Sarasvati River
23 quotes
Biography
"When the [Rig Vedic] hymns were written the focus of Āryan culture was the region between the Jamnā (Sanskrit Yamunā) and Satlaj (Shutudrī), south of the modern Ambālā, and along the upper course of the river Sarasvatī. The latter river is now an insignificant stream, losing itself in the desert of Rajasthan, but it then [in Rig Vedic times] flowed broad and strong..."
"Sarasvati's rediscovery, although arguably suggestive of considerable Vedic antiquity, cannot be used to prove absolute synonymity of the Indus Valley residents and the Vedic Aryans."
"Likewise for the interminable discussion on the Sarasvati, although I will note, here, that proposals correlating her with other rivers in Afghanistan or elsewhere are unconvincing to my mind, as are attempts to argue that she ended in a terminal lake rather than the ocean. Kazanas has provided additional philological arguments to support the least complicated opinion, that Sarasvati as known in the Rgveda was a mighty river that flowed to the sea. One can always engage in special pleading to avoid this conclusion..."
"In any case, the Sarasvati-phobia of this group of scholars is inexplicable. If they are upset by the density of distribution of Harappan sites in the region drained by the Sarasvati and get alarmed by the prospect of the Indus civilization being associated with ancient Brahmavarta, basically the land between the Sarasvati and the Drishadvati, that is their problem."
"The Ghaghar river . . . does not in the heaviest season pass in force beyond Bhatnir . . . and the period when this river ceased to flow as one is far beyond record, and belongs to the fabulous periods of which even tradition is scanty... When the depopulation took place, I am not prepared to say; it must have been long since, as none of the village sites present[s] one brick standing on another, above ground,—though, in digging beneath it, very frequent specimens of an old brick are met with, about 16 inches by 10 inches, and 3 inches thick, of most excellent quality: buildings erected of such materials could not have passed away in any short period. The evident cause of this depopulation of the country is the absolute absence of water."
"As for Burrow‘s thesis that some place names reflect the names of geographical features to the west, and thus preserve an ancestral home, they once again rather rely on an assumption of Arya migrations than prove it. [...] His cited equivalence of Sanskrit Saraswati and Avestan Haraxvaiti is a case in point. Burrow accepts that it is the latter term that is borrowed, undergoing the usual change of s- > h in the process, but suggests that Saraswati was a proto-Indoaryan term, originally applied to the present Haraxvaiti when the proto-Indoaryans still lived in northeastern Iran, then it was brought into India at the time of the migrations, while its original bearer had its name modified by the speakers of Avestan who assumed control of the areas vacated by proto-Indoaryans. It would be just as plausible to assume that Saraswati was a Sanskrit term indigenous to India and was later imported by the speakers of Avestan into Iran. The fact that the Zend Avesta is aware of areas outside the Iranian plateau while the Rigveda is ignorant of anything west of the Indus basin would certainly support such an assertion."
"The treatment of the Saraswati evidence forms an interesting case study in the stonewalling of putative pro-OIT evidence by AIT militants, typically outsiders to Indo-European studies such as comparative historian Steve Farmer: they lambast the equating of the Vedic Saraswati with today’s Ghaggar as a paranoid Hindu-nationalist concoction, when actually it was established by a string of Western scholars since the 1850s, in tempore non suspecto. A case study of how this debate has been poisoned by endless political imputations."
"Now, it would be ludicrous to claim that the IAs left the common Indo-Iranian habitat, as per the AIT, moved into Saptasindhu and turning the Haraχvaiti name into Sarasvatī gave it to a river there to remember their past while they proceeded to generate the root sṛ and its derivatives to accord with other IE languages. Occam’s razor, which here is conveniently ignored by AIT adherents, commands the opposite: that the Iranians moved away, lost the root sṛ and the name Sarasvatī in its devolved form Haraxvaiti was given to a river in their new habitat."
"The Sarasvatī comes between the Jumna and the Sutlej, the position of the modern Sarsūti . . . There are strong reasons to accept the identification of the later and the earlier Sarasvatī throughout [the Rig Veda]."
"The waters of the Sarasvati [are] continuous with the dry bed of a great river [Hakra], which, as local legends assert, once flowed through the desert to the sea."
"Although the river below the confluence [with the Ghaggar] is marked in our maps as Gaggar, it was formerly the Saraswatī; that name is still known amongst the people."
"We have also seen that the Vedic description of the waters of the Saraswatī flowing onward to the ocean, and that given in the Mahabharata, of the sacred river losing itself in the sands, were probably both of them correct at the periods to which they referred."
"[The Hakra’s drying up] reduced a vast extent of once fruitful country to a howling wilderness, and thus several flourishing cities and towns became ruined or deserted by their inhabitants."
"The trace of the ancient riverbed was recently found, still quite recognizable, and was followed far to the west. [This discovery] confirmed the correctness of the tradition."
"Traditional Indian belief recognizes in this well-marked bed the course of the sacred Sarasvatī, once carrying its abundant waters down to the ocean and since antiquity ‘lost’ in desert sands... [The Ghaggar was] still known as the Sarsuti (the Hindi derivative of Sarasvatī) [which] passes the sacred sites of Kurukshetra near Thanesar, a place of Hindu pilgrimage."
"There is now a desperate salvage operation on, in powerful leftist and "secularist" political circles in India, to put a complete full stop to any further official research on the Sarasvatī (including archaeological and geological investigations), and to launch an all-out Goebbelsian campaign through a captive media to deny that there ever was a Vedic Sarasvatī river in existence in India: the river named in the Rigveda was either completely mythical, or it was the river in Afghanistan, but it definitely was not identical with the Ghaggar-Hakra!"
"Many [Rigvedic] verses celebrate the might of the ancient river Sarasvati, nah priyà priyàsu ‘dearest of all our dear ones’. The word priyá... has the sense of ‘one’s own, that one is used to, or attached to’."
"This dry bed is indeed the holy river ‘Sarasvatī’ . . .; once upon a time, this was a genuine solitary river which reached the ocean without any tributaries on its long way through the desert."
"Sarasvati, pure in her course from the mountains to the sea."
"O Gangā, Yamunā, Sarasvatī, Shutudrī (Sutlej), Parushnī (Ravi), hear my praise!"
"In some parts (of her course) she becomes visible and in some parts not so."
"Although the Sarasvatī seems to be lost, yet persons crowned with ascetic success . . . and owing also to the coolness of the herbs and of the land there, know that the river has an invisible current through the bowels of the earth."
"Where else is such happiness as that in a residence by the Sarasvatī? . . . All should ever remember the Sarasvatī! Sarasvatī is the most sacred of rivers!"