The Personality of India: Pre- and Proto-historic Foundation of India and Pakistan c16.s1.41

c16.s1.41

The other fundamental error of the Puranic works is about their geographic horizon. Hence the geographic horizon at the Mahabharata war, as given in the Mahabharata as well as the Puranas are defective. Hence Bhargava's sequence of Aryan expansion is also defective and it does not refer to the age of the Great Battle, but to a much later period. Law has made a fine analysis, taking the geographic account of Markandeya Purana as the basis.² He has also shown how the geographic accounts of the peoples and countries were stereotyped, as it appeared in the Vayu and Matsya, the earliest Puranas. Later these were copied with all sorts of defects and we find sometimes the same people mentioned in the different cardinal regions of India. Motichandra³ and Schafer⁴ have also attempted analysis of the geographic names. With the mention of Antioch and Rome, as suggested by Edgerton, and the intimate knowledge of places of Central Asia, their date cannot be earlier than the Kushan, and Motichandra admits that it should be around the Christian era or later. Finally, Paninian and Early Buddhist ignorance of Peninsular India south of Godavary; the smriti definitions of Aryavarta, as being north of Vindhyas, certainly shatter the theories of Pusalkar and Bhargava. Hence an ideal solution is to put the lower limit of Aryan expansion (Era of Settlement) at about the beginning of the Christian era when most of the puranic material was incorporated in Vayu and Matsya Puranas.