Jhelum River

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Jhelum River photographed during the summer periods

Jehlum River or Jhelum River (Punjabi: Shahmukhi: دریاۓ جہلم, Gurmukhi: ਜੇਹਲਮ) is the largest and most western of the five rivers of Punjab, and passes through Jhelum District. It is a tributary of the Indus River.

[edit] History

A photograph from 1900 shows a passenger traversing the river precariously seated in a small suspended cradle.

The river Jhelum was called Vitasta by the ancient Indians in the Vedic period and Hydaspes by the ancient Greeks. The Vitastā (Sanskrit: वितस्ता, fem., also, Vitastastā) is mentioned as one of the major river by the holy scriptures of the Indo-Aryans—the Rigveda. It has been speculated that the Vitasta must have been one of the seven rivers (sapta-sindhu) mentioned so many times in the Rigveda. The name survives the a Kashmiri name for this river as Vyath.

The river was regarded as a god by the ancient Greeks, as were most mountains and streams; the poet Nonnus in the Dionysiaca (section 26, line 350) makes the Hydaspes a titan-descended god, the son of the sea-god Thaumas and the cloud-goddess Elektra. He was the brother of Iris the goddess of the rainbow, and half-brother to the harpies, the snatching winds. Since the river is in a country foreign to the ancient Greeks, it is not clear whether they named the river after the god, or whether the god Hydaspes was named after the river.

Alexander the Great and his army crossed the Jhelum in 326 BC at the Battle of the Hydaspes where he defeated the Indian king, Porus. According to Arrian (Anabasis, 29), he built a city "on the spot whence he started to cross the river Hydaspes", which he named Bukephala (or Bucephala) to honour his famous horse Bukephalis which was buried in Jalalpur Sharif. It is thought that ancient Bukephala was near the site of modern Jhelum City. According to a historian of Gujrat district,Mansoor Behzad Butt, Bukephala was buried in Jalalpur Sharif, but the people of Mandi Bahauddin, a district close to Jehlum, believed that their tehsil Phalia was named after Bucephala, Alexander`s dead horse. They say that the name Phalia was the distortion of the word Bucephala. The waters of the Jhelum are allocated to Pakistan under the terms of the Indus Waters Treaty.

[edit] Course

The river Jhelum rises from north-eastern Jammu and Kashmir and is fed by glaciers, and then passes through the Srinagar district. At the city of Srinagar, the serpentine Jhelum, along with the lake Dal which lies in its course, presents a very picturesque site. The Kishenganga(Neelum)River, the largest tributary of the Jhelum, joins it near Muzaffarabad, as does the next largest, the Kunhar River of the Kaghan valley. It is then joined by the Poonch river, and flows into the Mangla Dam reservoir in the district of Mirpur.

The Jhelum enters the Punjab in the Jhelum District. From there, it flows through the plains of the Punjab, forming the boundary between the Chaj and Sindh Sagar Doabs. It ends in a confluence with the Chenab at Trimmu in District Jhang. The Chenab merges with the Sutlej to form the Panjnad River which joins the Indus River at Mithankot.

[edit] Dams and Barrages

• Mangla Dam, completed in 1967, is one of the largest earthfill dams in the world, with a storage capacity of 5.9 million acre-feet (7.3 km³)
• Rasul Barrage, constructed in 1967, has a maximum flow of 850,000 ft³/s (24,000 m³/s).
• Trimmu Barrage, constructed in 1939 at the confluence with the Chenab, has maximum discharge capacity of 645,000 ft³/s (18,000 m³/s).

[edit] Canals

• The Upper Jhelum Canal runs from Mangla to the Chenab.
• The Rasul-Qadirabad Link Canal runs from the Rasul barrage to the Chenab.
• The Chashma-Jhelum Link Canal runs from the Chashma Barrage on the Indus River to the Jhelum river downstream of Rasul Barrage.

[edit] External links

• Livius.org picture of the Hydaspes
• Apnajhelum a Website of Jhelum
• Jhelum's website for mobile stuff
• Jhelum's Informational Website

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