The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati

by Michel Danino

  Kurukshetra-Thanesar, the Mahābhārata tells us, was close to the Sarasvatī’s southern bank; the river is remembered there especially during solar eclipses, when worshippers from all over India crowd for a bath in the Brahmasar water tank; holy waters from all the other tīrthas are said to visit this spot on such occasions. North of the town is the famous Sthānu tīrtha, which, O.P. Bharadwaj informs us, received the Sarsuti’s flood waters as late as the mid-twentieth century.61

  Travelling downstream, we reach Pehowa, near which the Sarsuti is joined by the Markanda; that town boasts several temples (built by the Marathas) dedicated to Sarasvatī, as well as sacred tanks, one of which is named after the goddess and another after Brahmā; there, pilgrims offer prayers and conduct rituals for their ancestors or their departed ones.

  Leaving the Sarsuti’s course, let us veer southward into Rajasthan. A little earlier, we heard a legend narrating how the Sarasvatī once halted at Pushkar on her way to the ocean. Pushkar’s main temple and its famous lake are dedicated to Brahmā, Sarasvatī’s father (and, later, consort) in Puranic mythology. From the lake’s waters, the Sarasvatī is said to re-emerge after her disappearance at Vinashana. (This is not the course of the river we had followed so far, but let us not quibble over such details now.) Legend has it that Rāma, Sītā and Lakshmana, the protagonists of the Rāmāyana, once came to the lake for a dip in those waters, and every year, large numbers of pilgrims converge on it for the same purpose. Perhaps in remembrance of the Sarasvatī’s halt at Pushkar, the upper course of the Luni river, which has its source a few kilometres away, locally still bears her name, and is marked as such on some maps.62

  If we follow the Luni’s southwesterly course, we reach the Great Rann of Kachchh; a little to the south, the Little Rann is joined by a third river that bears the name of Sarasvati. With its source at the southwestern tip of the Aravalli Hills, its full course runs for hardly a distance of 200 km. (It is sometimes called ‘Kumari’ or virgin, as it does not ‘wed’ the ocean.) Marked on Fig. 4.2, it is by no means an impressive watercourse, yet on its banks we find several towns that have preserved the memory of the Sarasvatī, notably Siddhapur and Patan, two important pilgrimage centres. Siddhapur is famous for its beautiful, though ruined, Rudramāla temple and its sacred pond Bindusarovar, where Gujarati Hindus often perform rituals in memory of their departed parents or their ancestors. Patan draws visitors to its magnificent stepped well ‘Rani Ki Vav’ and its impressive waterworks alongside a now dry channel of the river; at the eastern end of a huge reservoir, three small pyramidal shrines draw the eye: they are dedicated to river-goddesses Gangā, Yamunā and Sarasvatī.

  Finally, we reach the southwestern tip of Saurashtra to find a small river named ‘Sarasvati’ flowing down from the Gir Hills to Somnath. In his wide-ranging treatise on India, the eleventh-century Islamic scholar Alberuni recorded the ‘mouth of the river Sarsuti’,63 three miles east of Somnath (in Saurashtra). A few kilometres upstream lies the much-visited tīrtha of Prabhas Patan (which may or may not be the Mahābhārata’s Prabhasa from where Balarāma set out on his pilgrimage). There, three rivers meet: Hiranya, Kapila and Sarasvati.

  These four Sarasvatis—the first flowing down from the Shivaliks, the second with its source near Pushkar, the third rising in the Aravallis and the fourth in the Gir Hills—are separate rivers, and very likely were always so. The third Sarasvati must have been so named in memory of the Vedic Sarasvatī’s estuary in the Rann of Kachchh. When the Rann turned into a huge marsh, that memory must have been further transferred to nearby Saurashtra for the convenience of worship—that seems to be the most logical way to explain a fourth Sarasvati at Prabhasa, which cannot have been physically connected with the Rann. Such ‘transfers’ of names are common in Indian tradition. In Rameswaram, for centuries pilgrims walked some 18 km from the central Rāmanathaswāmy temple to the Agni tīrtha located at Dhanushkodi on the island’s eastern tip. When Dhanushkodi was ravaged by a cyclone in 1964, the Agni tīrtha was ‘transferred’ to a creek near the town centre, a stone’s throw from the main temple; today, the average pilgrim probably believes that this has been the tīrtha’s location from time immemorial! In the Hindu mind, the symbol or the inner concept always outweighs the physical object.

  There are a few more Sarasvatis in other parts of the country, but the above-mentioned four are clearly part of the same tradition originating from the Vedic Sarasvatī. There is, however, a better-known Sarasvatī: the ‘invisible’ one at the triple confluence (trivenī sangam) of Prayāga (Allahabad), where the Ganges and the Yamuna meet. But that is a later, Purānic tradition; it does not figure in any Vedic literature. It is another case of ‘transfer’, and I will later propose a likely mechanism for it.

  Tradition lives on in different ways: the Sārasvat Brahmins, one of the five Gowda (or northern) Brahmin clans, are today found all the way from Punjab (and till recently Kashmir) to Karnataka and Kerala; remarkably, they have a long-preserved memory of having lived in the Sarasvatī Valley in ancient times, till they were forced to migrate in several directions after the river dried up.

  SARASVATĪ IN THE EYES OF INDOLOGISTS

  Let us now cross the oceans: we need to go and pick the brains of European Sanskritists, who formed their own opinions on the vanished river when they started poring over the various texts that mention her.

  Possibly the first to comment on the issue was H.H. Wilson, who translated the Vishnu Purāna in 1840. He wrote in his introduction:

  The earliest seat of the Hindus within the confines of Hindusthān was undoubtedly the eastern confines of the Panjab. The holy land of Manu and the Purānas lies between the Drishadwatī and Saraswatī rivers, the Caggar [Ghaggar] and Sursooty [Sarsuti] of our barbarous maps.‡ Various adventures of the first princes and most famous sages occur in this vicinity; and the Āshramas, or religious domiciles, of several of the latter are placed on the banks of the Saraswatī . . . These indications render it certain, that whatever seeds were imported from without, it was in the country adjacent to the Saraswatī river that they were first planted, and cultivated and reared in Hindusthān.64

  Wilson thus endorsed without hesitation the identification of the Sarasvatī with the Sarsuti, and placed in its vicinity ‘the earliest seat of the Hindus’.

  A few years later, in his History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, Max Müller sought to identify the ‘Land of the Seven Rivers’, which the Rig Veda frequently evokes (Saptasindhava65). It consisted, in his opinion, of ‘the Indus, the five rivers of the Panjab, and the Sarasvatī’66—the five rivers in question being the Sutlej, the Beas, the Ravi, the Chenab and the Jhelum, all of which figure in the Rig Veda (see p. 37). Max Müller was convinced that the Vedic Sarasvatī flowed in the bed of today’s Sarsuti, though the latter may be ‘at present . . . so small a river’.67 The Sarasvatī in the east and the Indus in the west thus bracket the Land of the Seven Rivers—the Vedic heartland (Fig. 2.2). Indeed, the Rig Veda rarely mentions any river beyond it: Gangā occurs only twice, and the Yamunā only three times, despite its proximity to the Sarasvatī’s basin.

  The Orientalist M. Monier-Williams, author of a monumental Sanskrit-English dictionary, endorsed this definition of the Saptasindhava in 1875, with the same location for the Sarasvatī.68More scholars of the nineteenth century could be cited who shared that view, including Weber,69 Eggeling70 or Oldenberg.71 Thus, a book published in France in 1881, Vedic India,72 which reflected the views of Indologists of the time, included a map of the Land of the Seven Rivers, where the Sarasvatī was clearly identified with the Ghaggar (see Fig. 2.4).

  If anything, twentieth-century Sanskritists were even more emphatic. In 1912, A.A. Macdonell and A.B. Keith, in their authoritative Vedic Index of Names and Subjects, had no doubt that

  the Sarasvatī comes between the Jumna and the Sutlej, the position of the modern Sarsūti . . . There are strong reasons to accept the identification of the later and the earlier Sarasvatī throughout [the Rig Veda].73
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  A decade later, the British Indologist F.E. Pargiter published a landmark study of India’s ancient history derived from the dynasties listed in the Mahābhārata and the Purānas. Throughout his scholarly reconstruction, Pargiter placed on the map the ancient kingdoms mentioned in the texts, and tried to make out the migrations of the main clans. And he followed his predecessors in locating the Sarasvatī: ‘The river constituted the boundary between the Panjab and the Ganges-Jumna basin.’74 Fig. 2.5 reproduces a detail of a map drawn by Pargiter to illustrate some of his research.

  H.H. Gowen, a U.S. Orientalist, also made it clear that he regarded the Sarasvatī as the eastern boundary of the Vedic territory.75 And he began his enthusiastic History of Indian Literature (written in 1931) with an image as lovely as it is apt:

  Often enough it seemed as though, like the river Sarasvatī, the lost stream of the old Sapta-sindhavas, the river of Indian thought had disappeared beneath the surface or had become lost in shallow marshes and morasses . . . But, sooner or later, we see the stream reappear, and then old ideas resume their way.76

  Writing in 1947, French Sanskritist Louis Renou, one of the most respected authorities of his time, painted the Rig Vedic landscape in his unrivalled Classic India (co-authored with Jean Filliozat and a few other scholars); listing the Sindhu and its five tributaries (the five rivers of Punjab), he added: ‘More important is the Sarasvatī, the true lifeline of Vedic geography, whose trace is assumed to be found in the Sarsutī, located between the Satlaj and the Jamnā. With the Indus and its five tributaries, it forms the Veda’s “seven rivers”.’78 Renou made the location of this ‘true lifeline’ clear in several maps; a detail of one of them is reproduced here in Fig. 2.6.

  Thomas Burrow, another authority on Sanskrit, plainly stated in 1963 that the Ghaggar is ‘the ancient Sarasvatī’.79 Three years later, the British scholar of Asian civilization, Arthur L. Basham, wrote in his well-known Wonder That Was India :

  When the [Rig Vedic] hymns were written the focus of Āryan culture was the region between the Jamnā (Sanskrit Yamunā) and Satlaj (Shutudrī), south of the modern Ambālā, and along the upper course of the river Sarasvatī. The latter river is now an insignificant stream, losing itself in the desert of Rajasthan, but it then [in Rig Vedic times] flowed broad and strong . . .80

  Although Basham thought it ‘probably joined the Indus below the confluence of the Satlaj’, he at least did not question the location of the river’s upper course.

  Finally, the Dutch Indologist Jan Gonda, an acknowledged expert on Vedic literature, agreed in 1975 that most of the hymns ‘seem to have been composed in the country round the Sarasvatī river, in the hilly and best parts of the Punjab . . . To the east the Aryans had not expanded beyond the Yamunā.’81

  Naturally, such views were shared by many other equally eminent Indian scholars, including M.L. Bhargava,82 B.C. Law,83H.C. Raychaudhuri,84 A.D. Pusalker85 and D.C. Sircar.86

  With such near unanimity among Indologists and such a close concurrence with ground explorations and local traditions, we could be entitled to consider the ‘mystery of the vanishing river’ as good as solved.

  And yet, a few rare scholars differed; the dissent has grown in recent years, and we are sometimes told that the Vedic Sarasvatī might not have been located in India at all, or perhaps never existed except in the poets’ imagination. What prompted them to swim against the current, we will examine in Chapter 11.

  For the moment, we must complete our picture of the Sarasvatī with a survey of recent findings from a variety of scientific disciplines, each of which will enrich our understanding of the lost river.

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  New Light on an Ancient River

  Understandably, the quest for the Sarasvatī has captivated researchers of all fields: an opportunity to pull a ‘mythical’ river out of the mists of time does not come your way too often. In fact, the amount of data that has accumulated during the last three or four decades is so enormous that I can only highlight here some of the main findings, even if a lot of minor ones are equally interesting.

  I cannot refrain from mentioning, as an example of the latter, the case of the freshwater shells noted by C.F. Oldham (p. 32) along the bed of the Ghaggar-Hakra, ‘exactly similar to those now seen in the Panjab rivers’. Six decades later, in 1952, the Indian archaeologist Amalananda Ghosh, who conducted pioneering explorations in the Sarasvatī region, also noticed ‘a large number of shells, kindly identified for me by the Zoological Survey of India . . . Some of these, being freshwater shells, must have got deposited on the banks of the river when it was alive.’1 So humble shells, too, have a tale to tell.

  FROM VASISHTHA TO BALARĀMA

  After R.D. Oldham, quite a few geologists have scoured this stretch of land between the Indus and the Gangetic systems. Today a largely arid region, extending southward to the Thar Desert, it was once streaming with water, since one of its peculiarities is a thick layer of fertile alluvium, ranging from 5 to 30 m, often buried under layers of sand accumulated by the wind once vegetation started dwindling.2

  The most recent layers of alluvium date back to the end of the last Glacial Age some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago: as temperatures rose, ice sheets started retreating over much of North America and Eurasia, as did glaciers in mountainous regions such as the Himalayas. The melting ice generated bountiful streams and rivers, and if I were offered a trip on a time machine, my first choice would be 8000 BCE : I would love to watch those waters deliriously roaring down the Himalayas, bouncing on the Shivaliks, as it were, and flooding the plains below. It must have been an exhilarating sight, perhaps a little scary, and certainly scarring for the landscape. Indeed, hundreds of palaeochannels, small and large, abound in eastern Punjab and Haryana, and many have been diligently traced.

  Running from west to east across the Punjab-Haryana plains in today’s India, we meet four seasonal streams rising in the area between Bathinda and Patiala (Fig. 3.1): the three Naiwal channels (Western, Central and Eastern), almost parallel to each other, join the Ghaggar at two points, just across the international border and near Hanumangarh. Between the Eastern Naiwal and the Ghaggar runs the Wah (also known as ‘Sirhind’), and then the Patialewali (or ‘Patiala’), which flows through the city of Patiala. Today, being diverted to irrigation through a dense network of canals and weirs, the seasonal waters of the Naiwals, the Wah and the Patiala almost never reach the Ghaggar. Those five streams are often thought to be palaeobeds of the Sutlej, which once branched off near Rupar to connect to the Ghaggar system.

  Continuing with the Ghaggar itself, the Dangri, the Markanda, the Sarsuti and the Chautang—we have ten major channels whose waters once flowed together as the Hakra in today’s Cholistan Desert. And there are many more minor ones, most of which were converted at minimal cost into canals, or disappeared under sediments or sand blown by the wind.

  It would be wrong, however, to imagine crystal-clear, sparkling water streaming from the mountains: it must have been muddy enough, washing along vast amounts of debris from glaciers, rubble and sand. Two decades ago, geologists P.C. Bakliwal and A.K. Grover commented on findings near Lunkaransar, a town in the Thar Desert, south of Suratgarh (Fig. 1.1):

  Recent exploration by the Geological Survey of India reveals the presence of older alluvium with gravel beds up to 90 metres thick in Lunkaransar area indicating the presence of river-borne materials below the sand dune country.3

  Lunkaransar is over 400 km from the Shivaliks as the crow flies; such a colossal layer of gravel—as high as a thirty-storey building—could only have been accumulated there by a massive flow of water over the ages.

  Overlooking the Ghaggar, just upstream of its confluence with the Chautang, lies an important Harappan site: Kalibangan. In 1968, as excavations were nearing completion, US hydrologist Robert Raikes drilled a few bore holes in the Ghaggar’s bed just north of the site, and found ‘at a depth of about 11 metres below the present floodplain level, a coarse, greyish sand very similar i
n mineral content to that found in the bed of the present-day Yamuna. It extended over a width of at least four times that of the bed of the present-day Yamuna and down to a depth, at one point, of 30 metres.’4 In his opinion, this ‘wide buried bed of coarse sand’ was the result of ‘an immediate post-glacial Yamuna, much enlarged by Himalayan ice-melt, flowing to the Indus system’.5 Above this greyish sand were layers of ‘silty clay’ alternating with ‘shallow beds of a fine silty sand still containing the grey granite-derived material that occurs in the Yamuna’.6 Raikes explained this alternation by ‘a series of alternating captures [of the Yamunā] by the Indus and Ganges systems’,7 which fitted neatly with various protohistoric and historical stages of occupation and abandonment of the area, but this explanation has not found much acceptance among other experts; on the other hand, the geological connection of the Ghaggar with the Yamunā, which R.D. Oldham had already proposed (p. 24), has since been endorsed by many.

  Indian geologist K.S. Valdiya is one of them; in his brief but rich monograph on the Sarasvatī, he writes, ‘The river that caused the diversion of the Saraswati and carried its water to the Ganga via the Chambal, is called the Yamuna. In this manner, the Ganga “stole” a major portion of the discharge of the Saraswati River.’8

  Balarāma, whom we had followed on his pilgrimage along the Sarasvatī, returns on the stage at this point, with a curious legend. Finding some divine liquor in a forest near Vrindavan one day, he became so inebriated that he was taken over by the fancy to summon the Yamunā to himself so that he could bathe in her. The lady was less than enthusiastic, however, and turned a deaf ear. Furious, Balarāma seized his ploughshare, plunged it into her bank, and dragged her to him: ‘He compelled the dark river to quit its ordinary course,’ says the Vishnu Purāna.9 The Bhāgavata Purāna adds: ‘Even to this day, the Yamunā is seen to flow through the track (river bed) through which [she] was dragged.’10It might be stretching the legend too far to read in it the Yamunā’s desertion of the Sarasvatī, but it does show, at least, that people remembered a shift in the Yamunā’s course.