You may have recited the shlok invoking the seven holy rivers before taking bath. River Saraswati is revered as goddess in Hinduism; ever wondered where the river vanished?
Triveni Sangam, Allahabad – the confluence of Ganga, Yamuna and the “unseen” Sarasvati.
DESCRIPTION
The Saraswati River is a deified river. It played an important role in the Vedic religion, appearing in all but the fourth book of the Rig Ved. As a physical river, it is described as a ‘great and holy river in north-western India.’ The river is also described as a powerful river and mighty flood. The Sarawati is also considered by Hindus to exist in a metaphysical form, in which it formed a confluence with the sacred rivers Ganges and Yamuna, at the Triveni Sangam.
Location
Rigvedic and later Vedic texts have been used to propose identification with present-day rivers, or ancient riverbeds. ‘The Nadi-stuti’ hymn in the Rig Ved (10.75) mentions the Sarawati between the Yamuna in the east and the Sutlej in the west, while RV 7.95.1-2, describes the Sarawati as flowing to the samudra (समुद्र), a word now usually translated as ‘ocean’. Later Vedic texts such as the Tandya Brahmana and the Jaiminiya Brahmana, as well as the Mahabharat, mention that the Saraswati dried up in a desert.
Saraswati in the Vedas
In the oldest texts of the Rigved, she is described as a ‘great and holy river in north-western India,’ but the Rigved indicates that the Saraswati ‘had already lost its main source of water supply and must have ended in a samudra approximately 3000 years ago.’ The middle books 3 and 7 and the late books 10 ‘depict the present-day situation, with the Saraswati having lost most of its water.’ The Sarawati acquired an exalted status in the mythology of the Kuru Kingdom, where the Rig Ved was compiled. Sarawati is mentioned some fifty times in the hymns of the Rig Veda. It is mentioned in thirteen hymns of the late books (1 and 10) of the Rig Ved.
The most important hymns related to Sarawati goddess are RV 6.61, RV 7.95 and RV 7.96. As a river goddess, she is described as a mighty flood, and is clearly not an earthly river. In 10.30.12, her origin as a river goddess may explain her invocation as a protective deity in a hymn to the celestial waters. In 10.135.5, as Indra drinks Som he is described as refreshed by Sarawati. The invocations in 10.17 address Sarawati as a goddess of the forefathers as well as of the present generation. In 1.13, 1.89, 10.85, 10.66 and 10.141, she is listed with other gods and goddesses, not with rivers. In 10.65, she is invoked together with ‘holy-thoughts’ (dhi) and ‘munificence’ (puraṃdhi), consistent with her role as a goddess of both knowledge and fertility.
Significance and Importance in Hinduism
After the Vedic Saraswati dried, new myths about the rivers arose. Saraswati is described to flow in the underworld and rise to the surface at some places. For centuries, the Saraswati River existed in a ‘subtle or mythic’ form, since it corresponds with none of the major rivers of present-day South Asia. The confluence (Sangam) or joining of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers at Triveni Sangam, Allahabad, is believed to also converge with the unseen Saraswati River, which is believed to flow underground. This is despite Allahabad being at a considerable distance from the possible historic routes of an actual Saraswati River.
The Saraswati River was revered and considered important for Hindus because it is said that it was on this river’s banks, along with its tributary Drishadwati, in the Vedic state of Brahmavarta, that Vedic Sanskrit had its genesis, and important Vedic scriptures like initial part of Rigveda and several Upanishads were supposed to have been composed by Vedic seers. In the Manu smriti, Brahmavarta is portrayed as the ‘pure’ centre of Vedic culture. The earliest Aryan homeland in India-Pakistan (Aryavarta or Brahmavarta) was in the Punjab and in the valleys of the Sarawati and Drishadwati rivers in the time of the Rigveda.
Transformation of Saraswati
Though Saraswati initially emerged as a river goddess in the Vedic scriptures, in later Hinduism of the Puranas, she emerged as an independent goddess of knowledge, learning, wisdom, music and the arts. The evolution of the river goddess into the goddess of knowledge started with later Brahmanas, which identified her as ‘Vagdevi’, the goddess of speech, perhaps due to the centrality of speech in the Vedic cult and the development of the cult on the banks of the river. It is also possible to postulate two originally independent goddesses that were fused into one in later Vedic times.
The ‘Lost’ River
Late Vedic texts such as the Tandya Brahmana, Jaiminiya Brahmana, as well as the Mahabharata, refer to the Sarawati drying up in a desert. While ‘Nadi-stuti Sukta’, which is Book 6 of the RV, exhorted Saraswati River as the ‘perfect mother, unsurpassed river, supreme goddess’, the focus seems to shift to the river Indus by the Book 10, the last part of the RV. Indus was known as Sindhu to Indian ancestors. In the later Panchvimsha Brahmana which was part of the Sama Veda written c. 800 BC, the river stopped being referred to as ‘Nadimata Saraswati’ and instead being called ‘Vinasana Saraswati’, – an entity that can ‘no longer able to hold up the heavens and consequently has gone underground”.
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