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"Hydaspes" redirects here. For the historic battle, see Battle of the Hydaspes River.

Jhelum River photographed during the summer periods.

Jehlum River or Jhelum River (Punjabi: Shahmukhi: دریاۓ جہلم, Gurmukhi: ਜੇਹਲਮ) is the largest and most western of the five rivers of Punjab, and passes through Jhelum District. It is a tributary of the Indus River and has a total length of about 480 miles (772 kilometers).

A photograph from 1900 shows a passenger traversing the river precariously seated in a small suspended cradle.

The river Jhelum was called Vitastā by the ancient Indians in the Vedic period and Hydaspes by the ancient Greeks. The Vitast (Sanskrit: वितस्ता, fem., also, Vetastā) is mentioned as one of the major rivers by the holy scriptures of the Indo-Aryans — the Rigveda. It has been speculated that the Vitastā must have been one of the seven rivers (sapta-sindhu) mentioned so many times in the Rigveda. The name survives in the Kashmiri name for this river as Vyath.

The river was regarded as a god by the ancient Greeks, as were most mountains and streams; the poet Nonnus in the Dionysiaca (section 26, line 350) makes the Hydaspes a titan-descended god, the son of the sea-god Thaumas and the cloud-goddess Elektra. He was the brother of Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, and half-brother to the Harpies, the snatching winds. Since the river is in a country foreign to the ancient Greeks, it is not clear whether they named the river after the god, or whether the god Hydaspes was named after the river.

Alexander the Great and his army crossed the Jhelum in 326 BC at the Battle of the Hydaspes River where he defeated the 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 Bukephalus or Bucephalus which was buried in Jalalpur Sharif. It is thought that ancient Bukephala was near the site of modern Jhelum City. According to a historian of Gujrat district, 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 Bucephalus, Alexander's dead horse. They say that the name Phalia was the distortion of the word Bucephala. The waters of the Jhelum are allocated to Pakistan under the terms of the Indus Waters Treaty.

View on the river at Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India.

The river Jhelum rises from a spring at Verinag situated at the foot of the Pir Panjal in the south-eastern part of the valley of Kashmir. It flows through Srinagar and the Wular lake before entering Pakistan through a deep narrow gorge. The Kishenganga (Neelum) River, the largest tributary of the Jhelum, joins it near Muzaffarabad, as does the next largest, the Kunhar River of the Kaghan valley. It also connects with Pakistan and Pakistan-held Kashmir on Kohala Bridge east of Circle Bakote. It is then joined by the Poonch river, and flows into the Mangla Dam reservoir in the district of Mirpur. The Jhelum enters the Punjab in the Jhelum District. From there, it flows through the plains of Pakistan's Punjab, forming the boundary between the Chaj and Sindh Sagar Doabs. It ends in a confluence with the Chenab at Trimmu in District Jhang. The Chenab merges with the Sutlej to form the Panjnad River which joins the Indus River at Mithankot.

Water control structures are being built as a result of the Indus Basin Project, including the following:

• Mangla Dam, completed in 1967, is one of the largest earthfill dams in the world, with a storage capacity of 5.9 million acre-feet (7.3 km³)
• Rasul Barrage, constructed in 1967, has a maximum flow of 850,000 ft³/s (24,000 m³/s).
• Trimmu Barrage, constructed in 1939 at the confluence with the Chenab, has maximum discharge capacity of 645,000 ft³/s (18,000 m³/s).

• The Upper Jhelum Canal runs from Mangla to the Chenab.
• The Rasul-Qadirabad Link Canal runs from the Rasul barrage to the Chenab.
• The Chashma-Jhelum Link Canal runs from the Chashma Barrage on the Indus River to the Jhelum river downstream of Rasul Barrage.

• Livius.org pictures of the Hydaspes
• Official website of Jhelum - Urdu Version
• Official website of Jhelum - English Version

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