Millennia-old palaeochannel traced in Rajasthan again hints at ancient Saraswati: Read how Leftists have kept denying its existence, despite cultural legacy and scientific evidence

“Mythology, not history”: this is the first and foremost argument leftists put forth whenever Saraswati, the sacred ancient river kept alive in Hindu faith, is mentioned. In what could be a significant step in tracing the Saraswati river mentioned in the most ancient religious text Rig Ved, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has dug up an ancient paleochannel buried 23 metres under the Bahaj village in the Deeg district of Rajasthan.

Rajasthan dig reveals 3,500-year-old settlement and River channel: This ancient river system nourished early human settlements and connects Bahaj to the larger Saraswati basin culture. https://t.co/kLEjIGihTS

— Niraj Rai (@NirajRai3) June 25, 2025

Notably, a paleochannel is the remnant of an ancient river or stream channel that is no longer active and has ceased surface flow.

What emerged from the excavation conducted between April 2024 and May 2025 has drawn the attention of historians and archaeologists, who link the discovered paleochannel to the Saraswati River. There is evidence suggesting that there were settlements here between 3500 and 1000 BC. These discoveries date back to the Kushan, Magadha and Sunga (also spelt, Shunga) dynasty.

The discovery of a paleochannel is reported to be the first-ever in India’s archaeological history.

While giving a presentation at the Banaras Hindu University, Vinay Gupta, superintending archaeologist of ASI Jaipur, said, “This ancient river system nourished early human settlements and connects Bahaj to the larger Saraswati basin culture.”

Gupta also called the palaeochannel an “unprecedented discovery confirming ancient water systems supported civilisation here”.

Notably, the ASI has submitted its report to the Ministry of Culture, which will decide how to preserve the site. In addition to the paleochannel, the ASI excavation team has also found remnants of residential structures with earthen posts, trenches with stratified walls, furnaces and a variety of iron and copper artefacts.

The Microlithic tools or small stone implements suggest that the roots of this settlement date back to the pre-Holocene era, TOI reported.

The excavation team also found many Hindu religious relics, including 15 yajna kundas (sacrificial pits), votive tanks dedicated to Shakti worship, and terracotta images of Shiva and Parvati, dating back to around 1000 BC. In addition, Yajna kundas from the Mahajanapada period were also found, most of them filled with sandy soil and miniature pots holding uninscribed copper coins.

‘The mythical river that never was‘ or the ancient ‘Guptagamini’ remerging? How leftists kept denying the existence of Saraswati due to its Vedic connection

In the Vedas, theSaraswati River is called “ambitame, naditame, devitame (the best of mothers, the best of rivers, the best of goddesses)”. The Saraswati river is mentioned some fifty times in the hymns of the Rig Veda. It is closely related to the ancient Rig Vedic society and Hinduism.

The Saraswati river, also known as ‘Guptagamini’ (the river with a hidden flow), revered in the Vedas as a mighty and sacred river, has long been a subject of debate among scholars, archaeologists, and ideologically driven groups looking for opportunities to demean and discredit Hindu history. While scientific evidence now increasingly hints at the existence of a massive river system matching the Vedic descriptions, especially the mentions made in the oldest Vedic text, the Rig Ved, some leftists ‘historians’ and propaganda outlets have perpetually been dismissing even legitimate research pertaining to the existence of the Saraswati river. They come up with absurd arguments to claim that Saraswati is only a ‘mythological’ river or a symbolic mention instead of a real geographical entity.

On the surface, the rhetoric of leftist ‘scholars’ and ‘media’ around the Saraswati River’s existence or the possibility of its existence appears to be academic denial. However, this denial is not simply academic; the Hindu-hating leftists have long been critiquing and dismissing research and findings that emphasise the antiquity and continuity of Vedic traditions. They undermine the cultural and historical significance of the Vedas as the Vedic texts form the bedrock of Hindu civilisation.

In fact, the repeated use of the term ‘mythical’ for the Saraswati River in the media indicates a perpetual and deliberate attempt at subtle brainwashing so as to convince the general populace, especially the Hindus, that the Saraswati River is ‘mythical’ even as archaeological evidence and research show otherwise.

Unsurprisingly, leftist propaganda portal TheWire has long been denying the Saraswati River’s existence, slamming attempts at research and mindlessly mocking legitimate scientific enquiries into India’s ancient river systems.

In February 2019, TheWire published an article headlined: Saraswati: ‘The River That Never Was, Flowing Always in the People’s Hearts’. In this piece, the author mentioned the likes of Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, among other leftist historians who have a history of glorifying Islamic invaders and tyrants and diminishing the Hindu history, to equate the existence of the Saraswati River with cultural memes.

“So it is also likely that the Saraswati was a mental construct of the Vedic Aryans, which metaphorically overflowed as they encountered the bleak, water-poor landscape of the Indus-Yamuna interfluve. The new findings don’t believe there existed a perennial river in Harappan times in the Indus-Yamuna interfluve region of northwest India,” TheWire article reads.

It further lamented the government’s decision to spend Rs 50 crore on finding a “non-existent” river.

In 2021, TheWire again cried hoarse over the government’s decision to set up the Centre of Excellence for Research on the Saraswati River (CERSR) at Kurukshetra in Haryana. TheWire article headline, “How the Indian Govt Is Pushing Money Down a Mythological River“, called the Modi government’s efforts to trace the ‘disappeared’ Saraswati River, a ‘Hindu project’.

The article authored by an architect and sculptor also lamented back then that the Central government was spending money on connecting Char Dham and on the Kashi-Vishwanath Corridor, suggesting that the government is promoting Hindu ‘mythology’. It also asserted that Saraswati is a mythical river and mythology provides immediate results while science is slow, tedious and evidence-based, thus, may not yield quick benefits for the Modi government.

TheWire also platformed alleged journalist-turned-YouTuber Ravish Kumar in August 2018, to mock the government’s steps to back research and investigation pertaining to the Saraswati River.

Similarly, in January 2018, Scroll reported the formation of a permanent panel to study the mythical Saraswati river. The concluding paragraph of the article, as usual, casts aspersions on the existence of the river itself.

There are many such articles calling Saraswati a ‘mythical’ river, the pursuit of tracing it as a ‘Hindu project’, and any scholar, historian, or archaeologist attempting to explore history and archaeological remains, based on the descriptions made in the Vedic texts, as ‘Hindutva-influenced’. Such opinion pieces, mostly authored by leftist ‘intellectuals’, insinuate that a trend of excavating sites approximating descriptions in the ancient Hindu scriptures has become mainstream and is a part of the ‘revivalist’ agenda of the Hindu nationalists.

At the 2001 Indian History Congress, Marxist historian Irfan Habib, who has been a Mughal fanboy and often villainises the Hindus, presented his research paper titled, “Imaging River Sarasvati: A defence of common sense”. In this, Habib not only dismissed the grandeur of once-thriving Saraswati River, but also argued that the claims about Saraswati’s existence were exaggerated to back a Hindu-centric view of history. Even Romila Thapar has been among the leftist-communist historians who reject the research and findings linking the Ghaggar-Hakra system with the ancient Saraswati River.

While the leftists dismiss Vedic texts and other Hindu scriptures as unreliable sources since, for them, everything mentioned in these texts is ‘mythical’, a growing body of scientific research hints at the existence of paleochannels in northwestern India, consistent with the Vedic descriptions of the Saraswati River.

In 2019, a research team led by scientists and researchers of IIT-Bombay and the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, stated that they had found ample evidence of a perennial river on the plains of Northwestern India, which had led to the flourishing of early Harappan civilisations in the area.

Contradicting the earlier beliefs that the Harappan civilisation depended upon the monsoon, ample evidence has been found that suggests that a considerable number of Harappan settlements flourished along the ancient course of a modern seasonal stream called Ghaggar in Northwestern India.

The research by the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad, in collaboration with IIT-Bombay, has stated that there is enough evidence to say that there was a perennial river in the parts of Northwestern India that followed along the current course of the Ghaggar. The scientists believe that it is the ancient river Saraswati mentioned in the Rig Veda.

The research says that the Saraswati was perennial and had flowed from the higher Himalayas between 7000 and 2500 BC. The Harappans had built their earliest settlements along the perennial Saraswati between 3000 and 1900 BC. The decline of Saraswati eventually led to the collapse of Harappan civilisation, the research adds. It also says that the demise of the river and the Harappan civilisation approximately coincide with the onset of the Meghalayan stage, the current dry state of global climate that began 4200 years ago.

The scientists involved in the study also say that while the Saraswati had sources in the glacial regions of the Himalaya, similar to the Ganga, Yamuna and Sutlej, the current Ghaggar has no direct connection to the higher Himalayas and originates from the Siwalik, the foothills of the Himalaya.

The dating of the layer was done with the radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence methods at the PRL. Scientist JS Ray explains that they found that the perennial river had uninterrupted flow starting 80,000 years ago and continued till 20,000 years ago. It then started diminishing due to the extreme aridity of the later glacial period. However, the river gained strength some 9000 years ago and continued till 4500 years ago.

The decline of Saraswati’s flow is said to have started due to the drying up of the Sutlej-fed channels. The later Hindu scriptures, such as the Mahabharat, also describe the Saraswati’s diminishing flow, till it all but disappeared.

“This revived perennial condition of the Ghaggar, which can be correlated with the Saraswati, likely facilitated the development of the early Harappan settlements along its banks. The timing of the eventual decline of the river, which led to the collapse of the civilisation, approximately coincides with the commencement of the Meghalayan Stage,” the research report reads.

“Our study brings to light the fact that the Harappans built their early settlements along a stronger phase of the river Ghaggar, during ~9 to 4.5 ka, which would later be known as the Saraswati. However, by the time the civilisation matured, the river had already lost its glacial connection,” the study adds.

In his book, “The Land of Seven Rivers”, noted historian and economist Sanjeev Sanyal comments that tectonic shifts may have played a role in the shift of the river’s course. The site Dholavira (Gujarat) is located in the Rann of Kutch. Surely, no civilisation could have built a city and lived there if there were no water source nearby. He also backs the hypothesis that the Harappan civilisation could have ended due to the death of the Saraswati River. The people who lived in those cities might have moved eastwards to the Gangetic plains after the death of the Saraswati River.

Interestingly, back in 2013, an unstarred question was asked by Harish Chaudhary in the Lok Sabha about the Saraswati River. Since ISRO functions directly under the PMO, the answer was addressed to the Prime Minister. In response to the query raised, the government said that the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) studied the paleochannels in North West India and related them to the channels of the River Saraswati.

“An integrated palaeochannel map of River Saraswati has been prepared from the origin in the Himalayas to the Rann of Kutchch. The origin of the mapped course of the River Saraswati palaeochannel in North West India was linked to the Himalayan perennial source through the Sutlej and Yamuna Rivers,” the government said.

It added that the work on delineation of the entire course of the river ‘Saraswati’ in North West India was carried out using Indian Remote Sensing Satellite data along with a digital elevation model. Satellite images are multispectral, multitemporal and have the advantage of a synoptic view, which is useful to detect palaeochannels. The palaeochannels are validated using historical maps, archaeological sites, hydro-geological and drilling data. It was observed that major Harappan sites of Kalibangan (Rajasthan), Banawali and Rakhigarhi (Haryana), Dholavira and Lothal (Gujarat) lie along the River Saraswati.

There are numerous Harappan sites, including Kalibangan, Rakhigarhi, and Dholavira, located along the Ghaggar-Hakra system. This suggests that a significant river supported the development of the Indus Valley Civilisation, which is also known as the Sindhu-Saraswati or Indus-Saraswati Civilisation.

Archaeologist Braj Basi Lal, or BB Lal, the former Director-General of the ASI, has been a prominent advocate of the argument that the distribution of these Harappan sites aligns with the course of Saraswati, not the Sindhu/Indus, suggesting that Saraswati was a central hub of the IVC. Even in Kalibangan, excavations have uncovered Vedic ritual altars, Vedis, and Yupas, hinting at the cultural-religious continuity between the Vedic and Harappan civilisations. Interestingly, BB Lal is often labelled as a ‘Hindutva-influenced’ archaeologist by the left-liberal cabal.

The deliberate dismissal of the Saraswati as ‘mythical’ seeks to weaken the authority of Hindu scriptures, especially the Vedas, as reliable historical sources. It is understandable that relying solely on religious scriptures, even if those scriptures are the cornerstone of Hindu culture and give elaborate insights into the life and times of the Vedic era, is not appropriate. However, the leftists discredit legitimate research papers, archaeological findings and other evidence just because it does not align with their agenda, and to prevent further research and investigations in this direction.

Besides the ideological imperative of undermining the histriocity of Hindu scriptures, the leftists and other anti-Hindu elements who have been blind supporters of the Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT), are also opposed to efforts to trace what they call the ‘dead river’, since the Saraswati’s perennial phase, (9,000-4,500 years ago), and its mention in the Rig Ved as massive river still flowing, likely before 1900 BCE. Many scholars are of the view that this earlier dating aligns the Vedic period with the Mature Harappan phase (2600-1900 BCE). This suggests that the Vedic and the Harappan cultures could have been contemporaneous or even identical.

Interestingly, the discovery of Vedic religious elements at Harappan sites, the absence of archaeological evidence for a violent invasion, as well as genetic studies showing limited Steppe ancestry in India, have devastated the Aryan Invasion Theory propagators. So far, the studies have hinted at cultural continuity rather than a disruptive and violent foreign incursion. Even the shrewd attempts by leftist scholars and historians to shift the narrative from ‘invasion’ to ‘immigration’ have not yielded the desired results.

However, denying the existence of the Saraswati River helps leftists maintain whatever little relevance their AIT has, by avoiding the need to reconcile the Rig Ved’s timeline with the Indus Valley Civilisation. No wonder, there was a massive outrage among the left liberal ‘intellectual’ ecosystem when the NCERT decided to update the name of Harappan Civilisation as Sindhu-Saraswati Civilisation in school textbooks. Not to forget, acknowledging Saraswati River’s existence validates the antiquity of the Vedic culture and also debunks the divisive claims made by the likes of Max Müller and other foreign scholars in the 19th century and later on, that the foreign Aryans invaded the Indian subcontinent and clashed with the native Dravidians, displacing the existing Indus Valley civilisation. Interestingly, while the neo-Buddhists are among those who propagate the AIT as a universal truth, OpIndia reported earlier how even their idol, Dr BR Ambedkar, debunked the Aryan Invasion Theory.

In conclusion, while left-liberal cabal kept trying all tactics at hand to discredit Hindu history and to establish the narrative that the Saraswati river is nothing but a ‘myth’, archaeological evidence emerging one after the other, suggest that what they call ‘myth’ is probably, a truth yet to be fully discovered. Thus, more research on the Saraswati River and its link to the Harappan and Vedic cultures should be conducted to trace the ancient river and its role in an indigenous Vedic-Harappan continuum.

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