Charles Frederick Oldham

"Although the river below the confluence [with the Ghaggar] is marked in our maps as Gaggar, it was formerly the Saraswatī; that name is still known amongst the people."

"The first person who attempted to correlate the textual descriptions of Sarasvati with empirical paleogeology was C. F. Oldham, in 1874. He surmised that "the waters of the Sarasvati [are] continuous with the dry bed of a great river [Hakra], which, as local legends assert, once flowed through the desert to the sea"."

"(the Rig Veda in one of its hymns clearly places the river) ‘between the Yamuna and the Satudri [Sutlej] which is its present position’. ... ‘it was formerly [known as] the Saraswatī; that name is still known amongst the people . . .’ Its ancient course is contiguous with the dry bed of a great river which, as local legends assert, once flowed through the desert to the sea. In confirmation of these traditions, the channel referred to, which is called Hakra or Sotra, can be traced through the Bikanir and Bhawulpur [Bahawalpur] States into Sind, and thence onwards to the Rann of Kach. The existence of this river at no very remote period, and the truth of the legends which assert the ancient fertility of the lands through which it flowed, are attested by the ruins which everywhere overspread what is now an arid sandy waste. Throughout this tract are scattered mounds, marking the sites of cities and towns. And there are strongholds still remaining, in a very decayed state, which were places of importance at the time of the early Mahommedan invasions. Amongst these ruins are found not only the huge bricks used by the Hindus in the remote past, but others of a much later make. All this seems to show that the country must have been fertile for a long period . . . Freshwater shells, exactly similar to those now seen in the Panjab rivers, are to be found in this old riverbed and upon its banks... ... ‘great changes in the course of the Sutlej have occurred in comparatively recent times. Indeed, only a century ago [that is, in the late eighteenth century], the river deserted its bed under the fort of Ludiana, which is five miles from its present course’... the ‘old riverbed generally known as Narra. This channel, which bears also the names of Hakra or Sagara, Wahind, and Dahan, is to be traced onward to the Rann of Kach59 . . . The name Hakra . . . is also applied to the Narra, as far as the Rann of Kach, so that the whole channel is known by this name, from Bhatnair [Hanumangarh] to the sea’...."

"the Sutlej ‘flowed southwards from the Himalāya . . . and onwards, through Sind, to the sea’—until, for some reason, a prince-turned-ascetic named Puran, a hero of many Punjabi legends, cursed the river to leave its bed and move westward. ‘The stream, in consequence, changed its course more and more towards the west, until, six hundred and fifty years ago, it entered the Beas valley . . .’, which would take us to the thirteenth century CE; but leaving aside the date, the consequence was ‘a terrible drought and famine in the country on the banks of the Hakra, where [large] numbers of men and cattle perished. The survivors then migrated to the banks of the Indus, and the country has ever since been desert’... ‘the traditions of all the tribes bordering upon it [the Rann of Kachchh] agree that this expanse of salt and sand was once an estuary’... The course of the ‘lost river’ has now been traced from the Himalaya to the Rann of Kach . . . We have also seen that the Vedic description of the waters of the Saraswatī flowing onward to the ocean, and that given in the Mahabharata, of the sacred river losing itself in the sands, were probably both of them correct at the periods to which they referred."