Indian rivers and seas, found on the map

North India7 on the map

Chambal

The Chambal is one of the cleanest large rivers in India, largely because the ravines it has cut through soft soil made its valley hard to farm and easy to hide in; they were bandit country well into the twentieth century. That same emptiness makes it the best remaining home of the gharial, the narrow-snouted fish-eating crocodile, and it is protected for that.

Ganges

The Ganges runs about 2,500 kilometers from the Gangotri glacier in Uttarakhand to the Bay of Bengal, and its basin feeds several hundred million people, more than any other river basin on earth. It joins the Brahmaputra in Bangladesh, and the two build the largest delta in the world. It is worshipped as the goddess Ganga, and bathing in it is an act of purification.

Yamuna

The Yamuna is the longest tributary of the Ganges, about 1,375 kilometers, and Delhi, Mathura and Agra all stand on it; the Taj Mahal is built on its bank. It meets the Ganges at Prayagraj, and that confluence, the Triveni Sangam, is where the Kumbh Mela draws tens of millions of pilgrims.

Also on the mapBeas · Ghaghara · Ravi · Sutlej

East and Northeast India5 on the map

Barak

The Barak is the second river system of the northeast after the Brahmaputra, about 900 kilometers of it and some 560 in India. It rises in the Manipur hills, swings around the end of the ranges there and runs west past Silchar through the Barak valley, the part of Assam that speaks Bengali rather than Assamese. At the border it splits into the Surma and the Kushiyara, which meet again in Bangladesh as the Meghna and carry the Ganges and the Brahmaputra out to sea with them.

Bay of Bengal

The Bay of Bengal is the largest bay in the world, around 2.2 million square kilometers, and nearly every great river of the east coast empties into it, the Ganges and the Brahmaputra at its head, then the Mahanadi, the Godavari, the Krishna and the Cauvery down the coast. All that fresh water and silt makes its surface unusually light and warm, which is part of why the cyclones that form here are among the deadliest storms on earth.

Brahmaputra

The Brahmaputra rises in Tibet as the Yarlung Tsangpo, runs east for well over a thousand kilometers behind the Himalaya, then turns south around the end of the range and enters India through Arunachal Pradesh. Across Assam it braids into channels several kilometers wide, and it is one of the few rivers in the world with a masculine name in the local tradition.

Mahanadi

The Mahanadi runs about 850 kilometers through Chhattisgarh and Odisha and used to flood so badly that the Hirakud dam was built across it after independence, finished in 1957; at some 25 kilometers it is among the longest earthen dams in the world. Its delta is where Odisha grows most of its rice, and Cuttack has stood at the head of it for a thousand years.

Son

The Son is the largest of the Ganges tributaries that come up from the south rather than down from the Himalaya, about 780 kilometers of it, and it rises on the same plateau in Madhya Pradesh as the Narmada, which then runs the opposite way. Its wide sandy bed and its seasonal floods are why the rail bridge at Dehri, opened in 1900, was for a long time one of the longest in Asia.

West and Central India5 on the map

Arabian Sea

This was the working half of the Indian Ocean trade for two thousand years. The summer monsoon blows a ship from Arabia and East Africa to the Malabar coast, and the winter monsoon blows it home. Rome paid for its pepper across this water, and Vasco da Gama crossed it with a local pilot in 1498. The Narmada and the Tapi reach it from the east, and Mumbai and Kochi are its Indian ports.

Gulf of Kutch

The Gulf of Kutch has some of the strongest tides in India, which is why it has been proposed for tidal power more than once, and its shallow southern shore holds the country’s first marine national park, with coral and mangrove. North of it lies the Rann, a salt flat that floods with the monsoon and dries white for the rest of the year.

Narmada

The Narmada runs about 1,300 kilometers west along a rift valley between the Vindhya and Satpura ranges, and that line has long been taken as the divide between northern and southern India. It is the most sacred of the rivers that do not reach the Ganges, and pilgrims walk the whole length of both its banks. The Sardar Sarovar dam near its mouth was fought over for decades before it was finished.

Tapi

The Tapi runs about 720 kilometers west through a valley between the Satpura range and the plateau, and reaches the Gulf of Khambhat at Surat, which is why Surat was the main Mughal port for Arabia and the first place the English East India Company set up a factory in India, in 1613.

Also on the mapGulf of Khambhat

South India9 on the map

Cauvery

The Cauvery rises at Talakaveri in Coorg and runs about 800 kilometers to a delta in Tamil Nadu that has been irrigated since the Grand Anicut, a dam the Chola kings built across it in the second century, one of the oldest water control structures still in use. How its water is shared between Karnataka and Tamil Nadu has been argued over since the 1890s.

Godavari

The Godavari is the longest river in peninsular India, about 1,465 kilometers, and rises at Trimbakeshwar in the hills behind Nashik, some eighty kilometers from the Arabian Sea, before crossing the whole width of the country the other way. It is called Dakshina Ganga, the Ganges of the south, and its delta in Andhra Pradesh is some of the most productive rice country in India.

Indian Ocean

The Indian Ocean is the third largest and the warmest of the oceans, and the only one named after a country. It is also the only one whose winds reverse. The monsoon blows from the southwest in summer and the northeast in winter, and that single fact set the sailing seasons, the trade routes and the harvest calendar of every coast around it.

Krishna

The Krishna rises at Mahabaleshwar in the Western Ghats, a few dozen kilometers from the Arabian Sea, and runs about 1,400 kilometers east instead, which is what the tilt of the Deccan plateau does to almost every river on it. Vijayawada stands where it leaves the hills, and its water is fought over by four states.

Palk Strait

The strait is between about forty and eighty kilometers across and shallow enough that no large ship can cross it. A chain of sandbanks and islets called Adam’s Bridge or Rama’s Bridge runs most of the way over, and the Ramayana tells of an army crossing there. Plans to dredge a shipping channel through it have been argued over since 1860 and none has been built.

Tungabhadra

The Tungabhadra is formed where the Tunga and the Bhadra meet in Karnataka and runs about 530 kilometers to the Krishna. Hampi stands on its bank among granite boulders, and the Vijayanagara kings who built it drew their water from a network of channels off this river, some of which are still in use.

Also on the mapAndaman Sea · Gulf of Mannar · Laccadive Sea