Historical Geography of Ancient India c5.s3.1

c5.s3.1

The ancient Indians had a very accurate knowledge of the true shape and size of their country. Alexander's informants gathered their knowledge from the people of the country and described India as a rhomboid or unequal quadrilateral in shape with the Indus on the west, the mountains on the north and the sea on the east and south.² In the *Mahābhārata*, the shape of India has been described as an equilateral triangle divided into four smaller equal triangles.³ Cunningham observes, ‘The shape corresponds very well with the general form of the country, if we extend the limits of India to Ghazni on the north-west, and fix the other two points of the triangle at Cape Comorin, and Sadiya in Assam’. (*C.A.G.I.*, p. 6.) That India was divided into nine portions was first pointed out by Parāśara and Varāhamihira. It was afterwards adopted by the authors of some of the *Purāṇas*.⁴ In the *Kūrmaniveśa* section the surface of India is made to conform to the convex shape of the upper shell of a tortoise ‘lying outspread and facing eastwards’. Some Pauranic passages suggest that the ancient Indians were acquainted with the four-fold conformation of India. This is also borne out by the early Greek accounts of the country. We learn from Strabo that Alexander caused the whole of the country to be described by men well acquainted with it. They were undoubtedly of Indian origin. Not long afterwards the Hellenistic ambassadors who were accredited to the court of the great Maurya kings at Pāṭaliputra also wrote accounts of India based partly on their own observations and partly on the information derived from the Indian sources. In the *Geography* of Ptolemy we find that the acute angle formed by the meeting of the two coasts of the Peninsula at the Cape Comorin, is changed to a single coast line running almost straight from the mouth of the Indus to the mouth of the Ganges.⁵ According to the early Buddhists, India is broad on the north whereas in the south it has the form of the front portion of a cart and is divided into seven equal parts.⁶ This shape of India corresponds to a great extent to the actual shape of the country which is broad on the north having the Himalayas extending from east to west and triangular towards the south. It agrees wonderfully with the description of the shape given by the Chinese author Fah-kai-lih-to. According to him the country is broad towards the north and narrow towards the south. The Chinese traveller, Hiuen Tsang, who visited India in the 7th century A.D., describes the shape of the country as a half-moon with the diameter or broadside to the north and the narrow end to the south. His travels were mainly confined to the north of India which may be said to resemble a half-moon with the Vindhyas as its base and the Himalayas spreading its two arms on two sides as the diameter. About the size of India Megasthenes and Deimachos consider the distance from the southern sea to the Caucasus to be over 20,000 stadia.⁷ According to Megasthenes the breadth of India at the shortest is 16,000 stadia and its length is at the narrowest 22,300 stadia.¹ The Sanskrit Buddhist texts give us no glimpse as to the size and shape of India.