Legend of the Saraswati River

 On the 26th of January Science Gallery Bengaluru played host to eminent geologist, scholar and author K. S. Valdiya as part its exhibition SUBMERGE. Dr. Valdiya has spent decades trying to unearth the story behind the mythical river Saraswati and he was invited to talk about this path-breaking work in Geology and Environmental science.   

At 82, Valdiya has the enthusiasm of a child. He begins with a polite namaskar and shows us a map of north India. He points to the Himalayan region, where the rivers Ganga, Yamuna emerge before flowing towards the south and east through the plains. Then he points to the river Indus which emerges in the Tibetan Plateu before flowing south along with its tributaries through Punjab and Pakistan. He then asks the audience, “Why is there a desert in the Thar region?” he asks. The talk slowly unravels a mystery that has haunted geologists for a long time. 

He gives us a few hints about the region; it is the world’s most crowded desert in terms of density of people and livestock, the soil here is nutritious, settlements existed as far back as 3000 B.C., these people were farmers and had boats, they did not rely on wells for water! “How is all this possible in a desert?” - maybe there was a river after all. 

He proceeds to build the case with more evidence through satellite images of underground water channels, the presence of minerals similar to those found in the Gangetic plains, huge reservoirs of underground water found by ONGC, sediment analysis at the Rann of Kutch where the river would have met the Arabian sea. He comes to the final question - What happened to this river? He proposes that tectonic fault lines seem to have changed the course of the river at various points and pushed the remaining part of it underground around 2000 B.C. 

Despite the mythos surrounding the origin of Saraswati river being hotly contested, Valdiya was able to present a scientifically accurate view that was rooted in observable phenomenon and quantified data. On being asked about the dire situation of water bodies today he is candid “there are plenty of solutions. My generation was wretched, we just talked but you guys must get to work!”. 

By Nomaan, Mediator