ASI encouraged by the new BJP regime re news search for the mythical Saraswati river

Merely months into the Narendra Modi regime, a cherished Sangh Parivar project is being reactivated-the quest for the long-lost Saraswati river, venerated in Vedic texts. While the BJP government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee and tourism and culture minister Jagmohan Malhotra had directed scientific and archaeological resources into tracing Saraswati, the UPA wound up this project after taking charge in 2004, with Jaipal Reddy telling Parliament that no amount of research had succeeded in locating this "mythical" river.

Now with the BJP back at the helm, the Saraswati revival project is also back on track. Union Minister for Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation, Uma Bharti, told the Lok Sabha in August that her government seriously intended to locate the river. Her ministry ordered the Central Ground Water Board to test the water of a well located inside the Allahabad Fort, in an attempt to trace the source and route of the lost river. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and the Culture Ministry seem to have responded to the new interest in the project.

Top sources confirmed to India Today that starting November, the ASI will initiate excavation at key sites along the Ghaggar-Hakra river course, believed to be the course that the Saraswati river once took. The Ghaggar originates in Himachal Pradesh and flows through Punjab andHaryana into Rajasthan; the Hakra flows in from Pakistan and is seen as a continuation of the Ghaggar in India. The ASI plans to identify ancient settlement sites in the upper reaches of the Ghaggar-Hakra river course later this month, so that fresh excavations can be carried out. The first of these sites will be in Rajasthan or Haryana.

"Our objective is limited. While ASI cannot be working on revival projects, we will be exploring and excavating sites around the Ghaggar-Hakra river course to assess the architecture, planning and living style of the inhabitants of that period. We hope to start excavation next month," a highly placed official told India Today on condition of anonymity.

Twice shy ASI

The ASI, this time, has been carefully following the rulebook, and with good reason. In 2006, a parliamentary panel headed by CPM leader Sitaram Yechury had raised questions about procedural lapses and the lack of scientific basis in the Saraswati Heritage Project initiated by the NDA. It had pulled up the ASI, asking how it could take up a project on river revival and excavation when no institute had proposed such a study, as is the requirement.

Now, curiously timed with the change in government, several proposals have come to ASI, suggesting excavations along the Ghaggar-Hakra course. Those who recommended this reportedly include the excavation branch of ASI, Delhi and Deccan College, Pune, among others.

The ASI is doubly wary, having burnt its fingers last year with the controversial Daundiya Kheda excavation in Uttar Pradesh, it had undertaken a search for a fabulous treasure on the basis of a dream and prompting from a self-styled seer called Shobhan Sarkar. This time, it is waiting for the Central Advisory Board of Archaeology (CABA) to allow this key excavation. The CABA, the apex body at the ASI that deliberates on the archaeological merits of a proposed excavation before giving it the green signal, will take up over 140 excavation proposals including those proposed along the Ghaggar-Hakra course.

B.R. Mani, a field archaeologist and additional director general in the ASI, sought to defend the move, arguing that it had never really stopped its investigative research on early Harappan sites, also called Ghaggar-Hakra sites, which were taken up as part of the NDA-era Saraswati project.

"ASI and other learned institutions have been working in Haryana, Rajasthan, Punjab and Gujarat and have come across many significant sites and archaeological material. Details about the significance and early antiquity of new material from sites such as Bhirrana in Haryana have put Indian civilisation in the 8th millennium BC. ASI and others will take up new excavations in this region which would be shortly decided after the standing committee of CABA meets," he told India Today by email.

Mani, who has directed more than 14 excavation projects, including Lal Kot (Delhi), Salimgarh (Delhi), Muhammad Nagar and Harnol (Haryana), Siswania, Sankisa, Ayodhya, Lathiya (UP) and Kanispur andAmbaran (J&K) has also written extensively on the 'Indus-Saraswati' civilisation. In a recent piece, "The 8th Millennium BC in the 'Lost' River Valley", Mani writes of the "lost" Saraswati/Hakra valley and posits Haryana and Rajasthan as the epicentre of pre-Harappan cultures.

"The Hakra river basin in Cholistan, which is a continuation of the 'lost' Saraswati valley, has yielded a set of pottery in exploration known as 'Hakra ware' whose stratigraphic position has now been assigned at Bhirrana in excavation, thereby confirming that the cultural level achieved in the valley of the 'lost' Saraswati river is the cradle of Indian civilisation," Mani has written. He claims that the radiometric dates from Bhirrana, Rakhigarhi and Kalibangan show the clear developmental stages of Harappan culture in the subcontinent.

This also fits in seamlessly with the mission to revive the Saraswati, seen not just as a river, but as a civilisation.

The Saraswati time travel

In June 2002, Jagmohan Malhotra announced at the Saraswati Nadi Shodh Sansthan in Yamunanagar, Haryana, that the Centre would initiate excavation along the entire length of what was believed to be the extinct Saraswati river. A four-member committee was set up and two-phase excavations were planned. The first phase would cover the stretch from Adi Badri in Yamunanagar district to Bhagwanpura in Kurukshetra district to Sirsa, while the second phase would see it go up to Kalibangan in Rajasthan.

Meanwhile, a study jointly carried out by scientists of the Regional Remote Sensing Service Centre, Indian Space Research Organisation, Jodhpur, and ground water department, government of Rajasthan, Jodhpur, in 2004 suggested the existence of a mighty palaeo drainage system of the Vedicera Saraswati river in this region.

The ASI's Saraswati Heritage Plan was elaborate. Fifteen sites were identified for excavation. Ten of these had been partially excavated even then, including Adi Badri, Thanesar, Sandhauli, Bhirrana, and Hansi in Haryana, Rajasthan's Baror, Tarkhanwala Dera, and Chak 86, as well as Gujarat's Dholavira and Juni Karan. R.S. Bisht, an archaeologist who has conducted excavations at various sites, was then deputy director general at ASI, and largely steered the Saraswati Heritage project. Until the Lok Sabha election of 2004, which changed everything. In Bisht's words, as stated in his CV, "Most unfortunately, the successor government uncannily shelved the project".

Bisht, who had retired, but had been given a six-month extension by the NDA to take the project forward, put in his papers. Now, a decade later, political winds have shifted again.The ASI is said to have quietly sought his suggestions on sites to be picked for excavation in the Saraswati search. "The project was killed before it could take off just because a new government came in. It was seen as a saffronisation attempt. Actually, this was a genuine multi-disciplinary project to understand how so many settlements came up," he says.

Many question the historical accuracy of his claims, and the conflation of the supposed river Saraswati with the Ghaggar-Hakra river system. Another archaeologist, also with ASI, said on condition of anonymity that the Ghaggar-Hakra river system and civilisations around it may bear no relation with the fabled river of Vedic scriptures. "In my view, Ghaggar-Hakra has nothing to do with the Saraswati at all. The whole settlement system from Kalibangan to Rakhigarhi is clearly part of an ancient trade route. The hunt for the Saraswati has been on since the British were here and it has become increasingly political now. The fact is, there is no clear archaeological evidence to suggest where the Saraswati flowed and if it flowed at all," the archaeologist said.

Nayanjot Lahiri, an archaeologist and professor of history at the Delhi University, has another point to make. She argues that it was equally important to move beyond the obsession with Saraswati.

"Instead of Saraswati alone, the Centre and the culture ministry should come up with a larger national vision for archaeology that covers the whole country," Lahiri points out. But even as historians debate the very existence of this elusive subterranean stream, it is clear that the state's cultural agencies will spare no effort in the search.

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