The Indus River

Sindhu (सिन्धु), “the river,” is the Sanskrit name of the Indus and the headwater of every other name on this page. It is hymned in the Ṛgveda, above all in the Nadīstuti of the tenth book, the praise-song of the rivers, where the Sindhu is invoked as a mighty masculine stream at the head of the waters of the northwest, loud and swift and rich. The word is at once the river’s proper name and, by an early generalization, the ordinary Sanskrit noun for a river, a stream, the flood, or the sea.

Sindhu is the most fertile place-name in this atlas. From it the Persians made Hinduš and the Greeks Indós, and through those the river named a subcontinent, India; a religion, Hindu; and a province, Sindh, which holds the old name unchanged at the river’s mouth. And it did all this while becoming, within its own language, the common word for any river at all, so that a Sanskrit poet could call any stream a sindhu and any sea a sindhu, the proper name of one river dissolved into the name of all of them. No other river on earth has given its name to so much.

Hinduš is the Iranian name of the river, taken from the Sanskrit Sindhu by the regular Old Persian change of initial s to h; the cuneiform writes the skeleton h-i-du-u-š, leaving the nasal before the dental unmarked. The Persians did not distinguish in name between the river and the borderland it watered: the word that appears in the royal inscriptions of Darius and his successors, in the land-lists at Behistun and Naqsh-e Rustam, names their easternmost province, but it is the river’s name worn as a country’s, the frontier called simply after the water that bounded it.

This Iranian form is the hinge of the page. It stands midway in the chain that runs from Sanskrit Sindhu to Latin Indus: the s has become h here, and from this Hinduš the Greeks, dropping the aspirate, made Indós, the river. Every western name for the Indus, and through the river the names of the subcontinent and the religion alike, passes through this single Old Persian word. The river that India called Sindhu the Persians made Hinduš, and it was as Hinduš, the river at the empire’s edge, that it began its long journey westward into the languages of the world.

Greek Indós (Ἰνδός) is the name of the river as the Greeks received it, taken from the Old Persian Hinduš of the province through which it ran, with the initial h dropped and written as the smooth breathing. Herodotus, the earliest witness, reports that Darius sent Scylax of Caryanda to sail down the Indós to its mouth and around to Egypt; a century and a half later the historians of Alexander, Arrian and Nearchus among them, describe the Macedonian army crossing the river in 326 BCE and the fleet sailing it down to the ocean, the act that first brought the Indus into Greek geography in detail.

Indós is the form on which the western name of the river, and through it of the whole subcontinent, depends. The Greeks had it from the Persians, who knew and administered the river’s valley; the dropped aspirate that distinguishes Indós from Hinduš is the same loss that separates “India” from “Hindu.” It is a small irony of the page that the river kept, in Greek and Latin, the very name that the country borrowed from it: Indós the river is the parent of Indía the land, the watercourse naming the world it drained.

Latin Indus is the Greek Indós taken over unchanged, the name of the river at the eastern edge of the world the Romans knew. Pliny makes it the western boundary of India, gathering into his account the rivers and tribes of its basin; the historians of Alexander, Curtius Rufus chief among them in Latin, set on its banks the great crossing of 326 BCE and the campaigns in the Punjab that marked the limit of the Macedonian advance.

Indus is the form the modern world kept. From Latin it passed, unaltered, into the European languages, so that the river is “the Indus” in English exactly as it was to Pliny, three removes now from the Sanskrit Sindhu: a Latin borrowing of a Greek borrowing of a Persian name for an Indian river. The river that named a subcontinent ended, in the West, wearing the subcontinent’s own borrowed spelling, the h long since dropped and the s of Sindhu surviving only at the source and the sea.

Xìndù hé (信度河), “the Sindhu river,” is the name by which the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims knew the Indus, the suffix hé (河), “river,” marking the watercourse and distinguishing it from the country Yìndù (印度). Xuanzang’s seventh-century Da Tang Xiyu Ji describes the great Xìndù river of the northwest, which his party crossed on the road between Gandhāra and Sind, and the pilgrim literature names it as the boundary and the danger of the western journey. The exact transcription is unsettled: Xuanzang’s text is given as both 信度河 and, with the “ford” character, 信渡河, while the earlier traveler Faxian wrote 辛頭河 (Xīntóu hé), and it is for this scatter of characters that the form is marked disputed.

That instability is the ordinary condition of Chinese phonetic transcription, the same variation that gave India itself three successive names, Shēndú, Tiānzhú, and Yìndù. Where those named the country, Xìndù hé names the river the pilgrims actually forded on their way to the holy land of the Buddha. It is the only name on this page written by men who had stood on the Indus bank and watched the water, and even they, hearing the Sanskrit Sindhu with their own ears, could not settle on how to spell it in Chinese.

Mihrān (مهران) is the name by which the Arab geographers knew the Indus, the great river of Sind. al-Bīrūnī, who had crossed into India in the train of Maḥmūd of Ghazna, describes how the rivers of the Punjab join above Aror and run on as a single stream “known to the Muslims as the Mihrān”; al-Iṣṭakhrī, Ibn Ḥawqal, and al-Masʿūdī use the name in the same way, for the lower river through Sind to the sea. Its origin is unsettled: it has been connected to an Indian or Iranian Mihr-name and to a local Sindhi word, and the form is given here with the etymology left open.

Mihrān is the one name on this page that does not descend from Sindhu. Where every other tongue called the river by some worn reflex of its ancient Sanskrit name, the Arabic tradition gave it a name of its own, so that at the very mouth of the river, in the delta the Arabs called al-Sind, the Indus ran under a word unrelated to the one it had carried for three thousand years upstream. The river that lent its name to a subcontinent answered, in its own last miles, to a name it had borrowed from no one.

Nahr al-Sind (نهر السند), “the river of Sind,” is the descriptive Arabic name of the Indus, set beside the proper name Mihrān. It is built on al-Sind, the Arabic name of the lower Indus valley, the river-province that the geographers carefully distinguished from al-Hind, India proper. The province takes its name from the river and the river, in this form, takes its name back from the province, both of them resting in the end on the Sanskrit Sindhu.

Nahr al-Sind is the survival of the original name at the far end of the chain. The Sanskrit Sindhu that the Persians turned to Hinduš and the Greeks to Indós, losing the s and then the h along the way, surfaces here in Arabic almost unchanged, the S-n-d of Sind preserving the consonants of the three-thousand-year-old river-name. Hind and Sind, the whole and the part that the India page tracks across the languages, meet at last on the water itself: the subcontinent named for the river, and the river named for the province named for the river.