The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati

by Michel Danino

  But not everyone agrees. As the implications of the Sarasvatī’s chronology have grown clearer in the last two decades, voices have been heard questioning the identification of the Vedic Sarasvatī with the dry Ghaggar-Hakra bed—sometimes voices of the same scholars who had earlier endorsed that identification.

  Romila Thapar, for example, in 1974 mentioned ‘the change in the course of the Sarasvatī river with a consequent encroaching of the desert’20 as one among the likely causes for the decline of the Harappan cities. Again, in a textbook on Ancient India in 1987 (reprinted till 2000 at least), she wrote:

  The Aryans at first settled in the Punjab. Gradually they moved south-eastwards into the region just north of Delhi. There used to be a river flowing nearby called Saraswati but the water of this river has now dried up. Here they remained for many years, and here they prepared the collection of hymns known as the Rig-Veda.21

  The first half of this statement reflects the common theory of an Aryan migration into India, while the second half evidently endorses the Sarasvatī’s location and relationship with the composers of the Rig Vedic hymns. Yet in 2002, Thapar states, ‘The identification of the Ghaggar with the Sarasvatī, mentioned in the Rig-Veda, is controversial.’22

  The ‘controversy’, if there is one, must then be recent: there was none in the days of Aurel Stein or A. Ghosh. But rather than dwell on it, we will benefit from a discussion of current objections to the identification of the Vedic river.

  AN AFGHAN SARASVATĪ?

  One line of argument has resuscitated a theory first put forth over a century ago. One of its early proponents was Edward Thomas,23 an Indologist, who in 1883 argued that the original Sarasvatī did not belong to the plains of the Punjab, but was the Helmand of southern Afghanistan. (Alfred Hillebrandt, a German Sanskritist, propounded a similar thesis a few years later.) That river, the largest of the region, flows westward from the southern flank of the Hindu Kush massif and ends in a depression close to the Iranian border. In the ancient Avestan language,* its name (rather that of its chief tributary, the Arghandab) was ‘Harahvaitī’, linguistically akin to ‘Sarasvatī’. (The letter ‘s’ becomes ‘h’ in Avestan, as for instance in ‘Hapta Hindu’, which corresponds to the Rig Veda’s ‘Sapta Sindhu’.)

  In Thomas’s thesis, the Aryans, in their southward movement from Central Asia, stayed in the Helmand basin for a while; then, entering the Indian subcontinent and fighting their way eastward, they crossed the Indus and its tributaries, till they came upon today’s Sarsuti: though it was always, in Thomas’s opinion, a small stream, which gave the intruding Aryans ‘so shadowy an impression’, he suggested that they transferred to it the name of the Sarasvatī in memory of the ‘grand waters’24 they had loved in Afghanistan.

  This moving scenario—we can almost picture the brave Aryans fatigued by their Long March and longing to rest in the maternal arms of the mighty river goddess—has been dusted off, deromanticized and recycled by some of today’s critics of the Sarasvatī-Ghaggar identity.

  Among them, Rajesh Kochhar, an Indian astrophysicist, presented in 2000 what is probably the most closely argued thesis. Although he accepts that ‘the Ghaggar had a far more dignified existence in the past than it has today’ and must have ‘flowed into the Nara and further into the Rann of Kutch without joining the Indus’,25 he is nonetheless convinced that the Ghaggar-Hakra cannot have been the Rig Vedic Sarasvatī, and presents twelve points to that effect. Let us hear the salient ones.

  The first is that even if the Sutlej and the Yamuna flowed into the Ghaggar, ‘the confluence would affect the Hakra part [in Cholistan] of the Ghaggar-Hakra channel, not the Ghaggar part [in today’s India]’. That is to say, above the confluence with the Sutlej and the Yamunā, ‘the basic character of the Ghaggar would not change. It would still be a rainwater stream in low hills . . . The Rgvedic description of Sarasvatī as a mighty, swift river that cuts the ridges of the hills does not fit the Ghaggar of today. It would have neither fitted the Ghaggar of the past.’26 But the first part of the argument is based on wrong data. While it is true that some or most of the Yamuna’s waters would have joined the Ghaggar’s (through the Chautang) near Suratgarh, nothing rules out a partial flow of the Yamunā into the Markanda Valley, as proposed by geologists Puri and Verma (p. 64). Even leaving aside the Yamunā’s case, the Sutlej undeniably joined the Ghaggar far above the international border; it did so through several palaeochannels, one of which is still visible from Rupar and has been confirmed (p. 69) by satellite imagery: earlier we heard many researchers emphasize the Ghaggar’s considerable widening not far from Shatrana (Fig. 3.1). It is therefore not just the ‘Hakra part’ (in Cholistan) that would have been swollen by the Sutlej’s waters, but much of the Ghaggar too. As regards the Sarasvatī ‘cutting the ridges of the hills’, even allowing for some poetic licence, it is, again, entirely possible within the scenario proposed by Puri and Verma; even without it, it is clear that the Markanda, at least, once carried much more water than it does today, and during the monsoon at least, it would have been impressive enough to justify such a language.

  Kochhar’s second point, also stressed by Michael Witzel,27 carries more weight. In the Rig Veda’s third book, which counts among the earliest, rishi Vishvāmitra addresses the rivers Vipāsh (the Beas) and Shutudrī (the Sutlej). The two rivers have joined and flow together ‘to the sea’ (samudra), but Vishvāmitra, after duly praising them, wishes them to reduce their flow below the axle of his chariot so that he and his Bharata followers may cross over. The rivers, perhaps flattered, oblige and promise to bend ‘like a nursing mother’ and yield to the sage ‘like a girl to her lover’.28 Kochhar and Witzel argue that since the Sutlej was joining the Beas, this early hymn was composed when it had already deserted the Ghaggar—which, in that case, must have been reduced to a small stream, and could not have been the ‘mighty Sarasvatī’. Both of them therefore conclude that the Ghaggar was in Vedic times more or less what it is today.

  But there are alternative explanations. Although Kochhar speaks of the ‘event’29 of Vishvāmitra’s crossing, this particular hymn can scarcely be historical: two large rivers accepting to drastically reduce their combined flow and let chariots through their beds may not sound quite as grandiose a miracle as the parting of the Red Sea, but it is a miracle nonetheless: in actual fact, at no point of time would the confluence of the Beas and the Sutlej have been fordable. Either we accept that the Rig Veda’s ‘style is generally quite hyperbolic’,30 as Witzel himself argues in another context, or the hymn is an allegory with some concealed meaning.

  Even if we concede a confluence of the Sutlej with the Beas, there is no reason to take it as a permanent state of affairs. As noted earlier, the region’s flat alluvial terrain makes the Sutlej a capricious river. We saw (p. 33) how the Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 recorded the Sutlej’s flow into the Hakra in 1000 CE; the same gazetteer observed that the Sutlej ‘has changed its course more than once in historical times’:

  By 1245 the Sutlej had taken a more northerly course, the Hakra had dried up . . . Then [after the sixteenth century] the Sutlej once more returned to its old course and rejoined the Ghaggar. It was only in 1796 that the Sutlej again left the Ghaggar and finally joined the Beas.31

  Wilhelmy, whose work on the Sarasvatī figured in Chapter 3, also conducted a meticulous study of the history of the Indus system, in which he endorses this view: ‘This early confluence of the Sutlej and Beas was by no means the end of the matter. Both rivers have separated and rejoined several times in the last 2000 years.’32

  But in fact, we are misled—both in the Rig Vedic hymn and in the above gazetteer—into regarding the Sutlej as a single-bed river flowing either into the Ghaggar or into the Beas. Rather, the number of its palaeobeds between those two rivers (which include, among others, the Patialewali, the Wah and the three Naiwals) suggests that it had various stages of ‘braidedness’—also hinted at by the legend of Vasishtha’s attempted suicide conveyed in the Mah�
�bhārata (p. 62). Whether the Sutlej’s complex history will ever be fully known is doubtful, but at no past stage can we rule out multiple branchings into both the Ghaggar and the Beas. Moreover, the Beas itself is known to have ‘changed its course considerably since ancient times’, as Macdonell and Keith record in their Vedic Index,33 and we cannot be sure of its location in the early Vedic age. In other words, this Rig Vedic hymn is of little help in reconstituting the riverine landscape of the time.

  Kochhar’s other arguments, all of them minor as compared to the above, appear artificial or forced.34 He writes for instance, ‘It is strange that a river system containing such majestic rivers as the Satluj and Yamuna should be known by the name of a puny rainwater stream such as Ghaggar.’35 But the whole point, as he himself concedes, is that the Ghaggar had a ‘far more dignified existence in the past’, and that happens to fit the Rig Vedic descriptions.

  Or he argues, rightly, that ‘the Sarasvatī hymns in the Rgveda are older than or contemporaneous with the Indus hymns’, and concludes—wrongly—that ‘If this Sarasvatī were identical with the Ghaggar, then the archaeological sites on the Ghaggar should have been at least as old as the Punjab-Sind sites. What is observed is otherwise.’36 Leaving aside the solitary case of Mehrgarh, this is by no means certain: Mohenjo-daro seems to have had no pre-urban phase (as cogently argued by Michael Jansen37); Harappa’s earliest occupation, according to recent findings,38 goes back to the Hakra Ware phase (starting about 3800 BCE), named after a type of pottery identified by Mughal along the Hakra. The same Hakra phase is in evidence further upstream at Kalibangan39 and Kunal,40 and at several recently explored sites in Haryana, such as Kheri Meham, Girawad and Farmana.41 The first occupation at nearby Bhirrana appears to have begun even earlier, during or before the fifth millennium BCE.42 Until many more radiocarbon dates are available from both regions—the Indus and the Ghaggar-Hakra basins—we cannot say which one has the ‘older’ sites. Nor is the issue as important as Kochhar makes it out to be: there is no valid reason why the antiquity of the hymns should exactly match the antiquity of the sites.

  At any rate, having decided that the Ghaggar-Hakra could not have been the Vedic Sarasvatī, he looks for the latter in Afghanistan, and opts for the Helmand (Thomas’s old theory, although Kochhar does not name him). The evidence supplied for this identification is limited to malleable descriptions of the Sarasvatī in the Rig Veda, and a similarity between one of them and a portrayal of the Helmand in the Avesta. Kochhar is, however, aware that the Rig Veda associates the Gangā and Yamunā to the Sarasvatī and, therefore, proposes to transfer those two rivers too to Afghanistan: they were originally, in his view, tributaries of the Helmand,43 and that is where we must look for the stage of the Rāmāyana’s events: ‘Rāma himself must have lived in Afghanistan.’44

  The thesis is bold, but it runs into many difficulties when we recall the plot of the epic. However, here I will confine myself to spelling out the chief weaknesses in the identification of the Vedic Sarasvatī with the Afghan Helmand:

  It implies (and Kochhar says as much45) that the Rig Vedic people would have transferred the name of a medium-sized river (today’s Helmand) to a petty stream on the road to complete desiccation, which would be a bizarre way of glorifying the former’s memory. In 1886, R.D. Oldham, the geologist whose survey of the Ghaggar we quoted earlier, ridiculed the Afghan Sarasvatī thesis (then propounded by Thomas) precisely on this ground, protesting that it ‘implies an almost incredible degree of childishness in the ancient Aryans’.46 The objection stands.

  Then, if the migrating Aryans were so attached to a Sarasvatī left behind in Afghanistan, it is unclear what prevented them from transferring its name to the Indus—the first river they encountered after descending into its vast plains—or to any one of its respectable tributaries from the Jhelum to the Sutlej, which they would have crossed before reaching the largely defunct Ghaggar. It stretches the imagination to picture them having a sudden afterthought some 200 or 300 years after they left Afghanistan, and lauding the bygone Sarasvatī by transferring its hallowed name to a petty seasonal stream.

  None of the other rivers named in the Rig Veda, from the Gangā to the Sindhu, flows outside northwest India. There is no ground to transfer the Gangā and Yamunā to Afghanistan, and certainly no tradition there or in the Avesta to that effect.

  Other aspects of the Rig Veda that are incompatible with an Afghan setting have long been noticed, such as mentions of the elephant, the gaur, peacocks, and a typically Indian flora.47 And this Indian flora and fauna appear not just in the last books of the Rig Veda, but right from the older ones.

  ‘SAMUDRA’ IN THE RIG VEDA

  A fifth objection demands our attention. In the Rig Veda, the Sarasvatī flows ‘from the mountain to the sea’ (giribhya ā samudrāt)—but the Helmand ends in a swampy depression, not in the sea : it is a land-locked river. Although Kochhar is silent on this point, other defenders of the Afghan thesis have argued that the word samudra should not be taken to mean the sea or ocean, but just any ‘large body of water’.48 This argument is not new : a few early Indologists, convinced that the Aryans, who had freshly arrived from Central Asia, could not have known about the sea, decided that samudra in the Rig Veda does not mean what it does in classical Sanskrit.

  However, it is now over seven decades since M.L. Bhargava rejected this contention in the first chapter of his unrivalled Geography of Rgvedic India, quoting numerous references from the hymns.49 More recently, historian and Sanskritist P.L. Bhargava covered the same ground again, and concluded that ‘the evidence for the Vedic Indians’ familiarity with sea and maritime navigation is so varied and so overwhelming that it is really impossible to dismiss it as a mere figment of imagination’.50 Other Vedic scholars, such as David Frawley51 and Nicholas Kazanas,52 have argued along similar lines.

  While the word samudra (literally meaning ‘gathering of the waters’) does carry a metaphorical meaning at times, most of its 160 occurrences are plain enough. Thus Indra is ‘as extensive as the sea’;53 elsewhere, he carries two chieftains or kings safely over the sea.54 Rishi Vasishtha is so eminent that he is compared to ‘the sea’s unfathomed greatness’.55 The ‘eastern and western seas’56 are mentioned, as well as islands.57 Several hymns58 sing the legend of Bhujyu, who was treacherously abandoned in the middle of the ‘billowy ocean’, but rescued by the Ashvins, the heavenly horsemen twins, who fly to his help in the form of two birds and bear him swiftly for three days and three nights ‘to the sea’s farther shore’,59 finally bringing him back safely ‘in a ship with hundred oars’,60 one of the many mentions of vessels. (The Ashvins themselves, interestingly, are the ‘sons of the Sea’.61)

  In none of these occurrences can the word samudra stand for a swampy Afghan lake: the picture of the ocean imposes itself. As a matter of course, and in spite of their adherence to the Aryan invasion theory, early translators of the Rig Veda into English used the words ‘sea’ or ‘ocean’ in all such passages.

  And, as is their wont, the hymns build on the physical reality to create a powerful symbolism for the inner reality: thus, in a striking image of the spiritual quest, ‘the seven mighty rivers seek the ocean’;62 two seas, one above and one below,63 clearly stand for the superconscious and subconscious realms; or again, we find a ‘sea of milk’64 and, quite transparently, the ‘ocean of the heart’65 (hrdyāt samudra). Even in such passages, substituting a lake for the sea will hardly do. As regards the boat or the ship, it is often the symbol of the crossing to a safer or truer shore: ‘The ships of truth (satyasya nāvah) have borne the pious man across’.66

  Returning to the Sarasvatī, there is simply no good reason not to accept at its face value the phrase ‘flowing from the mountains to the ocean’ (so rendered by both Wilson and Griffith, the two nineteenth-century translators of the Rig Veda into English). We can now read with profit Max Müller’s comment on the same hymn, partly quoted earlier and written in 1869:

  Here we see samud
ra used clearly in the sense of sea, the Indian sea, and we have at the same time a new indication of the distance which separates the Vedic age from that of the later Sanskrit literature. Though it may not be possible to determine by geological evidence the time of the changes which modified the southern area of the Penjāb and caused the Sarasvatī to disappear in the desert, still the fact remains that the loss of the Sarasvatī is later than the Vedic age, and that at that time the waters of the Sarasvatī reached the sea.67

  Such is the natural conclusion flowing from the hymns: the ‘Vedic age’ precedes the Sarasvatī’s disappearance. And Max Müller, for all his straitjacket chronology, accepted, as we saw earlier (p. 51), that the Vedic river coincided in location with the Sarsuti.

  ALL IMAGINATION?

  Within a year of the publication of Kochhar’s book, the Sarasvatī was unceremoniously hauled from the witness box to the dock: the well-known Indian mediaevalist historian Irfan Habib68 authored a paper whose title is its conclusion: ‘Imagining River Sarasvatī’. His thesis, subtitled ‘A Defence of Common-sense’, is radical: to him, the Sarasvatī as a river never existed, except in the rishis’ and our imagination.

  Let us hear the prosecution. The first charge is easy to deal with: ‘The Sarsuti running past Thanesar is too petty a stream to fit the picture of a great river that the Rigveda’s verses cited above suggest.’ True, but this does not help us, for the Rig Veda nowhere says or implies that the Sarasvatī was limited to today’s Sarsuti; the scholarly consensus has been that the latter is no more than a relic or memory of the former.