According to press reports on August 12, India’s new Government, through its Water Resource Minister Uma Bharti, announced in Lok Sabha the intention to identify the sources of the Saraswati of yore and to “revive” it. In her reply to a question from a BJP Member of Parliament, who called for the creation of a “Saraswati Research Institute”, Uma Bharti stated, “Saraswati is not a myth but scientific evidence is now available to prove its existence. I have asked the groundwater recharge authorities to collect information, detect and revive the water sources and the roots of the river.” Referring to a tributary of the Alaknanda, she added that there were “several” Saraswati rivers in India and made a reference to the tradition of Allahabad’s Triveni Sangam where Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswati are said to meet, the last being “invisible”.

Such sound bites have been heard earlier; the announcement denotes good intentions, but may also generate avoidable confusion. What are the real issues here?

First, let us note that a few dailies, while reporting the Minister’s statement, rushed to stick the label “mythical” to the Saraswati river, parroting the Leftist historians who, since the mid-1980s have objected to any attempt to identify the Saraswati of the Rig-Veda with a real river within India’s geography (their objection would have been dropped if it was located in, say, Afghanistan). These historians and their followers in the media do not seem to know that the bed of the Ghaggar river running through Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan and on to Cholistan (where it is known as “Hakra”) has been identified with the Vedic Saraswati since 1855 by generations of geologists, geographers, Indologists, archaeologists and remote sensing experts. They are too numerous to list here, but among them are F Max Müller, HH Wilson, RD Oldham, CF Oldham, Marc Aurel Stein, Louis Renou, Herbert Wilhelmy, Mortimer Wheeler, Raymond Allchin, Jonathan M. Kenoyer, Gregory Possehl…. This is also not the place to go into the arguments favouring this identification, but let me briefly recall that they include, first, the Rig-Veda’s description of the Saraswati as flowing “from the mountain to the sea”; second, the text’s specific mention of the river between the Yamuna and the Sutlej; and third, the existence of a small “Sarsuti” stream as a tributary of the Ghaggar. Indeed, a number of British maps, right from 1760 noted the Ghaggar-Saraswati association.

As regards identifying the source of river Saraswati, if that is indeed the intention, it is not likely to bear fruit. There is no agreement on whether the Saraswati was the Ghaggar itself or one of its tributaries originating in the Shivalik Hills — from east to west, the Sarsuti, the Dangri, the Markanda, the Sirhind and the three Naiwals. In 1855, the French geographer Louis Vivien de Saint-Martin proposed that all of those streams together should be regarded as the collective relic of the ancient Saraswati. Because the Rig-Veda speaks of the river’s “seven sisters”, I believe this remains the best solution.

More importantly, to “revive” the Saraswati waters is easier said than done. In practice, it could only mean one of two things: diverting water from another river into the Ghaggar’s bed — but its neighbours, the Sutlej and the Yamuna, are already under considerable strain; or drilling lakhs of borewells in the Saraswati’s basin, which would only deplete the ancient aquifer, as it has little modern recharge. Water cannot be invented. Since the Ghaggar remains a seasonal river (and during strong monsoons, such as in 2010, it still manages to flow well into Punjab), what needs to be done is to prolong its flow beyond the monsoon season by promoting reforestation of the Shivaliks and well-conceived water harvesting measures in the river’s upper basin. The benefit will be certain — but the old Saraswati will still not flow again, as the contributions it once received from the Yamuna and the Sutlej are long gone.

On the cultural front, hundreds of Harappan sites have been identified in the Saraswati basin (especially Haryana and Rajasthan), but many are fast disappearing owing to the spread of mechanized agriculture and exploding urbanism. The Archaeological Survey of India is spending far too little on excavations, luckily, archaeologists from other institutions (e.g. a few Haryana universities, Pune’s Deccan College), but with limited means and people. A programme of coordinated excavations in the Saraswati basin before more sites are lost forever will bring about rich rewards. This, to my mind, is more urgent than any attempt to “revive” the by-gone river.

Finally, there are indeed several other “Saraswati” rivers, such as (apart from the Alaknanda’s tributary), the Sirsa, the Luni (named “Saraswati” at Pushkar) and two small Saraswatis in Gujarat. But those names are later echoes or memories of the lost Vedic river flowing through Kurukshetra. In particular, invoking the Saraswati supposedly flowing at the Triveni Sangam (the Minister has asked the Central Ground Water Board “to test the water of a well located inside the Allahabad fort”) will only confuse the picture. There is no Saraswati at Allahabad: as I explained in my Lost River, the name was brought there as a device to remember the lost river and to transfer its attributes and sacredness to Ganga and Yamuna (both of which were of very minor importance in the Rig-Veda). Here, the Saraswati may be said to be truly “mythical”, in the proper and positive sense of the term: a “myth” is a powerful cultural device that has its own truth and function.

But while we have one mythical river at the Triveni Sangam, the other two are about to join their elder sister into mythology: Ganga and Yamuna are moribund, severely affected by the degradation of their catchment basins, massive diversion of their waters to irrigation, excessive damming, uncontrolled and untreated discharge of sewage and toxic industrial effluents. Ancient Indians were river-worshippers; we are river-killers. (In my state of Tamil Nadu, not a single major river is perennial today.) Perhaps that is what we mean by “progress” and “development”. Be that as it may, the Central Government’s efforts to save Ganga are in the right direction and deserve our full support. We must hope that they will overcome powerful lobbies whose limitless greed is a national danger.

Indian civilization grew on the banks of the Indus, the Saraswati and the Ganga. The Harappans were not responsible for the Saraswati’s disappearance, and had time and space to adapt to new circumstances; but the loss of Ganga will be of our own making and will have catastrophic consequences for its overpopulated basin and beyond. Ganga, not Saraswati, should be the focus of our concern and action.

The writer is the author of The Lost River: On the Trail of the Saraswati(Penguin Books India, 2010) and a long-time student of Indian protohistory; he lives in Tamil Nadu and is currently guestprofessor at IIT Gandhinagar.