The Five Rivers of Punjab

Say the name and you have already counted them. Punjab is Persian — panj, five, and ab, water — the land of five waters. The Greeks who came with Alexander called the same plain Pentapotamia, which means precisely the same thing in a different language, and the Rigveda knew the wider region as Sapta Sindhu, the seven rivers. Whatever else has been disputed about this place for three thousand years, everyone has agreed to identify it by its water.

Which makes the modern position strange. Since 1960, no country has all five. The plain is named for a set of rivers that no longer belongs to anyone as a set.

One Family of Rivers

The five are not independent. Every one of them is a tributary of the Indus, and they arrive at it by joining each other first.

The Jhelum flows into the Chenab. So does the Ravi. The Beas flows into the Sutlej. And then the Sutlej and the Chenab meet, at which point all five are travelling in a single channel called the Panjnad — the five waters — which runs south-west and delivers them to the Indus near Mithankot. From there the combined flow crosses Sindh to the Arabian Sea.

So the five rivers are, physically, one long conversation between the Himalaya and the ocean, and the plain called Punjab is the stretch where that conversation is spread out widest.

The Jhelum

The westernmost of the five rises in the Kashmir valley at Verinag, runs north-west through Srinagar and Wular Lake, then turns south to cut through the mountains and out onto the plains past the city that shares its name.

It is the river of the ancient Hydaspes, where Alexander fought Porus in 326 BCE — an engagement whose site nobody has ever securely identified, because the Jhelum has moved repeatedly across its own floodplain in the intervening millennia. That is worth remembering generally about these rivers: they are not fixed lines. They wander, and the villages and boundaries drawn against them wander too.

The Chenab

Formed in Himachal Pradesh where the Chandra and Bhaga streams meet at Tandi — Chandrabhaga, from which the name comes — it runs through Jammu and out into the plains of what is now Pakistani Punjab.

The Chenab is the river of the poets. Sohni crossed it every night on a fired earthen pot to reach Mahiwal, and drowned when the pot was swapped for unbaked clay. Heer's country is the Chenab country, around Jhang. In Punjabi verse the river is not scenery; it is treated as a party to what happens, spoken to and blamed. To the Greeks it was the Acesines.

Where the Chenab flows, the old singers say, it carries the sighs of Heer and the courage of Sohni.

The Ravi

The smallest of the five in volume, and the one with the most history stacked along it. It rises in the Bara Bhangal region of Himachal Pradesh, runs past Chamba, and then for a long stretch forms the India-Pakistan border before turning into Pakistan.

Lahore sits on it, and so did the Mughal capital's gardens, forts and tombs. The Sikh Empire's court was a Ravi court. Guru Nanak's Kartarpur, where he spent his last years farming, is on its bank. To the Greeks it was the Hydraotes; in Sanskrit, Parushni — and it was on the Parushni that the Rigveda places the Battle of the Ten Kings, which makes it arguably the earliest named battlefield in South Asian literature.

The Beas

The only one of the five that lies entirely within India. It rises near the Rohtang Pass, runs through Kullu and Mandi, comes out at Talwara and joins the Sutlej near Harike.

Its historical distinction is negative and rather large: the Beas is where Alexander's army stopped. His troops refused to go further east, and the empire that reached India got no deeper into it than this river. The Greeks called it the Hyphasis.

The Sutlej

The longest of the five, and the odd one out. It does not rise in the Himalaya of India at all but far beyond them, near Lake Rakshastal on the Tibetan plateau, close to Mount Kailash — which means it is older than the mountains it crosses, cutting a gorge through the range as the range rose around it.

It enters India in Himachal Pradesh, comes onto the plains at Bhakra, and is the river of the Malwa. The Greeks knew it as the Hyphasis or Zaradros; in Sanskrit it is Shatadru, the hundred-channelled.

The Doabs Between

Between each pair of rivers lies a doab — do, two, and ab, water — the tongue of alluvium held between two channels, renewed by silt and among the most productive farmland in Asia.

The Mughal administration named each by splicing the names of the rivers that framed it, and the names have stuck:

These are not merely geographical labels. They are cultural regions with their own dialects, their own reputations and their own histories — the Doaba that sent so much of the diaspora abroad, the Majha of the Bari Doab that is the Sikh heartland, the Malwa south of the Sutlej.

The Canals

The nineteenth century did something to these rivers that changed the plain permanently.

Beginning with the Upper Bari Doab Canal in the 1850s and accelerating through the 1880s and 90s, British engineers built out of the five rivers what became the largest irrigation network in the world. Millions of acres of the western doabs — the Rechna and Chaj in particular — which had been dry scrub grazed by pastoralists, were watered and settled as the canal colonies, populated largely by cultivators moved from the crowded east.

This is the origin of a great deal of modern Punjab. Faisalabad, Sargodha and much of the western plain are canal-colony towns. It also created a wheat and cotton export economy, a class of prosperous peasant proprietors, and a system in which control of a headworks was control of a region's livelihood. That last point mattered enormously in 1947.

1947, and the Problem Nobody Had Solved

The border drawn by Cyril Radcliffe cut the irrigation system in half.

It left the headworks of the Upper Bari Doab Canal at Madhopur, and the Ferozepur headworks on the Sutlej, on the Indian side — while the canals they fed watered land that was now in Pakistan. A system built as a single hydraulic unit had a frontier through it, with the taps upstream in one country and the fields downstream in another.

In April 1948, India briefly stopped the flow into those canals. Water was restored under an interim agreement within weeks, but the point had been made and could not be unmade: Pakistani agriculture depended on rivers whose upper courses India controlled.

The Indus Waters Treaty, 1960

It took twelve years and the World Bank to settle it.

The Indus Waters Treaty was signed at Karachi on 19 September 1960 by Jawaharlal Nehru, President Ayub Khan, and W. A. B. Iliff for the World Bank. Rather than trying to share each river, it did something blunter and, as it turned out, far more durable: it split the basin's six rivers into two sets.

• Eastern rivers — Ravi, Beas, Sutlej — to India, for unrestricted use.
• Western rivers — Indus, Jhelum, Chenab — to Pakistan, with India permitted limited non-consumptive use upstream.

A Permanent Indus Commission was established, with a commissioner from each country and a graduated procedure for disputes. The treaty has now survived three wars and sixty-five years of hostility, and is routinely described as one of the more successful water-sharing agreements anywhere — a reputation earned less by goodwill than by the fact that it required almost none.

The arithmetic of that settlement is worth stating plainly. Pakistani Punjab holds the name and has two of the five, plus the Indus itself. Indian Punjab has three, and one of those, the Ravi, it shares as a border. Nobody has five.

What the Division Did

Having been granted unrestricted use of the eastern rivers, India built to use them: Bhakra on the Sutlej, Pong on the Beas, Thein on the Ravi, and the canal systems that made the Green Revolution possible in the 1960s and 70s.

The consequence downstream is visible from any bridge. The lower Sutlej and lower Ravi, below the dams and diversions, carry a fraction of their historic flow, and for much of the year the water in them is substantially drainage and municipal effluent rather than river. In Pakistani Punjab, towns that grew up on the Ravi now sit beside a channel that is dry or foul for months at a stretch. The Indian side has its own version of the problem, in the form of an aquifer being drawn down to make up what the surface water no longer supplies.

The rivers, in short, were not simply divided. They were spent.

The Name That Outlasted the Thing

There is something worth sitting with in all this. Punjabis on both sides of the border still call the place the land of five waters, teach children the five names in order, and write songs about a river system that has not existed as a unit within living memory for most people now alive.

The five rivers were a fact for several thousand years and an administrative category for a few hundred. They stopped being either in 1960. What survives is the name — carried by two provinces in two countries and by a diaspora scattered across several more — for a plain that is still, whatever the treaty says, thought of as one place with five rivers running through it.