Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c15.19

c15.19

But a people called Gaṅgā, Gāṅga or Gāṅgeya inhabiting Lower Bengal and having their capital at a city called Gaṅgā (Greek Gange or Ganges) is not known from ancient Indian literature. This powerful people, known to the foreign writers from the fourth century B.C. down at least to the second century A.D., was apparently known to the Indians by a different name. Curiously enough Kālidāsa, who lived in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., locates, in connection with the mythological dig-vijaya of Raghu, the celebrated Vaṅga people, known from ancient Indian literature, exactly in the same region where the Gangaridae or Gangians are placed by the Classical writers. In Canto IV of Kālidāsa’s Raghuvamśa, Raghu is said to have reached the shores of the Bay of Bengal (verse 34) and to have accepted the submission of the Suhmas (verse 35) and subdued the Vaṅgas (verses 36-37). The Suhma country, later called Rāḍha, lay on both banks of the Ajay river in the modern Burdwan region in South-West Bengal. The Raghuvamśa further says that, after having conquered the Vaṅgas, the Ikṣvāku hero crossed the Kapiśā (the modern Kaśāi river in the Midnapur District, identified by Raychaudhuri with Ptolemy’s Kambyson, the westermost mouth of the Ganges) and, through the country of the Utkalas (inhabiting parts of the Midnapur and Balasore Districts), reached Kaliṅga in the Cuttack-Puri-Ganjam region (verse 38). It seems that the Kaśāi river in the Midnapur District was once regarded as the demarcating line between the Vaṅga and Utkala countries and that the Vaṅgas occupied the delta of Lower Bengal as far as the Kaśāi in the west.