The Rigveda's Missing River: What the Nadistuti Sukta Actually Says About the Sarasvati

Open almost any popular article on the "lost Sarasvati" and you will find the same verse cited as proof: the Nadistuti Sukta (नदीस्तुतिसूक्त, "hymn in praise of rivers"), Rigveda 10.75. It is treated like a satellite photograph in verse — a list that supposedly pins the Sarasvatī between two named rivers and settles, once and for all, where a vanished waterway used to flow. The hymn is real. The list is real. What is not real, or at least not settled, is the confidence with which that list gets used.

Rigveda 10.75 is a single hymn of nineteen verses, addressed to the rivers themselves, asking them to carry the poet's praise onward like a mother reaching for her child. Verses 5 and 6 contain the geography everyone quotes: a procession of named rivers running, in most manuscripts, roughly from the Gaṅgā and Yamunā in the east, through the Sarasvatī, the Śutudrī (शुतुद्री, the Sutlej), the Paruṣṇī (पारुष्णी, usually taken as the Ravi), and on to the Sindhu (सिन्धु, the Indus) and its western tributaries in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The word doing the heavy lifting

The trouble starts with a single verb form: imam me gaṅge yamune sarasvati — "this [praise/prayer] of mine, O Gaṅgā, Yamunā, Sarasvatī..." Ralph T. H. Griffith's 1896 translation renders the sequence as a simple vocative list, rivers being invoked in a row, and that is exactly how it reads if you don't stop to ask why a poet composing somewhere in the Punjab would open his roll call with the Ganges — a river far to the east of everywhere else named in the hymn.

That ordering has done a lot of quiet work in later arguments. If you assume the list is strictly geographic, east to west or west to east, the Sarasvatī's position between Yamunā and Śutudrī looks like a precise coordinate: somewhere in the plains between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, roughly where dry paleochannels have since been mapped by remote sensing and identified by many geologists with the Ghaggar-Hakra system. If instead the list is a formulaic invocation — rivers named by convention, ritual importance, or metrical convenience rather than a west-to-east transect — the same line proves nothing about location at all.

What the newer translation does differently

Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton's 2014 translation, published by Oxford University Press as The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, treats the same verses with more hedging than Griffith allowed himself. Their notes on the hymn flag it as a late addition to the Rigveda's tenth book — the tenth maṇḍala (मण्डल, "book" or "circle," the youngest section of the collection by most philological reckonings) — and treat the river sequence as praise-poetry cataloguing rather than cartography. Where Griffith's Victorian prose reads like a gazetteer, Jamison and Brereton's translation reads more like a litany: rivers are being flattered and thanked, not surveyed.

This is not a small stylistic difference. Griffith was working in the 1890s, decades before the Ghaggar-Hakra paleochannel became a live subject in Indian archaeology, and his translation choices were not built to answer questions about Harappan hydrology. When later writers lift his English lines to argue for a precise, mapped Sarasvatī, they are borrowing the authority of the Sanskrit while running on Griffith's syntax.

Tradition, evidence, and the gap between them

None of this means the Sarasvatī was invented. The river appears repeatedly across the Rigveda — most famously in RV 7.95, praised as "pure in her course from the mountains to the sea" — and Vedic tradition consistently treats it as a major, named, flowing river, not a metaphor. That the Sarasvatī was a real river is not seriously disputed among Vedic scholars; what is disputed is whether the Nadistuti Sukta specifically gives its location with the geographic precision popular accounts assign it.

The paleochannel evidence — dry riverbeds traceable by satellite through Haryana, Punjab, and Rajasthan, often mapped onto the Ghaggar-Hakra system — is a separate line of argument from the textual one. Geology can show a river dried up. Philology can show what a hymn says. Treating the second as automatic confirmation of the first, rather than a hypothesis worth testing against the Sanskrit's actual grammar, is where the "lost Sarasvati" narrative tends to get ahead of its sources.

Read closely, RV 10.75 is a hymn of gratitude to rivers a Vedic poet knew and traveled among. Whether it is also a map depends less on the Sanskrit than on how badly the reader wants it to be one.

Sources referenced:

• Ralph T. H. Griffith, The Hymns of the Rigveda (1896 translation, Rigveda 10.75)
• Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India (Oxford University Press, 2014)