The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati

by Michel Danino

  The groundwater in the area is enriched in stable isotope content . . . compared to that of Himalayan rivers . . . The groundwater samples exhibit negligible tritium content indicating absence of modern recharge. Radiocarbon dates suggest the groundwater is a few thousand years old . . . (uncorrected ages: 4950 to 4400 BP [before present]).32

  Once calibrated, those dates would be approximately 3700 to 3200 BCE,33 after which very little recharge took place: the date of these ‘fossil waters’ suggests the onset of an arid phase in the area, or at least a drying up of this watercourse.

  In fact, the research of Rao and Kulkarni was part of a broader project: in collaboration with BARC and other agencies,34 the Rajasthan Ground Water Department (RGWD) proposed to explore reserves of groundwater under the desert sand, with a view to alleviating water scarcity in western Rajasthan, especially Jaisalmer and Bikaner districts. Years earlier, it had noted that ‘freshwater was available in many places of Jaisalmer district, and some wells never dried up. This aroused considerable interest, for Jaisalmer’s water is known to be saline. Investigations revealed that about 100 m away from the site of the fresh water, the groundwater was saline.’35 In some places, freshwater was available at depths of 30 or 40 m—extraordinarily shallow for such arid areas, considering that in regions of India where intensive agriculture is practised, it is not uncommon to find the water table as low as 200 m or more. Moreover, the very presence of freshwater in the heart of the Thar Desert is revealing: the alignment of freshwater wells corresponds with subterranean palaeochannels, some of which, in the view of the scientists involved, formed part of the Sarasvatī system: ‘There are palaeochannels in all ten districts of western Rajasthan, and these have been mapped to prepare the river’s ancient course.’36

  In 1999, a study by four Indian scientists led by V. Soni in the Jaisalmer region found that even though some of the tubewells had been in use for up to forty years, their output was stable and there was no sign of the water table receding: this confirmed that the underground flow was active.37 I cannot help recalling here the ‘invisible current through the bowels of the earth’, which, the Mahābhārata told us (p. 43), accomplished sages sitting near the lost Sarasvatī could alone detect.

  Regardless of whether there was an invisible current or not, K.R. Srinivasan, a former director of the Central Ground Water Board, estimated in a report that the central Sarasvatī river basin in Rajasthan could sustain a million tubewells.38 The search for the Sarasvatī can thus have quite pragmatic applications even today. Let us hope, however, that any exploitation of those ancient reserves of water will be accompanied by effective replenishment measures; otherwise, it might be a case of killing the proverbial goose.

  Significantly, the same situation prevails in Cholistan, as Mackeson had noted: ‘Wells dug in it [the Hakra course] 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.’ (p. 14) This has since received strong support from a ‘comprehensive hydrogeological, geophysical, and isotope hydrological survey conducted from 1986 to 1991’ by German scientists M.A. Geyh and D. Ploethner in the Hakra’s floodplain of Cholistan between Fort Abbas in the east and Fort Mojgarh in the south-west.39 Their survey revealed a huge body of fresh groundwater, some 14 km wide, 100 km long and 100 m thick; it was unexpectedly shallow, too, at a depth of less than 50 m on average. A tritium-based isotope study established that ‘the present recharge of groundwater in Cholistan is negligible’,40 pointing to ‘a range of the actual water age from 12900 to 4700 years BP’,41 that is, till about 2700 BCE.

  The last date is broadly consistent with that of 3200 BCE, which resulted from the study by the BARC scientists in nearby western Rajasthan, and it is corroborated by a study of 2008, in which a team of British, U.S. and Pakistani researchers directed by Peter Clift conducted field excavations on the Ghaggar-Hakra’s flood-plain in Pakistan’s state of Punjab. They obtained dates of sedimentation by ‘radiocarbon dating freshwater gastropod shells and woody material recovered from the pits’. According to their initial but promising findings, ‘Provisional age data now show that between 2000 and 3000 BCE, flow along a presently dried-up course known as the Ghaggur-Hakkra River ceased, probably driven by the weakening monsoon and possibly also because of headwater capture into the adjacent Yamuna and Sutlej Rivers.’42 Clearly, something radical happened to the river in the third millennium BCE.

  A LONG JOURNEY THROUGH THE DESERT

  Right from the two Oldhams, the Sarasvatī conundrum never ceased to fascinate observers; at regular intervals, new researchers came along to add their perspectives. We cannot hear them all, but we will end this first leg of our journey of exploration with a few observations from two geographers, the first, Indian, the second, German.

  Shamsul Islam Siddiqi’s contribution, ‘River Changes in the Ghaggar Plain’,43 dates back to 1944. After a mention of seven major dry river channels joining together in that plain, Siddiqi follows the resultant Ghaggar downstream and observes that ‘this dry river bed can be traced, fairly continuously, from Jakhal in Hissar [district] to the Eastern Nara in Sind’.44 In his analysis of the historical evidence, ‘the Sutlej was not always a tributary of the Indus . . . It was a late interloper into the Indus system’,45 and before that, the main feeder of the Ghaggar system, proceeding straight to it from Rupar instead of taking the present unnaturally sharp bend westward. ‘The Sutlej was the most westerly and the Jumna the most easterly tributary of the Ghaggar and their present courses are of comparatively late acquisition.’46 A conclusion supported, in Siddiqi’s opinion, by ‘the Hindu tradition which believes a mighty river, Sarsuti, to have once flowed across the Ghaggar Plain’.47

  Writing in 1969, Herbert Wilhelmy, a distinguished German geographer, provided a more detailed analysis: having surveyed the topographic and geological findings available in his time (therefore without satellite imagery), he proposed a careful reconstruction of the evolution of the hydrography of the Sutlej-Yamuna watershed, accompanied by five maps depicting the successive stages of the Sarasvatī river system.

  In the first (Fig. 3.8), which corresponds to Vedic times, the Sarasvatī flows through the Ghaggar, receives the waters of the ‘Veda-Sutlej’ at Bhatnir† (Hanumangarh) and those of the ‘Ur-Jumna’ or proto-Yamunā (flowing through the Chautang) near Suratgarh. The second stage sees the Yamunā captured by the Ganges system in the east, while the Sutlej had veered westward, meeting the Ghaggar farther downstream, at Walhar; the next three stages are marked by the continued migration of the Sutlej, until its final capture by the Beas. The details of these migrations are not crucial to us at this point; Wilhelmy’s general conclusions are what matters:

  The extraordinary breadth of the Hakra bed, which is not less than 3 km over a distance of 250 km and is even 6 km in some places, must therefore be due to the flood discharge from the big glacial rivers coming down from the Himalayas48 . . . The small Siwalik rivers would not have been enough to supply all the water in the Sarasvatī. In other words, the Sarasvatī must have had a source river in the Himalaya; the Sarasvatī must have lost this source river either due to a diversion or tapping, as indicated by the sharp bend near Rupar.49

  The work of Puri and Verma cited above, which sought to connect the Sarasvatī’s source to glaciers of the inner Himalayas, comes in support of this view. Wilhelmy continues:

  There should no longer be any doubt that Sutlej water flowed into the Hakra at three different places in an earlier period50 . . . In the very distant past, the Jumna [Yamuna] was certainly one of the big water suppliers of the ‘Lost River of Sind’. The water flowed through an old 1.5 km wide bed of the Chautang51 . . .

  This dry bed is indeed the holy river ‘Sarasvatī’ . . .; once upon a time, this was a genuine solitary river which reached the ocean without any tributaries on its long way through the desert.52

  Such is the picture that all the studies we have surveyed here converge on with a satisfying degree
of agreement, whatever differences they may have in terms of data and interpretation, especially as regards the chronology of the main stages in the Sarasvatī’s decline and final disappearance.

  If we have to postpone till the later chapters a more complete discussion of that crucial stage, it is because it did not merely impact the hydrography of northwest India; it affected millions of children, women and men who have so far not appeared in our beautiful but rather disembodied landscape. We will never fully know their story, but some of them have left us substantial traces of their existence: we have in front of us not just a collection of scattered settlements, but a far-reaching network extending to the Indus and to Gujarat—a whole civilization, the first on Indian soil.

  Part 2

  INDIA’S FIRST CIVILIZATION

  ‘Several hundred sites [of the Indus civilization] have been identified, the great majority of which are on the plains of the Indus or its tributaries or on the now dry course of the ancient Sarasvatī River, which flowed south of the Sutlej and then southward to the Indian ocean, east of the main course of the Indus itself.’

  Raymond Allchin, 2004

  ‘The large number of protohistoric settlements, dating from c. 4000 BC to 1500 BC, could have flourished along this river only if it was flowing perennially.’

  V.N. Misra, 1994

  {4}

  A Great Leap Backward

  Given a chance for a second trip on our time machine, I would unhesitatingly opt for 2700 BCE. Something mysterious was beginning to unfold around that date, complex stirrings that remain poorly understood to this day. For at least four millennia, a few regions of the Indo-Gangetic belt had already harboured settled village communities—settled, but slowly evolving new practices of agriculture, technology (metallurgy in particular), and crafts. Suddenly—over a few decades, at most a century—the Northwest witnessed the explosion of a wholly new category of human settlements: cities. Extensive, planned cities, rising almost at the same time hundreds of kilometres apart, fully functional by 2600 BCE and interacting with each other through a tight network. They thrived for seven centuries or so, declined, and were slowly swallowed by sand and soil. Until . . .

  THE PIONEERS

  In 1844, Major F. Mackeson, as we saw, pleaded with his superiors for the opening of what he thought to be a new route from Delhi to Sind via the Ghaggar-Hakra. Five years later, however, with the annexation of Punjab, the project lost its raison d’être : all that was now needed was to strengthen communications to and through Punjab, which the British promptly set about doing. Telegraph and railways, always projected as bringing ‘progress’ to India, were, in reality, first and foremost indispensable tools in the delicate exercise of keeping this huge territory under Britain’s ‘providential rule’. In the late 1850s, railway lines were laid through Punjab, particularly between Lahore and Multan, a line running south of the Ravi river, and through Sind. But to stabilize a railway line, you need ballast—a lot of it—and in flat alluvial plains, ballast material is not always easy to come by. Unless, of course, you are lucky enough to have an old ruined city at hand, with tons of excellent bricks waiting to be plundered.

  That is precisely what happened to a group of huge mounds located near a village called Harappa, in the Sahiwal district of Punjab, on the bank of a former bed of the Ravi, twelve kilometres south of the river’s present course. No one could have guessed that this name, ‘Harappa’, was destined to become world-famous—least of all the engineers of the Western Railways, who had eyes only for the cartloads of bricks they could ‘mine’ from this bountiful quarry. The cartloads soon became wagonloads, with a light railway laid for speedier extraction. Alexander Cunningham, who had visited the site in 1853 and again in 1856, returned to it in 1872 as the director of the newly formed Archaeological Survey of India (ASI); in his report, he recorded, with some anguish, that the massive ancient walls he had noted during his initial visits had vanished, having been turned into ballast for no less than 160 km of the new Lahore-Multan line.1

  Who could have manufactured those compact, precisely proportioned baked bricks? Neither Cunningham nor the few of his countrymen who preceded him to Harappa2 had a clue. Since the Mauryan age then constituted the farthest horizon of Indian archaeology, Cunningham naturally assumed that the site belonged to it—to ‘Buddhist times’ to be precise, as his eras seemed glued to religious lines (pre-Buddhist times, for instance, were ‘Brahminical’—a meaningless term that still lurks around in quite a few Indological studies). Cunningham also thought that Harappa was still a populous town in the seventh century CE when Hsüan-tsang visited the region. And when he came across a black-stone seal from Harappa, on which a bull and a few strange characters were incised, he could only see in them ‘an archaic kind of writing of c. 500 or 400 BC’.3 He was wrong on all three counts—but his curiosity was tickled.

  In two captivating studies, historians Upinder Singh and Nayanjot Lahiri recently wove the story of the beginnings of archaeology in India.4 Cunningham retired in 1885; after him the ASI went through ups and downs—mostly the latter. Nominated India’s viceroy in 1899, Curzon lost no time in reconstituting it; his immediate goal was to appoint a new, young and dynamic director, a post which successive financial curtailments had ended up abolishing. Enquiries zeroed in on John Marshall, a twenty-five-year-old classical scholar trained in archaeology in Greece, Crete and Turkey. Reaching India in early 1902, he took up his first assignment: apart from familiarizing himself with a largely unknown land, it consisted in the preservation of many badly neglected monuments, an issue that had much preoccupied Curzon. Given the viceroy’s contemptible political record in Bengal, it is good to remember this positive contribution of his: had he not stemmed the rot in the archaeological establishment, India would have lost hundreds of more monuments, ancient and medieval.

  Curzon’s protégé, Marshall, energetically moved on with his work, encouraging his superintendents and hiring local pundits to spot valuable antiquities, and getting Buddhist and other sites identified, protected and, when possible, excavated. All the while, he kept at the back of his mind the puzzling absence, in the archaeological record then available in India, of Bronze Age sites comparable to those that had come to light in recent decades in Egypt, Mesopotamia or the Aegean islands, such as the Minoan civilization of Crete, where Marshall had worked. It was now understood that the Bronze Age was a stage between the Neolithic and the Iron Age which saw a rapid development of civilization. In India, a few copper and bronze implements had indeed been collected here and there, but no full-fledged site of such a period had so far come to light. The Iron Age was thought to begin around 800 BCE (the date has now been pushed back by a whole millennium in the Gangetic region5). Beyond those misty times there was a big blank.

  In 1913, Marshall started an ambitious excavation at Taxila in northern Punjab (close to today’s Islamabad), a large city of early historical times. Ancient texts referred to it as ‘Takshashila’ and located an important Hindu-Buddhist centre of learning there; it was founded around 600 BCE and lived on for a millennium till it was destroyed by the invading Huns. Marshall returned there season after season until 1934, long after his directorship of the Survey had ended. Although remarkably extensive in scope (‘horizontal’, as archaeologists would put it), meticulously performed by the standards of the time, and important with regard to India’s historical period, it was not the excavation that would earn Marshall lasting fame. That would be Harappa, to which he deputed assistants in 1909 and again in 1914 in order to assess the potential of its badly plundered yet still impressive mounds—and also to look around for other specimens of the intriguing seal with unknown characters that Cunningham had described (a few more of the same type had since come to light through private collectors). Those brief explorations failed to reveal much of interest, yet it is to Marshall’s credit that he persisted with a plan to excavate the site.

  World War I and greater financial squeeze delayed it. In February 1917, Daya Ra
m Sahni, a Sanskrit scholar and epigraphist with a long experience of excavations, and now superintendent of the Archaeological Survey’s Northern Circle, paid a visit to Harappa on Marshall’s instructions. It took another four years for the necessary acquisition of two of the mounds and protection of the others. Finally, in January 1921, the digging began. In a little over a month, apart from pottery, portions of brick structures, long beads, numerous bangles and terracotta toys, Sahni dug out two inscribed seals and a lot of ‘well-burnt bricks of fine texture’ of proportions that were different from those of the bricks found in historical sites: Harappa’s bricks had, in his words, ‘the scientific proportion of two widths to a length, which is the essential condition of good bonding’.6 (He could have added two heights to a width : in short, height, width and length were in the ratio 1:2:4, ‘one to two to four’.) All these artefacts, thought Sahni, must have belonged to a ‘pre-Mauryan’ epoch—how much ‘pre’ was the question. Excited by the seals and their ‘curious pictographic legends’,7 Marshall pressed for deeper diggings into this huge vertical mound.

  A year earlier, in December 1919, Rakhal Das Banerji, another brilliant archaeologist and superintendent of the Survey’s Western Circle, had, in the course of a tour of Sind, paid a visit to imposing mounds not far from Larkana, a little to the west of the Indus, on the bank of an abandoned bed of the river. Locals called them ‘Mohenjo-daro’,* that is, ‘mound of the dead’. Banerji returned to it three years later with a team of excavators, and soon a few inscribed seals came to light in the middle of brick structures. Learning of this find in the spring of 1923, Marshall was, as he wrote to Banerji, ‘immensely interested’.8 The next year, he sent Madho Sarup Vats to pursue excavations at Mohenjo-daro; apart from unearthing more seals, Vats emphasized other important parallels with Harappa, notably pottery styles and baked bricks with identical proportions.