Saraswati

Saraswati begins as water. In the Rigveda she is a river, and the hymns to her are hydrological before they are anything else: she is best of mothers, best of rivers, best of goddesses, she breaks mountain ridges with her force, and she nourishes the people along her banks. Nothing about learning appears yet.

Where that river ran is one of the most contested questions in Indian studies. The hymns place it between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, and it is commonly identified with the dried bed of the Ghaggar-Hakra system in Haryana and Rajasthan. The identification is argued and unresolved, and the reason it is fought over is that a great deal follows from it: the date at which the channel carried water bears on the date of the hymns, and both bear on the long-running dispute over the relationship between the Vedic tradition and the Indus Valley civilisation. The atlas records this as an open question with political stakes and does not resolve it.

The move from river to word is traceable in outline. Vac, speech, is a goddess in her own right in the Rigveda, and a hymn is spoken in her voice. Saraswati and Vac converge, and by the Brahmanas the river goddess has become the goddess of speech, and thereafter of learning, music, poetry and all the arts. What survives of the river is the flow: the tradition reads inspiration and articulate speech as things that move and cannot be dammed.

Her classical form carries no weapon, which is uncommon. She is white, seated on a white lotus or a swan, holding a vina, a manuscript and a rosary, and one hand is often free. The swan is said to be able to separate milk from water, and stands for discrimination.

Saraswati travels further than any other Hindu deity except possibly Ganesha, and she is received in traditions that reject almost everything else about the pantheon she came from.

Jains honour her as the goddess of scriptural knowledge, and she appears in Jain manuscript illumination and temple sculpture. Buddhists take her up as Sarasvati and, in the Sutra of Golden Light, as a protector of those who preach the teaching, which is how she reaches China and then Japan.

In Japan she becomes Benzaiten, and the transmission changes her substantially. She keeps the water and she keeps the lute, which becomes the biwa. She acquires a sword and a wish-fulfilling jewel, an association with snakes and with dragons, and shrines sited on islands and beside ponds: Enoshima, Chikubushima and Itsukushima are the famous three. She becomes the only woman among the Seven Lucky Gods, and a patron of music, eloquence and, in that company, of money. For most of Japanese history she was served at Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines without anyone needing to decide which she was. The forced separation of the two religions in 1868 required a decision, and many of her shrines reassigned her to the kami Ichikishimahime.

In Southeast Asia she stands on Indonesian ground as a goddess of learning, with a statue outside a school in Bali and another presented to Washington, in a country that is overwhelmingly Muslim and treats her as heritage rather than as worship.

At home she has one day above all. Vasant Panchami, in late winter, is when small children are given their first letters to trace, and when students, musicians and writers place their books and instruments before her image and do not use them for the day. The tools rest because they are hers.