Sep 28,1998
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SCIENCE: LEGACY Search for the Sarasvati Spawned by the myths of history, the legend of a mighty river endures. A new project to find it could revive an ancient legacy and some of Rajasthan's parched lands. By Rohit Parihar and Samar Halarnkar
About 400 km from the dunes in Jodhpur, a team of government scientists and technicians ready a giant jackhammer drill mounted on a truck, some four times larger than the ubiquitous rigs that drill for water. Next month monsters like this will be hauled to the desert, first to the dunes of Ghantiyal Ji and later to seven other sites in Rajasthan. From their three-storey-high masts, a rotating mechanical jaw with teeth of superhard diamond will eat into the earth. It will pull up undisturbed, layered cores of sediment and water from 70 m below the surface. The cores are like calendars: each layer will reveal a snapshot of a past era, each foot tells the tale -- the climate, the geography -- of a few hundred years. It is an epochal history that the dunes hide. For, an excited band of remote-sensing specialists, hydrogeologists, archaeologists and historians is increasingly convinced the cores will prove a once-shaky theory that has gained much ground this decade: this arid wasteland was once the lush basin of the mystical, lost Sarasvati, a mighty river that spawned religious legends -- and a prehistoric culture not yet properly recorded in our history books. In the feverish hunt to find more Indus Valley sites, archaeologists have already uncovered a vast civilisation that they now say centred not just on the Indus but on a mightier river to its east, a river that does not exist today Yet it is not just the lost pages of history this diverse bunch of scientists seek. "Primarily, the search for ancient river channels is to fulfil a current need," says D.C. Sharma, chief hydrogeologist of the Rajasthan Ground Water Board, Jodhpur. "Such channels, as initial surveys reveal, have immense scope of providing sweet water for drinking and irrigation in saline areas." It is an attempt to bring succour to Rajasthan's parched present. In 1996, Indian remote-sensing satellites found evidence of groundwater sanctuaries below the lost river's supposed bed, which first showed up in 1970 satellite imageries. Desert specialists guided drilling rigs to some of these ancient aquifers. When the water was carbon dated at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Trombay, it was estimated to be 3,000 to 4,000 years old. This was the era of the Rig Veda, the ancient Aryan scripture that time and again provides tantalising references to the existence of the Sarasvati. If the course of the Sarasvati is properly tracked and established, its old channel could also conceivably be used as a conduit for canal waters to recharge its forgotten aquifers.
Enthused by the prospect of finding water where there was believed to be none, the Rajiv Gandhi National Drinking Water Mission has already sanctioned Rs 50 lakh, with another Rs 39 lakh to come. Every participating institution will also pay for its own expenses. Next month's drilling will be followed by seven more such exercises over an area of 1,000 sq km along strips that satellite imageries and geological field surveys have strongly indicated to be the courses of ancient rivers. Half these sites are just above what is now believed to be the last course of the Vedic Sarasvati before it disappeared around 1500 b.c. Ghantiyal Ji is one of the five locations marked along a 60-km strip of land that is located above an ancient water channel, believed to be an isolated section of the Sarasvati around the area where it petered out into the desert in the time of its geological death throes. Experimental drillings have yielded sweet water just 30 m below the surface. "We are beginning from the end," says K.S. Srivastava, a senior government hydrogeologist. "Success here will take us backtracking along the Sarasvati's course to look for similar channels." Ambitame, naditame, devitame, Sarasvati. O best of mothers, O best of rivers, O best of goddesses, Sarasvati. About 4,500 years after the Sarasvati was eulogised thus in the Rig Veda, many prepare today for its rebirth in India's collective consciousness. The government drilling project is a great official boost to a band of scientists and enthusiasts devoted to the legend of the revered river. Some are religious scholars, some are serious scientists, some are simply fascinated at the prospect of a mythological rediscovery. Since the '70s they have put together an impressive body of anecdotal, Vedic and scientific evidence to prove that the Sarasvati was a fact, not an exotic tale of a vast, underground river still flowing somewhere deep below the subcontinental mass. "That is purely a myth," laughs V.N. Misra, director of the department of archaeology at the Deccan College, Pune. "But the subject has been of interest since the last century." It was an English engineer called C.F. Oldham who sparked off the modern search for the Sarasvati. About 100 years ago he was riding on horseback through the dry bed of the puny, seasonal Ghaggar river, when he realised that there was no reason it should have a breadth of 3 km in places -- unless it simply occupied the bed of a much vaster river. He seemed to be right. In the mid '70s, Bimal Ghose, a geomorphologist at CAZRI pored over black-and-white images from the satellites of the time. Ghose always believed the desert's wastes harboured storages of groundwater. He concluded that the dim lines extending over hundreds of miles from Punjab to Rajasthan looked contiguous enough to be a prehistoric channel. Recalls Amal Kar, who worked with Ghose at the time: "It was not difficult for us to convince scientists that such channels along the dry bed of the Ghaggar could well be the Sarasvati." However, other scientists could not make out the channels Ghose spoke of on those grainy early pictures. But the latest satellite colour images clearly show the marks
of a palaeochannel, as wide as 12 km in places, from the Shivaliks to Bhinmal in south
Rajasthan. From there it breaks into five parts, heads towards Somnath and finally
disappears near the coast of Saurashtra. "The marks of the channel nearly match the
description of the Sarasvati's flow given in the ancient books," says P.S. Thakkar,
an ISRO remote-sensing specialist who has worked on the Sarasvati project for 15 years,
poring over mythological references and matching them to satellite images. Not everyone though is sure that these markings are proof enough. After all, the north-western arid lands of Rajasthan were once lush plains. The salt flats of the Rann of Kutch were navigable up to 3,000 years ago. The sea snaked in deep inland. "I think those who claim that the Sarasvati flowed on this route have prejudged the issue," argues A.K. Singhvi, a PRL expert on soil dating. "We only have evidence of floods on this route." He goes on to say that there is evidence of the Harappans trying various water-harvesting methods. "Why would they do this if there was a mighty river flowing here?" The archaeological evidence is strong that there was a river of some sort. Experts examining excavations of the Indus Valley sites found 175 sites along the alluvial plain of the Ghaggar, compared to 86 in the Indus area, now in Pakistan. In an era when civilisations centred around rivers, why did so many settlements spring up along a dry river bed? This could not have happened, many experts argue, unless today's Ghaggar was once the mighty Sarasvati. "This should be called the Sarasvati Valley Civilisation, not the Indus Valley Civilisation," says K.S. Valdiya, a geologist from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre of Advanced Sciences and Research, Bangalore, for whom the search for the Sarasvati has been a passion for close to 30 years now. Formerly director of the Wadia Institute for Himalayan Geology in Dehradun, Valdiya too is trying to put together a multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional team of scientists to help find the river. There are others like him, votaries of the Sarasvati civilisation. They point to the ongoing six-year excavation of the sprawling Harappan site of Dholavira in Gujarat and 90 other sites that provide clues to a decidedly riverine existence, like the figurines of sea-going craft. Part of this great civilisation ended around 1500 b.c., around the same time that the scriptures speak of the Sarasvati's decline. The Varaha Purana say the river was in decline 3,700 years ago, around the time of the Mahabharata; the great sage Manu talks of the Sarasvati disappearing into the sands near Sirsa, Rajasthan. Valdiya says tectonic movements initially pushed up the old Aravalli hills, cutting off the headwaters of the Sarasvati. Forced eastwards, the Sarasvati was then progressively robbed of its waters: first by the Yamuna, then by the Satluj -- both rivers, along with the Tons, were once a part of its massive expanse. A branch of the Chambal cut northwards in a channel deeper than the Sarasvati, finally beheading the great river. This new channel became the Yamuna, which migrated eastwards. Similarly, the Satluj migrated westward. A geological paroxysm in the Aravallis pushed it into a U-turn at Ropar, Punjab, forcing a complete abandonment of the Sarasvati, sending the Satluj into the arms of the Indus. The Sarasvati's demise indicates how dramatic tectonic movements can change the face of a society. Betrayed by its two snow-fed sources, the Sarasvati was left with the waters of petty streams rising in the puny Shivaliks. Its twin sources survive to this day. The Sarasvati was born in the Banderpunch (monkey's tail) massif in the Garhwal Himalayas. This is today the source of the independent Tons, one of the Sarasvati's source streams. Beyond the Indian Himalayas in Tibet near the holy lake Mansarovar is Kapalshikhar, the other source of the Sarasvati. The river is still there, known locally as the Mang Nang Tsangpo; further downstream a Survey of India map actually calls it the Sarasvati. Without its snow-bound origins, the Sarasvati became a shadow of its former self. Its people migrated upstream and settled in today's Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. There seems to be archaeological evidence to this movement: The total absence of late Harappan settlements in the area of the Sarasvati is in sharp contrast to the dramatic increase in habitations in the plains of Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. There is also a remarkable scarcity of Harappan sites around what are today's Yamuna and Satluj. This is again in sharp contrast to the archaeological gold mines turning up in the dry channels of Punjab, Rajasthan and Sindh in Pakistan. Finally, only flood waters flowed down the Sarasvati's once vast channel. It remained dry for several centuries, though some water again found its way in during the early centuries of the Christian era. The Sarasvati's decline and the loss of its civilisation are an indication of how tectonic shifts can combine with localised climate change to dramatically transform human settlement. As the shifting Aravallis chopped off the Sarasvati's waters, the climate too was changing. Over the years western Rajasthan, once a green, rich expanse with extensive rainfall, gradually turned into a parched, desert land. Where there was once a torrent of water, there remained nothing but tonnes of drying sand, a few lakes that survive to this day, and of course the veins of groundwater under the earth. The Sarasvati's eclipse also shows how central rivers have been to civilisation and culture. With the Sarasvati gone, its place in mythology was taken over by the Ganga. To this day, it is the Ganga that is predominant to India's Hindu consciousness. But the Sarasvati, as the drilling rigs at Ghantiyal Ji should reveal, has not disappeared altogether. The great river might never flow again, its spiritual form might never regain its mythological glory, but its legacies are flooding back all over again. |
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The early September sun is fierce enough to set off a
life-imperilling heat stroke. The earth is parched enough to decimate all but the hardiest
of plants. Out here in the cradle of the great Thar desert, on the wind-blown dunes of
Ghantiyal Ji near Longewala -- made famous by a valiant last stand of Indian infantry
against invading Pakistani tanks in 1965 -- the land is notoriously unforgiving. 
Now "The Reconstruction of Palaeo Drainage
Network in Western Rajasthan" -- as the project is cautiously called to avoid any
semblance of official encouragement of a Hindu slant to ancient history -- has pulled
together scientists from a variety of disciplines. The Central Ground Water Board will
coordinate the Rs 1.5 crore Sarasvati project. The state board has already carried out
geological surveys to identify the type of water available, its quality and its depth,
based on data from satellite images provided by the Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad.
The Central Arid Zone Research Institute (CAZRI), Jodhpur, has already established the
rough course of some buried channels. At Ghantiyal Ji, scientists from the Physical
Research Laboratory (PRL), Ahmedabad, will collect sediment samples and establish their
age; BARC scientists will do the same for the water drawn. 
