Sarasvati: The River and The Goddess

Abstract

The ancient Indian entity called Sarasvati is very rare and thus special. The concept of themighty river ‘Sarasvati’ of ancient (undivided) India and the concept of one of the main deities ‘Sarasvati’ of the Indian pantheon go hand in hand and share a unique relationship. One concept, the one of the rivers is tangible and the other concept, that of the deity is intangible. Both of them seem to be very closely related to each other, thus we move from the tangible to the intangible. Today we know that the mighty river Sarasvati was an integral part of the Harappan Civilisation and was flowing nearly parallelly to the Sindhu alias Indus. So, the recentmost way of naming this great Indian civilization is ‘Sindhu– Sarasvati’ or ‘Indus– Sarasvati’ Culture. This civilisation encompasses the vast territory flanked by the Sindhu or the Indus to the west and the mighty Sarasvati to the east, including the settlements on both their banks, namely, east and west banks of the two big rivers.The territory also included some other parts of Western India. The total area of the expanse of this Indian civilisation covered around 1,500 kms X 1,500 kms.For respecting the word limit; we are bringing brevity to our text.