When the Ravi surged through Lahore in August 2025 after years of near-silence, it did more than flood plains and submerge roads; it reopened a chapter of the city’s soul long thought closed. For people who had grown up with the river as playground, lifeline, and legend, its sudden return was less catastrophe than reunion, a reminder that Lahore’s history is inseparable from the waters that once defined it.
Rooted in myths, epics and legends
From its earliest myths, Lahore has been inseparable from the Ravi. The river doesn’t just flow past the city — it flows through its memory and identity.
Foundational folklore locates the city’s origins in Lava or Loh, son of Rama and Sita, casting the river as both guardian and witness, flowing by the fort’s walls. In fact, Ravi’s banks were the stage for one of the earliest remembered battles: the Dasarajna, or Battle of Ten Kings.
In an archival compilation on Lahore’s antiquities, the Deshwa Bhaga — a traditional account naming Lahore as Lavpor or ‘City of Lava’ — reportedly speaks of a duel between the Raja of Lahore [ruler of the ancient Hindu principality of Lahore before its conquest] and the Pandava Bhim [a central heroic figure in the ancient Indian epic Mahabharata] at a forest by the Ravi’s edge. Punjabi ballads, too, place Lahore’s jungles, then called Udinagar, as the site where folk-hero Raja Rasalu slew a man-eating rakshas, casting the Ravi as a theatre of defiance and courage.
Together, these texts and oral traditions present Lahore not as a city beside a river but as a city forged through it: a civic identity built on epic landscapes of struggle and survival.
According to an article in Dawn, the Ravi, known in the Vedas [a body of religious scriptures originating in India] as Iravati, was part of Saptasindu, the land of seven rivers that defined the earliest cultural imagination of Punjab. The same piece recalls how the Battle of the Ten Kings, one of the most celebrated episodes of the Rig Veda (an ancient Sanskrit collection of hymns), was fought “on the banks of the River Ravi surrounding Lahore.” In that clash, King Bharata’s tribe defeated a powerful confederation of rulers.
Thus, from the very outset of South Asia’s mythic consciousness, Lahore and the Ravi are intertwined: the city emerges not just as a settlement on water but as a battlefield, a site of identity forged through conflict and survival.
This cultural symbolism extended into Lahore’s religious imagination. The 16th-century mystic Shah Hussain, better known as Madho Lal Hussain, was first buried on the Ravi’s bank. When the river flooded, his grave was swept to higher ground near Shalimar, far from the current river course, an act his devotees interpreted as the Ravi’s own homage, carrying its lover to safety. Lahore’s famous Mela Chiraghan (‘Festival of Lights’) grew up around this shrine, once involving lamps floated on the Ravi’s waters in his memory. Through this story, the Ravi itself becomes a character in Lahore’s Sufi history — a vehicle of divine will and protector of saints.
In Sikh tradition, Ravi and Lahore are immortalised as a site of martyrdom and faith. It was along the fort’s Ravi-wall in 1606 that the 5th Sikh Guru, Arjan Dev, met his end. Sikh scriptures recount that after days of torture in Lahore, Guru Arjan was permitted to bathe in the Ravi, which then flowed just outside the city walls. According to legend, Guru Arjan’s soul merged with the Ravi’s waters — a serene acceptance of God’s will.
This poignant event is commemorated at Gurdwara Dera Sahib in Lahore (on the old Ravi bank), and the river itself is revered as a witness to the Guru’s sacrifice.
These are not idle fictions, rather collective myths: narratives through which communities stabilise identity and transmit values across generations. For Lahoris, the Ravi functioned as a symbolic reservoir, embodying both beauty and defiance, and each retelling on the bridges or in the gardens reinforced their social frameworks of memory. In this way, folklore was less about individual imagination and more about a shared cultural memory that allowed the city to see itself reflected in the river, century after century.
That inheritance began to fade as the river itself receded. By the late 20th century, upstream diversions and unchecked pollution left the Ravi a blackened trickle. Experts noted a 36pc decline in annual flow and more than 40pc in summer months, transforming what was once a gold-bearing artery of Punjab into an open sewer.
For Lahoris, the sight of a dry bed beneath the bridges was more than ecological loss; it was cultural bereavement. A city once defined by its river was left with nothing but dust and memory.
The reunion of August 2025
This August, unprecedented monsoon rains and dam releases forced the Ravi back into Lahore. Alongside the Sutlej and Chenab, it produced one of the largest floods in Punjab’s history, displacing over two million people. Yet amid danger, Lahoris flocked to the bridges not in fear but in awe. Families gathered to watch the river swell, stretched their hands towards the water, and the two long-lost lovers had met again.
So what does it mean when a community celebrates the very flood that endangers it? The answer lies not in irrationality but in collective memory.
In Lahore, the Ravi has long functioned as what sociologist Maurice Halbwachs might call a “social framework of memory” — a living symbol through which people situate themselves in history and culture. The river is not merely water; it is a repository of myth, identity, and continuity. Its disappearance hollowed out not only Lahore’s landscape but also its cultural self-understanding. Its sudden return, how ever destructive, activated what French historian Pierre Nora describes as a lieu de mémoire: a site where memory condenses, reviving an ancient rhythm in the civic imagination.
Yet nostalgia must be distinguished from material conditions. The flood did not simply return romance to the city; it also exposed the structural vulnerabilities of Lahore’s urban planning, the weakness of its embankments, and the absence of a coherent ecological strategy. Schemes like the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development Project as well as the myriad of other real estate projects dotting the riverbanks are framed as progress, but without critical attention to ecology and equity, they risk repeating the very extractive logic that once killed the river.
The paradox
When Lahore expanded toward the Ravi, it wasn’t simply a cartographic shift; it was an urban philosophy that treated a living floodplain as a real estate frontier. For some Lahoris, this August’s flood was a moment of dread as their homes swept away, their lives upended. For others, it was a bittersweet reunion with a river they had long cherished as memory. Yet what returned was not nostalgia alone but the Ravi itself, in its own course, at its own speed, with the force of disaster. And the truth that must be faced is this: it is not only the river that has returned to its place, but human construction that has trespassed into it now stands exposed and precariously at risk.
Entire swathes of land, formerly declared “prone to floods” by the Punjab Irrigation Department are now filled with private housing schemes, many of which have seen considerable damage in the recent floods. Supported by regulators applying rules unevenly and even approving projects inside the flood-influence zone, many of these housing schemes are located in the Ravi Riverfront Urban Development Project. The irony here is that the “river training works” and construction of flood protection embankments, which were supposed to be carried out by the Ravi Urban Development Authority (Ruda), lagged far behind in approvals.
Moreover, the Human Rights Watch too reported that the scheme spans over 100,000 acres, with around 85pc of the land under cultivation before its acquisition. At the time, the HRW documented how farmers were pressured off their land even as environmental groups warned of the risks posed by the channelisation and paving of the floodplain.
Together, these findings expose how Lahore’s expansion into the Ravi was less development than denial; a refusal to respect the ecological logic of the river, and a gamble that was always going to end up in catastrophe.
Today, the river’s return denotes the paradox of affective attachment in contexts of risk: people are drawn to it because it anchors identity, even as it threatens material survival. Lahoris are interpreting the river both as symbol of who they are and as hazard to what they have built.
Header graphic: A representative scene of the Ravi river in Lahore created using generative AI
