Cosmography and Geography in Early Indian Literature c6.s1.4

c6.s1.4

As late as the fifth century B.C. when Pāṇini wrote his Aṣṭādhyāyī at Śālā-tūra in the Peshawar region, the people of North-Western India had little knowledge of the south and the extreme east, though later Vedic texts composed in the central region of India exhibit, as we have seen above, some knowledge of East India excluding Assam. In the fourth century B.C., Kātyāyana’s vārttikas mention the Cola and Pāṇḍya peoples of the extreme south. Indeed, Kātyāyana’s derivation of the name Pāṇḍya from Pāṇḍu and Megasthenes’ reference to the confused story of Herakles (Kṛṣṇa-Vāsudeva) and Pandaea suggest that the Pāṇḍyas were migrants to the Madurai (Mathurā, the Mathurā of the South) region from Northern India. The inscriptions of Aśoka mention Cola, Pāṇḍya, Kerala and even Tāmraparṇī