The Ravi rises in the Bara Bhangal in Himachal and runs about 720 kilometres. It is the smallest of the five in volume and it carries the most history.
Lahore is on it. Kartarpur, where Guru Nanak Dev Ji farmed for eighteen years, is on it. Dera Baba Nanak is on the Indian bank opposite. The body of Guru Arjan Dev Ji went into it at Lahore in 1606.
Madhopur headworks, built in the 1850s, take it into the Upper Bari Doab Canal, which watered Amritsar, Lahore and Gurdaspur districts and was the first of the great Punjab canals.
Under the Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 the Ravi is one of the three eastern rivers allocated to India. Below Madhopur the flow into Pakistan is small, and Lahore's stretch of it carries the city's untreated discharge.
The Kartarpur corridor, opened in November 2019, crosses it. Pilgrims from India can reach the gurdwara at Kartarpur without a visa, four and a half kilometres inside Pakistan, and go back the same day. It is the only such arrangement anywhere on that border.
It rises in the Bara Bhangal range, comes through Chamba, enters the plain near Madhopur and forms part of the India Pakistan boundary before joining the Chenab.
Kartarpur, Dera Baba Nanak, Lahore and Sri Hargobindpur are all on it. It is the river of the Guru period in the way the Sutlej is the river of the eighteenth century.
It was allotted to India under the Indus Waters Treaty and is heavily used. Below Lahore it carries the city's effluent and very little else in the dry season.