Cosmography and Geography in Early Indian Literature c6.s1.1

c6.s1.1

The question of the date of the geographical sections in the Purāṇas is related to the knowledge of the country they exhibit. We have referred above to the later Vedic conception of the Indian Ekarāṭ (sole monarch) ruling over the whole earth bounded by the ocean—from one end to the other, which we have explained as an indirect allusion to the Śaiśunāga empire of Magadha extending from the Bay of Bengal to the Arabian Sea. This idea may, however, indicate some vague knowledge of the Indian subcontinent bounded by the Bay of Bengal, the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the deserts (sand-ocean) of Central Asia, though there is no indication of any specific knowledge of territories in all the outlying regions of India. It is doubtful whether precise information about all the areas of the south and of the extreme east was available to the later Vedic writers. They did not even have any name for the whole country unless they called it ‘the earth’, even though Aśoka (third century B.C.) refers to his empire covering practically the whole of the Indian subcontinent and parts of Afghanistan as both Pṛthivī and Jambu-dvīpa,¹ and, during the later ages, the name Jambu-dvīpa was often used to indicate both India and the earth. In the Pali Buddhist literature, Jambu-dvīpa, is sometimes the name of the Indian subcontinent which then included parts of Central Asia.² The Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas often call it Bhārata-varṣa and Sāgarasamvṛta-dvīpa (Kumārī-dvīpa of later writers) as we shall see below.8 These Indian names indicated the Indian subcontinent together with the contiguous areas of Central Asia. The earliest epigraphic reference to the name Bhārata-varṣa is however found in the Hathigumpha inscription of Khāravela who flourished in Orissa during the latter half of the first century B.C.4 The Jain writers call the land Bharata instead of Bhārata.