Our Father Who Art Sindhu
Sindhu in might surpasses all the streams that flow. […] Like floods of rain that fall in thunder from the cloud, so Sindhu rushes on bellowing like a bull. Rigveda 10.75
When Aryans first arrived in the Indian subcontinent, they must have been left dumbfounded by the vast expanse of the Indus River. In their awe, they named it Sindhu, a Sanskrit term meaning “sea” or “ocean”.
After the split of Indo-Iranian culture into Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches around 2000 BCE, Sindhu became Hindu in Old Persian and the fertile floodplains it flowed through came to be known as “Hindu Astan”, meaning “Indus land”. Hindu was later adapted into Greek as Indos and subsequently as Indus in Latin.
During the time of the Achaemenids, Darius the Great is said to have commissioned the Greek explorer Scylax, among others, to sail and chart the course of the Indus. According to Herodotus, Scylax set out from a city called Caspatyrus (likely Kashmir or a misspelling of Paskapyrus (Peshawar)) and sailed downstream.
Using the data gathered during this expedition, Darius conquered the region that lay southeast of Gandhara soon afterward, adding it to his empire as a new province called Hinduš (modern-day Sindh). The name of the province was translated by Greek historians as India, but with time, it came to refer to the lands, people, and culture of the region that lay around the Indus and the subcontinent that extended much farther eastward.
This makes Sindhu in a very real sense, the father of India. Its influence goes much further than the subcontinent’s name. Sindhu is the nourishing artery that allowed the first major civilization in the region, the Indus Valley Civilization, to flourish 5000 years ago.
The river’s regular flooding cycles deposited rich silt along its banks, enabling agriculture to support large urban centers like Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. Interestingly, we don’t know for sure what name the ancient Indus Valley people had for Sindhu or their civilization.
One of the earliest foreign historical records of India comes from a royal inscription on a statue from ancient Sumer, which reads:
“Ships from Meluhha, Magan and Dilmun he moored at the docks of Akkad.”
The inscription dates to the 24th century BCE and is attributed to Sargon of Akkad, the progenitor of the Akkadian Empire and the earliest known emperor in recorded history.
The land of Meluhha or Melukhkha, hinted in the inscription as a trading partner of ancient Mesopotamia, is widely identified as the Indus Valley Civilization by modern scholars. The inscription itself seems to be a boast by Sargon that he’s the ruler of a land that trades with Meluhha.
This was indeed around the same time when the Indus Valley Civilization was flourishing in the nurturing embrace of Sindhu. By this time, it had developed sophisticated urban planning and architecture, a standardized system of weights and measures and a complex writing system - feats considered well ahead of their time.
By 1700 BCE, the Indus Valley Civilization had declined and most of its cities had been abandoned, possibly due to an abrupt century-long global drought that disrupted and caused the collapse of many other contemporary civilizations. Archaeological evidence indicates that the decline of IVC drove people eastward towards the Ganges basin.
The same global climatic anomaly may have also been responsible for driving Indo-Aryan peoples towards South Asia. Fueled by their migrations into the northwestern regions of India that brought an influx of new ideas, beliefs and practices, the IVC transformed into what we now know of as Vedic culture.
Civilizations have risen and fallen, cities have emerged and vanished, kings have ascended and been deposed. Even the gods have fallen in and out of favour. Yet, through it all, our father Sindhu has persistently flowed as the only constant.