Chapter 2, “The Making of the Indus–Saraswati Civilization,” locates the contested politics of Harappan archaeology by examining the epistemological emergence of the River Saraswati and interrogating its historical and ideological relationship to Harappans and Aryans. It argues that the epistemic trajectory of the Saraswati from a literary entity to an empirical category followed four phases. First, it emerged as a mythical river of colonial Indology; second, as a civilizational river of colonial archaeology; third, as a hydrological body of postcolonial geology; and, fourth, as an empirical fact of postcolonial archaeology and history. Contrary to historians who attribute the resurrection of the Saraswati solely to the growing influence of Hindutva ideologies, this chapter argues that the Saraswati is also an epistemic product of the disciplinarian discourse of colonial Indology and postcolonial science. This chapter outlines the historical and political contours through which the subsequent ethnography navigates. At the end of this chapter, I describe the four SHP excavation sites where I did my ethnographic work— Dholavira, Hansi, Baror, and Bhirrana. I provide descriptions of each site, their significance within the archaeology of the Harappan civilization, the research plan of the ASI for each site, and the nature of the materiality discovered.