While protesting against the "racist" views of "colonial" western scholars like Max Muller, the US Swami David Frawley tells us that "the Indo-Europeans and other Aryan peoples were migrants from India, not that the Indo-Europeans were invaders into India". In this new version of the race theory, however, the Aryans did not simply go out from India, they went off from the banks of the Sarasvati. Thus Frawley speaks of "the pre-Indus period in India", namely that of the Yajurveda, "when the Sarasvati river was more prominent".2

If this pronouncement is given an honoured enough place in the Geological Society’s memoir, there is also the US "NASA scientist," Navaratna S. Rajaram, speaking through the same volume. He tells us that "the Sarasvati river and the Sarasvati civilization are inseparable", and the latter name is the correct one to give to what has so far been known "(incorrectly) as the Harappan or the Indus Civilization". Indeed, "the ebb and flow of the ancient Sarasvati river determined the fate of the Harappan Civilization".3 That the two great excavated cities of the Indus Civilization, namely, Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, or such sites as Dholavira or Lothal are not on the Sarasvati, however it might be elevated from its status as a seasonal stream passing by Thanesar, does not matter to the proponents of the Sarasvati nomenclature.4 Giving a name amounts to half the battle, and if the Indus Civilization is to be rechristianed ‘Sarasvati Civilization’, name-capture, not argument, is the thing that matters. It may be recalled that John Marshall had used the name "Indus Civilization" in 1931,5 and Stuart Piggot had preferred "Harappa Culture" in 1950.6 Both terms are valid, the first referring to the geographical region of the Indus basin, and the other to the type-site. As late as 1984 B.B. Lal and S.P. Gupta conformed to the standard usage when they edited the Frontiers of the Indus Civilization, New Delhi. But thereafter the pull of the Sarasvati exerted itself, and in 1996 appeared S.P. Gupta’s The Indus-Sarasvati Civilization, Delhi. Professor V.N. Misra, full of authority as Director of the Deccan College Postgraduate Institute, Pune, India’s premier research institute of archaeology, contributed an enthusiastic review of this book. He drew attention to the indication in the title that "the Harappan Civilization was not the product of one river alone, but of two rivers, the Indus and Sarasvati". Since a look at any atlas may not disclose a river like the Sarasvati running parallel to the Indus, Misra joined Gupta in inventing a "Sarasvati System, which includes the old beds of the Sutluj (sic!), Ghaggar, Drishadvati, Yamuna, etc." One can then pursue an unspoken chain of logic: If the alleged Sarasvati system was important for the Indus culture, its people must have held Sarasvati sacred; and if they held such a belief, they must have been Vedic Aryans (not Dravidians or other unknown people). So Professor Misra could the more easily uphold Gupta’s argument that "the Harappan and the Vedic were neither two different culture-complexes nor the earlier (sic! former) preceded the latter".7

The whole question of the Sarasvati, therefore, needs to be scrutinised carefully, perhaps as carefully as Navaratna Rajaram’s famous "horse" on the Indus seals.8

(1) Evidence helping to identify River Sarasvati with the Thanesar stream: In the famous River Hymn (Nadisukta) we read (Rigveda, X.75.5): "Favour ye this my laud, O Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati, O Sutudri, Parushni With Asikni, O Marudvridha, Vitasta, O Arjikiya with Sushma, hear my call."9

It will be seen that in this list rivers are arranged east to west.The Sutudri is Sutlej (Ptolemy’s ‘Zaradros’); the Parushni is generally taken to be the Ravi; and the Asikni is more certainly the Chenab, since the latter is named Askesines by Alexander’s historians and by Megasthenes. Aurel Stein has felicitously identified Marudvridha with the Maruwardwan, an affluent of the Chenab. Vitasta, the same name used also in the Rajatarangini, is modern "Behat", the Jhelum of the maps. Sushoma is probably the ‘Soanos’ of Megasthenes, the modern Soan or Sohan, a small eastern tributary of the Indus. The Arjikiya alone is not firmly identifiable, while the Vipas or Beas mentioned elsewhere in the Rigveda, III. 31.1-3, and IV.30.11, is here omitted.10 Even with these omissions there is enough geographical exactitude here as to enable us to place the Sarasvati definitely inside the Sutlej-Yamuna divide. From this it has been further assumed that we have here the Sarasvati (locally called ‘Sarsuti’) that passes by Thanesar in Haryana.11

Rigveda, VII, 95.2: "Pure in her course from mountains (giri) to the ocean (samudra), alone of streams, Sarasvati hath listened".12

Sarasvati is also called "the best" or "foremost" of rivers (naditama) (Rigveda, II, 41.16);14 and in Rigveda, VIII. 36.6, we have -

There must still be doubt as to where the Sarasvati is being addressed as a Goddess of Rivers and where as a specific river. Yet her ‘seven sisters’ are treated as recalling the sapta sindhavah, the ‘Seven Rivers’, of frequent occurrence in the Rigveda, referring obviously to the Indus and her tributaries.16 And these verses are therefore taken to suggest the Sarasvati’s great status in size and length in comparison to these rivers.

This river rises near Kalka, the railway station for Shimla, and runs northwestwards in a long valley with the Himalayan ranges on one side and the Siwaliks on the other. It finally joins the Sutlej, the great Himalayan river coming from the north. After the junction the latter pierces the Siwaliks above Rupar where it makes a great change of direction to flow almost due west. The tributary we are speaking of is a perennial river with a respectably long catchment area and, in its lower course, forms a broad channel, which still bears the name Sirsa.17 This name, we need not remind overselves, is a recognized corruption of ‘Sarasvati’: Compare ‘Sirsa’ in Hisar district of Haryana, known until the fourteenth century as Sarsati.18 The Sirsa river too similarly enters 14th-century historical record as Sarsati. This occurs in the accounts of an attempt of Sultan Firoz Tughluq (1351-88) to cut through a hill in order to find a point of release for the river southwards. The contemporary work Sirat-i Firozshahi has a description of the Sultan’s massive enterprise to capture the river (‘Sarsati’) for the plains;19 but the Tarikh-i Mubarakshahi (early 15th century) has a geographically more interesting account of what the project was about:

The effort, however, proved too Herculean and was abandoned. Modern topographical sheets show that the plan was not so absurd, since the head of one of the feeders of the "Choeea Nud" (Choiya), which runs through Sirhind and Mansurpur to Sunam, lies very close indeed to this Sarsati or Sirsa river.21

What usually tilts the balance in favour of the Vedic Sarasvati’s identification with the Thanesar stream undoubtedly is the weight of sanctity that attaches to the latter. But from early times the very tradition that speaks of its sanctity insists on the stream drying up ‘a virgin’, that is, without flowing into any river or joining the sea. Vinasana is the name given to the spot of its ‘disappearance’ in the Pancavimsa Brahmana, Katyayana Srauta Sutra and other Sutras and in the Jaminiya Upanishad Brahmana.22 The Manusmriti, II,21, too has Vinasana setting the western limits of Madhyadesa.23 The Mahabharata makes the Sarasvati disappear in the desert, at Vinasana, to avoid being looked at by the Nishadas,24 This tradition is sustained by local nomenclature. The name Sarsuti was confined to the Thanesar stream, and to the channel after its junction with the Markanda river.25 It is not applied to the Ghaghar (‘Ghaggar’ of the maps), a perennial stream that, unlike the Sarasvati, has its sources beyond the Siwaliks which it pierces at the well-known Chandigarh gap. The Sarasvati used to run in the ‘Old Sursettee bed’, without joining the Ghaghar. So far as one can see the junction with the Ghaghar is the work of Firoz Shah Tughluq (1351-88). We are told that "he cut another canal (jui, stream) from the Ghaghar and brought it to the fort of Sarsati [Sirsa] and from there he carried it to Harni Khera."26 If the fort of Sarsati (modern Sirsa), to judge by its name, was on one of the old beds of the Sarasvati, Firoz must have run a channel from the Ghaghar into that bed and so joined the two streams. This should warn us not to forget human actions of the past when we are looking at the interplay of old river-beds and channels. It is in fact inferable from this particular text that the Ghaghar and Sarasvati were separate rivers and did not join each other at all before Firoz Tughluq forced such a junction.27

One should think that those who so ardently swear by tradition28 should accept this situation and cease their quest for a larger-than-life "Sarasvati". But quite the contrary: they have warmly taken to heart the nineteenth-century Sarasvati-Desert River hypothesis, though this is of impeccably foreign ancestry, going back, through the famous debates in the Journal of Royal Asiatic Society and the Calcutta Review, to de Saint Martin,29 and involving Max Muller,30 who these days is put at par with Wheeler for his `racist’ views. The irony cannot surely be lost on one when Dilip K. Chakrabarti, Senior Lecturer at Cambridge, inveighs against perceptions of the "text"-based past inherited from "western colonial indology" and pleads for the primacy of "grassroots archaeological investigations",31 and yet such high principles do not prevent him from telling us that "the political fabric of the Indus civilization" underwent decline because of "the hydrographic changes in the Sarasvati-Drishadvati System", thereby freely invoking not only Rigvedic river-nomenclature but even the Manusmriti’s pairing of the two rivers that enclosed the holy land of Brahmavarta.32

The fact is that there has never been in the popular consciousness that goes into river-name fixing, any connexion between the Haryana ‘Sarsuti’, on the one hand, and the dry beds of the Chautang, Ghaghar, Hakra and Nara, forming the line of the postulated Desert River, on the other. From the seventeenth-century work Tarikh-i-Tahiri it appears that above upper Sind, the dry desert river was called Hakra, Wahind and Wahan, and below, it was given the name Nar.33 No name or local tradition has ever connected the Desert dry beds with the Sarasvati. One cannot but agree with Rajesh Kochhar that to insist on imposing the name "Sarasvati" upon the dry beds of the Desert River "obliterates the vital distinction between hypothesis and fact."34

But while we may make our objections, the Sarasvati school not only continues with its own terminological usage, but also goes on getting a larger and larger vision of the Sarasvati. It is now seen as not only flowing right down to the Rann of Kachh, but also to have once run into the Luni and so through the middle of Rajasthan, and thus avoiding Pakistan altogether.35 In any case, the supposition is that the Desert River bed (Chautang-Ghaghar-Hakra-Nara) not only consituted a single connected bed (on the illusoriness of which see below), but also carried a splendid flowing stream, the very stream of which the Rigvedic seers sang when they praised Sarasvati. By this assumption one can claim that the contradiction apparent in the Rigvedic evidence between the smallness of the actual river and its great attributes, stands fully removed.

Even before we enter into a dicussion of these two possible sources, we must note a curious phenomenon with regard to the channels of the so-called "Sarasvati system". Wherever there is still water in them, the river channels are small; none of the streams of the Sutlej-Yamuna divide can compete with even the Gomti, a purely rain-fed river in Uttar Pradesh. How any one of these can then have ever carried a larger volume of water is hard to imagine. Their courses begin to broaden out only in areas where they have for long remained dry. The moment one becomes aware of this paradox, one begins to doubt whether these broad belts of sand, sometimes two miles broad, sometimes four, as in the case of the Hakra bed can really represent the distances between opposite river-banks. The sand, it turns out, is in fact drift-sand, which the dead or decaying scrub has captured, so that not the extinct water-channel but the extinct vegetation belt is represented by these sandy courses.36 Once this is realised, one can begin to see the unlikelihood of the Ghaghar-Hakra channel ever containing a river at par in size with any of the principal Punjab rivers.37

With this caveat in mind, let us turn to the evidence that has been put forward to support the assertion that the "Sarasvati" flowed as a great river right through the Desert down to the sea in Vedic times. In 1971 Gurdip Singh published a paper analysing results from pollen samples from beds of four lakes in Rajasthan, arguing that when duly carbon-dated these indicated the saline and fresh-water phases of the lakes, which in turn could correspond to phases of low and heavy rainfall. The palynological research was concentrated subsequently at the Didwana lake. The results as published in 1990 did not exactly correspond to the earlier findings, but still suggested that Holocene had three phases here: (1) arid up to 5510BC; (2) wet. from 5510 to 2230 BC; and (3) arid, again, thereafter.38 This immediately became the basis for the claim that the Sarasvati river contracted to its present puny size only when Gurdip Singh’s wet phase ended at 2230 BC; before that year it was a mighty river corresponding in length and volume to what the Rigveda should make us expect of it. This evidence thus was thought to provide proof not only of the past glory of that river, but of a greater antiquity of the Rigveda than had uptill now been assigned to it.39

One, therefore, needs to point out that Gurdip Singh’s findings are by no means the final truth. Possehl notes that the radiocarbon dates are not sufficiently numerous to form a firm basis for the chronology though he accepts the sequence of the three phases.40 And when the same procedure was followed in the salt basins of Pachpadra and Thob in Rajasthan, the pollen analysis did not even disclose such a sharp dry-wet-and-dry sequence. It rather indicated evidence of such changes as could simply "result from erratic rainfall characteristics of desert terrains".41

As doubts about any long regime of much higher monsoon rainfall in middle Holocene have grown, there has been a revival of the old alternative assumption for the supply of water into the Sarasvati, viz., its capture of the Yamuna and the Sutlej during the same phase of Holocene. This renewed effort was initiated by two articles, one by Yash Pal, et al., using Landsat maps, published in 1980, and the other by V.N. Misra, invoking mainly the archaeological and literary evidence.43 Possehl’s current embracing of this theory seems partly due to its perceived efficacy in explaining Gurdip Singh’s findings from the Rajasthan lakes, through premising subsoil drainage from the Yamuna-Sutlej feeding of the Desert River.44 But Singh’s findings themselves, as we have seen, are not, by any means, firmly established.

It needs to be recalled that, as far as the use of Landsat imagery is concerned, its results in respect of the possible past connexions of the Desert River with both the Yamuna and the Sutlej go only a little way beyond what had already been observed on the ground and from toposheets, from the nineteenth century onwards.45 After all, landsat imagery too marks out ‘palaeo-channels’ by scanning "drainage scars, distinct tone, texture, surface manifestations like younger alluvium and concentration of vegetation".46 Broad coincidence between landsat imagery and field-survey is thus to be expected. But neither visual observation of a line of depressions or a band of different kind of alluvium brought out by Landsat imagery gives us the time when the river courses so discerned were active. One has thus a huge range of time to choose from, right from the beginning of Pleistocene, some 1.8 million years ago. That the courses traced belonged to Holocene, beginning some 10,000 years ago, has a proportionately smaller likelihood, unless these are established by Geology’s own resources. Of this, however, later.

For the moment, it is worth noting that even if what Yash Pal and his colleagues choose to call the "Lost Sarasvati River" is seen as they wish it to be seen, a river carrying the Yamuna and Sutlej as its `tributaries’, the problem of the Rigvedic Sarasvati is not at all solved. In Rigveda, X, 75:5, the Yamuna, Sarasvati and Sutudri are recognised as three distinct rivers, so that the two Himalayan rivers already bore the names by which we know them. The Yamuna is supposed to have had a western course, running into either the mod. Sarsuti (the supposed Sarasvati proper), designated Y-1, or into the Chautang or Chitrang, designated Y-2.47 In the first case if the Yamuna with its waters occupied the bed of the Sarasvati, it should have surely retained its own name; and the Vedic Sarasvati, then, could not have existed at all. On the other hand, if the Yamuna ran in the Chautang, then, whatever happened to Drishadvati, which too is a genuine Rigvedic river and which everyone keeps on identifying with the Chautang? Even if we leave the Drishadvati to its fate as a homeless ghost, how would anyone have called the Desert River by the name of Sarasvati, when the Ghaghar (of which modern Sarsuti is a tributary) could hardly have contained water to compare with that of the Chautang bed carrying the Yamuna, at the point of junction between them? It would be the Yamuna, not the Sarasvati, that should, then, have run parallel to the Indus. Again, in case the Sutlej had taken a southern turning at Rupar to flow straight into the Ghaghar,48 it would then be the Sutudri that the Ghaghar would be called, and not Sarasvati, an insignificant rain-fed seasonal stream on its own. After the Yamuna, flowing through the Chautang (Y-2) channel joined the Sutlej, the united river could carry either river’s name, but the Sarasvati would have no place here. By throwing either the Yamuna or the Sutlej or both into the Desert River, one can provide the latter with sources in the Himalayas, but this still canot be what is devoutly wished for — a river called Sarasvati, to enable one to describe it as "a mighty perennial river from the Himayala to the Arabian Sea".49 The words quoted come surprisingly from a geologist, who seems to forget the ordinary principles on which people give rivers their names. We must, therefore, surely appreciate Kochhar’s warning that, in order to be credible, the geologists "should depend entirely on their own sources of information" and not try to import into geology what they believe is the teaching of either "archaeology or literature".50

When geologists pursue their own methods, they appear to reach quite different conclusions. Thus one way of testing the thesis of a westward course of the Yamuna would be to dig up the soil of that probable course and see if the soil at some level below matches the Himalayan detritus and alluvium that deposits from the Yamuna should contain. An Indo-French team carried out explorations of the hydrology of the Ghaghar plain in 1983-87, and Marie-Agnes Courty has published a series of papers since then: She reports that alluvium from a large river was not found down to the depth of 8 metres below the present floodplain, thus showing that there has been no large-scale intrusion of the Yamuna into the Haryana plain since early Holocene.51

This should be definitive;52 but if any doubts remain, these should be dispelled by the failure of the Yamuna to take a southwestward course even when cuts were repeatedly made in medieval times to lead its waters into the Chautang. The evidence on these efforts has been studied by Abha Singh, who has convincingly reconstructed what happened at each stage. In 1355 Firoz Shah cut two canals, the Ulughkhan-ni and Rajabwah, from the Yamuna, the headwaters placed respectively near Khizrabad and Karnal, and ran them into the Chautung, which he probably partly re-excavated and re-aligned, so that much water reached Hissar, and there were even floods there from his canal during the rains.

Finally, in 1647-48 Shahjahan’s administration completed the Shahnahr, which in effect used the course of the Ulughkhan-ni by taking off below Khizrabad, but turning south-eastwards near Gohana to flow back into the Yamuna at Delhi.53

These cuts from the Yamuna were made without any effort either to train the Yamuna or control the flow from that river into the canal through dams and sluices. If there was a natural tendency of the Yamuna to flow southwestwards, it should surely have enlarged the cuts and maintained an increasing flow, even throwing out a major branch. This is suspected to have happened with the Sidhnai reach of the Ravi, which is a very straight channel that turned the Ravi away from its pre-16th-century course east of Multan.54 That the Yamuna not only failed to change course, but the canals themselves repeatedly got silted up shows that the river had such high and broad walls of soil on its right bank as would prevent any break-through of the river westwards. It is impossible to consider such massive deposits to have accumulated, or the river to have carried out erosion to flow so much below them, within a period of less than many thousands of years; and that would take us at least to early Holocene, if not to Pleistocene. This would accord with the antiquity of the high terraces, as much as 25 metres above the present bed and "covered with boulders", that are found on the Yamuna’s right bank just where it is supposed to have turned southwest to flow into the Chautang or some other feeder of the "Sarasvati system."55

Wilhelmy’s reconstructions of possible Sutlej outflows towards the Ghaghar/Hakra are far more plausible for the Holocene epoch. One channel dividing into two further on, takes off from below Rupar, one branch meeting the Ghaghar just above the point it meets a dry bed of the Chautang, and the other running into the Hakra much further west, receiving before its junction another dry bed from the lower course of the Sutlej. Finally, there are channels running south from the Sutlej around Bahawalpur leading to the Hakra.56 If we assume that one or more of these channels at any time served as the main bed of the Sutlej, it would still have met the Ghaghar/Hakra so far below the modern Sarsuti so as to make any possible connexion with the Rigvedic Sarasvati out of the question. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that these channels at any time carried the mainstream of the Sutlej at all; they could just as well have been carriers of Sutlej flood-waters, without pretending to mainstream status. It should be recalled that in the Rigveda, III.33.1, the Vipas and Sutudri are paired together—

It is true that early official small-scale maps used to show the ‘Dry Bed of Hakra or Ghaggar’ run past Dilawar or Derawar in Bahawalpur State and then right down to the Sind border, where it seemed to link up with ‘Raini N’, which ran to a point close to E. Nara R, which in turn entered the Great Rann of Cutch near Ali Bandar.58 This has often been the basis of assumptions about an ancient river, now extinct, running parallel to the Indus. But on the ground there is, in fact, no connexion between the Ghaghar-Hakra and Raini-Nara. Aurel Stein had drawn attention to the fact that around Derawar "the broad Hakra bed breaks up into an inland delta marked by a number of dry channels spread out like a fan".59 This, of course, means that the Hakra’s "mouth" lay near Derawar, and the river, when it contained water, had its point of termination here. All lower channels that could have fed the Nara are not continuations of the Hakra, but take off from the Indus flood-plain and probably carried its excess flood waters.

Landsat imagery in fact confirms what ground observation had long told us. In the text and map given by Yash Pal, et al., there is explicit indication that the palaeo-channel of the Hakra divides into two as it enters Bahawalpur, the northern one ending near Marot, the southern at Beriwala, and thus both fall far short of even approaching Derawar.60

One obvious proof that the Ghaghar-Hakra did not even have water to take it beyond the middle of the Bahawalpur Cholistan comes from the distribution maps of the protohistoric sites themselves. While the Harappan (as well as pre-Harappan and post-Harappan) sites seem to run in a large belt along the Hakra river, and are especially numerous around Derawar, they just cease here, with only very rare sites below the great settlement of Ganweriwala.61 The pattern of distribution of the Hakra Ware (4th millennium BC), the early Harappan (Kot Diji) and mature Indus sites also give the appearance of being positioned along the deltaic branches of the Hakra; and this makes even G.L. Possehl, a believer in "the Sarasvati system", agree that the "Sarasvati" flowing through the Hakra bed has never, at least in Holocene, flowed past the deltaic fan around Derawar, and so could never have joined the E. Nara to make its way down to the sea.62

The vacuity of the conclusion that J.P. Joshi, later to be the Director-General of the Archaeological Survey, and his two co-authors drew from their painstaking work on the distribution of the Indus-culture sites, will now be manifest, the conclusion being that the "Ghaghar was a mightier river than the Indus, with its own network of tributaries".63 One can immediately reply that if sites of protohistoric cultures on its banks is the best index of its size, then the Kali Nadi in the Doab, rich in Painted Greyware sites, must have been "mightier" than the Ganga, which in the same region has few to show besides Hastinapur. J.P. Joshi and his colleagues attribute the absence of Harappan sites on the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej to "the erratic behaviour" of those rivers, by which they must mean not simply the proneness of these rivers to floods (which even small rivers like the Sarsuti would have), but their hugely large volumes of water and areas of floodland. They thus concede in the same breadth, as it were, that the Ghaghar-Hakra had the settlements on its banks, because it was a smaller and tamer stream.64 Indeed as Rajesh Kochhar pertinently observes: "It is very likely that a mighty Ghaggar would have precluded the appearance of chalcolithic settlements on its banks."65 The possibility cannot, of course, be excluded that remains of large numbers of chalcolithic settlements on the floodplains of the great rivers have simply been washed away, a fate that remains of similar settlements on the Hakra have escaped.

There remains one question to answer. The Hakra and the lower beds of the Chautang and Ghaghar have been dry for centuries. How then did these dry courses have had water that could reach down to Derawar to create a delta there and sustain settlements upto that point? While any regular natural outflow from the Yamuna is most doubtful, any outflow from the Sutlej would, as we have seen, feed only the Hakra and not supply water to the Chautang or Ghaghar. It is possible, however, that sufficient attention has not been paid to the ability of rivers to carry more water for longer distances in conditions where the natural environment was far less affected by man’s handiwork. At the time of the Indus Civilization the Siwalik and sub-Siwalik (Terai) forests would have been denser and much more extensive than now. Below them the scrub and bush would have been far less affected by grazing and agriculture. Both grazing lands and cultivation could then have occupied a very small area compared with later times. All of this must have meant a distinctly higher precipitation than now. But a much greater factor would have been the higher level of underground water, since very little of it would have been drawn out through wells. Finally, the bunds and cuts that man has made as agriculture has extended would have been few, if any. In the 1630’s a Mughal official’s memorandum claimed that the Chautang which had failed to bring water for a hundred years could do so if the bunds upstream were removed.66 It is, therefore, possible that, given the earlier natural conditions, the Desert River could come down to the Bahawalpur Cholistan, fed by its own rain-fed Siwalik and Terai tributaries. Since that time the contraction of the Desert River has proceeded in rough correspondence to the expansion of agriculture in its catchment area, a process which has levied greater and greater tribute upon its upper feeders and subsoil flows.67

This alone would put out of court, as it were, the case of the Sarasvati as a greater river than the Indus, the status assigned to it in some other verses notwithstanding. The only way out, one supposes, is to argue that since Mandala X as a whole, and the nadisukta in particular, is later than the other parts of the Rigveda, it represents a situation much later than when the Sarasvati was in its full flow. This would, however, also weaken the Sarasvati’s identification with the Haryana Sarsuti. We would, then, only have for its location between the Sutlej and the Yamuna, the reference in Rig. III, 23.4, where Agni is asked to shine "on the rivers Drishadvati, Apaya and Sarasvati".69 Since in later texts Drishadvati is paired with the Sarasvati and the Apaya is associated with Kurukshetra,70 we may take this as an alternative indication that the name Sarasvati had been given to the Thanesar stream. On the other hand, it is equally possible that, since the names Apaya and Drishadvati have not actually survived as names of particular rivers (and Apaya given its association with Kurukshetra, can hardly be distinguished from the Sarsuti), one may legitimately ask if all the three names have been transferred from somewhere else, and the earlier Sarasvati joined with these two was quite another river.

The most natural way of reading the text here would be to take Sindhu (Avestan, Hindu) to mean Indus, Sarasvati (Avestan, Harakhvaiti) to mean Arghandab-Helmand, and Sarayu (Avestan, Haroiva), the Hari Rud.72 These would be the major rivers to be successively met with if one proceeds from the Indus northwestwards. But this would not be the case if one went east. Sarayu (the modern Sarju) would be met far away in the east, across the Yamuna and the Ganga, which could hardly be overlooked by any way- farer. The Arghandab could well have been given the name Sarasvati/Harakhvati when the proto-Vedic-Avestan language was still undifferentiated.73 But the identification does not resolve all our problems. The name ‘Harakhvaiti’ applies properly to the Arghandab, a tributary of the Helmand (Avestan, Haetmant), which is the main river, and both are separately named in the Vendidad. Secondly, the Helmand does not flow into the sea, but into an inland complex of marshes and lakes (Hamun-i Helmand). Nor would its size (it is practically entirely snow-fed, with little rains in its catchment area) make it really appear great to those familiar with the Panjab rivers.

The second possibility is the Indus. Both Sarasvati and Sindhu means ‘river’, and, therefore, it is conceivable that in Rigvedic times, the Indus appearing as the River par excellence could be designated as both ‘Sindhu’ and ‘Sarasvati’. This identification, proposed by Roth and accepted by Zimmer,74 was revived by K.C. Chattopadhyaya, an eminent Sanskritist, who pointed out that the Indus, with its long course amidst the mountains and massive volume of water, suits the Rigvedic descriptions of Sarasvati much better than the Sarsuti, which at best would have been a river of the plains. In Rig. X,75, the name Sindhu replaces Sarasvati, but with the same attributes, while the name Sarasvati itself is given in this hymn to a small river.75 The argument here is not without merit, and if Sarasvati could even in those early times be the name of Arghandab as well as Sarsuti (and, perhaps, Sirsa too!), the name could also have been given to the Indus.

There may, however, be a simpler explanation. Sarasvati in most of the references to it in the Rigveda is not a particular river, as in a few undoubted cases it is, but the river in the abstract, the River Goddess. When the poet priest here sings of Sarasvati, he sings not of a particular river he sees, not a particular river named Sarasvati, nor any of the Sapta Sindhavah (Avestan, Hapta Hindu), but a mightly sister of these rivers,76 or, alternatively, one containing all of them.77 Indra’s chariot could not be any particular vehicle seen, but still be the greatest of all chariots. So too the goddess Sarasvati’s own river (like her, not seen) would be the greatest of all rivers. As such it could not be the Thanesar Sarsuti, any more than it could be the Arghandab or the Indus — or the Sirsa, the Sutlej tributary.