Sarasvatī as the embodiment of the Sarasvatī River is significant in both a historical and a theological sense. The religion of the Vedic Āryans was primarily a portable religion. It centered around a fire cult that did not require permanent temples or places of worship. The domestic hearth itself was a center of worship. By and large Vedic religion was appropriate for a nomadic people or for a people who only recently had ceased to be nomadic. In fact, the Āryans of the Vedas migrated into Northwest India sometime during the second millennium B.C.E. and gradually spread throughout the subcontinent in the course of many generations. The reverence given to Sarasvatī as the embodiment of a river in Northwest India is important because it indicates that the Āryans had begun to identify their culture with a specific geographical location and were beginning to settle down to a non-nomadic way of life.
The transition from a nomadic to an agricultural, village culture is central in the transition from the religion of the Vedic Āryans to classical Hinduism. In classical Hinduism India herself is affirmed to be the center of the world, the navel of the earth, the special and sacred location of the divine. This is dramatically specified in the sacrality of many individual features of the Indian subcontinent, especially the sacredness of the major rivers of the land.2 The goddess Sarasvatī, then, represents a very early example of this tendency in the Hindu tradition toward affirming the land itself as holy. The river goddess Sarasvatī of the Vedas is a prototype of such important later river goddesses as Gaṅgā and Jumnā.
The river goddess Sarasvatī is also important in a theological or religious sense in that she suggests the sacrality inherent in rivers or water in general. While the symbolism of water is rich and complex in the religions of the world,3 two typical associations are important in Vedic descriptions of Sarasvatī. First, she is said to bestow bounty, fertility, and riches. Her waters enrich the land so that it can produce. The waters of the river represent life itself in a dry environment, which Northwest India may have already been at the time of the Āryan migrations. Second, Sarasvatī represents purity, as does water, particularly running water. Although this characteristic is rarely mentioned directly vis-à-vis Sarasvatī, it is stated frequently in the Vedas that rituals were often performed on the banks of the Sarasvatī, which were held to be especially sacred for ritual purposes. This probably suggests the purifying powers of the river.
Saravatī’s purifying power in the Vedic texts is also suggested in her association with medicine and healing. In the Śatapatha-brāhmana in particular she is called upon to heal sickness and is referred to as a healing medicine.4 In the Ṛg-veda she and the Aśvinas, twin gods often associated with healing, are said to heal the god Indra (10.131). As a divine physician, then, Sarasvatī is petitioned to cleanse the petitioner of disease.
A particularly Indian association with rivers is the imagery of crossing from the world of ignorance or bondage to the far shore, which represents the world of enlightenment or freedom. The religious quest in all three native Indian religions—Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism—is expressed by the metaphor of fording or crossing a wide stream. The river in this metaphor represents the state of transition, the period of rebirth, in which the spiritual sojourner undergoes a crucial metamorphosis. The river represents a great purifying power in which the pilgrim drowns his old self and is born anew, free and enlightened. This imagery is not expressly used in connection with Sarasvatī in the Vedas, but it may have been understood implicitly and may help to explain the association of Sarasvatī with inspiration, speech, and wisdom in her later history.
Although Sarasvatī’s nature and characteristics are overwhelmingly associated with a mighty river, this is no ordinary river. Early Vedic references make it clear that the Sarasvatī River originates in heaven and flows down to the earth.5 This idea, also affirmed in the case of such important later river goddesses as Ganga, is a way of asserting the sacred nature of the rivers in question. The Sarasvatī (and later the Gaṅgā) represents an ever-flowing stream of celestial grace which purifies and fertilizes the earth. The earthly manifestation of Sarasvatī as a river thus represents only a partial disclosure of her being. Physical contact with her earthly manifestation, however, connects one with the awesome, heavenly, transcendent dimension of the goddess and of reality in general.