Geography of Mahabharata: A Geographical Journey into the Pandava-Era (Set of 2 Volumes)

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This book, Geography of Mahabharata, spans two volumes. It is the final part of the geochronological trilogy of Rgveda, Ramayana and Mahabharata, connecting them into a single whole like the pearls of a chain! It shows Hanumat, Parasu Rama, and others mentioned in Ramayana and Mahabharata in a never-imagined new light! It details the geography and chronology of the Pandava Era and analyses the entire 1995 Adhyayas and 18 Parvas of Mahabharata without missing any events in the life of the Pandavas! It covers the sub-narratives of Nala, Savitri and a short Ramayana embedded into Mahabharata! It has the realistic age of the Pandavas, Bhisma, Droņa, Vyasa, and others and solves numerous puzzles and riddles of Mahabharata.

Jijith Nadumuri Ravi is a former space scientist with ISRO who contributed to the Chandrayan 1 GSO-LTO orbit design, and the GSLV launches D2, F01, and F02.

He is currently into research on the Rgveda, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata, focusing on their geography and chronology. He is the founder of AncientVoice (http://ancientvoice. wikidot.com), the world's only Wiki website containing the full text of Ramayana, Mahabharata, the four Vedas, and Vishnu Purana, with 25376 pages and millions of inter-connecting hyper-links. This site contains dedicated pages for 15,000 plus nouns found in these texts. Jijith has created many maps of Bharatavarsa. They are hosted in AncientVoice, Wikipedia, and hundreds of other sites.

He is also working as an IT professional focusing on Generative Al based Digital Holograms and Extended Reality (AR/VR/MR). By combining the expertise in futuristic technologies and the knowledge of the past encoded into the Vedas, Itihasas and Puraņas, he created a platform called Dharma Digital (https://www.dharmadigital.in) aimed at the Dharmic revival using the Digital Holograms of the Veda-Itihasa-Puraņic Devatas. These Devatas can interact with humans using Artificial Intelligence.

On 18th January 2022, Jijith Nadumuri Ravi published the book Rivers of Rgveda focusing on the Rgvedic Geochronology as part of a trilogy on the Geochronology of Bharatavarsa. On January 2023 he published his 2nd book in the trilogy named Geography of Ramayaņa focusing on the Geochronology of the Ramayaņa. This book (Geography of Mahabharata) is the 3rd book in this trilogy and continues from where the 2nd book ended, focuing on the Geochronology of Mahabharata.

Mahabharata is a voluminous Itihasa of gigantic proportions, four times larger than Välmīki Ramayaņa and eight times larger than the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey combined! Mahabharata studies, focusing on its structure, philosophy, and literature, are voluminous. This book primarily focuses on the geographical aspects of Mahabharata. Here, we follow the footsteps of the Pandavas and the other travellers. We pass through the kingdoms, cities, towns, villages, holy spots, rivers, lakes, mountains, and forests traversed by the Pandavas and the other travellers.

Ramayaņa is Rama's Ayana (travel). But, Mahabharata is much more than 'Pandavayana':- the Ayana of the Pandavas. While the bulk of Mahabharata is centred around the life of the Pandavas, this Itihasa focuses on several others, including their ancestors and descendants. It even contains an 18 Adhyaya long Ramayaņa focusing on Rama, Laksmaņa, Sīta, and Ravaņa! Similarly, it focuses on Nala and Damayantī, Satyavat and Sävitrī, and other Aitihasic personalities in several sub-narratives. They are embedded in a frame-within-a-frame narrative structure.

I started writing this book in 2020, along with another on the Ramayaņa Geography. I worked on them together so that different chronological and geographical aspects in the two Itihasas can be cross-correlated. Then, it became clear that I needed to validate the data from the Itihasas with the data in Rgveda. Hence, a book on Rgveda (Rivers of Rgveda) is authored 1st. I published the book on Ramayaņa (Geography of Ramayaņa) as the 2nd book, as a sequel. This book on Mahabharata is the 3rd and final book in this trilogy. These three books define a new unified geochronology of the Vedic and Aitihasic Periods.

Since 2004, I contributed my research data and geography maps to Wikipedia. These were related to the Janapadas of Mahabharata. Since 2010, I created my Wiki websites. The Wiki format allows rendering research data as well-structured multi-dimensional hypertext, which is impossible in the book format.

I published the research data on Rgveda (1526 pages), Yajur Veda - Krsņa and Šukļa recensions (978+1138=2125 pages), Säma Veda (339 pages), Atharva Veda (1443 pages), Ramayaņa (3420 pages), Mahabharata (10,802 pages), Visņu Puraņa (2923 pages); the Eighteen Upanisads, the Tamil texts Tirukkural and Silappatikäram (jointly 1790 pages); the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey, the Avestan texts Vendidad, Visperad, Yasna and Yast (together 4012 pages) as individual Wikis spanning into three websites - AncientVoice (25,376 pages), Naalanda (1790 pages) and Takshasila (4012 pages). These total 31,178 web pages containing geography maps, lineage trees, graphical illustrations, and tabulated research data.

In an attempt to reduce the size of this book, Mahabharata is abbreviated as MBH, Välmīki Ramayaņa as VRM, and Rgveda as RV.

My former studies on MBH Geography were published as research papers in the 2016-2019 period as conference proceedings. The geography maps published in these papers identify and locate hundreds of places mentioned in MBH.

My primary passion and expertise is with MBH, compared to VRM or RV.

I first learned the Mahabharata traditional narrative from my parents and cousins. When I was around ten, I read the Amar Chitra Katha version of MBH & VRM. I mapped the route of the Pandavas in a blank map of India. Then, I switched to creating digital maps plotting the locations mentioned in the two Itihasas. I published some of these maps on Wikipedia in 2004. Then, I made the MBH Wiki in March 2010 with an analysis of around 8500 nouns in MBH that includes names of people and places mentioned in it.

From 2016 to 2020, I got familiarized with the Critical Edition (CE) of MBH (hereafter abbreviated as MBH-CE) in Samskrtam. I corroborated it with the English translation of MBH by Dr. Bibek Debroy. It is solely based on the Critical Edition. A Critical Edition version of an Itihasa or Puraņa eliminates the extremely late additions to the source text. These activities culminated in the creation of this book solely based on MBH- CE. The Regional Recensions of Mahabharata (MBH-RR) are referred to if required.

This book refers to data from RV, VRM, and MBH and other relevant source texts like the Puraņas, Brahmaņas, Aranyakas, and Upanisads. Since it focuses on MBH, any reference from MBH will drop its prefix. For example, MBH 2.2.5 is written as 2.2.5, referring to the 2nd Parva, 2nd Adhyaya, 5th Śloka of Mahabharata.

Having sought my way through the puzzle of ancient Indian history for years, I had to confront the magnitude of the text corpus from which evidence had to be drawn. Moreover this evidence had to be measured against a fast-growing corpus of non-textual evidence, mostly archaeological and now also genetical. I realized I had started way too late in life to learn Samskrt and discover its ocean of ancient literature. Moreover, by then I had involved myself too deep in several other debates (essence and consequence of the concept of idolatry, Indo-European homeland, history of Yoga, place of Buddhism in Indian thought history) and simply in making a living to devote myself full-time to late- and post- Vedic history.

Fortunately, among Indians, a great many people had a better grasp of this corpus. Quite a few of them, mostly not card-carrying historiographers, proved to be zealously capable to devote a titanic energy to this part of history. Taking on the many question-marks there, they mostly go by the name of history-rewriters. Unfortunately, many of them prove to be less than rigorous in their method, being untrained in the historian's sifting of factual data from the literary hyperbole, embellishments, and even pure fiction. Overly faithful to the textual narrative, and often wedded to Hindu chauvinism, they resent the historical method as "Western" and consider it as "decolonization" to do without the text-critical approach. Moreover, they rarely use the fairly sober and certainly older Vedic text. They rely much more on the many Puranic versions.

Thus, in an authoritative book about the Rsis, the Rsi Mahidasa Aitareya is credited with chanting the twelve-syllable mantra, "Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya". This is a salute to Krsna, the son of Vasudeva, logically composed only after the latter's promotion to divine status. But this Krsņa, even as a mere human being, lived two generations after Veda Vyasa, the compiler and editor of the Vedic hymns into a henceforth unchangeable corpus. Aitareya must have lived earlier than Krsna. This makes it unlikely that he chanted a salute to Krsņa. I surmise that the story of the twelve-syllable mantra results from confusion with the Dvadaśaha, the "twelve-day rite" discussed prominently in the Aitareya Brahmaņa.

Another, very consequential example of a clumsy approach to ancient history is the use of the Yuga concept, omnipresent in the speculations of history-rewriters about the Mahabharata. This term refers to an astronomical cycle starting from a conjunction and ending in the repetition of this conjunction. The astronomical manual Jyotisa Vedanga mentions a 5-year Yuga, not quite the unwieldy length of the Puraņic Yuga, with 4,32,000 years for the shortest one. On the basis of this Puraņic Yuga, the date of Krsna's death was determined to be 3102 BCE. But this date, despite the traditionalists' preference, is not attested before the 5th century.

A final example is regarding India's native name Bharata (varsa). This is derived from the personal name "Bharata". But who is this Bharata? This much is certain:- 3000 or more years ago, many Indian fathers named their newborn sons "Bharata" after the first known historical Bharata, like all the Alexanders in the world have been named after the ancient conqueror Alexander of Macedon. But looking from the present late moment, there are many Bharatas to choose from. We saw where most Indians get their national history from when the question of Bharata's identity became topical in the summer of 2023: the Government of India had invited the G-20 guests to an event presided over by "Droupadi Murmu, President of Bharat";. After whom was this 'country Bharata' named? Many columnists volunteered a claim from the Itihasa-Puraņa literature, choosing one of these later Bharatas, Rama's younger brother not excluded. Few went back all to the way to the pre-Vedic king Bharata of the Paurava tribe in Haryana, at whose court the poet- sage Bharadvaja, later reported to be his adoptive son, composed the first Vedic hymn. His descendants are called the Bharatas, and it is in this dynasty that a war of succession between two branches formed the historical core of the Mahabharata.

Against the consensus among premodern believing Hindus, childlike or inertial, and distinct from the cacophony among the numerous contemporary history rewriters, the gods decided to restore clarity. To this end, they sent down Jijith Nadumuri Ravi. At last, here was a scientist capable of penetrating this jungle of literary data and interpretating them in combination with the increasing information from more exact disciplines.