SUPPLEMENT ONE
WHO WERE THE Gangaridai? AN OLD QUESTION REOPENED
"Gangaridai" (sometimes misspelled "Gandaridai", once "Gan-daritai") - "Gāngārides", - "Gāngāridae" (or "Gaggaridae"1) -these are the names under which a great people in ancient India was known to Greek and Latin writers of antiquity. Modern historians2 are as good as unanimous in locating this people in the region watered by the mouths of the Ganges, the Ganges-delta in what is now called Lower Bengal. And for their decision they quote two authorities: (1) Megasthenes (c. 302 B.C.) whose lost book Indica is believed to have been extensively drawn upon by several Classical authors after him; and (2) Ptolemy (c. 130 A.D.), the geographer. Both are taken to be explicit in their indications, leaving little room for controversy.
But we submit that the indications seen in Megasthenes are due to a superficial first-impression, that a bit of analysis will reveal the sense of a much wider location, that this sense can be substantiated by several passages in the Classical writers themselves and that the indications found in Ptolemy, far from being independent evidence, are actually borrowed from Megasthenes on a misunderstanding of him comparable to that by modern historians.
1
The earliest account based on Megasthenes occurs in Diodorus (1st century B.C.). Referring to the Ganges, he (II.37)3 writes: "Now this river which at its source is 30 stadia broad, flows from north to south, and empties its waters into the ocean forming the eastern boundary of the Gangaridai, a nation which possesses the greatest number of elephants and the largest in size. Owing to this, their country has never been conquered by any foreign king; for all other nations dread the overwhelming number and strength of these animals. Thus Alexander the Macedonian, after conquering
1.The Cambridge History of India, I, p. 468, fn. 5.
2.Ibid., p. 469.
3.The Classical Accounts of India, p. 234.
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all Asia, did not make war upon the Gangaridai, as he did on all others; for when he had arrived with all his troops at the river Ganges, and had subdued all the other Indians, he abandoned as hopeless an invasion of the Gangaridai when he learned that they possessed four thousand elephants well trained and equipped for war."
True, we begin here with an association of the Gangaridai with the Ganges-delta; but obviously we do so because they end where the river ends. Otherwise, why should only their eastern boundary be mentioned? Diodorus supplies us with no reason to confine their other boundaries to lower Bengal. What seems implied by the end of the Ganges with the end of the Gangaridai is that this river and this nation are everywhere associated and that the remaining boundaries of the Gangaridai are in the regions traversed by the Ganges in its flow from north to south before it falls into the ocean. And the second part of Diodorus's report plainly makes the Gangaridai spread north-west of lower Bengal.
Of course, to say that Alexander arrived at the Ganges is a mistake: not the Ganges but the Hyphasis (Sanskrit Vipasa, Beās) marked the terminus of his march. However, if by crossing the Ganges he would have had to wage war upon the Gangaridai, they must have extended very much north-west of the Ganges-delta: they must have been right in Madhyadeśa, the Middle Country, for he would have first touched the Ganges there.
Indeed Diodorus himself in another passage (VI.XCIII)1 tells us in general where Alexander would have touched it: "he had obtained from Phegus a description of the country beyond the Indus. First came a desert which it would take twelve days to traverse; beyond this was the river called the Ganges with a width of thirty-two stadia and a greater depth than any other river; beyond this again were situated the dominions of the nation of the Prasioi and the Gandaridai, whose king, Xandrames, had an army of 20,000 horses, 200,000 infantry, 2,000 chariots and 4,000 elephants trained and equipped for war."
The whole concluding phrase about elephants repeats verbatim the one from the other extract and assures us that the same Gangaridai are spoken of. But now we are only some distance away from the "Indus". The "Indus" here is actually the "Hypa-nis" towards which Diodorus makes Alexander advance just be-
1. Ibid., p. 172.
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fore he obtains Phegus's description. "Hypanis" is the same as "Hyphasis", the penultimate eastern tributary of the Indus, However, the "Ganges" mentioned cannot be identified with any tributary; for its own proper dimensions are given. Now, the distances which Pliny (VI.21)1 in the 1st century A.D. reports as having been calculated for Seleucus Nicator (c. 305 B.C.) from the point where Alexander stood on the Hyphasis are: "168 miles to the Hesidrus (Śutudru, Sutlej), and to the river Jomanes (Yamunā) as many (some copies add 5 miles); from thence to the Ganges 12 miles." This makes the Ganges, at the most (168+168+5 + 112=) 453 miles away. By the same table the mouths of the Ganges are over 2,600 miles off. So the place where Alexander would have touched the Ganges would have been about (2,600-453=) 2172 miles apart from Lower Bengal. So he would have met the Prasioi and the Gangaridai at a distance of (in round numbers) 2,000 miles from the Ganges-delta.
Perhaps our attention will be drawn to the sequence of the two nations in Diodorus's account. The Prasioi are mentioned first, the Gangaridai afterwards. But the order is of little significance - first, when we set over against it the same historical material presented by Curtius (c. 40 A.D.) and Plutarch (c. 50 A.D.) and then when we look at Diodorus's own other references to the same situation.
Curtius (IX.2)2 writes in the course of his account: "Next came the Ganges, the largest river in all India, the farther bank of which was inhabited by two nations, the Gāngāridae and the Prasii..." Plutarch's treatment (LXII)3 of the situation reads: "...its farther banks were covered all over with armed men, horses and elephants, for the kings of the Gandaritai and the Praisiai were reported to be waiting for (Alexander)..."
Both Curtius and Plutarch reverse Diodorus's order. And Diodorus himself, going on to say more about King Xandrames, has the words:4 "...the king of the Gandaridai..." He omits the Prasioi altogether, as if only the Gangaridai really mattered, as if it was they who were prominent and Alexander had to combat Xandrames as their king rather than the Prasioi's. We may go still further and say: "Xandrames was truly their king and merely in
1.Ibid., p. 341.
2.Ibid., p. 128.
3.Ibid., p. 198. 4- Ibid., p. 172.
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some manner of speaking the Prasioi's." Such a conclusion is lent strong colour by Plutarch's plural, "kings", instead of the singular of Diodorus and Curtius: Plutarch signifies different kings for the two peoples.
However, we must take stock of what Plutarch1 writes a little later of the youth "Androcottus" ("Sandrocottus" in Strabo, Pliny, Arrian, Appian and Justin): "Androcottus...saw Alexander himself and afterwards used to declare that Alexander could easily have taken possession of the whole country since the king was hated and despised by his subjects for the wickedness of his disposition and the meanness of his origin." Alongside the previous "kings", these words should mean: all the territory which was banded against the Macedonian had for practical purposes one king who, as distinguished from the other crowned head, ruled over the whole country which Alexander had to face first in the course of his projected advance. This king we can identify as Xandrames since both Diodorus2 and Curtius' speak of Xandrames's unpopularity for the same reasons that Plutarch gives. The Gangaridai then, under their specific monarch Xandrames, are implied by all the three authors to be Alexander's immediate enemy.
Such a suggestion becomes explicit after a few more lines in Diodorus's own text: we hear there4 of Alexander being "sensible of the difficulties which would attend an expedition against the Gandaridai". In the next chapter (XCIV)5 "the expedition against the Gandaridai" is the topic on two occasions. No, we cannot put the Prasioi in front. The Gangaridai definitely stand in the fore, waiting for Alexander, over 2,000 miles away from Lower Bengal.
This situation of theirs becomes even clearer in a passage from Diodorus elsewhere (XVIII.6):6 "(India) is inhabited by very many nations, among which the greatest of all is that of the Gandaridai against whom Alexander did not undertake an expedition, being deterred by the multitude of their elephants. This region is separated from farther India by the greatest river in those parts (for it has a breadth of thirty stadia), but it adjoins the rest of
1.Ibid., p. 199.
2.Ibid., p. 172.
3.Ibid., p. 129.
4.Ibid., p. 172.
5.Ibid., p. 173.
6.Ibid., p. 239.
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India which Alexander had conquered..."
These phrases join up on the one hand with those relating to Xandrames, king of the Gangaridai, and on the other with those that specify the Gangaridai's eastern boundary. What is more plainly brought out in connection with (1) Alexander's warlike intentions against the Gangaridai, (2) the Gangaridai's terrifying mass of elephants, (3) their territory's limitation on the east by the Ganges - what emerges into sharp focus in the midst of glimpses of things we have already been told is the extension westward of their territory from that eastern river-frontier. We have a reference to the "region" inhabited by the Gangaridai: while it is said to be "separated from farther India" - that is, India's extreme east - it is stated to "adjoin" all the parts over which Alexander stood as conqueror. In language as plain as possible we learn that the Gangaridai stretched out to the west up to the point Alexander had reached in the course of his invasion.
Nor is that the end of the story for us from Diodorus. In another section (VII.91)1 of the same work (Bibliotheca Historica, Historical Library) he tells us that the Younger Porus - into whose kingdom Alexander had moved after crossing the river (obviously the Acesines, Sanskrit Asikni, Chenāb) next to the Hydaspes (Sanskrit Vitasta, Jhelum) in the eastward direction - had fled farther east "to the nation of the Gandaridai". Unquestionably, the Younger Porus did not flee to Lower Bengal - not even to the country just beyond the Ganges. Diodorus brings Alexander up to the Hypanis and Porus is still uncaught. All we can say is that Porus went across this tributary of the Indus into the valley of the Gangetic river-system. E.R. Bevan2 comments: "To the Gandaridai, says Diodorus. The people of the Ganges-region are probably meant."
"The people of the Ganges-region" - here Bevan appears to go unwittingly to the heart of the matter. The very name "Gangaridai" relates the nation concerned to the Ganges, and it would be strange that this nation should then be limited to the delta of the river rather than be spread to all the lands through which, together with its tributaries, it flowed.
But the query inevitably arises. "Why should all the people of
1.Ibid., p. 170.
2.'Alexander the Great". The Cambridge History of India, I, p. 370, fn. 4.
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the Ganges-region be classed under one rubric as if they made a single nation?" The sole answer can be: "They were all either directly under one rule or within a confederate arrangement of some sort providing for an effective working head."
The next unavoidable query is: "When the Gangaridai are linked with the Prasioi, what exactly is the relation of the two?" Our scholars equate the "Prasioi" to the Sanskrit Prāchya, meaning "Easterners"; but, though the linguistics are correct, the Greek and Latin texts fix a narrower denotation than the Indian term. After stating that Palibothra (Pātaliputra) lies at the confluence of the Ganges and another river, which is elsewhere called Erannoboas (Hiranyavāha) or Sonos (Son), Strabo (IV.1.36)1 who was a contemporary of Diodorus says: "the tribe of people amongst whom this city is situated is called the Prasii..." And Pliny (VI.22)2 informs us that the Prasii, after their capital Palibothra, are themselves called the Palibothri. Solinus (first half of the 3rd century A.D.) comes with the same picture:3 "The Prasian nation, which is extremely powerful, inhabits a city called Palibothra, whence some call the nation itself the Palibothri." The Prasioi or Prasii or Praisiai or Prasians of the Classical writers are, therefore, specifically those Easterners whose capital city was Pātaliputra: they are the people of the ancient province of Māgadha.
However, we must distinguish their specific role from their general one. Pliny, at the end of the information to which we have referred, observes that not only the Prasii proper but even the people "along the whole tract of the Ganges" are called the "Palibothri". And, as if in proof of this, he4 writes: "The river Jomanes flows through the Palibothri into the Ganges..." Certainly, these Palibothri did not belong to Māgadha: they were only the people under the rulers of Pātaliputra. And it is in the same sense that we have to take Pliny's slightly later statement:5 "The Indus skirts the frontiers of the Prasii." Thus in their general role the Prasii or the Palibothri are co-extensive with the Gangaridai. The two seem a joint entity or rather the same entity under two names, and it is as such that they commanded those vast military forces the
1.The Classical Accounts..., p. 261.
2.Ibid., p. 342.
3.Ibid., pp. 457-8.
4.Ibid., pp. 342-3.
5.Ibid., p. 343.
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rumour of which struck terror into the hearts of Alexander's army and halted its progress at the Hyphasis.
But at the same time we have to note some difference within the unity. First, although the Prasii proper of the Palibothran province of Māgadha are themselves the Gangaridai inasmuch as Palibothra is on the Ganges and although the Gangaridai everywhere are the Prasii and the Palibothri inasmuch as the latter hold sway over the entire Gangetic tract, the Gangaridai can be distinguished from them as those peoples of the Gangetic tract who do not belong to that distinct unit of political power, the Palibothran province of Māgadha. Secondly, when Xandrames was king and represented the strongest authority in the Indian interior, the Gangaridai in their difference from the Prasii were prominent, with 20,000 horses, 200,000 infantry, 2,000 chariots and 4,000 elephants.1
A little later, when Sandrocottus is the master of interior India, the Prasii are - as Pliny2 recounts - in paramount power and "their king has in his pay a standing army of 600,000 foot-soldiers, 30,000 cavalry, and 9,000 elephants, whence may be formed some conjecture as to the vastness of his resources".3 We may also mark that while Palibothra is frequently associated with Sandrocottus in the Classical reports,4 it is never mentioned in connection with Xandrames in spite of the Prasii being associated with.the Gangaridai whose monarch especially he is called. From this we may suppose that Classical authorities do not picture him as sovereign of Pātaliputra even if he commanded the Prasii: only a part of Māgadha, if at all, can be attributed to him and mostly he must have held sway over the Gangaridai west and south-west of Māgadha with the result that Alexander's intended expedition was said to be against the Gangaridai and not the Prasii.5
1.These are Diodorus's figures. Curtius gives 3,000 elephants. Plutarch's figures are: 8,000 horses, 200,000 infantry, 8,000 chariots and 6,000 elephants.
2.The Classical Accounts..., p. 342.
3.Solinus's figures are: 60.000; 30,000; 8,000 {ibid., p. 468).
4.Ibid., p. 262; McCrindle, The Invasion of India by Alexander the Great (Westminister, 1893), p. 409.
5.A limitation like this of Xandrames's kingdom would conflict with the current view that he was the last of the Nandas, the dynasty founded by Mahāpadma Nanda who is described in ancient Indian books as a Māgadhan ernperor with his seat at Pātaliputra. We may add that the Classical accounts also do not speak of Xandrames being fought by Sandrocottus who is currently identified with Chandragupta Maurya, the overthrower of the last Nanda.
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One point, however, calls out for settlement. We may be told: "If the Prasii in their specific role are inhabitants of Māgadha, should not the Gangaridai in a similar role have an original province of their own? And must we not think that, like the Prasii in their general role, the Gangaridai too are mentioned as being in various places just because their rule extended far and wide? Their homeland, their origin, their central seat need not be anywhere except in the Ganges-delta. And may not Xandrames have been particularized as king of the Gangaridai because he hailed from Lower Bengal and may not the Gangaridai for the same reason have been particularized as Alexander's waiting enemy against whom he was to make an expedition?"
This argument would be cogent only if, just as the Prasii can be fundamentally equated with the Palibothri, the people whose home is in or about Pātaliputra, so also the Gangaridai could be equated on genuine grounds with the Ganges-delta rather than with the whole tract of the Ganges. Diodorus supplies us with no cause to favour that locality: he gives us nothing analogous to Palibothra to localize them there or anywhere else.
And we must remember that the very word "Gangaridai" has defied explanation in terms of a particular spot. De St.-Martin1 searched for a tribe-name answering to it and picked out the Gonghris of south Behār as preserving it to our day. But as the Gonghris are not at all a famous people even in India, leave aside the ancient West that kept the Gangaridai in mind for nearly five centuries, they have to be rejected.
S.N. Majumdar2 has suggested Gangā-Rādhā, standing for "the territory of the Ganges with Rādhā" - Rādhā being the name of West Bengal. The objection to it is that if Rādhā is intended to be an addition to the territory of the Ganges, it is superfluous as it is itself part of that territory and if the sense is of Rādhā as a Ganges-territory the nomenclature is odd because Rādhā which is only one part of the Ganges-territory was never known by such a designation and is unlikely to have been called so rather than by its own well-known individual name. Besides, the Prasii themselves were Ganges-people and to draw a line between the people of Rādhā and those of Māgadha by calling the former the Ganges-
1.McCrindle, op. cit., p.
2.McCrindle's Ancient India as Described by Ptolemy, edited by S.N. Majumdar (1927), p. 383.
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people is without import: two individual provinces having the same characteristics do not require to be thus distinguished. It is only if a number of provinces with a common characteristic are sought to be demarcated for some purpose from Māgadha that they can be classed together generically as the Ganges-people. The purpose of the demarcation could be that in those days Māgadha was a distinct entity standing out from all the rest whereas all the rest were great only by diverse kinds of coalition under one head or another. We might have said: "The rest were those parts of the Ganges-region that were ruled over by the Prasii", but such a statement would not be adequate to the fact that in connection with Xandrames the Gangaridai instead of the Prasii are in prominence. Hence what we are entitled to hold is simply what we have already done: the word "Gangaridai" is for the Ganges-people who are other than the distinct political entity constituted by the Prasii and who are spread over a vast area west and south and east of the Prasii.
But what then must be the Indian original of the word? No designation of the kind we want exists in Sanskrit literature, and some scholars believe it to be a purely Greek formation on the analogy of the Greek name for the people of the north-western frontier country of Gandhara: Gandarai, Gandarioi, Gandaridai -the last variant even stealing into Diodorus to do duty for "Gangaridai". But the Classical writers unmistakably tell us that Alexander received the name from Indian princes who were his allies: Phegus alias Phegelas (Bhagalā) and later the Elder Porus (Paura-va). So we must think it an Indian compound expression, with Gangā (Ganges) for its first member, which these informants found it useful to adopt from regional colloquial practice. The most likely expression is the possible Prakrit Gangārāttā, "Ganges-State". It would denote either of two political entities. There could be a confederacy of different countries, with minor heads under one paramount lord. Or there could be a number of confederacies of varying size and importance, each with its rāja, king, and functioning in practical independence but having a general interrelation or unity under the head of the largest and most central confederate group, a unity which would become most effective in a time of emergency like Alexander's invasion. Which of the two arrangements was presided over by Xandrames we shall decide after we have examined all the evidence from Megasthenes.
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Our conjectural term, Gangārāttā, could easily have arisen in Alexander's period. R. K. Mookerji1 has spoken of "the republican peoples for which the Punjāb was known in those days, the Ārattas or Arāshtrakas, 'kingless' peoples, peoples not living under a rāshtra or State, of which the usual normal type was a kingship." He adds: "Baudhāyana, in his Dharmasūtra (c. 400 B.C.) describes the Punjāb as the country of Ārattas [1.1, 2, 13-15]. The Mahābhārātā [VIII.44.2070] calls the Ārattas Pdnchanadas, 'natives of the land of five rivers', [Ib.45, 2110] and also Vdhikas, 'people of the land of rivers', comprising the Prasthalas, Madras, Gandharas, Khasas, Vasatis, Sindhus, and Sauvīras." We may note here not only the employment of the word rātta, though with a negative prefix, but also the grouping of several peoples thus designated with a reference to rivers. Further we learn from Mookerji:2 "In Panini's time there were both individual republics functioning by themselves and confederacies of such republics such as the Trigarta-shashtha, or the Sdlvas..." In the very time of Alexander, says Mookerji,3 "some kind of national opposition was organised... by the confederacy of the Kshudrakas and Malavas who united their military resources in a powerful allied army. Such a federal army was known even in the days of Panini who calls it, 'the Kshudraka-Mālavi-sena.'" A confederacy not of Ārattas but of rattas with a reference to the river Ganges could certainly be mentioned to Alexander in the natural course by Punjāb-princes like Bhagala and Paurava.
Thus the name "Gangaridai" occurring in Diodorus and his fellow-historians can itself prop up our theory of a wide location. All in all, we cannot conclude from Diodorus that Megasthenes put the Gangaridai centrally in the delta of the Ganges. The signs are quite to the contrary.
And we may round off with some words of Arrian's to match those of Diodorus with which we started our inquiry. Diodorus, before speaking of Alexander's decision to cry a halt to his invasion, referred to the eastern boundary of the Gangaridai and typified them as "a nation which possesses the greatest number of
1.Chandragupta Maurya and His Times, p. 36.
2.Ibid., p. 39.
3.Ibid., p. 42.
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elephants and the largest in size". Arrian (Anabasis, V.25),1 without mentioning the Gangaridai, has yet a pointer to them when, like Diodorus, he too writes of the end of Alexander's march towards the Indian interior. In the description which, according to him, Alexander got of the country beyond the Hyphasis we have the phrase: "The elephants there are more numerous than elsewhere in India and conspicuous both for size and courage."
So the outstanding mark which Diodorus gives of the Gangaridai commences right from the eastern frontiers of the Punjāb, putting the seal on Diodorus's own testimony that the Gangaridai's country adjoined the Indian areas conquered by Alexander and that the Gangaridai were there to afford shelter to the Younger Porus fleeing from the foreigner. The outstanding mark runs also into the Ganges-delta; and evidently the collected strength of a good deal, if not all, of the Gangetic valley constitutes it. But it would seem mainly to lie in the Middle Country in part alliance with Māgadha.
2
The next version from Megasthenes comes in Pliny. Pliny (IV.22)2 touches on the Gangaridai after making an observation about the Ganges in mid-career: "...it flows out with a gentle current, being at the narrowest eight miles, and on the average a hundred stadia in breadth, and never of less depth than twenty paces (one hundred feet) in the final part of its course, which is through the country of the Gāngārides. The royal city of the Calingae is called Parthalis. Over their king 60,000 foot soldiers, 1,000 horsemen, 700 elephants keep watch and ward 'in procinct of war'."
Here, at first sight, there is no ambiguity as regards the Gangaridai, but one wonders why suddenly in their wake crops up the royal city of the Calingae and why the military strength of this people rather than of the Gangaridai has been reported. If we go in Pliny backwards from our quotation, pass through the introduc-
1.Arrian s Life of Alexander the Great, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt (The Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1958), p. 187.
2.The Classical Accounts..., p. 341.
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tory sentences about the Ganges and reach the end of the preceding paragraph, we alight upon the words:1 "The tribes called the Calingae are nearest the sea, and higher up are the Mandei, and the Malli in whose country is Mount Mallus, the boundary of all that district being the Ganges." What is most striking is that the Calingae, by being "nearest the sea" in all the district whose boundary is the Ganges, are actually in continuity with the "Gāngārides" through whose country the Ganges has "the final part of its course" (before it "empties its waters into the ocean"). We get the suspicion that something is amiss in separating them. And the return to the Calingae, with a mention of their royal city and the forces keeping watch and ward over their king, suggests that the theme of the whole description is some combination of the Gāngārides and the Calingae and not the Gāngārides as such.
A passage from a third writer, Solinus (c. 200 A.D.), provides the answer to our perplexity and illuminates a point which the translation of Pliny's passage obscures. Solinus (52.7)2 transmits Megasthenes thus: "The least breadth of the Ganges is eight miles, and its greatest twenty. Its depth where it is shallowest is fully a hundred feet. The people who live in the furthest-off part are the Gāngārides, whose king possesses 1,000 horses, 700 elephants, and 60,000 foot in apparatus of war."
It must hit anyone in the eye that Pliny and Solinus are concerned with the same subject, the latter in a somewhat abbreviated form. The estimate of the military strength is exactly the same -and the passages of both are followed by communications absolutely alike3 about the various occupations of the Indians, though again in a shorter form in the later version. Now we may ask: "If the identical subject is treated, why does the one passage attribute the military figures to the Calingae and the other to the Gāngārides? Could it be that the identical people is called by two names?" If we have the identical people, the sudden appearance of the Calingae and their royal city in the first context is explicable. And our natural suspicion would be that the people bore some such name as the Gāngārides-Calingae.
J. McCrindle, the first translator and editor in English of all of
l. Ibid.
2.. Ibid.. p. 457.
3. Ibid., pp. 342, 457.
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Megasthenes surviving in others' account, has a footnote1 to Pliny's version, mentioning a reading which depends in the original Latin on the shifting of a full-stop. In the actual translation the Latin has been construed: "...Gāngāridum. Calingarum regia ..." = "...of the Gāngārides. The royal city of the Calingae..." But the footnote says that the common reading is: "...Gāngāridum Calingarum. Regia...", which has to be translated: "...of the Gāngārides-Calingae. The royal city..." R.C. Majumdar2 too has the note: "Bostock translates: 'The last nation situated on the banks of the Ganges is that of the Gāngārides Calingae; the city where their king dwells has the name of Portalis'; and he adds in a footnote against Portalis: 'called Parthalis in most of the editions'."
McCrindle3 comments on "the common reading":"This is probably the correct reading, for, as General Cunningham states (Ancient Geography of India, pp.518-519), certain inscriptions speak of 'Tri-Kalinga'. 'The name of Tri-Kalinga,' he adds 'is probably old, as Pliny mentions the Macco-Galingae and the Gāngārides-Calingae as separate peoples from the Calingae, while the Mahābhārata names the Kalingas three separate times, and each time in conjunction with different peoples. (H. H. Wilson in Vishnu Purāna, 1st ed., pp. 185 note and 188.).' "
"Tri-Kalinga" is only mediaeval and not early: Cunningham has no real justification in supposing it to be an ancient term. But we may bear in mind the people named Vanga who are mentioned in Kalidasa's Raghuvamsa (Canto IV) and put in the Ganges-delta. Scholars like D.C. Sircar4 identify them with the Gangaridai of the Classical accounts. More accurately, we should equate them with the Gangaridai of the Calingae. And, accordingly to McCrindle,5 the MahāBhārata describes the Kalingas "as occupying, along with the Vangas (from whom Bengal is named) and three other leading tribes, the region which lies between Māgadha and the sea". The Purānas suggest even a closer relationship. They speak of the Vangas as having a progenitor who was a brother of the progenitor
1.Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian (Calcutta, 1920), pp. 137-38.
2.Op. cit., p. 350, note 8.
3.Op. cit., p. 138.
4.Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, Bombay, 1947, pp. 91-8.
5.Op. cit., p. 135, fn. contd. from p. 134.
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of the Kalinga people. In the time of Megasthenes the Vangas may have been deemed a part of the Kalingas who, as McCrindle1 infers from Pliny, were a widely diffused race. Cunningham, as well as McCrindle and Bostock after him, is thus essentially correct in favouring the combination "Gāngāridum Calingarum" which can be established even by a mere comparison of Pliny with Solinus.
Once the true name, for Megasthenes, of the people in Lower Bengal has been ascertained we have to fix down what it implies about the term "Gangaridai". McCrindle, with the preoccupation born of the first impression that the Gangaridai lived originally, if not exclusively, around "the final part of the Ganges' course", takes Pliny to be considering them wholly a branch of the Caling-as. But the straightforward interpretation is simply that one section of the Calingas is the Gangaridai of the Ganges-delta: there is no inevitable implication that the Gangaridai are limited to this region or at least have their original home in it, no necessary implication that they are not a larger people, only a part of whom is here, forming one branch of a certain tribe. Without examining all that may be elsewhere said about them it is gratuitous to regard them as being completely exhausted by constituting a particular portion of the Calingae and by dwelling in Lower Bengal.
The gratuitousness becomes quite apparent if we just look at the number of elephants ascribed to the Gangaridai in the version of Solinus: 700. How is it that a nation, which owns "a vast force", "an overwhelming number" of these animals, is credited with so low a figure when even the "Megallae"2 and the "Pandae"3 boast of 500 each and the "Andarae"4 are actually given 1,000 and the "Horatae"5 1,600? Surely, the 700 belong to merely a portion of the great nation of the Gangaridai, the portion which is within the group of the Calingae. This small number not only demolishes the idea that the Gangaridai are exclusively the people of Lower Bengal: it also renders suspect the idea that they have their original home there, for one cannot without self-contradiction speak in the same breath of a nation famous for the multitude no less than the size of its elephants and attribute to its central stock a
1.Ibid., p. 134. fn..
2.Pliny (VI.23); Majumdar. op. cit., p. 343.
3.Pliny (ibid.); Majumdar, ibid., p. 344.
4.Pliny (VI.22); Majumdar, ibid., p. 342.
5.Pliny (VI.23); Majumdar, ibid., p. 344.
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few piffling hundreds which barely exceed or which even fall below the possessions of nations not at all famous in this respect.
Here some objections may be raised apropos of the combination: Gāngārides-Calingae. First it may be said: "If the Gāngārides represented the inhabitants of the whole Gangetic tract, why do the Classical writers link them with only one people, the Calingae, instead of with several who too are inhabitants of that tract?" The answer is: "The linking happens not because those people fail to be the Gāngārides but because the Calingae are the sole people who, as Cunningham's reference to the Macco-Calingae shows us, have several groups in several localities and have one group coming into the Gangetic area: this group gets distinguished from the others by being called the Gāngārides-Calingae."
The second objection may run: "If one group of the Calingae coming into the Gangetic tract gets its name linked with 'Gāngārides', why does another group which lived according to Megasthenes (Pliny VI.22; Majumdar, op. cit., p. 342) on 'a very large island in the Ganges' get called Modogalingae? McCrindle (op. cit., p. 138, footnote) regards the Modogalingae as a subdivision of the Calingae. What prevents the people of the large Ganges-island from being also termed Gāngārides-Calingae if the Gāngārides are not to be deemed specifically the people of Lower Bengal?" The answer runs: "If we take the Modogalingae, also known as Mod-ogalikam (McCrindle, op. cit., p. 138, footnote §), as really a sub-division of the Calingae,' we should note what exactly Megas-thenes says: 'There is a very large island in the Ganges which is inhabited by a single tribe called Modogalingae.' Mark the word 'single'. The Calingae in the Ganges-delta may have been composed of many tribes.2 Instead of each of them getting mentioned
1. M. de St.-Martin (McCrindl e, op, cit. p. 133, fn.) thinks they are such a subdivision and finds their representat ives in the ancient Mada,a colony which the Book of Manu , in its enumeration of the " impure" tribes of Āryavarta, mentions by the side of the Andhras, a people ancientl y located also in the lower Gangesregion. S.N. Majumdar (McCrindle's Ancient India as Described by Ptolemy , p. 234) believes Modo or Modoga to be equivalent to mudu of ancient Telugu, meaning "three" . so that "Modogalingae" would connote the Three Kalingas . But Megasthenes does not at all bear out such a wide and general significance, and the Three Kalingas are too mediaeval to be brought in.
2. Cf. McCrindle (op. cit. , p. 134, fn. contd . from p. 133) who writes that the Gangaridai of Lower Bengal "consisted of various indigenous tribes, which in course of time became more or less Aryanized".
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with a different prefix to the name 'Calingae', all of them may have been lumped together as people of the Ganges-tract, the Gāngārides, and then combined with that name. When one single tribe, particularly mentioned as such, was a sub-division of the Calingae, it could be conveniently indicated by a specific name in the prefix 'Modo' and no need would arise to label it as Gāngārides. If we explain the use of this label as meant not only to indicate the coming of a certain group of a many-grouped people into the Ganges-tract but also to indicate the inclusion of many tribes within this group under a Gangetic heading, the objection will be completely met."
The not unreasonable hypothesis that many tribes were contained by the group of the Calingae in Lower Bengal will answer also the query: "When Pliny says that the district, of the Mandei and the Malli has the Ganges for its boundary, why is the people of Lower Bengal alone designated as the Gangaridai?" We may submit: "The Mandei and the Malli are, like the Modogalingae, single tribes upon the Ganges; they are not a collection of tribes upon it. Hence they are listed by individual names and not by a general Gangetic title as we suppose the Ganges-delta collection to be."'
We may add: "If the Mandei and the Malli or, for that matter, any other Ganges-tribes had been taken in a lump in relation to the river along which they lived, they would have been called the Gangaridai. Pliny himself provides room for such a broad label when, as we have already marked, he employs the collective phrase: 'the whole tract along the Ganges.' Even a collective heading he mentions: the context in which he has that phrase concerns the Prasii and their capital Palibothra and he tells us that the people along this tract were called 'Palibothri', denoting the Palibothri's domination there. In a different context the Gangetic tract, taken a la Pliny as one whole of various peoples, would naturally give rise to a label like 'Gangaridai'."
There appears to be no argument derivable from Megasthenes through Pliny and Solinus, any more than through Diodorus, against our theory. We have certainly to grant that the Gangaridai stretch eastward into the Ganges-delta; but, if their members in this locality could count only 700 elephants out of the 4,000 assigned to them by Classical writers, the major bulk of them must have been outside that locality and stretched westward up to
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the frontiers of the Punjāb.
With the mention of the 700 elephants we may revert to the topic we have touched upon earlier: the kind of confederate arrangement of which Xandrames was the head. These elephants, we may recall, belonged to a "king" and we are informed also of his "royal city". The reference is not at all to a vishayanati, "provincial governor", who could also be labelled as a rāja. It is to a regular monarch, a true rājā , guarded by his own troops. In that case , the Gangārāttā ("Ganges-States") of Xandrames consisted of a number of confederacies, each with its own true head, and all of them loosely linked together under the hegemony of the largest of them. The largest was in the Madhyadeśa, Middle Country; for, Xandrames is named in connection with the eastern bank of the Ganges after the country beyond the Hyphasis . This country between the Hyphasis and the Ganges, which adjoined the parts conquered by Alexander and in which the Younger Porus sought shelter. was also the Gangaridai's. So there must have been a smaller confederacy there too. The largest, along .with that smaller, may be taken to have supplied the 3,300 elephants whose addition to those 700 of the "Gāngārides-Calingae" made up the whole sum of the mighty multitude mentioned by Diodorus when he states the Gangaridai's eastern boundary in Lower Bengal but with no inclusion of them in the Calingae, no restriction of them to the eastern side of India and with a suggestion 'of their Gangesextensive existence.
A collectivity of confederacies leads us to see in Plutarch's "Kings of the Gāngāritai and the Praisiai" more than merely a couple of crowned heads: the kings of the several Gangetic confederacies might be present, side by side with one or more royal leaders of the other group. Then Plutarch's later single "king" would be the royal leader of the largest Gangetic confederacy, who was virtually master of the "whole country" by which Alexander was immediately and directly opposed, quite far from the Ganges-delta.
3
Now Ptolemy alone remains. His main testimony is where in his Geography (VII.181)1 he writes: "All the country about the
1. The Classical Accounts..., p. 375.
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mouths of the Ganges is occupied by the Gangaridai." At a second place he1 implies by the proximity of another people, the Maroundai, to the north of the Gangaridai the latter's location in the same region.
So much does the first statement read like a paraphrase from Solinus or from the version of Pliny where the Gāngāridae are separated from the Calingae, that we may imagine Ptolemy to have depended entirely on his old materials. But he mentions the royal city of the Gangaridai to be Gange2 and the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (about 60 years before the Geography) not only mentions (63)3 the same Gangé, which it calls Ganges as well, but also says that it stood on the river Gange or Ganges in the country called Gangé or Ganges. All this information is missing in Megasthenes. Hence one may argue: "With so much of Gange on the scene it is natural for the people to be called Gangaridai."
Sircar4 writes: "It is clear...that the Gāngāridae or Gangetic people received their name from this chief city called Gange, apparently named after the river Ganges." But he himself admits: "A people called Gāngā or Gahgeya inhabiting lower Bengal and having their capital at a city called Gāngā (Greek Gange or Ganges) is not known from ancient Indian literature." And we may make the addition: "The river Gāngā is not confined to Lower Bengal. Gange as a city-name is also not unique to the Ganges-delta. Artemidorus (c. 100 B.C.), the author of an earlier Periplus, is reported by Strabo (XV.I.72)5 thus: 'Artemidorus says that the Ganges River flows down from the Emoda mountains towards the south, and that when it arrives at the city Ganges it turns towards the east to Palibothra and its outlet into the sea.'" Wilson identifies this Ganges or Gange with Prayāga, i.e., Allāhābād, but Groskurd with Anupshahr.6 So Sircar's derivation of "Gāngāridae" from the city-name "Gange" can have no force to put the people of that designation originally or exclusively in Lower Bengal. All the more radical is the lack of force when Artemidorus's Gange which is fairly distant from Lower Ben-
1.McCrindle's Ancient India as Described by Ptolemy, edited by S. N. Majumdar, p. 212.
2.The Classical Accounts..., op. cit.
3.Ibid., p. 308.
4.Journal of Indian History, Vol XXXIV, Part III, Dec. 1956. p. 267.
5.The Classical Accounts..., p. 281.
6.McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Ptolemy, p. 175.
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gal is reported nearly 200 years earlier. And the irrelevance of such a city-name plus the possibility of its occurrence wherever the river Ganges flows does away with the necessity of looking for a particular tribe with a Gangetic-sounding name restricted to it. The search, therefore, for a people called Gāngā or Gdhgeya or anything approximate to it, inhabiting Lower Bengal or any other locality, is beside the point.
All this cuts the ground from under Sircar's further elaborate argument. He1 says about the city Gange at the meeting of the Ganges with the Bay of Bengal: "The modern representative of this ancient city seems to be the holy place at the junction of the Gāngā and the Sagara or Gangā-sagara. The name Gāngā, suggested by the early Graeco-Roman writers, may be regarded as an eka-desa of the name Gāngā-sāgara.,, And he continues apropos of the historical fact that the Vangas inhabited the Ganges-delta: "After the name of the capital the country was also often called Gāngā... The Greek name of the Vanga people seems to be the result of a confusion the foreigners made between the sounds of the two names Vangāh and Gāngā."
Yes, Sircar's argument proceeds on a basis that has no solidity and that therefore vitiates the whole superstructure. But even otherwise can it stand up?
The city Gange was, no doubt, called after the river Ganges. But when, from the name of this capital, the people of the Ganges-delta were never known as Gāngā or Gangeya, can we build anything towards "Gangaridai" on the notion that the country was often called Gāngā from the name of the capital? Moreover, at the time when Megasthenes reported the Gangaridai branch of the Calingae in the Ganges-delta the capital was not called Gange but Parthalis. The existence of the Gangaridai has no connection with what the name of the capital at any period might be. And so the calling of the country from the capital's appellation Gang6 can contribute nothing towards the formation of the label "Gangaridai" for the people in it. Again, the confusion of Vangāh with Gāngā is possible but hardly probable: from ancient times the country of the Vangas was known as Vanga and the mere occurrence of a city-name "Gange" is not likely to make foreigners mistakenly say "Gāngā" for "Vanga" in regard to the land and its people. Artemidorus's Gange above Palibothra or to the north-
1. Op. cit., p.
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west of it led to no "Ganga" for the country where it stood.
Suppose we accept Sircar's proposed confusion on the foreigner's part. Then too would it follow at all that the name "Gangaridai" for the Vanga people could emerge from the confusion? There is no philological process by which "Gangaridai" can derive from Gange or Ganges. The people-name can be Gāngāi or Gāngāe, even Gangidai, Gangidae or Gangides, but never Gangaridai or any equivalent of it. In Classical writers, as we have noted - and they include Ptolemy - we hear of the people of Gandhara called Gandarai, Gandarioi, Gandarae or Gandaridai as well as Gandaridae. The two last forms are very similar to what we are discussing, but quite legitimate because the ar-sound occurs in Gandaritis, which is Strabo's name for the country, and in Gandaria which must have been the name used by those who termed the inhabitants Gandarioi. A country to have its inhabitants known as Gangaridai must itself be Gāngāra or else Gāngār-ida. To derive Gangaridai from Gange or Ganges is not sound philology. Sircar's idea that, since the capital in the Ganges-delta was called Gāngā from the capital city's name and since Vangah sounded like Gāngā to the foreigner's ear, the Vanga people were called Gangaridai by the foreigners - this idea is founded on Sircar's error that for the foreigners a variant for the term Ganges was "Gāngāres"1 and this variant led to Gangaridai. There is no such variant as "Gāngāres". If there were, Classical scholars like de St.Martin and McCrindle would not cast about for a tribe-name similar to Gangaridai and conjecture the name "Gonghri" of an obscure tribe to be answering to the demand. "Gāngāres" does not figure in any Classical dictionary. And if "Gonghri" has to be rejected, as certainly it must, the name "Gangaridai" cannot issue naturally or logically or inevitably for the Vanga people of the Ganges-delta by any philological process from any Classical term for river, city or country.
How, then, did Ptolemy strike upon it for the people of Lower' Bengal? He could not have got it from mariners or travelling tradesmen, for they would have used not this word but some genuine derivative from Gange or Ganges - unless they mistook the term in Megasthenes to refer exclusively to this people. The mistake could be committed if a passage like Solinus's were read by itself or if a wrong version of the one in Pliny were accepted
1. Ibid., p. 267.
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without being compared to the Solinus-passage or to the statements of Diodorus. Most probably Ptolemy himself or his model, Marinus of Tyre, misunderstood Megasthenes and, on finding Gange in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea and perhaps also in the reports of others, got confirmed in the misunderstanding by the resemblance of their word to the first two syllables of the word from Megasthenes.
Ptolemy is certainly not beyond error. R. C. Majumdar1 marks that "'discoveries of modern times have brought to light [the Geography's] grave and manifold errors" and that "Ptolemy had a very distorted view of the shape of India and his determination of the positions of places is mostly inaccurate". We may instance some of his "howlers". He2 puts Barberie inland to the north of Patala which was at the head of the Indus-delta, in contrast to the Periplus which correctly mentions it as a maritime port under the name of Barbarikon on the middle mouth of the Indus. He3 gives Pityndra as the existing capital of Maisolia, the country named, as S. N. Majumdar4 observes, "from the river Maisolos which signifies the whole extent of the mouths of the Godavari and the Krishnā" - Pityndra which, as Levi pointed out, is the same as Pithuda mentioned in the Hathigumpha Inscription of Kharavela before Ptolemy's time as having been completely destroyed by that conqueror. Even the celebrated Palibothra is given by Ptolemy5 not to the Prasii (whom he calls the Prasiake) but to the Mandalai to whom he has assigned dominions far beyond their proper limits. Again, he6 gives the river Ganges itself only three tributaries, although Arrian (quoting from Megasthenes) enumerates no fewer than seventeen and Pliny nineteen. Evidently several items in the Geography are due to confusion or inadequate and wrong information. The designation of Lower Bengal as the home of the Gangaridai is surely one such item.
Ptolemy is not a foundation firm enough for the conventional view of the Gangaridai. He cannot be invoked to negate the wider location we have discovered for them in Megasthenes or the
1.The Classical Accounts..., p. 351 (introductory note).
2.McCrindle, op, cit., p. 140.
3.Ibid., p. 187.
4.Ibid., p. 387.
5.Ibid., pp. 167-8.
6.Ibid., pp. 96-97.
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significance we have drawn from it for their name.
To clinch our case for a wider location we may close with a reference to Virgil and Ovid, both of them writing in the 1st century A.D. as contemporaries of Diodorus.
Ovid has the phrase: "terra Gangetis" ("the land of the Ganges"). It stands in general for India. Virgil, in his Georgics (111.26-27), writes:
In foribus pugnam ex auro solidoque elephanto
Gāngāridum faciam victorisque arma Quirini.
Dryden renders the lines:
High o'er the gate in elephant and gold
The crowd shall Caesar's Indian war behold.
C. Day Lewis, in our own time, translates them:
On the doors of my temple I'll have engraved in gold and solid
Ivory a battle scene - the Romans beating the Indians.
In both versions we may notice the Gandaridai forming a broad category and representing India or the people of India.
What is to be fixed in mind on taking Ovid and Virgil together is the common concept of the Gangetic as one wide whole of country and people. On account of the growing importance of the Ganges-region in the three centuries before Ovid and Virgil, the Gangetic as an extensive unity has become a synonym for the Indian. The amplification of its significance may be traced to a historical phenomenon of the age of Megasthenes - the unification of "the whole tract along the Ganges" (to quote Pliny again) into a super-tribal far-spread "nation" constituting a many-sided yet single kingdom, Gāngārāttā, whose variously located inhabitants were collectively called the Gangaridai.
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