The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati

by Michel Danino

  From the vestiges of antiquity which are still abundantly scattered along its bed, it is clear that the Ghagghar once bathed with its waters a florid and prosperous region. Now the bed is dry, and like an immense road of glaring whiteness, crosses a scene of desolation, which is only broken here and there by a small village built of mud, or a field of rape-seed. Otherwise the river bed is barren, a clean sheet of argil, slippery and impracticable to the camel in the rains, hard and intersected by cracks during the rest of the year, and on both its banks and sometimes even in the middle the ancient theris raise their heads all red with fragments of bricks and pottery.4

  Two of those theris or mounds, near the village of Kalibangan, arrested Tessitori’s attention (Fig. 6.1), and he wrote in his report that they contained ‘vestiges of a very remote, if not prehistorical antiquity’5—a highly perceptive observation, when so little was known of India’s prehistory. He also noted that the mounds had suffered from a massive plunder of bricks for the laying of a section of the Jodhpur-Bikaner railway—the same cynical brick-robbing that Cunningham had noted at Harappa a few decades earlier.

  Tessitori’s limited excavations at Kalibangan in 1917 and 1918 brought to light a few brick structures, pottery unrelated to known types, a cylindrical well of trapezoid bricks, stone flakes and three mysterious seals, two of them with unknown signs. Oddly, he chose to omit the seals from his report to Marshall; had he mentioned them, Marshall would very likely have made a connection with the black stone seal from Harappa published by Cunningham. We can indulge in the speculation that he might then have ordered further excavations at Kalibangan; had this happened, Tessitori would have been immortalized as the discoverer of a civilization called the ‘Ghaggar civilization’ or, perhaps, the ‘Kalibangan civilization’!

  Fate, however, decided otherwise. With his mother taken seriously ill, Tessitori had to leave for Italy abruptly; he reached home too late to see her alive. After a few months, he returned to India, but fell ill on the ship. Once in India, his condition worsened rapidly; he breathed his last in Bikaner in November 1919, and was buried there. He was barely thirty-two.

  While in Italy, Tessitori had vainly tried to identify the signs on the Kalibangan seals, and Lahiri suggests that he must have finally made up his mind to show them to Marshall after his return to India. Death denied him that chance. With Tessitori leaving the most telling clues out of his report, Marshall never associated Kalibangan with the civilization unearthed at Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. For decades, the ‘Indus Valley’ remained the core area, actively investigated, while Kalibangan and other sites of the Ghaggar Valley slumbered on under the sands.

  AUREL STEIN AND THE SARASVATĪ

  The region saw its next explorer of importance in the person of one of the most colourful and intrepid archaeologists of the twentieth century: Marc Aurel Stein. Born in Budapest in 1862, this Jewish Hungarian studied in Austria, Germany and finally at Oxford, where he majored in archaeology, mastering many European languages in the process, besides Persian and Sanskrit.

  Drawn very early to Asia, he travelled to India when he was twenty-five, and became the principal of Lahore’s Oriental College. He occupied his leisure time by editing and translating Kalhana’s Rājatarangini, Kashmir’s well-known historical chronicle.

  But Stein thirsted for wider horizons, and after a brief stint in Calcutta, embarked on an expedition to Central Asia in 1900. Three more expeditions followed till 1930, and their outcome ensured Stein’s lasting fame. Over seven years, Stein covered some 40,000 km on horseback and on foot, during which he explored, surveyed and, occasionally, excavated China’s western region of Xinjiang,‡ especially the Tarim basin and its forbidding Takla Makan Desert. Tracing ancient caravan routes into China, including the legendary Silk Road, he brought to light much long-lost Buddhist art. His most spectacular discovery, in 1907, was the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas, which had been sealed eight centuries earlier; he managed to acquire many of its treasures, including paintings and thousands of rare scrolls, and bring them to Britain, along with manuscripts from other sites. Those achievements earned him a knighthood in 1912 (he had acquired British citizenship in 1904).

  When he was not roaming Central Asia or living in a tent in Gulmarg with his dog, Sir Aurel Stein worked for the ASI; but he remained bitten by wanderlust, probing in Iran the connection between the Mesopotamian and the Indus civilizations, or exploring Roman frontier defences in Iraq. His work on the subcontinent was extensive nonetheless, even if it often gives an impression of having been done on the run. In the Swat Valley (the northernmost part of today’s Pakistan), he traced some of the cities visited or besieged by Alexander the Great; while in Waziristan, Baluchistan and the Makran coast, he identified many prehistoric sites, including quite a few that later proved to be Harappan.

  The least known part of Aurel Stein’s work happens to be the one that concerns our story: his exploration of the states of Bikaner and Bahawalpur (Fig. 6.3), which he undertook in the winter of 1940-41—at the ripe young age of seventy-eight. Stein seems to have been fascinated by inhospitable regions, and we may imagine that he heard the call of the Great Indian Desert’s desolate landscape of endless sand dunes. But as a Sanskritist, he was also intrigued by the legend—or the mystery—of the lost Sarasvatī and the traditions echoing the legend. The title of a paper he published in 1942 makes that clear: ‘A Survey of Ancient Sites along the “Lost” Sarasvatī River’.6 (He wrote a more detailed report the next year, which remained unpublished until 1989.7) However, that was not his first contribution to the search for India’s bygone rivers: in 1917, he had authored a paper ‘On Some River Names in the Rigveda’, in which he discussed the identities of the rivers listed in the Rig Veda’s Nadīstuti sūkta, observing that ‘the identity of the first four rivers here enumerated . . . is subject to no doubt. They correspond to the present Ganges, Jumna, Sarsuti, Sutlej . . . The order in which the first four are mentioned exactly agrees with their geographical sequence from east to west.’8

  Twenty-four years later, then, he organized an expedition to the region. Here is, in his own words, how he was drawn to the quest:

  On my return to India . . . a survey of any remains of ancient occupations along the dry river-bed of the Ghaggar or Hakra, which passes from the easternmost Panjab through the States of Bikaner and Bahawalpur down to Sind, seemed attractive. Traditional Indian belief recognizes in this well-marked bed the course of the sacred Sarasvatī, once carrying its abundant waters down to the ocean and since antiquity ‘lost’ in desert sands.9

  Let us mark, once again, the recognition of the Ghaggar-Hakra bed as the Sarasvatī in ‘traditional Indian belief’. Stein added that the easternmost tributary of the Ghaggar was ‘still known as the Sarsuti (the Hindi derivative of Sarasvatī) [which] passes the sacred sites of Kurukshetra near Thanesar, a place of Hindu pilgrimage’.10 Like the nineteenth-century explorers of the region, he was struck by ‘the width of its dry bed within Bikaner territory [that is, downstream of Hanumangarh]; over more than 100 miles [160 km], it is nowhere less than 2 miles [3.2 km] and in places 4 miles [6.4 km] or more’. He also noted the presence of numerous mounds along the bed of the Ghaggar-Hakra: ‘The large number of these ancient sites contrasts strikingly with the very few small villages still on the same ground.’11 The region had clearly supported a much larger population in the past. He also observed that ‘the bed shows a firm loamy soil, easily distinguished from the light sand on either side’,12 which is precisely the contrast captured by satellite photography.

  Amused, Stein recorded, at Jandewala on the Ghaggar (in Bikaner), a ‘popular tradition [that] recognizes the place where a ferry service is supposed to have crossed the river to Mathula on the opposite bank, a distance of more than 3 miles’—or 5 km, but of course without a drop of water between the two banks! ‘Still more striking, perhaps,’ he continued, ‘is the name of Pattan-munara, the “Minar of the ferry”, borne by an old site in Bahawalpur territory which is similarly
believed to mark a ferrying place across the Hakra, the bed of which is here, if anything, still wider.’13

  Fascinating as these local traditions may be, they need to be correlated, if possible, with literary and archaeological evidence. Stein’s first landmark was therefore the Veda:

  In at least three passages of the Rigveda mentioning the Sarasvatī, a river corresponding to the present Sarsuti and Ghaggar is meant. For this we have conclusive evidence in the famous hymn, the ‘Praise of the rivers’§ (Nadistuti) which, with a precision unfortunately quite exceptional in Vedic texts, enumerates the Sarasvati correctly between the Yamuna (Jumna) in the east and the Sutudri or Sutlej in the west.14

  This is in perfect agreement with what we saw in this book’s first part: putting together the Rig Vedic descriptions of the Sarasvatī and ‘traditional Indian belief’, Stein had no doubt as to the identity of this broad, dry bed running through a scorched expanse of sand. And he hoped that the study of the bed’s topography and ‘of old sites on its banks’ would ‘be helpful to the student of early Indian history, still so much obscured by the want of reliable records and the inadequacy of archaeological evidence.’15His hope would be more than fulfilled, as his work was going to set off astonishing discoveries in the following decades.

  Meanwhile, with ‘very generous arrangements for the survey from Maharaja Ganga Singhji, that remarkable ruler of the Bikaner State’,16 Stein set off from Bikaner to Suratgarh in December 1940. The ‘generous arrangements’ included ‘the use of a motor car’, which allowed him and his small team to visit an impressive number of sites in the region. The team included the late Krishna Deva, then a young archaeologist, and now well known to students of temple architecture, among other fields.

  Villagers must have goggled at this rare car raising a cloud of sand as it hurtled around Suratgarh, Hanumangarh and Anupgarh, stopping mostly to inquire about mounds known in the area. They must have stared more at this spry elderly white man scrutinizing potsherds dotting their surface. A few trial trenches dug between Hanumangarh and Anupgarh convinced Stein that most sites in that area belonged to the historical era, such as the impressive ruins of Rangmahal, near Suratgarh, which date from the Kushan age (first to third centuries CE).

  Some 22 km northeast of Rangmahal, Stein stopped at ‘two large mounds’ near the hamlet of Kalibangan—the same mounds probed by Tessitori. (Stein was unaware at the time of Tessitori’s explorations : only after the completion of his own did he come across Tessitori’s report, ‘comprising 228 closely written foolscap pages’.17) Strangely, Stein failed to relate Kalibangan to the Indus civilization, noting merely that it was ‘an extensive site used mainly for burning bricks and for pottery’.18 It was nothing of the sort. As B.K. Thapar, one of Kalibangan’s excavators, put it decades later, Stein ‘failed to recognize that the painted pottery found on the site in fact belonged to the Indus civilization and the two mounds represented occupational deposit thereof and not the accumulation of kiln remains’.19 Perhaps he was in a tearing hurry to move on to Cholistan while the temperature was tolerable. Tessitori, studying Kalibangan before anything of the Indus civilization was known, had displayed more intuition when he sensed a ‘prehistorical antiquity’ at the site.

  Stein, similarly, let pass a number of Harappan sites on his way to Anupgarh, convinced that most of them, like Rangmahal, belonged to historical times.

  Instead of crossing into the Bahawalpur state from Anupgarh (Fig. 6.4), he returned to Bikaner on 23 January 1941, and after a few days’ halt proceeded to Jodhpur and Jaisalmer. From there, he travelled by lorry to Ramgarh, making a note of ‘a number of wells of no great depth in a wide sandy drainage bed’.20 At Ramgarh, our party had to switch to camels and horses; riding through Tanot, a former stronghold of the Bhati Rajputs, they crossed into Bahawalpur on 10 February.

  Stein’s account of his month-long exploration of Cholistan is enlivened by interesting forays into the region’s history and a warm eye for details, ranging from ingenious agricultural practices in a very arid environment to traces of the old caravan route between Multan and Delhi. Moving ‘upstream’ a dry Hakra, he rode up to Marot and Fort Abbas (less than 50 km west of Anupgarh), then turned back towards Derawar, finally reaching the town of Bahawalpur when the rapidly rising heat put a stop to the expedition, though not before he had conducted a trial excavation at one of the mounds on the way.

  Unlike in Bikaner, from Fort Abbas ‘right down the Hakra as far as my survey extended west of Derawar’, Stein related ‘prehistoric mounds with pottery of the chalcolithic period’. At many sites, besides ‘flint blades’ and ‘cakes of clay’, he found ‘painted pottery [which] closely resembled that of numerous chalcolithic sites explored by me in British Baluchistan and Makran, and also that of the now well-known great Indus Valley sites’. Clinchingly, at one place, Stein found ‘sherds with incised characters which appear on many inscribed seals from Mohenjo-daro and Harappa’. Altogether, there were ‘very numerous prehistoric mounds’ in the Hakra Valley with ‘close similarity in the shapes of vessels, terracotta, and shell ornaments’.21

  That was the high point of Stein’s expedition: despite its limitations, it established for the first time the existence, in the Hakra Valley, of sites related to the Harappan culture. Moreover, taking all periods together, he identified some eighty new sites, which in itself was a rich harvest.

  Archaeology apart, some of Stein’s remarks on hydrographic changes in the Ghaggar-Hakra basin are worth noting. He observed that the Hakra’s bed became wider near Walhar (close to today’s Indo-Pak border, on the Pakistani side), north of which he found ‘levels between the sand ridges of the Cholistan which unmistakably represent an ancient winding bed of the Sutlej, that once joined the Hakra between Walar and Binjor’.22 That is precisely one of the Sutlej’s palaeochannels, which we noted earlier (p. 61). As regards the Ghaggar upstream, Stein produced testimonies of a water flow sometime during historical times. In his view, the two evidences put together proved that a large river had once existed in the valley, which explained ‘how the Sarasvatī has come in hymns of the Rigveda to be praised as a great river’. Clearly, therefore, ‘a great change has affected the Sarasvatī river or Ghaggar since reference to it was made in Vedic texts . . . Lower down on the Hakra the main change was due to the Sutlej having in late prehistoric times abandoned the bed which before had joined the Ghaggar’.23

  Marc Aurel Stein completed his report in 1943, noting how his work in Bikaner would ‘rank among the happiest memories of all my years in the plains of India’.24 Indefatigable, he prepared for a fresh expedition, this time to Afghanistan: he had long asked for permission to explore that country, and it had finally come. But his rich and eventful life came to an end soon after he reached Kabul; he was buried there just a month short of his eighty-first birthday.

  Krishna Deva’s summary of Stein’s work on the subcontinent is an apt assessment:

  Stein was essentially a geographer and an explorer and is to be admired for his indomitable courage and spirit of adventure in undertaking hazardous journeys through difficult terrain. He discovered a large number of Chalcolithic and related sites in the Great Indian Desert and the entire reach of the Indo-Iranian borderlands, covering Northern and Southern Baluchistan and a good part of Iran. He was a pioneer and a pathfinder and was to Indian protohistoric archaeology what Alexander Cunningham was to Indian historical archaeology.25

  Stein’s survey of the Sarasvatī sites was too rapid to explore in depth the connection between those ‘prehistoric mounds’ and the brilliant cities of the Indus Valley, yet the evidence he unearthed in Cholistan was enough to send colleagues on the trail a few years later. Also, it goes to his credit that he was the first to attempt a synthesis between three different streams of evidence: the Rig Veda’s testimony, local traditions and archaeology. That synthesis rested on the identification of the Sarasvatī with the bed of the Ghaggar-Hakra, an identification which left no doubt in Stein’s mind.


  A HARVEST OF SITES

  With the 1947 Partition, all forty-odd known Harappan sites went over to Pakistan, except two (a minor one near Rupar in Punjab, and a larger one in Saurashtra, viz. Rangpur). Indian archaeologists must have felt almost bereaved (or was it orphaned?): they had been given a splendid ancient civilization, and within hardly a quarter of a century it was snatched away from them. There was only one thing to be done: probe whether that civilization may have extended to this side of the newly created border, and if so, how deep inside.

  According to a recent article by Nayanjot Lahiri, one man convinced Jawaharlal Nehru in 1948 to push through a project of ‘explorations in Jaisalmer and Bikaner’ : the well-known historian and administrator ‘Sardar’ K.M. Panikkar, who was then the Dewan of Bikaner. Panikkar had, in fact, met Aurel Stein when the latter visited Bikaner eight years earlier to prepare for his survey of the Ghaggar, and in his autobiography, Panikkar notes how Stein mentioned to him that if his work were carried forward, it would show that the Indus civilization originated in this tract. Whether these were Stein’s very words or were coloured by Panikkar’s own conviction we cannot say, but his note to Nehru, evidently referring to Stein’s explorations, shows great foresight:

  With the separation of the Pakistan Provinces, the main sites of what was known as the Indus Valley Civilisation have gone to Pakistan. It is clearly of the utmost importance that archaeological work in connection with this early period of Indian history must be continued in India. A preliminary examination has shown that the centre of the early civilisation was not Sind or the Indus Valley but the desert area in Bikaner and Jaisalmer through which the ancient Saraswati flowed into the Gulf of Kutch at one time.26

  Nehru endorsed Panikkar’s note and got a special grant of 10,000 rupees released to the Archaeological Survey of India for the purpose.