by Tony Joseph
To begin with, there is no certainty that the Sarasvati described as ‘mighty’ and ‘powerful enough to break mountaintops’ in the Rigveda is the one in India and not the Harahvaiti river in Afghanistan which the ‘Aryans’ may have become familiar with on their journey into India through Afghanistan. (It is a common practice for the letter ‘h’ in Indo-Aryan to be interchanged with the letter ‘s’ in Indo-Iranian and vice versa, well-known examples being ‘Hindu’ becoming ‘Sindhu’ and ‘Sapta Sindhu’ becoming ‘Hapta Hindu’. So Harahvaiti and Sarasvati are virtually the same name.) Today, Harahvaiti is known as Arghandab, the main tributary of the Helmand, a Himalayan snowmelt-fed river. Helmand is indeed a ‘mighty river powerful enough to break mountaintops’. It is also possible that the name of the river in Afghanistan that the ‘Aryans’ came across first was later transferred to a more feeble, rain-fed river now known as Ghaggar–Hakra lying between the Sutlej and the Yamuna, and the descriptions of the later Sarasvati in the Rigveda are written from a composite memory. Names of favourite heroes, rivers and places keep cropping up many times all over India, after all. There are also several rivers in India today that take their name from Sarasvati.1
But there are other big problems too: the Sarasvati or Ghaggar–Hakra seems to have dried up not once, but many times. There is no sanctity to the date of 2000 BCE for when the river Sarasvati was ‘enfeebled’. This is so even according to Robert Raikes, the internationally acclaimed hydrologist whose name is often quoted by those who equate the Vedic people with the Harappans. In 1968 Raikes studied the major Harappan site Kalibangan near the Ghaggar–Hakra and wrote a paper for the academic journal Antiquity, titled ‘Kalibangan: Death from Natural Causes’. Raikes says that the abandonment of Kalibangan was caused by the drying up of the river, but then goes on to write: ‘The general hypothesis, which emerges from the calculations that form part of the full article, and from the archaeological evidence that fits so neatly into the picture, is of alternating capture of the Yamuna by the Indus and Ganges systems respectively.’ In other words, in the low-lying delta between the Indus and the Ganga, Raikes sees the waters flowing into the Ganga through the Yamuna, or into the Indus through the Sarasvati and the Sutlej, at different periods. He then furnishes a table that shows five alternating diversions of water to the Indus and the Ganga between 2500 BCE and 500 CE, the diversion that caused the abandonment of Kalibangan being only one of them. So even if the ‘Aryans’ were indeed describing today’s Ghaggar–Hakra as the Sarasvati in the Rigveda, it does not necessarily mean this was based on observations made before 2000 BCE, during the Harappan period, because the Ghaggar–Hakra river could have been alive during periods even after the decline of the Harappan Civilization.
The archaeologist V.N. Mishra also made the same assessment, based on his study of sites distribution in the Sarasvati valley. He wrote in 1993:
All this evidence shows that the hydrological history of the Ghaggar-Hakra is a highly complex one, suggesting that the shifting of the Sutlej and Yamuna courses into and away from the Ghaggar Hakra was neither a unique nor a simultaneous event; instead it took place in multiple episodes . . .
In the light of new data, it can be stated with certainty that both Sutlej and the Yamuna flowed in the Ghaggar bed in the past, during the period of the Harappa civilization as well as before and after it.
In other words, the date of the last drying up of the Sarasvati/Ghaggar–Hakra remains wide open, and it cannot be used to claim that the Rigveda was composed before the Harappan Civilization declined – the Vedic people could have been on the banks of a river they called Sarasvati much after the end of the Harappan Civilization.
But could the Ghaggar–Hakra have been a ‘mighty’ river during Vedic times? Michael Witzel, Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, points out a difficulty. The migration denialists believe the Sarasvati dried up in part because of a tectonic event that caused the Sutlej, which earlier used to flow into the Sarasvati, to join the Beas and then flow into the Indus. But in Hymn 33, Book Three, of the Rigveda, the Sutlej is described as joining the Beas and then flowing together. This means that by the time the Rigveda was composed, the Sarasvati had already lost the Sutlej waters to the Indus, assuming that it had them earlier. It could not, therefore, have been a ‘mighty river that could break mountaintops’. Here’s a part of the hymn that describes the Sutlej joining the Beas, as translated by T.R. Griffith. (Vipas is the Vedic name for the Beas and Sutudri is the Vedic name for the Sutlej):
Forth from the bosom of the mountains, eager as two swift mares with loosened rein contending,
Like two bright mother cows who lick their youngling, Vipas and Sutudri speed down their waters.
Impelled by Indra whom ye pray to urge you, ye move as ’twere on chariots to the ocean.
Flowing together, swelling with your billows, O lucid streams, each of you seeks the other
(As for the waters of the Yamuna flowing into the Ghaggar–Hakra, if they did so, then the Rigveda wouldn’t be mentioning the Yamuna as a separate river. The ‘Yamuna’ would then ‘be’ the ‘Sarasvati’. That the Yamuna is listed as a river separate from the Sarasvati is proof that if the Yamuna did steal the waters of the Sarasvati to give it to the Ganga, it happened before the Rigveda was composed.)
Witzel quotes the surveys made by the Pakistani archaeologist Muhammad Rafiq Mughal which showed there were settlements on the Pakistani side of the Sarasvati even as late as 1500 BCE, suggesting that the river was still flowing then, well after the decline of the Harappan Civilization.2
The inferences mentioned above were based on philological and archaeological evidence and a limited number of geological studies and, therefore, it would make sense to take stock of two extensive scientific studies undertaken recently: a 2012 paper titled ‘Fluvial Landscapes of the Harappan Civilization’ and a 2017 paper titled ‘Counter-intuitive Influence of Himalayan River Morphodynamics on Indus Civilization Urban Settlements’. The first was co-authored by the geologists Liviu Giosan of the Woods Hole Geographic Oceanographic Institution, Massachusetts, Peter D. Clift of the University of Aberdeen, UK, the archaeobotanist Dorian Q. Fuller and others. The second was co-authored by the geologists Ajit Singh and Rajiv Singh of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Kristina J. Thomsen of the Centre for Nuclear Technologies of the Technical University of Denmark and others.
The first study looked at climatic and river flow changes during the Harappan Civilization to understand probable causes for its decline, and came to two clear conclusions. First, a gradual decrease in flood intensity probably stimulated intensive agriculture initially and encouraged urbanization around 2500 BCE. However, continued decline in monsoon precipitation adversely affected both flood-based and rain-based farming ultimately. The second conclusion was about Ghaggar–Hakra:
Contrary to earlier assumptions that a large glacier-fed Himalayan river, identified by some with the mythical Sarasvati, watered the Harappan heartland on the interfluve between the Indus and Ganges basins, we show that only monsoonal-fed rivers were active there during the Holocene. As the monsoon weakened, monsoonal rivers gradually dried or became seasonal, affecting habitability along their courses. Hydroclimatic stress increased the vulnerability of agricultural production supporting Harappan urbanism, leading to settlement downsizing, diversification of crops, and a drastic increase in settlements in the moister monsoon regions of the upper Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh.
In other words, from about 10,000 BCE onward, Ghaggar–Hakra has been a rain-fed river and, therefore, couldn’t have been the ‘mighty river’ that was powerful enough to ‘break mountaintops’ like a snowmelt-fed river would be.
The second study, by Ajit Singh and others, came to an equally strong conclusion: the Indus Civilization settlements developed along an abandoned river valley, not an active Himalayan one. It states:
Using optically stimulated luminescence dating of sand grains, we demonstrate that flow of the Sutlej in
this course terminated considerably earlier than Indus occupation, with diversion to its present course complete shortly after around 8000 years ago. Indus urban settlements thus developed along an abandoned river valley rather than an active Himalayan river . . . We suggest that this abandoned incised valley was an ideal site for urban development because of its relative stability compared to Himalayan river channel belts that regularly experience devastating floods and lateral channel migration.
Even after the diversion of the Sutlej, says the study, ephemeral monsoon-fed rivers deriving from the Himalayan foothills – much like the modern-day Ghaggar – continued to flow in the relict valley, thus helping sustain the Indus urban settlements. The study noted sedimentation in the valley decreasing after 3000 BCE, probably due to reducing monsoon intensity.
‘In conclusion,’ says the study, ‘our results firmly rule out the existence of a Himalayan-fed river that nourished Indus Civilization settlements along the Ghaggar-Hakra palaeochannel. Instead, the relict Sutlej valley acted to focus monsoon-fed seasonal river flow as evidenced by very fine-grained sediments in the upper part of the valley-fill record.’
On the question whether it was the weakening of the Indian summer monsoon that led to the decline of the civilization, the 2017 study is non-committal unlike the 2012 one. It states, ‘While independent climate records provide strong evidence for widespread weakening of the Indian summer monsoon across large parts of India 4,200 to 4,000 years ago, and our cores indicate a marked decrease in sedimentation rate after 5,000 years ago, current fluvial chronologies lack the resolution necessary to draw robust conclusions.’
However, the 2012 study’s findings that a long-term weakening of the monsoon is what caused the drying up of the Ghaggar–Hakra got a big thumbs-up in July 2018 when the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the official keeper of geologic time, introduced a new age called the Meghalayan, which runs from 2200 BCE to the present. This is significant because according to the ICS, the Meghalayan age began with a mega drought that crushed a number of civilizations worldwide – in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and, of course, India. The mega drought was likely triggered by shifts in ocean and atmospheric circulation.
For the ICS to approve a classification of this kind, there has to be clear and unambiguous evidence of a shift of some kind that is global in extent. In the case of the Meghalayan, the evidence is a perturbation in the isotopes of oxygen atoms present in the layers of a stalagmite growing from the floor of the Mawmluh cave in Meghalaya. Professor Mike Walkar of the University of Wales, UK, who led the international team of Holocene scientists responsible for developing the proposal for a new age, told a news agency that ‘the isotopic shift reflects a 20 to 30 per cent decrease in monsoon rainfall’.
The overwhelming evidence today, therefore, is that what shrunk the Ghaggar–Hakra was not a tectonic event that stole its waters and gave it to the Ganga or the Indus, but a mega drought that had global impact. To reiterate, the Ghaggar was a monsoon-fed river that was weakened by monsoon failure, and not a mighty, snowmelt-fed river that was used to ‘breaking mountaintops’ as migration denialists insist.
1The remarkable book The Vedic People by Professor Rajesh Kochhar deals with this issue of Sarasvati and Harahvaiti extensively.
2Mughal is the archaeologist who discovered the numerous Harappan settlements in Cholistan in the Ghaggar–Hakra valley which today allows us to confirm that the Harappan Civilization was based on two river systems, the Indus and the Ghaggar–Hakra.
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