Saraswati is the goddess of vidya — knowledge in its fullest sense: speech, learning, music, poetry, memory, and every art and science. Where Lakshmi grants material abundance, Saraswati grants the subtler wealth of wisdom, and the tradition is fond of noting that the two are not always easy to keep in the same house at once.

Her name means "she who flows," and that is her oldest identity. In the Rig Veda she is first a mighty river, praised as the greatest of streams, and from that flowing she becomes the goddess of flowing speech and inspired utterance — Vac, the sacred Word itself. To the people who composed the Vedas, language was not a tool but a power, the very vibration by which the cosmos is ordered; Saraswati is the presiding spirit of that power. Every act of true expression — a verse, a melody, a clear thought rightly spoken — is her movement.

Her iconography teaches by symbol. She is robed in spotless white, the colour of sattva, of purity and clarity, untouched by passion or dullness; she is rarely shown laden with the jewels and gold of other goddesses, for her radiance is inward. She sits upon a white lotus and plays the veena, the stringed instrument whose tuning is the harmony of a balanced mind. She holds a book — the Vedas, the body of knowledge — and a mala, a rosary signifying that learning matures into meditation. Her mount is the hamsa, the swan, which folklore credits with the power to separate milk from water: the discernment (viveka) that distinguishes the real from the unreal, the worthy from the worthless.

She is counted among the great consorts of the divine, traditionally associated with Brahma, the creator — fittingly, since creation begins with the Word, and the creator needs Wisdom at his side to bring forth an ordered world.

In Bengal and eastern India especially, Saraswati Puja is one of the warmest festivals of the year, observed on Vasant Panchami at the cusp of spring. Devotees and students dress in yellow, the colour of ripening mustard fields and of the season's brightness. Books, pens, and musical instruments are placed before her image and left unread and unplayed for the day — a beautiful gesture of resting the tools so that the source may be honoured. Many families perform a child's vidyarambha, the first writing of letters, guiding a small hand to trace its first words under the gaze of the goddess of all words.