Who Saraswati is
Saraswati is the only goddess of today's schoolrooms and music halls who can be found, under the same name, in the oldest book of India. But the Rigveda does not show her holding a veena. In the Rigveda she is a river.
Three whole hymns are hers, and she is named in many other verses. The poets who made them lived on her banks. They describe her as a flood that comes down from the mountains with a roar and breaks the ridges of the hills with her waves. She runs like a chariot and leaves every other water behind. One poet calls her a fort of iron. She has seven sisters, and they call her the dearest of them. In one list of rivers she stands between the Yamuna and the Sutlej.
To the people beside her she is a mother. She gives sons to the childless and fame to families who have none. Her friends are the Maruts, the storm gods. She comes to the sacrifice with the spirits of the ancestors and sits down on the sacred grass. With the goddesses Ila and Bharati she forms a trio that the old offering hymns call upon together.
Two things the poets say of her point forward to what she became. The first is that she wakes good thoughts. An early hymn calls her the one who inspires every pleasant song and lights up every prayer. The second is that she heals. When Indra lost his strength, the twin Ashvins stood by him, and Saraswati restored him.
The hymns also name a male river god beside her, Sarasvat, to whom people prayed for wives and children.
Scholars do not agree about which river the poets meant. Some have pointed to a riverbed that now dries up in the sands of the north-western plains, and others to the Indus or to a river in Afghanistan with a related name. The hymns do not say.
Best of mothers, best of rivers, best of goddesses, Saraswati: we are people of no name. Mother, give us a name.