Indus River

The Indus gives its name to India, to Hinduism and to the Sindhi people, by a chain of borrowings: the Sanskrit Sindhu became the Persian Hindu, which the Greeks rendered as Indos, and each of those forms then became the name for a country, a people or a faith. The word Hindu therefore began as a geographical term for people living beyond a river, and only much later became the name of a religion.

The Rigveda names the river and its tributaries repeatedly, and the hymn addressed to the rivers praises the Sindhu as loudest and swiftest among them, running ahead of the others like a bull. That hymn is one of the clearest pieces of internal evidence for where the Vedic hymns were composed, since the rivers it lists run from the northwest in a sequence that can be followed on a map.

Long before those hymns, the same plain carried the Harappan cities. Mohenjo-daro stood on the Indus itself, and the civilisation's dependence on the river's flood cycle is generally accepted as central to both its rise and its decline, although the mechanism of the decline is argued.

Downstream, in Sindh, the river's saint is Jhulelal, revered by Hindu Sindhis as an incarnation associated with the water and honoured at shrines that Muslims have also frequented, which is a common pattern along the lower river.

The Indus system's eastern tributaries define Punjab, the land of five rivers, and therefore the homeland of Sikhism, so the river basin carries the geography of a religion founded on its plain.

Partition in 1947 cut the irrigation network in half, leaving headworks in India and the canals they fed in Pakistan, and the dispute that followed took more than a decade to settle. The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 allocated the three eastern rivers to India and the three western rivers, including the Indus itself, to Pakistan, and it has survived several wars. It is regularly cited as one of the more durable water agreements anywhere, and it has been threatened publicly during recent crises.

The river also carries sacred sites that partition separated from their communities. The shrine of Katas Raj in the Pakistani Punjab, with a pool that Hindu tradition holds was formed from the tears of Shiva, receives Indian pilgrims under visa arrangements agreed between the two states. The Sikh sites of Nankana Sahib and Kartarpur are in the same basin.

The water itself is now heavily depleted. Abstraction for irrigation means that in many years very little of the Indus reaches the sea, and the delta has retreated with consequences for the fishing communities living in it. A river named in the oldest surviving Indian religious poetry as the loudest of the rivers now runs dry at its mouth.