Land of seven rivers: History of India's Geography (7 page)

In other words, the Rig Veda hardly
gives us a consistent picture of Arya–Dasa conflict. It is rather a
mish-mash of tribal feuds between clans whose ethnic background can no longer be
discerned. Their technology is decidedly Bronze Age and the use of iron appears many
centuries later in the Atharva Veda if at all.
¹⁶
By all accounts, iron smelting was an indigenously developed technology that
arose in Central India from the plentiful iron ore found there. It could not have
been an imported technological advantage that the invaders exercised over the
locals.

In my view, the more serious argument
against identifying the Vedic Indians with the Harappans relates to the use of
horses. The Rig Veda frequently mentions the bull and the horse. The former is a
common theme in Harappan art but the horse appears to be conspicuously missing. I
have not yet found a full explanation for this and perhaps the answer lies in the
hundreds of unexcavated sites littered across India and
Pakistan
or in the thousands of bags of animal bones from earlier excavations that have not
been examined for decades. Nonetheless, I would like to add two qualifications.

First, it is very likely that Harappans
were at least familiar with the horse, even if it was not a commonly used animal.
The horse was domesticated in Central Asia around 4000
BC
and we know that a millennium later, the Harappans had a trading outpost on the Amu
Darya. Surely they would have noticed how the locals had tamed an animal that could
be so useful. In fact, it would not be surprising if they were there to procure
horses. After all, the importation of horses remains a common theme throughout later
Indian history. Thus, one could argue that it was the horse and not the Aryan who
was imported. Indeed, there is independent evidence to suggest horses were familiar
animals even in Central India from a very early stage. The stone-age rock paintings
of Bhimbetka show horses. The Neolithic site of Mahagara on the Belan river has
yielded horse bones—which may indicate a familiarity with the animal from
a pre-Harappan era!
¹⁷
In short, there may have been plenty of horses about, which fits with the fact
that the so-called non-Aryan tribes in the Rig Veda also appear to have horses of
their own.

Second, it is not entirely true that
there are no signs of the horse in Harappan sites. While the horse is not depicted
in any of the seals, there are at least two terracotta figurines that depict a
‘horse-like’ creature. The set of ‘chessmen’
found in Lothal, too, has a piece that looks like a horse’s head. There
are even claims that horse bones have been found in a few places and have been
positively identified by leading scholars
¹⁸
although critics still argue that these remains are of asses/
donkeys and not of horses. I am not qualified to judge this but merely want
readers to know that the absence of horses can no longer be evoked quite so easily
to debunk the idea that the Harappans and the Vedic people were somehow related. In
my view, the really interesting debate relates to lions and not horses. We will
visit it in the next chapter.

On balance, the evidence appears to have
tipped in favour of the archaeologists rather than the historians. New
information—including genetic data—appears to be strengthening
their hand. Over time, it is possible that the remaining controversies will be
ironed out including that of the horse and the lion. My own sense is that the
Harappans were a multi-ethnic society, rather like India today. The Rig Vedic people
could well have been part of this bubbling mix.

Let us turn now to the geographical
event on which the archaeology and the texts categorically agree—the
drying up of the Saraswati. Whichever way one looks at it, one cannot escape the
conclusion that the drying up of this river was a major event in the evolution of
India’s civilization.

The identification of the Saraswati
with the Ghaggar is not new. A number of nineteenth-century British explorers and
cartographers identified the dry riverbed with the river mentioned in old texts and
legends. However, with modern satellite data, the matter can now be said to be
settled. As we have seen, the Rig Veda talks incessantly about the great Saraswati
river, echoed by the later Vedas. However, texts of the next generation repeatedly
mention how the Saraswati
dried up. The
Panchavamsa
Brahmana
tells us that the river disappeared into the desert. There are
many legends and folk tales about how the river dried up or sank underground. What
was the cause of its downfall?

As already mentioned, physical surveys
and satellite photographs confirm that the Sutlej and the Yamuna were once
tributaries of the Saraswati. This would have made the Saraswati a very impressive
river with a flow that was larger than that of the Indus and the Ganga. It is not
surprising that so many early Harappan settlements were centred around this great
river. Unfortunately, the river appears to have lost the Yamuna, perhaps due to a
major tectonic event. We have seen how the Himalayas are notoriously unstable and
prone to major earthquakes. The earthquakes of 2600
BC
may have been especially large but there would have been other tectonics movements
as well. The loss of the Yamuna was not the end of the Saraswati’s
misfortunes. It then lost the Sutlej, its other major tributary, to the Indus. The
Sutlej is a moody river and has had many channels in its past. Its ancient name
Shatadru literally means ‘Of a Hundred Channels’. At some point
it decided to swing west towards the Indus. The old channels flowing east remain
visible in satellite photographs.

The same process may even have cost the
Saraswati its own perennial source of glacial water. A Rig Vedic hymn hints that it
may have had three separate sources.
¹⁹
There is some research that argues that the Tons river, that is today a major
tributary of the Yamuna, may have been one of the original sources of glacial water
for the Saraswati, and that it flowed into the plains through the channel of the
Markanda, which is yet another of the Ghaggar’s tributaries.
²⁰

Without a perennial water source, the
Saraswati must have become a rain-fed seasonal river. Even this became untenable as
the climate became drier. Eventually, the river broke up into a series of lakes and
then completely dried up. The dry riverbed of the Ghaggar is all that is now left
although it does occasionally flow after an especially heavy monsoon season.

Nevertheless, the river was not
forgotten. We find its memory echoed in legends, folk tales and place-names. Modern
Hindus still worship the Saraswati as the Goddess of Knowledge, recalling the
river’s role as an ‘inspirer of hymns’. In Haryana,
one of the seasonal tributaries of the Ghaggar is called the Sarsuti. Farther south,
a seasonal river called Saraswati rises in the Aravallis and flows into the Rann of
Kutchh, not far from the estuary of the lost river. Deep in the deserts of
Rajasthan, the Pushkar lake recalls many legends about the Goddess Saraswati. Where
the Yamuna joins the Ganga at Allahabad, there is a legend that the Saraswati flows
underground. Perhaps it is a way to remember the fact that the Yamuna was once a
tributary of the lost river.

The shifting of the rivers may explain
one of the mysteries of the subcontinent’s wildlife: how the Gangetic and
Indus river dolphins came to belong to the same species. Till the 1990s they were
considered separate species but now they are classified as sub-species Platanista
Gangetica Gangetica and Platanista Gangetica Minor. The problem is that the two
river systems are today not connected, and the dolphins obviously could not have
walked from one to the other. The sea route too is unlikely since the mouths of the
two rivers are very far apart. In any case, the river dolphins are not closely
related to the salt-water dolphins of the Indian Ocean and must have
evolved separately from them. One possibility, therefore, is
that the shifting rivers allowed the dolphins to move from one river system to the
other. Sadly, both sub-species are now under severe threat from pollution and the
diversion of water into numerous irrigation projects.
²¹

Standing on the banks of the Yamuna in
Delhi, I ponder on the fate of a river killed by ill-advised civil engineering. Did
the Harappans feel like this as they gazed on the dying Saraswati? The concern with
water is echoed in the Vedas. The greatest feat of Indra, king of the gods, is to
have defeated Vritra, a dragon, who had held back the river waters behind stone
dams. Indra slays Vritra after a great battle, destroys the dams and sets the rivers
free. It may be significant that the slaying of Vritra is specifically mentioned in
a hymn eulogizing Saraswati. Perhaps the ancients too struggled with their inner
demon—the suspicion that they may have somehow brought on their downfall
by interfering with nature.

At the core of the Rig Vedic landscape
was an area called Sapta-Sindhu (Land of the Seven Rivers). This is clearly the
heartland of the Rig Veda, but the problem is that the text does not clearly specify
the seven rivers. It is almost as if it was too obvious to be worthy of explanation.
The hymns repeatedly describe the Saraswati as being ‘of
seven-sisters’, so the sacred river was certainly one of the rivers, but
the others are uncertain. The conventional view is that the seven rivers include the
Saraswati, the five rivers of Punjab and the Indus. This would mean that the
Sapta-Sindhu region included
Haryana, all of Punjab (including
Pakistani Punjab) and even parts of adjoining provinces. This is a very large
area.

Having traversed much of this terrain
and read and re-read the text, I have come to a somewhat different conclusion. The
Vedas clearly mention a wider landscape watered by
‘thrice-seven’ rivers
²²
. While one does not have to take it literally as referring to twenty-one
rivers, it is obvious that the Sapta-Sindhu is a sub-set of the wider Vedic
landscape. In my view, the Indus and its tributaries were not a part of the
Sapta-Sindhu. The Indus has long been considered a ‘male’ river
in Indian tradition and would have not been called a sister. Indeed, it is notable
that the Indus and its tributaries are never described as ‘of seven
sisters’. My hunch is that the Sapta-Sindhu refers only to the Saraswati
and its own tributaries. Take for instance the following stanza:

‘Coming together,
glorious, loudly roaring—
Saraswati, Mother of Floods, the
seventh—
With copious milk, with fair streams strongly flowing,
Fully swelled by the volume of their waters’
²³

My reading of this stanza is that it
talks of how six rivers emptied into the Saraswati, the seventh. There are several
old river channels in the region, some of which still flow into the Ghaggar during
the monsoon season. These include the Chautang (often identified as the Vedic river
Drishadvati) and the Sarsuti. The Sutlej and the Yamuna were probably also counted
among the Saraswati’s sisters.

If my hunch is right, it would mean that
the Sapta-Sindhu was a much smaller area covering modern Haryana and a few of the
adjoining districts of eastern Punjab. Incidentally, this area also corresponds to
what ancient texts refer to as
Brahmavarta—the Holy
Land—where Manu is said to have re-established civilization after the
flood. The texts define the Holy Land as lying between the Saraswati and the
Drishadvati—again roughly Haryana and a bit of north Rajasthan, but
excluding most of Punjab. So why was this small area so important? The people of the
Sapta-Sindhu were obviously part of a cultural milieu that covered a much larger
area. What was so special about these seven rivers? In my view the importance of the
Land of the Seven Rivers probably derives from it being the home of the Bharatas, a
tribe that would give Indians the name by which they call themselves.

Although the Rig Veda is concerned
mostly with religion, the hymns do mention one event that is almost certainly
historical. This is often called the ‘Battle of the Ten Kings’
that occurred on the banks of the Ravi river in Punjab.
²⁴
It appears that ten powerful tribes ganged up against the Bharata tribe and its
chieftain Sudasa.
²⁵
The confederacy appears to have mainly consisted of tribes from what is now
western Punjab and the North West Frontier Province (both now in Pakistan). In
contrast, the Bharatas were an ‘eastern’ tribe from what is now
Haryana.
²⁶
Despite the odds, the Bharatas crushed the confederacy in the battle. There are
descriptions of how the defeated warriors fled the battlefield or were drowned in
the Ravi.

As I stand on the edge of the Ghaggar
river in Haryana, I imagine the Bharata tribesmen fording the river on their way to
the great battle. As described in the Rig Veda, the warriors
would have been dressed in white robes, each with his long hair tied in a knot on
his head. There would have been horses neighing, bronze weapons shining in the sun
and perhaps the rhythmic sound of sage Vashishtha’s disciples chanting
hymns to the gods. The Saraswati was a sizeable river then, not the stream that I
see before me. Perhaps there would have been rafts ferrying men and supplies across
the river. As I stand watching the river, a few soldiers from the nearby army camp
wade knee-deep through the Ghaggar. They are Sikh soldiers, their hair knotted on
top of their heads. There are no Vedic chants, but there is the soft rhythm of a
diesel water-pump running in a farm somewhere.

So, how did the Bharatas single-handedly
defeat the great confederacy? The political acumen and military tactics of Sudasa
and his guru Vashishtha must have played a role. However, it is possible that it
also had something to do with access to superior weapons, since the territory of the
Bharatas included India’s best copper mines. Even today, the
country’s largest copper mine is situated at Khetri along the
Rajasthan–Haryana border. Armed with superior bronze and an energetic
leadership, the Bharatas were a formidable force. A number of ancient
‘copper hoards’, some including weapons, have been discovered in
recent decades in southern Haryana, northern Rajasthan and western Uttar Pradesh,
and probably belong to this period.