Ayodhya is located at the bank of which river ?

Correct — C, (c) Sarayu.

Ayodhya stands on the Sarayu, in the eastern part of Uttar Pradesh. The city is the headquarters of the Ayodhya district and division, and the river runs along its northern edge; the flight of steps known as Ram ki Paidi is on that bank.

The Sarayu of Ayodhya is identified with the Ghaghara, one of the great left-bank tributaries of the Ganga. The river rises in the Himalaya, crosses the plain of eastern Uttar Pradesh and joins the Ganga in Bihar, and along its course the name Sarayu attaches especially to the reach at Ayodhya. That is why an atlas may print Ghaghara where a text prints Sarayu, and both are right.

The association is old and is the reason the question can be asked at all. Ayodhya was known historically as Saketa and took the name Ayodhya during the Gupta period; the early Buddhist and Jain canonical texts record that religious teachers visited and lived in the city, and the Jain tradition makes it the birthplace of five tirthankaras. In the Ramayana and its many versions it is the capital of Kosala and the birthplace of Rama, and in that literature the Sarayu is inseparable from the city.

The item is a straightforward pairing of a place with a river, and the three wrong options are the rivers most often paired with other famous pilgrimage towns. One small printing note: the stem reads ‘at the bank of which river’, where ordinary usage would have ‘on the bank of’. The paper prints it that way and the meaning is unaffected.

Why the others are wrong

• (a)Falgu — The Falgu — more usually written Phalgu — is a river of Bihar, and its association is with Gaya, not with Ayodhya. Gaya stands on its bank, and the river is central to the rites performed there for the ancestors; Bodh Gaya, a short distance away, takes its name from the same district of pilgrimage. The Phalgu is famous for a peculiarity that fixes it in the memory: for much of the year it runs dry at the surface and the water flows beneath the sand. The option is on the list because it is a river a candidate is likely to have met attached to a place of pilgrimage, and pilgrimage towns are exactly what this item is about. Sorting the four rivers by the town each is normally named with is the quickest route through the question.
• (b)Ganga — The Ganga is the obvious guess for anybody who reaches for the most famous river in northern India, and it is wrong for Ayodhya. The Ganga’s own pilgrimage towns are a long list — Haridwar, Prayagraj, Varanasi, Patna — and the Sarayu, under its other name Ghaghara, is one of its tributaries, which is where the confusion has its root: the water of Ayodhya does reach the Ganga, but some way downstream and in Bihar. An item of this kind is testing precisely the difference between a river system and a river. Being in the Ganga basin is not the same as standing on the Ganga, and most of the great towns of the plain stand on tributaries rather than on the main stream.
• (d)Yamuna — The Yamuna is the river of Delhi, Mathura and Agra, and it joins the Ganga at Prayagraj. Its appearance here is a fair distractor because it too carries strong religious associations from the same body of literature — Mathura on its bank is the city of Krishna’s birth, as Ayodhya is of Rama’s — and a candidate who has the two cities filed together under the same heading may transfer the river as well. They are on opposite sides of the plain: the Yamuna runs through the western Doab, while Ayodhya lies far to the east, on a tributary that reaches the Ganga only in Bihar. The lesson is to learn each town with its own river rather than by association with a story or a deity.

Town-and-river pairings are a staple of general-studies papers because they can be asked in either direction and are simple to assess, and the reliable way to prepare them is by river system rather than by town.

On the Ganga itself: Haridwar, Kanpur, Prayagraj, Varanasi, Patna. On the Yamuna: Delhi, Mathura, Agra. On the Sarayu, also called the Ghaghara: Ayodhya. On the Gomti: Lucknow. On the Phalgu: Gaya. On the Sabarmati: Ahmedabad. On the Musi: Hyderabad. On the Mahanadi: Cuttack. On the Hooghly: Kolkata. On the Mula-Mutha: Pune. On the Cooum and Adyar: Chennai.

The Sarayu is worth a note of its own because of its double name. The river that flows past Ayodhya is the Ghaghara, a major left-bank tributary of the Ganga rising in the Himalaya and joining the main stream in Bihar; in the reach at Ayodhya it is known as the Sarayu, and that is the name the epic and the local usage employ. Questions may print either.

Ayodhya itself is worth a paragraph of history: known as Saketa in early texts and renamed during the Gupta period, mentioned in early Buddhist and Jain canonical literature, described in the Jain tradition as the birthplace of five tirthankaras, and in the Ramayana the capital of Kosala.

Key facts

• Ayodhya stands on the bank of the Sarayu, in eastern Uttar Pradesh, and is the headquarters of the Ayodhya district and division.
• The Sarayu at Ayodhya is identified with the Ghaghara, a major left-bank tributary of the Ganga which rises in the Himalaya and joins the main stream in Bihar.
• The city was historically known as Saketa and took the name Ayodhya during the Gupta period.
• Early Buddhist and Jain canonical texts record that religious teachers visited and lived there; the Jain tradition makes it the birthplace of five tirthankaras.
• In the Ramayana and its versions Ayodhya is the capital of Kosala and the birthplace of Rama.
• The Phalgu, offered as a distractor, is the river of Gaya in Bihar, known for flowing beneath the sand for much of the year.

Common traps

• Choosing the Ganga because Ayodhya lies in the Ganga basin. The city stands on a tributary, not on the main stream.
• Transferring a river from one pilgrimage town to another because the two cities are associated in the same literature.
• Not recognising that the Sarayu and the Ghaghara are the same river under two names, and rejecting the option for that reason.
• Assuming the most famous option must be right in a short recall item; all four rivers here are well known.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which city stands on the bank of the Gomti ?

  • (a)Kanpur
  • (b)Lucknow
  • (c)Gorakhpur
  • (d)Varanasi

  Answer(b) Lucknow — the Gomti flows through the city before joining the Ganga in Ghazipur district. Kanpur and Varanasi stand on the Ganga itself, and Gorakhpur is associated with the Rapti.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Sarayu, the river of Ayodhya, is identified with which of the following ?

  • (a)The Gandak
  • (b)The Ghaghara
  • (c)The Ramganga
  • (d)The Son

  Answer(b) The Ghaghara — the same river carries the name Sarayu in its reach at Ayodhya. The Gandak and the Son are separate tributaries of the Ganga, joining it in Bihar, and the Ramganga joins it in western Uttar Pradesh.