Saraswatiਸਰਸਵਤੀ

Saraswati is the goddess every student in India knows: the calm, white-clad figure with a veena whose image hangs in classrooms, music schools and libraries, and before whom examination candidates fold their hands. Where other gods govern wealth, war or the weather, Saraswati governs the life of the mind: knowledge, memory, speech, poetry and music. In a household that owns little else, her picture may still be pasted inside the cover of a child's schoolbook.

Who is Saraswati?

Saraswati began, in the Rig Veda, as a river: the mighty Saraswati river, praised in hymns as a mother and a purifier, on whose banks the earliest Hindu scriptures were composed. As the river faded from the land, the goddess merged with Vac, speech itself, and became the patron of learning and the mother of the Vedas. With Lakshmi and Parvati she forms the Tridevi, the three great goddesses. Tradition makes her the consort of Brahma the creator, whose creation, the texts say, found its order and harmony through her wisdom. Beyond Hinduism she travelled far: Jain tradition honours her as the bearer of the teachers' message, and Buddhism carried her to China and Japan, where she is Benzaiten, goddess of music and eloquence.

How is Saraswati shown?

Her image teaches her meaning. She wears white, the colour of pure knowledge unsullied by ignorance, and sits on a white lotus or beside a river. In her four hands she holds a veena, whose music is the harmony of the arts; a book, the Vedas, for sacred learning; prayer beads, for meditation and the power of mantra; and a pot of water, for purity and creation. Her swan is said to be able to separate milk from water, the symbol of telling truth from falsehood; her peacock stands for the brightness of the arts and the folly of vanity, held in check beside her.

Vasant Panchami, her festival

Saraswati's great day is Vasant Panchami, the fifth day of the bright half of Magha, falling in late January or February, when spring is welcomed and she is said to have been born. Schools hold her puja before the day's lessons; students place their books, pens and instruments at her feet and traditionally do not study from them that day, acknowledging that knowledge is her gift. Small children are taught to write their first letters in ceremonies called Vidyarambham or Akshar Abhyasam. Worshippers wear yellow, the colour of mustard flowers and of learning, and in many regions the day is kept as her birthday with processions and feasts. She is also honoured on the last days of Navratri, and in the south at Dussehra, when tools and instruments receive her blessing.

Temples and worship

Great temples to Saraswati are fewer than her household shrines, but they are famous: the Sharada Peetham at Sringeri in Karnataka, founded in the tradition of the philosopher Shankara, where she is worshipped as Sharada; the Gnana Saraswati temple at Basar on the Godavari, where children begin their letters; and Koothanur in Tamil Nadu, where she is the presiding goddess. In the Punjab context, her sister goddesses' shrines fill the mandirs of India guide, and her own festival is woven through the region's schools.

Saraswati in Punjab

The goddess and her lost river

The river Saraswati of the hymns haunts her story. The Rig Veda praises her as the greatest of rivers, flowing pure from the mountains to the sea, and later texts place whole kingdoms on her banks. Many scholars today identify her with the Ghaggar-Hakra, a river system that once ran through the plains of what is now Haryana and the Punjab border country before weakening as the climate dried. The identification is debated, and the goddess long ago outgrew any one river; but in the Punjab region the link is felt personally, and her spring festival is celebrated here with a fervour that suggests the land remembers her.

Her patronage of learning is built into India's institutions. Schools across the country bear her name, the Saraswati Vidya Mandir network alone runs thousands of them, and her veena-playing image presides over libraries, music academies and examination halls. India's Saraswati Samman, founded in 1991, is among the country's highest literary honours, awarded each year for an outstanding work of prose or poetry in any of the scheduled Indian languages. In each case the meaning is the same: whatever India learns, it learns in her presence.

Vasant Panchami, Saraswati's day, is one of Punjab's most joyful festivals, famous as Basant: the sky fills with kites, above all in Lahore, whose Basant celebrations became legendary, and in Amritsar and other cities, and everyone wears yellow. Saraswati Puja is kept in schools and colleges across the region, and Punjabi musicians, whose classical and Sufi traditions rest on lifelong learning, honour her as the source of their art. In the diaspora, Punjabi students carry her image into universities from Toronto to Sydney.