The story behind Saraswati : myth or reality?

 

Hello people! Back again.😅

So friends, how are you all enjoying your winters?

Pretty good! right?😊😄😆

HMM! After a long gap, I thought I should write…... so I again started scrolling/searching for the topic. While searching for a new topic for my blog, I was finding something repetitive, something that could engage you throughout, ( not sure of your mood swings though),  and something which was a mystery, until solved recently.

I read as many articles as I could, from different news sites: The Hindu, Firstpost, Down to Earth, HerZindagi,  Hindustan Times, News18, The wire……… and a few more………😵😶😫!

And what I saw more interesting here is that all these sites tell the news of the same thing but from different years, and wondered Why so much coverage for this news.

So, now here is another blog……which you may find interesting, as it keeps you revolving around the history, geography, a little folklore, and some myths about the existence of the river Saraswati. 

A painting by Raja Ravi Verma depicting the goddess in mythological stories

Some 10,000 years ago, there were believed to be many mighty rivers that flowed from the Himalayas and that allowed civilizations to prosper in the green, fertile, cool climate on the riverbanks in northwestern India, such as Rajasthan. Archaeologists have determined that ample precipitation and large flowing rivers enabled settlers to be prosperous farmers. Then, 6,000 years ago, one of the mightiest rivers, the Saraswati, dried up, forcing inhabitants in the area to relocate elsewhere.  Over the years, there have been several attempts to locate or recreate the course of the 'lost' Saraswati River by interpreting the information available in the Vedas. For instance, the Nadistuti hymn in the Rigveda mentions the Sarasvati between the Yamuna in the east and the Sutlej in the west while another describes it as flowing into a Samudra. Late Vedic texts such as the Tandya Brahmana, Jaiminiya Brahmana, as well as the Mahabharata, refer to the Sarasvati drying up in a desert. 

A map of 4000BC showing courses of Saraswati

BTW how many of you know that the goddess Saraswati and river Saraswati are the same???

I bet many of you were not aware of this!😅😁

 So, according to Hindu mythology, after the creation of the cosmic universe by Lord Brahma, a great pandemonium reigned supreme in the cosmos. But Brahma felt bewildered for he realized that his cosmic universe was bereft of order, conception and configuration. He created the embodiment of wisdom and art. Goddess Saraswati emerged out of His mouth.

Then all the celestial bodies including the sun, the moon, and the stars were created and organized under strict orders. The oceans sprang up and the seasons started changing periodically. Ecstatic Brahma named the Goddess Vagdevi, the goddess of speech and sound. In this way, Brahma created the Universe equipped with the eternal source of wisdom provided by the Goddess Saraswati.

In the Devi Mahatmya, Goddess Saraswati is one of the female Trinity i.e. Tridevis comprising Maha Kali, Maha Lakshmi, and Maha Saraswati. They are the consorts of the trinity of Lord Shiva, Lore Vishnu, and Lord Brahma. In the process of creation, maintenance, and destruction of the Universe, all three goddesses also played pivotal roles. Maha Saraswati is depicted as eight-armed sitting on a white lotus flower. There She is wielding in Her hands the bell, trident, plowshare, conch, pestle, discus, bow, and arrow. All these suggest that Maha Saraswati was not merely the goddess of knowledge and arts. Again it is thought that Goddess Saraswati, the metaphysical form of the Rigvedic River Saraswati, with Her watercourse of consciousness and knowledge, dispelled all the abysmal darkness of ignorance from the universe.

Hindu text contains numerous legendary tales about Devi Saraswati. Here is a short story mythical or real, the judgment is yours. 😇

 Her father Brahma was so enamored by Saraswati's radiant beauty and astute intellect that He was resolved to wed His daughter. But Saraswati was so enraged by Brahma's incestuous obsession with His daughter that she became anxious to avoid his lustful stare. She was going away from Brahma's line of sight. All of her efforts, however, were fruitless since Brahma simultaneously generated three more visages to cover each of the four corners of His vision. To satisfy His daughter's carnal beauty lover's yearning, a southern face with pallid cheeks, a western face with quivering lips, and the fourth face with amorous beauty all emerged. Then Saraswati adopted several animal disguises. However, Brahma pursued Her while disguising Himself as those animals' male equivalents. Saraswati flew high into the heavens after being unable to find another way to avoid His lewd stares. The fifth head was then made by Brahma, and it had a neck long enough to pierce the heavens and pursue Saraswati with His passionate gaze. As a result, Brahma knew Saraswati would never be able to escape His attention. Unhappy with the amorous attentions he bestowed upon her, she tried to dodge and hide. This is why the river Saraswati flows underground. And the brief appearance she made aboveground is the moment, legends assert, that she stopped to rest from her tiring run. She swore that Lord Brahma would not be respected and worshipped as widely as Lord Vishnu and Lord Shiva. The angry goddess then condemned Her father for showing unrestrained passion, which she claimed caused the earth to be overtaken by lust and longing, planted the seeds of unhappiness, and imprisoned the soul in a cage made of flesh and blood.

How much would you rate my storytelling?👉👈 Hehe, do not mind me this much. Okay!👻

an extract from Rig Ved, giving reference to the river

 So, we have several ancient Indian texts that have provided detailed descriptions of the Saraswati River. Among these, the oldest is the Rig Veda, where the Saraswati River is described as the mightiest and the best among all rivers, despite the term saras meaning a lake. The epic Mahabharata too mentioned the Saraswati as lost in the desert sands and then reappearing at different places in its downstream course, thus making it clear that the composer was aware of Saraswati losing its flow strength. Here it must be noted that ancient Indian texts, including the Vedas, were later compilations of much older verses and sermons that dealt with all aspects of life and environment that were passed on through generations following the ancient oral traditions, and were in a literal sense akin to an enormous knowledge bank accumulated over millenniums. The Rigveda, for example, mentions a mighty river that originates in the Himalayas and flows southwestwards. The Mahabharata speaks of a river that disappeared underground near the present-day town of Sirsa in Haryana. Besides, the geographical history of the now arid western Rajasthan points to the fact that the region used to be green and did not lack water resources. Barely 10,000 years ago, the whole region was host to a big river system, which attracted civilizations like the Mohenjodaro and Harappa.

Religious myths, oral history, and scientific research overlapped in this search for the Saraswati, which forms the Hindu holy triumvirate along with the Ganga and Yamuna, and the hypothetical confluence of these three rivers in Allahabad is the source of humanity’s biggest gathering every 12 years during the Kumbh Mela.

Can you tell where these three rivers meet? Anyone here?

U people are too weak in GK. 😏😏

Anyways the answer is Triveni sangam.😜😜

 

However, was the river ever actually there? Despite several allusions to Saraswati in the Vedas, academics have been unable to pinpoint the river's course or connect it to now or formerly existing river systems.

The Saraswati, named after the goddess of learning, finds mention in the epic Mahabharata and ancient Hindu texts such as the Rig Veda. History has it that the river supported the Harrapan civilization nearly 4,500 years ago. But the current hunt is for the river’s course depicted in the Survey of India’s 1913 and 1969 topographical sheets, according to which the Saraswati flowed through Haryana, Rajasthan, and Gujarat before draining into the Arabian Sea. Originating in the high Himalayas, the Saraswati is believed to have descended to the plains from Adi Badri, situated in the Shivalik foothills, joining the Arabian Sea at the Rann of Kutch. But these longstanding geological views have been challenged by a spate of research papers published in the last few years, backed up by refined satellite imagery, topographic analysis, and more precise dating techniques.

the recent finding of the river

The first evidence of the ancient underground channels came in the 1930s when scientists Haren and B C Gupta from the geological survey of India spoke of the channels. They claimed that they might belong to the river Saraswati. Bimal Ghose, the former scientist at Central Arid Zone Research Institute, Jodhpur, also made a reading based on the topography map of Rajasthan. He confirmed that the ancient channels were a dead river that could well be Saraswati. It may be mentioned here that ancient literature and texts and the region’s geographical history were constant bases of reference in these studies.  The existence of a once-vast river that ran through northwest India and was 5 miles (8 km) wide has recently been confirmed by scientists. They also discovered that it dried up 4,000 years ago, at the same time as the Saraswati vanished. Its demise is thought to have been triggered by both climate and geology. Drilling boreholes to look for water beneath the desert in the same location is being done by remote sensing scientists in collaboration with Indian water experts. The water they have so far pulled from the riverbed's depths has a carbon age of around 4,000 years. Along the river's path, approximately a thousand archaeological sites have also been found. Many people think that the historic Saraswati riverbed maybe that.

Summing up here,  like many cultural memes, the legend of Saraswati is part of Hindu religious identity and is alive in the minds of thousands of believers. But like all memes, these ideas are built up over several generations, incrementally embellished with time however we cannot deny the evidence found in recent research. the multiple paleochannels of the Ghaggar-Hakra system have been better understood by recent studies using satellite imaging, which began in the 1970s and are still ongoing. These photographs have also made it quite evident that there is a complicated network of canals that used to be a vast river. Due to the abundance of studies on the subject, this merits separate consideration, discussion, and possibly a distinct article. To put it all together, the majority of these current scientific studies indicate the following: the existence of a large river that previously flowed between the current courses of the Sutlej and Yamuna rivers.

Hope you enjoyed the swings throughout the article 😁😁

Do comment on what you think about it, any suggestions and queries are most welcome here.

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