The Lost River: On The Trail of Saraswati
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SARASVATĪ’S DESICCATION
The next stage takes us back to the dramatic sweeping away of the Mature Harappan sites from the Sarasvatī’s heartland: a big void (Fig. 12.3) suddenly stares at us in the region between Shatrana and Cholistan. Sites like Kalibangan and Banawali are abandoned, with no Late occupation as at Harappa or Dholavira, for instance—here, for some reason, most people found it impossible to stay on, even in a de-urbanized context. Instead, the Late sites appear to cling to the Shivalik foothills from the Ravi to the Ganges. A few alignments suggest some flow of water in the Drishadvatī and from the Sutlej, but the main trunk of the Sarasvatī appears to have gone dry. (One of the Sutlej’s channels further downstream also fed a few last Cholistan sites.)
If we cannot invoke a complete desertion of the upper Sarasvatī by the Sutlej, then a sharp drop in rainfall in the Shivaliks—detected by a few studies, as we saw—perhaps dealt, in effect, a deathblow to a depleted river system. The monsoon-fed streams flowing down the hills would have been enough to sustain hundreds of small, ‘back-to-village-life’ settlements, but we must suspect the onset of desertification in the central section.
This scenario—which differs in some details from those cited earlier—is consistent with the archaeological record, several of the recent climatic studies, and major descriptions of the river system in the literature. Yet, I would not presume to regard it as final or complete: a full account of the river’s evolution should discuss and evaluate in much greater detail than we can at present the region’s tectonic history, phenomena of erosion (resulting in river capture, for instance), changes in land use and agricultural practices, and ecological degradation. Not only would that take us beyond the scope of our story, but much data in these and other fields are still missing. Our scenario will, therefore, doubtless be refined or even corrected, but I am confident it will hold its ground at least in its major lines.
IN SEARCH OF GREENER PASTURES
Various movements can be discerned in the wake of the great urban collapse. From Gujarat, for instance, a southward push into the Tapti and Godavari Valleys is in evidence.11 Although Late Harappan sites survived in Saurashtra, most sites in Kachchh were abandoned, perhaps in part because the Rann ceased to be navigable owing to the withdrawal of the sea.12 Before that happened, the Sarasvatī had stopped emptying herself into the Rann, and we may assume that in memory of her estuary, her name was transferred to a nearby river (today’s Sarasvati flowing from the Aravallis) and to Prabhas (where three streams join, one of which is called Sarasvati).
The story in the Indus region is much less well known in view of the scarcity of Late sites. Recently, however, J.M. Kenoyer, compiling data from newly discovered (but still largely unexplored) sites in Sind and Pakistan’s Punjab, argued for ‘the continued existence of fairly large settlements and important legacies of the earlier Indus urbanism’. This would imply, in effect, ‘the presence of major polities in the Indus Valley continuing from the Late Harappan right through to the Mauryan periods’.13 If this approach is confirmed by excavations, one more considerable gap will be filled.
Returning to the central Sarasvatī basin, many Late Harappans stayed close to the Shivaliks, while others perhaps went south towards the northern parts of the Aravallis, where some streams still carried water. But the most conspicuous movement after the urban phase is towards and across the Ganges: as J.P. Joshi observed, ‘the increase in frequency of sites while moving from the west to the east . . . [establishes] the eastward movement of the late Harappans in Punjab, Haryana and western U.P.’14 Or, according to Jim Shaffer:
This shift by Harappan . . . groups is the only archaeologically documented west-to-east movement of human populations in South Asia before the first half of the first millennium BC.15
The bold italic type is not mine but Shaffer’s, and is intended to stress that an eastward migration of invading Aryans is simply nowhere in the picture: the Late Harappans’ ‘west-to-east movement’ is the only one detectable on the ground, and it is the one that would sow the seeds of the future Ganges civilization. Even as the Sarasvatī dwindled, it served as a bridge between the Indus and the Ganges, or between the Harappan and the Gangetic.
Thus is simply explained the considerable cultural continuity detailed in Chapters 9 and 10: despite dramatic new developments in technologies, agriculture and social structures, archaeology reveals no sharp break—instead, in Shaffer’s words again, we have a ‘cultural continuum stretching from perhaps 7000 BC into the early centuries AD’.16
Here too, this archaeological shift finds an echo in literature and tradition. The Shatapatha Brāhmana,17 for instance, narrates the oft-quoted legend of Videgha Māthava, probably king of Videha (a region generally identified with a part of north Bihar), who was ‘on the Sarasvatī’. Māthava, the story goes, carried Agni, the divine Fire, in his mouth; his family priest invoked the Fire so efficiently that Agni ‘flashed forth’ from the king’s mouth and fell on the earth. Agni then ‘went burning along this earth towards the east . . . He burned over all these rivers’, stopping finally at the Sādanīrā (identified with the Gandak river). Agni instructed Māthava to take up his abode ‘to the east of this river’. The text adds that ‘in former times’, that region was ‘very marshy because it had not been tasted by Agni’ but ‘nowadays, however, it is very cultivated, for the Brāhmans have caused Agni to taste it through sacrifices’. Agni, falling to the ground near the Sarasvatī, appears to be one more image of the river’s drying up. The king—followed, we may assume, by his clan—then migrated eastward to the Gangetic region and resettled there.
To my mind, we have here a fine record of the eastward movement of some of the Late Harappans in search of greener pastures. Another literary reference to the desolation of the Sarasvatī Valley is even more explicit (and it dates a few centuries after the Shatapatha Brāhmana). In a 1963 essay on a Sanskrit word (arma) for ‘ruins’, the Sanskritist Thomas Burrow drew attention to this passage from the Lātyāyana Shrautasūtra : ‘On the Sarasvatī there are ruined sites called Naitandhava; Vyarna is one of these.’18 These ‘ruined sites’ do evoke Harappan cities and towns. That is also Burrow’s interpretation, although we may safely ignore his view that the Aryans were responsible for the destruction of these cities19—a view comprehensively rejected since the 1960s, since neither the texts nor the archaeological evidence warrant it (leave alone the fact that three to five centuries elapsed between the end of the Indus cities and the purported arrival of the Aryans).
So too, the conventional explanation for the Shatapatha Brāhmana’s legend of Videgha Māthava is that it corresponds to the Aryan penetration into the Gangetic plains. Perhaps it does, but again, on the ground, only one movement is perceptible—that of the Late Harappans and their successors (such as the people of OCP and PGW cultures). We should also note that the conventional view of the Ganges Valley as a huge virgin forest that the incoming Aryans had to clear with their iron tools has been proved wrong: the archaeologist Rakesh Tewari recently demonstrated that iron was smelted in settlements of the Central Ganges plains as early as 1800 BCE,20 and the region, though surely more forested than today, had a ‘savannah landscape dominated by grassy vegetation along with thicker wooded pockets from about 15,000 yr. B.P.’21 In fact, hundreds of agricultural settlements had long been established there, some of them for several millennia, and a still poorly documented cultural convergence or fusion between their inhabitants and the newly arrived Late Harappans must have taken place, which eventually led to the urbanization of the region in the first millennium BCE.
FROM DEATH TO REBIRTH
Be that as it may, the Late Harappans were not ungrateful folk: long nurtured by the Sarasvatī, they had worshipped the river and imbued it—or her—with divinity. Those who migrated away from her increasingly arid basin did not, however, forget her. Eventually reaching the confluence of the Yamunā and the Ganges, they found a convenient way to remember her: evoke her presence there, but an in
visible one. The lost river could now flow in a subtle form, adding her sanctity to the other two and forming a sacred trinity of river-goddesses, the trivenī sangam, which became one of the locations for the famous Kumbhamela festival.
Not only was the Sarasvatī thus made to connect with the Ganges, but in the course of time, Sarasvatī the goddess passed on many of her attributes to Gangā. In a study of this mythological transfer, the Indologist Steven Darian22 showed with a wealth of examples how Gangā inherited many of Sarasvatī’s characteristics: like her elder sister she was born from Brahmā’s kamandalu, divided into seven streams, became ‘mother of the Vedas’, ‘identical with the Word or Speech’, and a giver of boons; like Sarasvatī’s, her waters were regarded as healing and salvific. In many ways, Gangā is an avatar of Sarasvatī, just as the Ganges civilization is a new avatar of the Indus-Sarasvatī civilization.
*
We have reached our destination. The Sarasvatī has been pulled down to the earth from the realm of legend. The river was ‘lost’, but not forgotten. And even as she dried up, she grew in vigour as an incarnation of Speech and Inspiration. Her last waters gurgling to a stop, the goddess took up her dwelling at the source of every true thought and word—a source unlikely to ever run dry. ‘Your excellent waters fill this whole universe’,23 rishi Vasishtha tells the river in the Mahābhārata.
There can hardly be a lovelier metaphor for the eternal rebirth.
*
May purifying Sarasvatī with all the plenitude of her forms of plenty, rich in substance by the thought, desire our sacrifice.
She, the inspirer of true intuitions, the awakener in consciousness to right thoughts, Sarasvatī, upholds our sacrifice.
Sarasvatī by the perception awakens in consciousness the great flood and illumines entirely all the thoughts.
Rig Veda24
Suggested Further Reading
The following titles are meant for those who wish to explore some of the unending ramifications glimpsed in this book. With a few exceptions, I have listed recent works accessible to a non-specialist public; they represent a broad spectrum of views. More scholarly or technical studies are found in Notes. I have retained a few French titles when those have no English translation.
I. India’s Prehistory and Protohistory
Agrawal, D.P. & Kharakwal, J.S., South Asian Prehistory: A Multi-disciplinary Study, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2002
Agrawal, D.P. & Kharakwal, J.S., Bronze and Iron Ages in South Asia, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2003
Allchin, Bridget & Raymond, The Rise of Civilization in India and Pakistan, Cambridge University Press, New Delhi, 1996
Allchin, F.R., (ed.), Archaeology of Early Historic South Asia: The Emergence of Cities and States, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995
Chakrabarti, Dilip K., The Archaeology of Ancient Indian Cities, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1997
Chakrabarti, Dilip K., India: An Archaeological History, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999
Chakrabarti, Dilip K., The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology: The Archaeological Foundations of Ancient India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006
Kennedy, K.A.R., God-Apes and Fossil Men: Paleoanthropology in South Asia, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2000
Misra, V.N., Rajasthan : Prehistoric and Early Historic Foundations, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2007
Sankalia, H.D., Prehistory of India, Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi, 1977
Singh, Upinder, The Discovery of Ancient India: Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2004
II. The Indus-Sarasvatī Civilization
Agrawal, D.P., The Indus Civilization : An Interdisciplinary Perspective, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2006
Allchin, Raymond & Bridget, Origins of a Civilization: The Prehistory and Early Archaeology of South Asia, Viking, New Delhi, 1997
Casal, Jean-Marie, La Civilisation de l’Indus et ses énigmes, Fayard, Paris, 1969
Chakrabarti, Dilip K., Indus Civilization Sites in India: New Discoveries, Marg Publications, Mumbai, 2004
Dhavalikar, M.K., Indian Protohistory, Books & Books, New Delhi, 1997
Eltsov, Piotr Andreevich, From Harappa to Hastinapura: A Study of the Earliest South Asian City and Civilization, Brill Academic Publishers, Boston, Leiden, 2007
Gaur, A.S., Sundaresh & Vora, K.H., Archaeology of Bet Dwarka Island, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, & National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, 2005
Gupta, S.P., The Indus-Sarasvatī Civilization: Origins, Problems and Issues, Pratibha Prakashan, Delhi, 1996
Habib, Irfan, The Indus Civilization, vol. 2 in A People’s History of India, Tulika Books, sec. edn, New Delhi, 2003
Jarrige, Jean-François, (ed.), Les Cités oubliées de l’Indus: archéologie du Pakistan, Association française d’action artistique & Musée national des Arts asiatiques Guimet, Paris, 1988
Joshi, Jagat Pati, Harappan Architecture and Civil Engineering, Rupa & Infinity Foundation, New Delhi, 2008
Kenoyer, Jonathan Mark, Ancient Cities of the Indus Valley Civilization, Oxford University Press & American Institute of Pakistan Studies, Karachi & Islamabad, 1998
Lahiri, Nayanjot, (ed.), The Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilization, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2000
Lahiri, Nayanjot, Finding Forgotten Cities : How the Indus Civilization Was Discovered, Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2005
Lal, B.B. & Gupta, S.P., (eds), Frontiers of the Indus Civilization, Books and Books, New Delhi, 1984
Lal, B.B., The Earliest Civilization of South Asia, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 1997
Lal, B.B., India 1947-1997: New Light on the Indus Civilization, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 1998
Lal, B.B., How Deep Are the Roots of Indian Civilization? Archaeology Answers, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2009
McIntosh, Jane R., A Peaceful Realm: The Rise and Fall of the Indus Civilization, Westview Press, Boulder, 2002
McIntosh, Jane R., The Ancient Indus Valley: New Perspectives, ABC-Clio, Santa Barbara, 2008
Mughal, Mohammad Rafique, Ancient Cholistan : Archaeology and Architecture, Ferozsons, Lahore, 1997
Possehl, Gregory L., Indus Age: The Beginnings, Oxford & IBH, New Delhi, 1999
Possehl, Gregory L., The Indus Civilization: A Contemporary Perspective, Altamira Press, Oxford, 2002; Indian edn, Vistaar, New Delhi, 2003
Rao, S.R., Dawn and Devolution of the Indus Civilization, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi, 1991
Ratnagar, Shereen, The End of the Great Harappan Tradition, Manohar, New Delhi, 2000
Ratnagar, Shereen, Understanding Harappa: Civilization in the Greater Indus Valley, Tulika, New Delhi, 2006
Stein, Marc Aurel, An Archaeological Tour along the Ghaggar-Hakra River, Gupta, S.P., (ed.), Kusumanjali Prakashan, Meerut, 1989
Wheeler, R.E. Mortimer, The Indus Civilization, third edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968
Wright, Rita P., The Ancient Indus: Urbanism, Economy, and Society, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2010
III. The Sarasvatī River and Goddess
Airi, Raghunath, Concept of Sarasvatī (in Vedic, Epic and Puranic Literature), The Rohtak Co-operative Printing and Publishing Society, Rohtak, 1977
Bhattacharyya, Kanailal, Sarasvatī: A Study of her Concept and Iconography, Saraswat Library, Calcutta, 1983
Chakrabarti, Dilip K. & Saini, Sukhdev, The Problem of the Sarasvati River and Notes on the Archaeological Geography of Haryana and Indian Panjab, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2009
Ghosh, Niranjan, Srī Sarasvatī in Indian Art and Literature, Sri Satguru, Delhi, 1984
Gonda, Jan, Pūshan and Sarasvatī, North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam, 1985
Kalyanaraman, S., Sarasvatī, vols 2 (Rigveda) & 3 (River), Babasaheb Apte Smarak Samiti, Bangalore, 2003
Kalyanaraman, S., (ed.), Vedic River Sarasvati and
Hindu Civilization, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, & Sarasvati Research and Education Trust, Chennai, 2008
Lal, B.B., The Sarasvatī Flows On: The Continuity of Indian Culture, Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2002
Ludvik, Catherine, Sarasvatī Riverine Goddess of Knowledge, Brill, Leiden, Boston, 2007
Radhakrishna, B.P. & Merh, S.S., (eds), Vedic Sarasvatī: Evolutionary History of a Lost River of Northwestern India, Geological Society of India, Bangalore, 1999
Valdiya, K.S., Saraswati, the River That Disappeared, Indian Space Research Organization & Universities Press, Hyderabad, 2002
IV. The Indus Script
Joshi, Jagat Pati & Parpola, Asko, (eds), Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions : 1. Collections in India, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Helsinki, 1987 (see vol. 2 under ‘Shah’ below)
Kalyanaraman, S., Sarasvatī, vols 6 (Language) & 7 (Epigraphs), Babasaheb Apte Smarak Samiti, Bangalore, 2003
Mahadevan, Iravatham, The Indus Script : Text, Concordance and Tables, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi, 1977
Mitchiner, J.E, Studies in the Indus Valley Inscriptions, Oxford & IBH, New Delhi, 1978
Parpola, Asko, Deciphering the Indus Script, Cambridge University Press, 1994, Indian paperback edn, 2000
Possehl, Gregory L., Indus Age : The Writing System, Oxford & IBH, New Delhi, 1996
Shah, Sayid Ghulam Mustafa & Parpola, Asko, Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions : 2. Collections in Pakistan, Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, Helsinki, 1991, (see vol. 1 under ‘Joshi’)