The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati

by Michel Danino

  A few more points militate against the scenario proposed by Courty and Francfort. Primarily, the concentration of sites farther downstream, in Cholistan, which, in Mughal’s opinion, could only have been sustained by a ‘mighty’ Ghaggar-Hakra; such a cluster is impossible in the absence of perennial rivers or streams (as Habib himself admitted). Let us recall an isotopic study (p. 76) of the Hakra waters, which found them in flow till about 2700 BCE. Equally revealing is the obvious scattering of sites already noted at the end of the urban phase (Figs 6.8 and 6.9): the drastic change in the settlement pattern, with the total abandonment of the Ghaggar’s middle basin, cannot be explained without some equally drastic change in the hydrographic landscape. Yet the French team will admit of none: rejecting the existence of a river flowing in the Ghaggar’s bed, they cannot very well discuss its desiccation.

  For those reasons, their findings have not found favour with archaeologists: Mughal, Possehl, Misra and others do mention them, but continue to refer to a perennial Ghaggar partly fed by the Sutlej and the Yamuna.

  Nor would their thesis satisfy impartial readers of the Rig Veda and subsequent texts. Francfort is, of course, aware of this last point, and offers two ways out of the contradiction. In the first, he asks whether ‘the mythical Sarasvatī could be a memory of real and very ancient large rivers that watered the region after the melting of Himalayan glaciers’.90 But nothing in the texts sounds or feels like a ‘memory’. The Rig Veda reminds the great river that the Purus, a Vedic clan, ‘dwells on your two grassy banks’.91 The Mahābhārata depicts not only Balarāma’s pilgrimage along those banks, but how the final dreadful battle between Bhīma and Duryodhana took place ‘on the southern side of the Sarasvatī’, on a spot selected because ‘the ground there was not sandy’.92 Such specific details (there are many others) cannot be ‘memories’ of bygone ages. Moreover, even Indologists who accept the Aryan invasion or migration framework will shudder at the suggestion that the Vedic Aryans, reaching a dry Ghaggar around 1200 BCE, would have adopted the local (and therefore alien, if not hostile) tradition of a great river that had flowed there long, long ago—at least four or five millennia, according to Francfort’s chronology—a tradition that could have meant nothing to them.

  Francfort, apparently not too convinced himself, adds, ‘Or if the Sarasvatī was not a purely spiritual river, would it be too poetical to imagine that the vast networks of canals that irrigated the region are what come under the designation of “Sarasvati”?’ A ‘purely spiritual river’ is somewhat like Irfan Habib’s ‘river in the abstract’, and I need not repeat the many objections to such a concept. As regards the vast networks of canals, whose physical existence remains unproved in the first place, it would be unkind to belabour the point, since nothing in the Rig Veda, least of all the descriptions of the Sarasvatī, refers to anything resembling a canal.

  MORE OBJECTIONS

  Courty’s work on the Ghaggar’s sediments can be fruitfully contrasted with a study published in 2004 by geologist Jayant K. Tripathi and three of his colleagues (one Indian and two German), who also sought to establish the ‘absence of a glacial-fed, perennial Himalayan river in the Harappan domain’.93 Since this study has often been quoted in Internet circles as the ultimate proof that the Sarasvatī never existed, we need to give it due attention.

  The method adopted is a standard one: the analysis of specific isotopes found in sediments (here, isotopes of strontium and neo-dymium, two metallic elements occurring only in compounds). The authors’ chief conclusion, in summary, is that ‘Yamuna, Ganga and Satluj . . . derive their sediments from the Higher Himalayas unlike the Ghaggar, which originates and derives its sediments from the Sub-Himalayas [i.e. the Shivaliks] only’. This conclusion is at variance with that of Puri and Verma (p. 64), who found evidence of Higher Himalayan sediments as far as the Markanda Valley.

  But there are major problems with this study. The authors do not provide the number of samples taken nor their precise locations. Judging from a very imprecise map,94 no sample was actually taken from the Ghaggar’s bed, and certainly none from any of the palaeochannels of the Sutlej and the Chautang; this restricts the value of the study. Also, samples were taken between the Sutlej (near Rupar) and the Ganges, at a depth of 1 to 9 m, but none of the results is given in terms of depth, as if it made no difference. If there are really no Higher Himalayan sediments down to a depth of 9 m, it clashes with Courty’s observation (p. 62) of ‘true grey sands at a depth of over 8 m [in the Ghaggar], identical to those of the Yamuna and the Sutlej’ (elsewhere,95 Courty speaks of 7 m).

  Tripathi and his colleagues differ from Courty on two more grounds. The first is one of chronology: they arbitrarily attribute to the studied sediments a date bracket of ‘between 2 to 20 Ka [kilo-annum]’, curiously basing themselves on the ‘personal communication’ of other experts rather than on their own isotopic analysis. But the lower date of 20,000 years appears invalid: in Courty’s analysis, the same sediments accumulated after the last Ice Age, that is, in the last 10,000 years or so. Second, while she finds evidence of semi-arid conditions in the Ghaggar basin, they opt for Phadtare’s model of ‘abundant monsoon precipitation in the Sub-Himalayan region’, as a result of which ‘the Palaeo-Ghaggar must have been a mighty river with broad channels’.

  So here again, if there was in the end a ‘mighty’ Ghaggar which ultimately dried up, why could it not be the Sarasvatī? The authors do not answer this question, but appear to think that a Vedic Sarasvatī could only have originated in the higher Himalayas: ‘the River Ghaggar is not the Saraswati as far as its origin in the glaciated Himalayas is concerned’. However, that is a non sequitur, since nothing in the Vedic texts expressly demands a glacial origin. If we have a ‘mighty Ghaggar’ in Harappan times, whatever the origin of its waters, it seems to me that the authors have proved the case of the Sarasvatī rather than disproved it.

  Finally, there is a serious problem with Courty’s and Tripathi’s approaches: both fail to notice the Sutlej’s contribution to the Ghaggar, since they do not find in the latter the Higher Himalayan sediments that the former would have carried. Yet we saw earlier (p. 262) Wilhelmy’s assertion that ‘both rivers have separated and rejoined several times in the last 2000 years’, and, as examples, the Tarikh-i-Mubarak Shahi’s testimony (p. 46) that the Sarasvatī joined the Sutlej in the fifteenth century, or the Imperial Gazetteer’s mention of the Sutlej finally leaving the Ghaggar in 1796. Either the geological data is inadequate or wrongly interpreted, or the Sutlej somehow deposited its Higher Himalayan sediments before joining the Ghaggar. Raikes’s finding (p. 60) of ‘shallow beds of a fine silty sand’ at more or less regular intervals in the upper layers of sediments of the Ghaggar was perhaps closer to the truth.

  Deep contradictions of the above sort between several scientific studies are to be expected in geophysical disciplines; they simply mean that more precise research is required before final conclusions can be securely reached. They also emphasize the need for studies of the Sarasvatī basin that will integrate data from inter-related fields—geology, palaeoclimatology, isotope analysis and archaeology in particular. As of now, such multi-disciplinary studies are non-existent.

  Of late, there have been others who object to the Ghaggar-Sarasvatī identity, such as the historian R.S. Sharma,102 but since his stand (basically a repetition of the Afghan Sarasvatī thesis) has been aptly refuted by B.B. Lal,103 I need not repeat the arguments here.

  If I have examined in some detail what I felt to be the best-argued cases, it is not merely because they deserved a hearing, but because they do help us refine our understanding of what really happened on the ground. One thing at least, I hope, has emerged from our explorations of the Sarasvatī: here as elsewhere, reality is not simple. We do not have a mighty river flowing uninterrupted in a well-defined bed from the end of the Ice Age till 1900 BCE, when it suddenly dried up. The stages of its evolution are complex, and cannot be worked out securely in every detail on the basis of
available data—that will be the task of future multi-disciplinary studies.104

  Nevertheless, if the vast majority of archaeologists, Indologists and other scholars accept the Sarasvatī’s existence and location, it must be with good reason. The mosaic in Fig. 11.2 is eloquent testimony from the archaeological world and an appropriate conclusion to our long arguments.

  The time has finally come to take the Harappan bull by the horns, attempt to piece together our jigsaw puzzle, and peer at the picture taking shape under our eyes.

  Epilogue:

  Sarasvatī Turns Invisible

  The web of our story has been woven with strands of various fabrics and colours : literature, tradition, geology, archaeology, climatology and a few more.

  The literary strand was our starting point, and I hope to have shown that the testimony of ancient texts cannot be brushed aside, especially when it tells a consistent tale. No doubt, there will be ‘hyperbole’ and, more to the point, a good deal of mythologizing: literalist readings will only land us into complete confusion. When, for instance, the Rig Vedic poet exclaims that the Sarasvatī ‘surpasses in might all other waters’, it need not mean that he went out to measure the flow of all Sapta Sindhus in cubic metres per second and found the Sarasvatī sitting at the top of the chart. But when he tells us that the river rose in the mountain and flowed between two others, we have no ground to disbelieve him, especially when later texts confirm this with a wealth of details.

  Nor can local traditions be scorned if they recollect a time when a river filled what is now a broad, dry bed in an arid landscape of sand dunes. Again, we may quibble over dates or whether the bygone river really ‘filled’ the bed, but not over the fact of the river’s existence—which is why scholars from Tod to Stein accepted the testimony of the folklore on the ‘Lost River of the Indian Desert’—a testimony strengthened by the presence of five rivers named after the Sarasvatī in the Yamuna-Sutlej divide : the four mentioned earlier (pp. 46-50) and the Sirsa discussed in the last chapter (to which we may add the city of Sirsa itself).

  THE SARASVATĪ AND THE YAMUNĀ

  To reconstruct the main stages in the river’s life—in a manner which, I believe, respects all the strands of our web—I will begin with a useful clue in the Mahābhārata. In two places at least, the epic tells us that the Sarasvatī’s course in the mountain was close to the Yamunā’s. In the more precise passage of the two, Balarāma climbs to a tīrtha on the Sarasvatī called ‘Plakshaprāsravana’ (the name of the river’s source as we saw earlier) and, from there, soon reaches the Yamunā. To reach Plakshaprāsravana, he has ‘not proceeded far in his ascent’1 of the mountain: the area is not far above the plains. Indeed, while Balarāma is enjoying himself bathing in tīrtha after tīrtha, Nārada, the ever-meddlesome emissary of the gods, happens along and apprises him of the terrible slaughter that has taken place on the battlefield of Kurukshetra; today, he adds, the final battle between Bhīma and Duryodhana is due to take place. Balarāma promptly dismisses his entourage and, regretfully tearing himself away from the river—’repeatedly casting his eyes with joy on the Sarasvati’2—descends from the mountain to reach the spot in time on the river’s southern bank, not far from Kurukshetra. There is nothing ‘hyperbolic’ about the passage: Balarāma’s ascent as well as descent are brief affairs, so that the tīrthas he visits must have been in the Shivaliks,3 probably in the Markanda or the Bata Valley, as scholars have often proposed.

  Proximity apart, the Sarasvatī’s relationship with the Yamunā is indeed a key issue. We saw in Chapter 3 how some geologists envisage that the Yamunā and the Tons once flowed together westward into the Bata-Markanda corridor. In such a scenario, however, there would be a single Sarasvati-Yamunā in the plains: the Yamunā would have no separate existence (except above its confluence with the Tons). Also, while the Markanda Valley is indeed ‘anomalously wide’,4 suggesting a greater flow than this rain-fed river could have had on its own, it seems to me that the combined Yamunā-Tons-Markanda should have left a deeper signature on the plains than can be detected today (through satellite imagery, for instance).

  THE SARASVATĪ IN FULL FLOW

  I will, therefore, take a middle path and propose that the Shivalik landscape was such that only a portion of the Yamunā-Tons ran westward into the Markanda Valley, with the rest flowing southward through a smaller and higher opening than today’s ‘Yamuna tear’. The westward branch was the Sarasvatī (which would explain why the Markanda does not appear in the Rig Veda), while the southward was the Yamunā.

  When it touched the plains, the Yamunā divided once more, as Cunningham (see his map in Fig. 2.3) and R.D. Oldham (p. 24) proposed, and others after them: because its terraces occupied a higher level than today, part of the river flowed southwest, joining minor streams to form the Drishadvatī of old. In the plains, the Yamunā was thus a double river—which would conveniently explain the root meaning of the word yamunā: ‘twin’. At the western end of the divide, the Sutlej—or, more likely, only a branch of it—joined the Ghaggar around Shatrana. Fig. 12.1 summarizes the proposed hydrography of the region.

  This state of things fits well with the pre-urban stage of the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization (Fig. 6.7): many sites are found along or near the Drishadvatī’s course and the Ghaggar’s after its confluence with the Sarasvatī, in a virtually unbroken chain all the way to Cholistan. The almost complete absence of sites away from the major watercourses or their tributaries appears to confirm a general trend towards aridity.

  This stage of a Sarasvatī in full flow also suits the Rig Vedic descriptions of the river, including its designation as ‘seven-sistered’. Let us recall Vivien de Saint-Martin’s sagacious remark: ‘The ancient designation of Sarasvatī very much appears to have embraced, apart from the chief watercourse flowing far to the west, the totality of the streams flowing down from the mountain close to each other before they unite in a single bed.’ Again, ‘seven’ need not be taken literally, but the number does suggest that the Sarasvatī of that age comprised all the tributaries together, from today’s Sarsuti in the east to the three Naiwals in the west (Fig. 3.1).

  Fed with a portion of the Yamunā’s waters and a portion, at least, of the Sutlej’s, the Sarasvatī would have had no difficulty in reaching the sea north of the Rann of Kachchh. Even its chief tributaries, such as the Ghaggar and the Markanda, would have held more water on their own than was noted in the nineteenth century: not only was rainfall in their catchment areas probably higher, as we saw, but the Shivaliks’ forest cover must have been much denser than in recent centuries, storing and releasing rainwater well beyond the monsoon.

  SARASVATĪ LOSES YAMUNĀ

  During the first centuries of the third millennium, before the start of the urban phase, a severe tectonic or seismic event appears to have occurred—a massive earthquake, in ordinary parlance, but in this special zone where the Indian plate pushes under the Eurasian, faulting, upthrust or subsidence can be important side effects of seismic episodes. K.S. Valdiya details such phenomena and gives an example of a geologically attested earthquake sometime after 3000 BCE farther downstream the Yamunā;5 I also quoted the case of the archaeologically attested earthquake that damaged Kalibangan’s Early settlement, farther to the west, around 2700 BCE, and another during the same epoch at Dholavira.

  This is about the time when our hypothetical event (or, more likely, chain of events) struck the upper Sarasvatī basin, broadening the Yamunā’s passage through the Shivaliks and forcing her southward, while in the plain below, its bed subsided : the ‘East Yamunā’ captured most of the waters of the ‘West Yamuná’, and both the Markanda-Sarasvatī and the Drishadvatī found their flow severely depleted (though the pattern of settlement suggests a westward branching off of the Yamunā further south). But such a capture may not have happened overnight; as Louis Flam puts it, ‘It should be noted that river capture and the drying of the captured stream are not single event phenomena occurring over a short period of time’.6 />
  Two key archaeological data confirm this second stage (Fig. 12.2): the number of sites along the Drishadvatī gets considerably reduced from the Early to the Mature phases and, as pointed out by Mughal, a segment in the Hakra’s upper stretch is now devoid of sites. On the other hand, a number of Mature sites rather neatly aligned along the Wah (or Sirhind) unequivocally testify to a branch of the Sutlej flowing there. At the same time, Mature sites west of Rupar and all the way to Ludhiana show that the Sutlej flowed there, too—it was bifurcated, at the least.

  The texts also give us two major clues for this stage: the earliest mentions, in the Brāhmanas, of ‘Vinashana’ or the place where the Sarasvatī disappears—if we can trust the site distribution pattern (Fig. 12.2), that spot would be very close to today’s international border. And intriguingly, the Pañchavimsha Brāhmana makes it clear that Vinashana is located below the Sarasvatī-Drishadvatī confluence7—precisely what the Mature sites tell us.

  We saw in the literature a few more hints, albeit more diffuse ones, that some cataclysm hit the region: the diversion of the Yamunā (p. 61) and the braiding of the Sutlej (p. 62) alluded to in the Mahābhārata, the Sarasvatī carrying fire to the ocean (p. 44). The last story could be interpreted as the river’s desiccation, or it could be related to two passages from the Purānas quoted by O.P. Bharadwaj,8 in which the Sarasvatī ‘carries blood’ or ‘water mixed with blood for a complete year’. (In the Mahābhārata also, the poor river is cursed by Vishvāmitra to flow ‘for a whole year, bearing blood mixed with water’.9) Recently, the scientist and Sanskrit scholar R.N. Iyengar argued in detail that the ancient literature is replete with memories of cataclysms, especially in the Northwest.10