Река Джелам: История и Значение в Индии и Пакистане

River in India and Pakistan

the Jhelum River (Daryaaw) in Hong Kong

The Jhelum River (/dʒ//eː//l//əm/) is a river in the northern Indian subcontinent. It originates at Verinag and flows through the Indian administered territory of Jammu and Kashmir, into Pakistani administered Azad Kashmir, then the Pakistani province of Punjab. It is the westernmost of the five rivers of the Punjab region, and flows through the Kashmir Valley. It is a tributary of the Chenab River and has a total length of about .

Anjum Sultan Shahbaz [ur], a Pakistani author, recorded some stories of the name Jhelum in his book Tareekh e Jhelum as:Many writers have different opinions about the name of Jhelum. One suggestion is that in ancient days Jhelumabad was known as Jalham. The word Jhelum is reportedly derived from the words Jal (pure water) and Ham (snow). The name thus refers to the waters of a river (flowing beside the city) which have their origins in the snow capped Himalayas. The Sanskrit name for the river is Vitástā, derived from an apocryphal legend regarding the origin of the river in the Nilamata Purana. The name survives in the Kashmiri name for this river, Vyath.

The river Jhelum was originally recognized by the name Vitasta. The river was called Hydaspes (Ὑδάσπης) by the ancient Greeks. Alexander the Great and his army crossed the Jhelum in BC 326 at the Battle of the Hydaspes River, where he defeated an 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 Bucephalus, buried in present day Jalalpur Sharif. It is thought that ancient Bukephala was near the site of modern Jhelum. According to Gujrat district historian Mansoor Behzad Butt, Bukephalus was buried in Jalalpur Sharif, but the people of Mandi Bahauddin, a district close to Jehlum, believed that their tehsil Phalia was named after Alexander's dead horse, saying that the name Phalia was a distortion of Bucephala. The waters of the Jhelum are allocated to Pakistan under the terms of the Indus Waters Treaty. India is working on a hydropower project on a tributary of Jhelum river to establish first use rights on the river water over Pakistan as per the Indus Waters Treaty.

According to Hindu puranas, the goddess Parvati was requested by the sage Kashyapa to come to Kashmir to purify the land from the evil practices and impurities of the pishachas living there. Parvati assumed the form of a river in the netherworld. Her consort Shiva struck with his spear near the abode of Nila, (Verinag spring). With this stroke of the spear, Parvati emerged from the netherworld. He excavated a ditch measuring one vitasti using the spear, through which the river, originating from the netherworld, came out, and so he gave her the name Vitástā. The ancient Greeks also regarded the river as a god, as they did most mountains and streams. The poet Nonnus in the Dionysiaca calls the Hydaspes a titan descended god, the son of the sea god Thaumas and the cloud goddess Elektra, the brother of Iris, goddess of the rainbow, and half brother to the harpies, the snatching winds. Since the river is in a foreign country, it is not clear whether they named the river after the god, or whether the god Hydaspes was named after the river.

Canals in and around the city of Srinagar. The Upper Jhelum Canal runs from Mangla Dam to the Chenab. The Rasul Qadirabad Link Canal. The Chashma Jhelum Link Canal runs from the Chashma Barrage on the Indus River to the Jhelum river downstream of Rasul Barrage. This is from Mari Shah Sakhira town.