The countless stories which Ravi has been carrying through times of yore cannot be appropriated by a mere 78 years of conflict narrative between India and Pakistan
COLONEL SATISH SINGH LALOTRA
For centuries, the river Ravi has flowed through the heart of Punjab’s history, culture and civilisation. Revered in ancient texts, celebrated in folklore, and crucial to the agricultural prosperity of the region, Ravi has been much more than a watercourse.
Flowing through myriad names, the kind of which most of Indians may not be even aware of, viz., Vedic Parushni, Puranic Irvati, Greek Hydraotes, river Ravi is one such water body of our sub-continent which is arguably the most talked about, referred as well as venerated that meets its more than equal in the form of the Indus. It is not for nothing that the ubiquitous phrase-‘ Heth Vage Ravi Darya’ or ‘Below flows the river Ravi’ became the sine qua non in most of the songs and stories of Punjab, both past and contemporary.
Most of the contemporary writers and poets of the Punjabi language in India lament that Punjabis have always written poetry and even prose around their rivers that have been left back in Pakistan. Whereas Pakistan, on the other hand, thinks most of Punjab’s rivers have been left back in India.
This is true more so in the case of the river Ravi, unlike other rivers of the Indus basin. With 23rd April 2026 having gone past, reminding all of us of the completion of more than one year of the holding in abeyance of the IWT ( Indus Water Treaty) in the wake of the infamous ‘Pahalgam attack by Pakistan-based terrorists, it is time to cast a glance at one of the major river systems of this IWT ( Ravi) from an altogether different perspective.
That of a water system which has bound both warring nations (India & Pakistan), ranging from livelihood, customs, culture, poetry and literature with each other for aeons. Unlike other rivers of the Indus basin, the Ravi is fed more by monsoon than by glaciers. Though having a modest yield, Ravi’s impact on the ecology and on human societies has been deep and nothing short of being stupendous.
It would be worth each drop of water of the river Ravi to undertake a short ethnographical view of this water system on the eve of the first year of its scrapping( though temporarily) of the IWT by India that will enable the readers of this column of mine to understand its connection with its people, on both sides of the Radcliff line. Those who worship it, fear it, and on whose banks in 1929 the clarion call for the independence of India ( Poorna swaraj) was given by the first PM, Nehru, Ravi still rules the mental firmament of this sub-continent as no other river system.
The precursor to this write-up of mine stemmed from my recent train journey ( Rajdhani Express) while coming back from my home town Jammu to Delhi and crossing the river Ravi that has been the traditional boundary between the erstwhile state of J&K and Punjab for centuries. The sight of still damaged Madhopur barrage on this river, wrought by last year’s torrential rains in August 2025, jolted me back to the stark realities of today’s geopolitical situation as it confronts our sub-continent.
The fact that the Pakistani side of Punjab was as badly affected by this river’s raging waves last monsoon as was the Indian side needs no elaboration. That river Ravi stood at the crossroads of all major historical events of this sub-continent dating back to the Indus valley civilisation circa 3300-2800 BC, so central that the first phase of ‘Harappan urban development’ has been aptly named as ‘Ravi phase’ is in itself a statement that needs no further elucidation.
The fact that even the British placed this water body in the 1846 ‘Treaty of Amritsar’ as a vital geographical and political boundary to define the newly formed borders of the Dogra princely state of J&K under its suzerainty, marking the region’s official transition from Sikh rule to Dogra ownership, underscores Ravi’s relevance across myriad time lines. As if this was not enough, astounding discoveries talk of rosewood and deodar logs floating down the river 5000 years ago.
Fish caught in its paleo channels forming an important part of the diet and surprisingly advanced urban development adapting to floods rather than merely fighting them, Ravi has much to offer to its admirers, cutting across myriad time lines. The fall of urban Harappa is also traced to the decisive avulsion of the river away from the settlement.
As river ‘Parushni’ in Rigveda, circa 1500 BC, Ravi’s banks were the battleground for ‘Dashrajna’ or the war of the ‘Ten kings’. Indira, the lord of the free-flowing rivers, is described as crossing the ‘woolly foam’ of Parushni. And even today, Gaddi shepherds set off on their long remembered migratory routes with woolly sheep along this river. Somewhere around the 5th century BC, ancient grammarian ‘Yaska’ recorded that the Parushni of the Rig-Veda is same as ‘Iravati’. It is Iravati that is found in Ramayana and Mahabharata, where Sita found refuge in its forested banks. Yaksa says—‘They call it Iravati as Parushni; a mountain river with a sinuous path’.
In the headwater forests deep in the valleys of Himachal Pradesh are found the conifer trees going by the name ‘Rei’, and hence the name of Ravi. In the 4th century BC, Alexander of Macedonia sailed the Ravi several times, forded it and, as was his habit, drove the native tribes to a bloody battle. The Greeks recorded the river as ‘Hydraotis’ or Hyarotis at that time. If one goes further upstream in Himachal Pradesh, the headwaters of the Ravi were always the lifeline of the relatively isolated Chamba kingdom. The river system connected high mountain passes and fierce deities with the capitals of Bharmour and Chamba.
The ancient Manimahesh Kailash yatra still traces its origins from this venerated Ravi. In the 9th century, the ‘Minjar’ festival unique to the Chamba region began with the victorious king ‘Sahil Varman’ crossing the Ravi. Till date, the festival commences with the immersion of fragile ‘Minjars’ ( corn tassels) into the flow of Ravi. While coming down to the plains of Punjab, the 16th century saw the rise of Sikhism on the banks of the Ravi, with Guru Nanak sahib having spent 18 years here and established ‘Kartarpur Sahib’ on the right bank.
It was only now, after centuries, that both India & Pakistan decided to step forward and put this sacred shrine of the Sikhs as a hallmark of ‘religious tolerance’ and ‘sub-continental bonhomie ’across the ‘Radcliff line’. Ravi was also the final resting place of Guru Arjan Dev, who said—‘ A virtuous soul must be a courageous soul’.
The 17th century saw some of the earliest canal systems on this river. ‘Shah Nehr’, which was later re-instituted as UBDC( Upper Bari Doab canal), was an extensive canal built on the Ravi from the present Madhopur Barrage, which is visible as one crosses over from Jammu and Kashmir into Punjab. The ancient engineers knew better than to build a dam at a place where the river deposited huge amounts of silt each monsoon. The broken Madhopur barrage, which I mentioned in the previous paragraphs, today stands as testimony to this fact.
The ‘Shah Nehr’( UBDC) took water over 150 kms to Lahore, irrigating the Shalimar gardens, that are now a pride of place in Pakistan’s urban landscape. The ‘Shah Nehar’, including various other canals of the Ravi were not only for irrigation; they were a place for lovers’ meetings, immortalised in several Punjabi songs. One such place of historical importance on the river Ravi was ‘Pul Kanjri’, a bridge built by Maharaja Ranjit Singh for his beloved.
Lahore, which now seldom sees water in its river (Ravi) owing to the temporary scrapping of the IWT by India in the wake of last year’s dastardly terrorist attack at Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir, was once a hub of progressive literature too. Works like Gulzar’s short story ‘Ravi Paar’ ( across Ravi), Amrita Pritam’s ‘Ajj Aakhan Waris Shah Nu’ bear witness to the partition pain and consequent strife that followed.
Poems of Punjab changed colour then, from love they spoke of separation as has been found written in the world famous book –‘Train to Pakistan’, a Pulitzer prize-winning book by the only one of its kind on the Punjabi literary firmament—Khushwant Singh. His main protagonist of the story—‘Jugga’- epitomises what both Punjabs (East & West) endured during those horrendous times of partition. ‘Akhtar Sheerani’, who died in Lahore in September 1948, just weeks after partition, wrote—‘ Kis rang ka hai Dariya-e-Attock, Ravi ka kinara kaisa hai’.
And today, after the long winding road through history of place and time, we have returned to square one. The headwaters of the Ravi are fettered in a cascade of hydropower projects. Yet these power projects are held hostage to the geostrategic brinkmanship as witnessed between the two Asian nuclear powers of India and Pakistan, which remind us time and again that these rivers of Punjab have long been extinct from their primary objective.
The objective of being a ‘primary caregiver’ to countless of its citizens who have made the banks of these rivers as their homeland. Though almost all major river systems of the world have innumerable stories hidden deep within their recesses impacting the mankind in ways yet to be deciphered, the countless stories which Ravi has been carrying through times of yore cannot be appropriated by a mere 78 years of conflict narrative between India and Pakistan.
That I was prompted to write this column for the ‘Rising Kashmir’ paper has already been conveyed in the preceding paragraphs, but yet no write-up will ever be complete on an important topic like Ravi, unless ended with the famous couplet of Allama Iqbal—
Kinare Ravi, sukoot-e-sham Mahav- e- sarod hai Ravi,
Naa pooch mujhse jo hai kafiyat mere Dil ki.
(The writer is a retired army officer and a regular scribe of the Rising Kashmir paper. He can be approached at his email: slalotra 4729@gmail.com)