Place · sacred river · Pakistan
Sindhu / Indus
Also known as Indus, Sindhu, Sindh, Abasin
The river that named India, and the one of the seven whose course now lies almost wholly outside it. Rigvedic Sapta Sindhu country; the Harappan cities stood on it and on the Ghaggar-Hakra beside it. It rises near Kailash, runs the length of Ladakh, and reaches the sea below Thatta.
- Periods
- Indus Valley Urbanisation, Vedic Age, Second Urbanisation, Classical and Puranic Age, Regional Flourishing, Islamic Age and Bhakti Traditions, Early Modern Age, British Colonial Age, Republic and Living Practice
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 29.300, 70.900 (approximate)
Connections (7)
- Shared sacred geographyOdero Lal
Jhulelal is the Indus itself, addressed as a person. The Sindhi story has the river god appear to save the community from a persecuting ruler of Thatta, and his worship is river worship — water from the Indus, a lamp floated on it, and the identification with Varuna, the Vedic lord of waters. Cheti Chand, the Sindhi new year, is his appearance day and is kept at Odero Lal. For a people whose whole cultivable world was one channel's flood, the river's god was the chief god.
- River flowNanga Parbat
The Indus turns the corner of the Himalaya around the base of Nanga Parbat, and the two are a single geological fact. The river runs at about twelve hundred metres within twenty-five kilometres of an 8,126-metre summit, which is among the steepest relief on earth, and the massif is being exhumed so fast that the river is barely keeping pace with the uplift — one of the clearest cases anywhere of a river cutting into rock that is rising to meet it. The gorge this produces is what the Karakoram Highway had to be blasted through.
- Shared sacred geographySadh Belo, Sukkur
The monastery is the river's. Bābā Bankhandi chose an island in the Indus at Sukkur in 1823 and the complex covers the whole rock, so the approach is by boat and the shrine is surrounded by the water it is dedicated among — a siting that belongs to the same Sindhi religious sense of the Indus as a person that produces Jhulelal at Odero Lal. Upstream and downstream, the other islands at Sukkur carry related establishments, and the barrage built in 1932 changed the channel around all of them.
- River adjacencyMohenjo-daro
Mohenjo-daro stands on the Indus in Sindh, the largest and most completely planned of the Harappan cities, with baked-brick streets, drains beneath them and the Great Bath on its citadel. It is far downriver of anything the Rigveda describes in detail, which is part of the argument about the two: the hymns are an upstream, north-western document, and the greatest city of the river lies outside their horizon.
- River flowAsiknī / Chenab
The Chenab, carrying the Jhelum and the Ravi with it, meets the Sutlej at Panjnad — the five waters — and the combined river joins the Indus at Mithankot. Everything the Punjab collects arrives in the Indus at that one point, which is why the province is named for five rivers and the country for the one they end in.
- River flowŚutudrī / Sutlej
The Sutlej brings the Beas down to Panjnad and there joins the Chenab; below Mithankot the Indus carries all of it to Sindh. The Sutlej is the longest of the five and the one whose course has moved most, and the argument that it once ran east into the Ghaggar–Hakra rather than west into the Indus is one of the standing explanations for how the Sarasvatī failed.
- River adjacencySindhu Darshan, Leh
The Sindhu Darshan festival is the principal living pilgrimage marking the Indus within India. Inaugurated in 1997 at Shey Manla near Leh, it draws pilgrims for a formal darshan of the river that gives the subcontinent its name, on the Ladakh reach that is the only stretch of the Indus still inside modern India — the rest of the river runs through Pakistan.
On these journeys
Sources
Added so the drawn Indus course has an entry of its own, as the other six sacred rivers do
Open Sindhu / Indus in the repository →