; after a halt at Pushkar (near Ajmer in Rajasthan), she proceeded, finally reached the ocean, and safely deposited the fire in it. Could this ‘all-consuming fire’ represent a severe drought that afflicted the whole region?

  The Sarasvatī’s disappearance left a deep imprint on subsequent literature and traditions. In Meghadūtam (the ‘Cloud Messenger’), India’s divine poet Kālidāsa (probably living in first century BCE), entreats a cloud to visit various spots of the northern plains and in the Himalayas, and invites it, after a visit to Kurukshetra, to go and taste the purifying waters of the Sarasvatī.49 But in Abhijñānashakuntalam (the famous play Shakuntala, which so moved Goethe), the despondent king compares his fruitless life to ‘Sarasvatī’s stream lost in barbarous sandy wastes’.50

  Much later, in his encyclopaedic treatise, the Brihat Samhitā, the renowned sixth-century savant Varāhamihira gives us an overview of India’s geography, in which he refers to ‘the countries bordering the Yamunā and the Sarasvatī’.51 From this reference, we may legitimately assume that there was still some flow in the river’s upper reaches at least in the sixth century CE.

  We get an unexpected confirmation from Bāna, the celebrated author of Harshacharita, the chronicle of Emperor Harshavardhana who ruled over much of northern India in the first half of the seventh century. When Harsha’s father, the king of Sthānvīshvara,† passed away, the people ‘bore him to the river Sarasvatī, and there upon a pyre befitting an emperor solemnly consumed all but his glory in the flames’. In a classic ritual, Harsha ‘passed on to the Sarasvatī’s banks, and having bathed in the river, offered water to his father’.52 Bāna’s frequently ornate style is plain enough here, and these passages (there are a few more) endorse Varāhamihira’s geography of the preceding century.

  Epigraphy also has its say in the matter: some 30 km west of Thanesar-Kurukshetra is Pehowa, near which, as we saw, the Markanda today joins the bed of the Sarsuti. ‘Pehowa’ is a corruption of ‘Prithūdaka’ (named after a legendary King Prithu), and the Mahābhārata53 refers to a ‘highly sacred’ tīrtha nearby, at the confluence of the Sarasvatī with a river called Arunā, which seems to have been the Markanda or a branch of it.54 Now, at Pehowa was found an inscription of King Mihira Bhoja of the Gurjara-Pratihāra dynasty, which refers to Prithūdaka in the vicinity of the river Prāchī Sarasvatī or ‘eastern Sarasvatī’.55 The inscription, datable to the middle of the ninth century CE, is crucial evidence that a river known as Sarasvatī flowed down to Pehowa at least—a welcome confirmation of the literary references we have seen so far; but the addition of the qualifier ‘eastern’ suggests a western Sarasvatī, which, I assume, refers to the dry part of the bed, beyond Vinashana.

  An Islamic chronicle of the fifteenth century, the Tarikh-i-Mubarak Shahi, also testifies to the existence of a Sarasvatī river in the region, since it refers to a ‘stream that emptied into Satladar [Sutlej] : it bore the name of Sarsuti.’56 The chronicle adds that the stream emerges from a hill, which fits what we know of the Sarsuti; if it was indeed a tributary of the Sutlej, it can only mean that the latter had a branch joining the Ghaggar. (We will soon return to the Sutlej’s complex history.)

  What emerges from our brief survey of literary sources is, above all, a sense of consistency as regards the Sarasvatī’s location right from the time of the Rig Veda, and the awareness of her disappearance at a certain point of her course. Also, successive texts reflect a gradual evolution in the drying up of the once ‘mighty river’ and the region it watered.

  FOUR SARASVATĪS

  The above two-fold recollection was preserved in the popular mind just as well: w
e have seen how James Tod and C.F. Oldham were struck by the local songs and legends that attributed the ruin of the region to the drying up of the Ghaggar-Hakra. Another testimony comes to us from Alexander Cunningham, an official of the East India Company who, as early as 1843, recommended the creation of an Archaeological Survey of India; as the preservation of India’s cultural heritage was rather low on the list of the Company’s priorities, it took another three decades before the institution was founded, in 1871, with Cunningham as its first director. He will be remembered, among other contributions, for embarking with stupendous energy on the first inventory of India’s countless heritage sites, monuments and inscriptions, some of which received a degree of protection (but others a degree of destruction), and for planning the first programme of excavations in the subcontinent.58

  The Sarasvatī did not escape Cunningham’s attention: he recorded a ‘local tradition’ according to which ‘the most sacred and eastern source of the Sarasvatī is said to be Adi-Badri Kunda north of Katgadh [Kathgarh], while the latter is still remembered to be the place where the sacred stream came out of the hills.’59Indeed, Ad Badri, near which the seasonal Sarsuti rises, is traditionally regarded as the source of the Vedic Sarasvatī.

  Building on his extensive fieldwork and trying to combine it with the accounts of Greek and Chinese travellers and with India’s texts and traditions, Cunningham authored Ancient Geography of India, a landmark study which has remained in print to this day.60 In it he drew several maps, one of which includes the Sarasvatī and the ‘Gharghara’ (Fig. 2.3).

  The tradition does not end there: we can follow it as we move downstream towards the Arabian Sea. Let us therefore turn into pilgrims for a short while and visit a few of the countless holy sites that dot the region.