Praised by the Rig-Veda as ámbitame nádītame dévitame sárasvati, "best mother, best river, best goddess," the great Saraswati river holds a very important place in the history of our land. Vedic Sanskrit and the first part of the Rig Veda are regarded to have originated along its banks in the 2nd millennium BCE . The Rig-Veda, and later Vedic and post-Vedic texts glorify this mighty river that flowed between Yamuna in the east and the Sutlej in the west. The Mahabharata mentions that the Sarasvati dried up in a desert.
While many believe that the river is just a myth, there are those who believe in the existence of the Sarasvati. They say that the river is represented by the Ghaggar and its tributaries in Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat, and the Cholistan region in Pakistan. Some suggest that the Helmand river of southern Afghanistan corresponds to the Vedic Sarasvati .The truth about the Vedic Sarasvati is crucial in figuring out whether there was an Aryan invasion around 2000-1500 BCE, after the decline of the "native" Indus Valley Civilisation.
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The new government launched efforts to trace the lost river as soon after coming to power in May 2014. With millions spend, the dried-up palaeochannel of the Ghaggar is being explored and is being excavated. The recent discovery finds the river in the Ghaggar-Hakra basin to be a monsoon-fed river like all the rivers of the central and peninsular region and not a glacial-fed river like the Indus, Ganga, and their tributaries.
Anil Kumar Suri of Swarajya.com shares his viewpoint and understanding in light of the recent findings-
The Swarajya article discusses the recent findings of a team of geologists led by Peter Clift. Using a geochemical technique called uranium-lead (U-Pb) zircon dating, the team able to establish that the sediments from the various rivers – Indus, Beas, Sutlej, Hakra and Yamuna – could be distinguished from each other and that they were matched to that of the dry channels. They were also able to determine that no sediment from the Yamuna, Sutlej or Beas in the main channel of the Ghaggar that could be said to be less than 5,000 years old. All this implies that the Ghaggar-Hakra was a much bigger river but this would have been well before the supposed arrival of the Indo-Aryans around 4,000 years ago.
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The team discovered that the Ghaggar-Hakra was not a glacially fed river, unlike the Indus, Ganga and their tributaries, but probably a monsoon-fed river like all the rivers of central and peninsular India.
The shift in the cultivation pattern to adapt to the declining monsoon lead to the vanishing of the Sarasvati, suggests that the natives migrated to new lands and that there was no new population and no invasion
-This article is compiled by a staff-writer at NewsGram.
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