Did this interview with Michel Danino, for the paper today. Danino in his latest book The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati,traces the death of the river Sarasvati.

Pasting the complete interview after this.

The common belief that the invisible river Sarasvati meets the Ganga and the Yamuna at the Prayag in Allahabad is just that: a belief. "After the collapse of the Harappan civilization some of the Late Harappans moved eastward, crossing Ganga, and it is likely that they did not want to forget the sacred river. So they restored it in the new location, but as an "invisible" river," says Michel Danino, a Frenchman, who has lived in India for more than 25 years and has most recently authored The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati (Penguin Books India, 2010). In this interview he speaks to Vivek Kaul.

A large number people believe that the search for the lost river Sarasvati is a very recent phenomenon. Is that true?

It is the recent study of the Sarasvati basin through satellite imagery that gives this wrong impression. But explorations of the region by British topographers, surveyors and geologists began in the 1820s, as I documented in my book. They soon noted a wide but dry riverbed running more or less parallel to the Indus through a mostly arid region. It was called "Ghaggar" and "Hakra" further downstream. They recorded numerous ruined mounds along its banks, local traditions of a "lost river of the Great Indian Desert" - a loss that explained the desolation of the region - and finally the presence of freshwater wells along that bed. Other explorations followed, building up a considerable body of evidence by the end of the nineteenth century.

From the evidence that is available, where exactly did the Ghaggar-Hakra river start and through which parts of India did it flow?

The Ghaggar-Hakra starts its course in the Shivalik Hills, flows through today's Haryana (it still does so during good monsoons), continues (its dry course, rather) through Punjab, northern Rajasthan, then into Cholistan (the Pakistani extension of the Thar Desert), and finally all the way to the Rann of Kachchh. This course was clearly marked, for instance, in a map of 1893 drawn by C.F. Oldham, who was a surgeon-major in the Indian Army, but also an Indologist.

So the Ghaggar-Hakra river system that flows through Rajasthan into Pakistan is the Sarasvati?

If in the nineteenth century most scholars identified the Ghaggar-Hakra's course with the Vedic Sarasvati, it is basically for three reasons. The Rig-Veda, the oldest of the four Vedas, mentions various rivers but praises the Sarasvati above all others: it was a "mighty river" flowing "from the mountain to the sea", and one hymn listed it between the Yamuna and the Sutlej - precisely the location of the Ghaggar-Hakra. Secondly, the local traditions regarding the "lost river" of the Indian desert matched those in the post-Vedic literature (including the Mahabharata), which recorded the gradual disappearance of the Sarasvati. Thirdly, scholars noticed a minor tributary of the Ghaggar called "Sarsuti", an obvious corruption of "Sarasvati": it rises in the Sirmur hills that are part of the Shivaliks and was marked on British maps as early as in 1788. Putting these three lines of evidence together, they concluded that the lost Sarasvati could only have flowed in the Ghaggar's bed. In fact it was a French geographer, Vivien de Saint-Martin, who reached this conclusion for the first time - in 1855! Since then, most archaeologists have accepted this identity between the Ghaggar-Hakra and the Sarasvati.

You suggest in the book that Sarasvati was an important part of the Harappan civilization. How did you come to that conclusion?

In 1917 Marc Aurel Stein, a famous explorer and archaeologist, who was also a fine Sanskritist, wrote a paper on "river names in the Rig-Veda" in which he endorsed the consensus on the Sarasvati's location. A few years later, the Harappan civilization was discovered, limited at first to the Indus valley. However, Aurel Stein had an intuition that it might extend eastward into the Sarasvati valley. He had to wait till 1940, when he was 78, before he could undertake an expedition in the then Bikaner and Bahawalpur states. For the first time, he found among the ruined mounds of the Cholistan desert (today in Pakistan) evidence of Harappan culture: pottery (some of it inscribed with the characteristic Harappan script), flint blades, shell ornaments etc

After Independence and Partition, Indian archaeologists followed suit, identifying dozens of Harappan sites further upstream. Today, we know that the Sarasvati basin was home to some 360 Harappan sites (of the "Mature" or urban phase), making it one of the major heartlands of this first urban civilization on Indian soil.

How did the Sarasvati river dry up and disappear?