INDIA, July 25, 2016 (mydigitalfc.om by Michel Danino): For some reason, unless it is for no reason, the word “mythical” has come to stick to the bygone Sarasvati river, with most mass media articles about its supposed “rediscovery” religiously starting with it. Unfortunately, rarely if ever have their authors researched what they write about. And since cutting-edge technology sells as well as religion, we are also told that the river’s lost bed was “rediscovered” in recent years through satellite imagery.
So let us attempt to go beyond these newsworthy but misleading sound bites. There is, of course, nothing “mythical” about the river, even if it acquired the status of a goddess in the earliest literature. Praised in the Rig-Veda’s hymns as a “mighty” river flowing “from the mountain to the sea,” the Nadistuti Sukta (or Hymn in Praise of Rivers) precisely located it between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, which would not have been the case had it been regarded as “mythical.” The river undergoes changes in the late vedic literature: a few centuries later, a few brahmanas (commentaries on the Vedas) depict it as disappearing in the desert at a point called Vinashana or Adarshana, which soon became a highly revered pilgrimage site; it has been located by scholars in northern Rajasthan’s Hanumangarh district.
The Mahabharata, whose great war is waged in the Kurukshetra region watered by the Sarasvati and its tributaries, paints a similar picture, adding some details about the broken-up westward course of the river as Balarama, Krishna’s brother, journeys on a pilgrimage from Prabhas on the Arabian Sea to the river’s source in the Shivalik hills. The evidence from the literature is thus perfectly consistent with a physical river that happens to dry up (for reasons I will not go into here). If the Sarasvati was ever “mythical,” it is at Prayag (modern Allahabad), where she was made to join Ganga and Yamuna as an “invisible” river — a convenient device to remember her despite no physical reality at that spot.
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