Jhelum Riverਜਿਹਲਮ ਦਰਿਆ

The Jhelum is the westernmost of the five rivers of Punjab, and in many ways the most storied. About 725 km long, it drains the whole Kashmir valley, runs through the Pir Panjal gorges into the plains at the city that shares its name, and ends by joining the Chenab at Trimmu. Alexander fought his hardest Indian battle on its banks, the valley of Kashmir floats its houseboats on it, and one of the largest earth-fill dams in the world, Mangla, holds back its water at the edge of Punjab.

From Verinag through the Kashmir valley

The Jhelum begins at Verinag, a deep blue spring at the foot of the Pir Panjal in the south of the Kashmir valley, a place long treated as sacred and landscaped with a Mughal garden. From Verinag the river winds slowly north across the valley floor through Anantnag and Srinagar, where its bridges, houseboats and the Dal Lake outfall define the city's relationship with water. Leaving Srinagar it spreads into Wular Lake, one of Asia's largest freshwater lakes, which acts as a natural regulator of its flow, then turns southwest towards Baramulla.

At Baramulla the river enters its gorge, cutting through the Pir Panjal range in a steep, forested defile towards Muzaffarabad, where it is joined by the Neelum (the Kishanganga of Indian maps) and the Kunhar. Below Muzaffarabad the Jhelum forms for a long stretch the boundary line of the divided Kashmir region, then bends south, gathers the Poonch river, and fills the reservoir of Mangla Dam near Mirpur. It enters the Punjab plain in Jhelum district, and from there flows southeast as the boundary between the Jech Doab to its east and the Sindh Sagar Doab to its west, passing Khushab's countryside and the Rasul Barrage, until at Trimmu in Jhang district it pours into the Chenab.

Where did Alexander fight on the Jhelum?

In 326 BC, on the eastern bank of the Jhelum in what is now Punjab, Alexander of Macedon fought the Battle of the Hydaspes, the name Greek historians gave this river, against King Porus, whose kingdom lay between the Jhelum and the Chenab. Crossing the flooded river at night during a storm, Alexander won the hardest fought battle of his Indian campaign, and, impressed by Porus, restored him as an ally. Alexander founded two cities on the field: Nikaia, 'victory', and Bucephala, named for his horse Bucephalus, who died there. The exact battlefield is debated, with sites near modern Jhelum city and Jalalpur Sharif among the candidates, but the battle's fame is fixed: it was Alexander's last great battle, fought on a Punjab river at the edge of the known Greek world.

Vitasta, Vehat, Hydaspes

The river's oldest name is Vitasta, one of the seven rivers of the Rigveda, and the name survives in Kashmiri usage as Vyeth. In Punjabi it has long been called the Vehat. The Greeks softened Vitasta into Hydaspes, the name that carried the river into European history through the Alexander accounts. Its modern name, Jhelum, belongs first to the city on its bank in Punjab, which gave its name in turn to the district; the river took the town's name as it entered the plains, a reversal of the usual order in which rivers name towns.

Mangla and the treaty

Mangla Dam, completed in 1967 near Mirpur, raised one of the largest earth-fill dams in the world across the Jhelum's exit from the hills. Its reservoir stores water for irrigation across Pakistani Punjab and generates around 1,070 MW of power; the dam was heightened in the 2000s to raise its capacity. Mangla was built as one of the replacement works of the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960, under which the Jhelum was allocated as one of the three western rivers to Pakistan, while India, upstream in the Kashmir valley, kept limited rights including run of the river power projects such as Uri on the Jhelum itself.

The Rasul Barrage in the plains diverts Jhelum water into the Lower Jhelum Canal, watering the Jech Doab between the Jhelum and the Chenab, and links into the Rasul-Qadirabad transfer that can move Jhelum water eastwards towards the Chenab system. In flood years the Jhelum, swollen by the Kashmir valley's drainage, is one of the most dangerous rivers of Punjab; the catastrophic Kashmir floods of 2014 were a Jhelum flood. Quiet in its valley reach, immense at Mangla and vital in the plains, the Jhelum is the river that connects Kashmir's story to Punjab's, and its waters finish their journey inside the Chenab on the way to the Panjnad and the Indus.