Chenab Riverਚਨਾਬ ਦਰਿਆ

The Chenab is the big river of the western Punjab plains, 974 km of snow-fed water that gathers the Jhelum and the Ravi into itself before joining the Sutlej to form the Panjnad. Two of the five rivers that name Punjab end their independent lives inside the Chenab, which makes it, in a sense, the collector of Punjab's waters. Most of its Punjab course today lies in Pakistan, through the districts of the Rachna and Jech doabs, but it is born in the Indian Himalaya and passes the towns of the Jammu hills before it reaches the plain.

Two rivers become one at Tandi

The Chenab begins as two separate rivers. The Chandra flows from the glaciers near the Bara-lacha La pass, and the Bhaga comes down from Suraj Tal lake on the other side of the same high country in Lahaul, Himachal Pradesh. At the village of Tandi the two meet, and from that confluence the combined river takes the name Chenab, a Persianised form of Chandrabhaga, 'the river of Chandra and Bhaga'. In the Rigveda it was the Asikni, the dark one, and Greek writers called it the Acesines.

From Tandi the young Chenab runs northwest through the Lahaul and Pangi valleys, then turns south into the Jammu region, cutting gorges through the hills past Kishtwar, Doda, Ramban and Reasi. At Akhnoor, near Jammu city, it leaves the hills and enters the plain. From there it crosses into Pakistan's Punjab near Sialkot and begins its long, slow journey across the doabs, a wide, braided, flood prone river very different from the mountain torrent at Tandi.

Across the doabs of West Punjab

In the plains the Chenab is the working river of West Punjab. The Marala Headworks near Sialkot, and downstream the Khanki and Qadirabad headworks, divert its water into the canal network that made the Rachna Doab, the land between the Chenab and the Ravi, into one of the great canal colonies of the British period and a heartland of Pakistani Punjab farming. The river flows past Gujranwala's countryside, through Jhang district's floodplain, where its annual inundation shaped the folk culture of the bar, and on towards Multan.

At Trimmu, near Jhang, the Jhelum joins the Chenab from the north. Further downstream the Ravi also flows into it, so that by the time the Chenab approaches its end it carries the waters of three of Punjab's five rivers in one channel. Near Uch Sharif, in Bahawalpur district, the Chenab meets the Sutlej, and the combined stream is called the Panjnad, the five rivers in one, which flows on to join the Indus at Mithankot.

What is the Panjnad?

The Panjnad, literally 'five waters', is the short final reach formed when the Chenab, carrying the Jhelum, Ravi and Beas with it, unites with the Sutlej near Uch in Pakistan. It is the point where the five rivers of Punjab stop being separate rivers at all. The Panjnad barrage and headworks near Uch feed canals in the Bahawalpur region before the river completes the roughly 70 km run to the Indus. For a Punjabi reader the name carries the whole meaning of Punjab itself: panj, five; ab, water.

The treaty river

Under the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, the Chenab was one of the three 'western rivers' whose waters were allocated mainly to Pakistan, along with the Indus and the Jhelum. India, the upper riparian, retains limited rights, chiefly to build run of the river hydroelectric projects that do not store or divert the flow. On the Jammu reach of the Chenab India has built the Salal (690 MW), Baglihar (900 MW) and Dul Hasti (390 MW) power projects, and several more are under construction or planned. The design of these dams has repeatedly been discussed between the two countries under the treaty's machinery, because on the Chenab every structure touches the water security of millions of farmers downstream in Punjab.

A river of folk memory

The Chenab lives deep in Punjabi folk culture. The bar country along its banks, the wild floodplain scrub between the rivers, is the setting of the Heer Ranjha story's world, and the river's floods, ferries and shifting channels run through the region's songs and proverbs. Today it is crossed by modern bridges and regulated by its headworks, but in the monsoon the Chenab still spreads across its floodplain in a way that reminds everyone why the old settlements kept to the high banks. Of the five rivers, it is the one that gathers the others, and its meeting with the Sutlej at the Panjnad is the true end of Punjab's five rivers as separate streams.