A city built in memory met the river that shaped it, and found both beauty and danger in return.
When the Ravi went up to Lahore in August 2025 after years of almost silence, he made more than the flood plains and submerge the roads; He reopened a chapter of the soul of the city for a long time the closed thought. For the people who had grown up with the river as a patio of recreation, line of life and legend, its sudden return was less catastrophe than the meeting, a reminder that the history of Lahore is inseparable from the waters that once defined it.
Rooted in myths, epic and legends
Since his first myths, Lahore has been inseparable from the Ravi. The river not only flows beyond the city, but it flows through its memory and identity.
Fundamental folklore locates the origins of the city in Lava either LohSon of Rama and Sita, throwing the river as guardian and witness, flowing through the walls of the fort. In fact, Ravi banks were the scene of one of the first battles remembered: the Dasarajnaor battle of ten kings.
In a file compilation on Lahore’s antiques, the Defwa Bhaga – A traditional story that names Lahore as Lavor or ‘Lava City’ – according to the reports, talks about a duel between Lahore’s slit [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] On a forest on the shore of the Ravi. Punjabi ballads also place the jungles of Lahore, then they called UdinagarLike the site where the folk hero Raja Rasalu killed a dining room man Rakshasthrowing Ravi as a theater of challenge and courage.
Together, these oral texts and traditions present Lahore not as a city next to a river, but as a city forged through it: a civic identity based on epic landscapes of struggle and survival.
According to an article in SunriseThe Ravi, known in Los Vedas [a body of religious scriptures originating in India] as IravatiIt was part of SaptasinduThe land of seven rivers that defined the first cultural imagination of Punjab. The same piece remembers how the battle of the ten kings, one of the most famous episodes of the Rig Veda (An old Sanskrit collection of hymns) was fought “on the banks of the Ravi River that surrounds Lahore.” In that clash, the tribe of King Bharata defeated a powerful confederation of rulers.
Therefore, from the beginning of the mythical consciousness of southern Asia, Lahore and the Ravi are intertwined: the city emerges not only as a settlement in the water but as a battlefield, a site of identity forged through conflict and survival.
This cultural symbolism spread to the religious imagination of Lahore. The mystical of the 16th century Shah Hussain, better known as Madho Lal Hussain, was first buried in the Ravi Bank. When the river flooded, its grave was swept to a higher land near Shalimar, far from the current course of the river, an act that its devotees interpreted as Ravi’s own tribute, taking his lover to a safe place. Lahore is famous Mela Chiaghan (‘Festival of Lights’) grew around this sanctuary, once they involve floated lamps in the waters of Ravi in his memory. Through this story, Ravi himself becomes a character in the history of Lahore: a vehicle of divine will and protector of Santos.
In the SIJ, Ravi and Lahore tradition they are immortalized as a site of martyrdom and faith. It was along the Ravi del Fuerte wall in 1606 that the fifth Guru Sikh, Arjan Dev, was found with its end. The SIJ Scriptures say that after days of torture in Lahore, Guru Arjan was allowed to bathe in the Ravi, which then flowed fair outside of the city walls. According to legend, Guru Arjan’s soul merged with the waters of Ravi, a serene acceptance of God’s will.
This moving event is commemorated in Gurdwara Dera Sahib in Lahore (on the old shore of Ravi), and the river itself is venerated as a witness to the sacrifice of the guru.
These are not inactive fictions, rather collective myths: narratives through which communities stabilize identity and transmit values through generations. For Lahoris, Ravi worked as a symbolic deposit, which embodies beauty and challenge, and each story in the bridges or in the gardens reinforced their social frames of memory. In this way, folklore was less about individual imagination and more about a shared cultural memory that allowed the city to be reflected in the river, century after century.
That inheritance began to fade as the river itself went back. At the end of the 20th century, the upstream deviations and un controlled pollution left Ravi a blackened drip. Experts noticed a 36pc decrease in the annual flow and more than 40 % in the summer months, transforming what was once a Punjab artery into an open sewer.
For Lahoris, the view of a dry bed under the bridges was more than ecological loss; It was the cultural duel. A city once defined by its river stayed with nothing more than dust and memory.
The August 2025 meeting
This August, unprecedented monsoon rains and dam launches forced the Ravi to return to Lahore. Together with Setlej and Chenab, it produced one of the largest floods in the history of Punjab, displacing more than two million people. However, in the midst of danger, Lahoris mass the bridges not with fear but astonished. The families gathered to observe the river that swelled, stretched their hands towards the water, and the two lost lovers had met again.
So what does it mean when a community celebrates the flood that puts it in danger? The answer is not in irrationality but in collective memory.
In Lahore, the Ravi has worked for a long time as what the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs could call a “social framework of memory”, a living symbol through which people are located in history and culture. The river is not simply water; It is a repository of myth, identity and continuity. His empty disappearance not only the landscape of Lahore but also its cultural self -understanding. His sudden return, how always destructive, activated what the French historian Pierre Nora describes as a Luad de Mémoire: A site where memory condenses, reviving an ancient rhythm in civic imagination.
However, nostalgia must be distinguished from material conditions. The flood did not simply return the romance to the city; He also presented the structural vulnerabilities of Lahore’s urban planning, the weakness of its embankments and the absence of a coherent ecological strategy. The schemes such as the Urban Development Project of Ravi Riverfront, as well as the myriad of other real estate projects that dot the river banks are framed as progress, but without critical attention to ecology and equity, run the risk of repeating the very extractive logic that once killed the river.
The paradox
When Lahore expanded to Ravi, it was not simply a cartographic change; It was an urban philosophy that treated a living flood plain like a real estate border. For some Lahoris, the flood of this August was a moment of fear when their homes swept, their lives overturned. For others, it was a bittersweet meeting with a river that had long appreciated as memory. However, what returned was not alone nostalgia, but Ravi himself, in his own course, at his own speed, with the force of the disaster. And the truth that must face this: it is not only the river that has returned to its place, but that human construction has now presented it is exposed and precariously at risk.
The entire land strips, previously declared “prone to floods” by the Punjab Irrigation Department, are now full of private housing schemes, many of which have seen considerable damage in recent floods. With the support of the regulators who apply rules in an unequal way and even approve projects within the flood influence zone, many of these housing schemes are found in the Urban Development Project of Ravi Riverfront. The irony here is that the “river training works” and the construction of flood protection embankments, which were supposed to be carried out by the Ravi Urban Development Authority (RUDA), delayed in approvals.
In addition, Human Rights Watch also reported that the scheme covers more than 100,000 acres, with about 85 % of the land under crop before acquisition. At that time, the HRW documented how the farmers were pressed from their lands, even when the environmental groups warned about the risks raised by the channeling and pavement of the flood plain.
Together, these findings expose how the expansion of Lahore in Ravi was less development than denial; A refusal to respect the ecological logic of the river, and a bet that was always going to end in catastrophe.
Today, the return of the river denotes the paradox of affective attachment in risk contexts: people are attracted because identity anchor, even when it threatens material survival. Lahoris is interpreting the river as well as who they are and as a danger for what they have built.
Header graph: A representative scene of the Ravi River in Lahore created using the generative
