Conjuring a river, imagining civilisation

Abstract

The depiction of the river Saraswati as an empirical centre of the Harappan civilisation has been marked by intense debate in recent years. Taking the short-lived Saraswati Heritage Project (2002–04) initiated by the Archaeological Survey of India as a case study, this article examines the epistemological emergence of the river and interrogates its historical and ideological relationship to the Harappans and the Aryans. It argues that the epistemic trajectory of Saraswati from a literary entity to an empirical category followed four phases. First, it emerged as a mythical river of colonial Indology; then, as a civilisational river of colonial archaeology; subsequently, as a hydrological body of postcolonial geology and, finally, as an empirical fact of postcolonial archaeology and history. Contrary to historians who attribute the resurrection of the Saraswati solely to the growing influence of Hindutva ideologies, this article argues that the Saraswati is also an epistemic product of the disciplinarian discourse of colonial Indology and postcolonial science. It contends that its ideological and political valence has to be located in the larger discursive universe of colonial and postcolonial scientific practices and not solely attributed to Hindutva.