Tribes in Ancient India c7.3

c7.3

In the same hymn, Kuruśravaṇa is also called Trāsadasyava or ‘descendant of Trasadasyu’. Trasadasyu is well known in the Ṛgveda (IV, 38, 1; VII, 19, 3, etc.) as a king of the Pūrus. Trasadasyu’s people, the Pūrus, were settled on the Sarasvatī (see Vedic Index, I, 327), a locality which accords well with the later union of Pūrus and Kurus. According to the Vedic Index, ‘it is likely that the Tṛtsu-Bharatas who appear in the Ṛgveda as enemies of the Pūrus, later coalesced with them to form the Kuru people’,¹ for there is evidence that the Bharatas, like the Pūrus, occupied the territory in which the Kurus were later found. Two of them are spoken of in a hymn of the Ṛgveda (III, 23) as having kindled fire on the Dṛṣadvatī, the Āpayā and the Sarasvatī—that is to say, in the sacred places of the later Kurukṣetra.²