The Sarayu is a river that originates at a ridge south of Nanda Kot mountain in

Bageshwar district Bageshwar is a district of Uttarakhand state in northern India. The town of Bageshwar is the district headquarters. Prior to its establishment as a district in 1997 it was part of Almora district. Bageshwar district is in Kumaon, and is bound ...

Uttarakhand Uttarakhand ( , or ; , ), also known as Uttaranchal ( ; List of renamed places in India, the official name until 2007), is a States and union territories of India, state in the North India, northern part of India. It is often referred to as t ...

, India. It flows through Kapkot, Bageshwar, and Seraghat towns before discharging into the Sharda River at Pancheshwar at the India—Nepal border. Sharda river (also known as Kali river) then flows into Ghaghara river in Sitapur District,

Uttar Pradesh Uttar Pradesh (; , 'Northern Province') is a state in northern India. With over 200 million inhabitants, it is the most populated state in India as well as the most populous country subdivision in the world. It was established in 1950 ...

, India. Lower Ghaghara is also popularly known as Sarayu in India. Especially while it flows through the city of

Ayodhya Ayodhya (; ) is a city situated on the banks of holy river Saryu in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Ayodhya, also known as Saketa, is an ancient city of India, the birthplace of Rama and setting of the great epic Ramayana. Ayodhy ...

, the birth place of the Hindu deity

Rama Rama (; ), Ram, Raman or Ramar, also known as Ramachandra (; , ), is a major deity in Hinduism. He is the seventh and one of the most popular ''avatars'' of Vishnu. In Rama-centric traditions of Hinduism, he is considered the Supreme Being ...

. The river is mentioned various times in the ancient Indian epic of

Ramayana The ''Rāmāyana'' (; sa, रामायणम्, ) is a Sanskrit epic composed over a period of nearly a millennium, with scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text ranging from the 8th to 4th centuries BCE, and later stages e ...

Course

The Sarayu rises at Sarmul (or Sarmool), which is located in the extreme north of the district Bageshwar of

on the southern slope of a ridge of the Nanda Kot. It flows through the Kumaon

Himalayas The Himalayas, or Himalaya (; ; ), is a mountain range in Asia, separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. The range has some of the planet's highest peaks, including the very highest, Mount Everest. Over ...

, passes by the towns of Kapkot, Bageshwar and Seraghat before flowing into the Sharda River at Pancheshwar.

Etymology

The name is the feminine derivative of the Sanskrit root सर् ''sar'' "to flow"; as a masculine stem, ' means "air, wind", that is, "that which is streaming".

Ramayana

In the epic

, Sri Rama along with the residents of Ayodhya went to vaikunth lok from this river and became deities in

heaven Heaven or the heavens, is a common religious cosmological or transcendent supernatural place where beings such as deities, angels, souls, saints, or venerated ancestors are said to originate, be enthroned, or reside. According to the bel ...

afterwards.

In fiction

Sarayu is also the name of the river that flows by the fictional town of Malgudi created by the Indian writer R. K. Narayan. Sarayu is the name given to the personification of the Holy Spirit in " The Shack" created by American Novelist William P. Young.

References

External links