Rivers of Rgveda- A Geographic Exploration

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Have you ever wondered what is really inside Rgveda? Do you know that apart from the names of the Devatas, Rgveda mentions hundreds of kings and sages by name? Do you know that it mentions more than 30 rivers? You may be familiar with many events in Ramayana and Mahabharata, but do you know about any interesting events mentioned in Rgveda? Most of the impressions about Rgveda are shaped by secondary information, and they seldom delve deep into the Rgvedic verses. This book is a geographical journey into Rgveda with the Rgvedic rivers as our primary guides. The book will take you through the rivers like Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Sarayu and others. You will get familiarized with many Rgvedic events like the Dasarajna Battle, Varshagira Battle and so on and get a clear picture of the chronology of events mentioned in Rgveda and its connections with Ramayana and 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 Rgveda, Ramayana and the Mahabharata focusing on their geography and chronology. He is the founder of AncientVoice, 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 Bharatavarsha which is hosted in AncientVoice, Wikipedia and hundreds of other sites. He is also working as an IT professional focusing on Digital Holograms, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. By combining the expertise in futuristic technologies and the knowledge of the past, gained through the study of the Veda Itihasa Puranas, Jijith created a platform called Dharma Digital aimed at the Dharmic revival using Digital Holograms of Devatas who can interact with humans using Artificial Intelligence.

This book is a geographical journey into the Rgveda. The Rgvedic Rivers will be our pathways into this highly dense body of knowledge. Hence, the book is titled 'The Rivers of Rgveda'. The Itihasas like the Mahabharata and Ramayana are larger than the Rgveda in terms of the number of the verses they contain. However, the density of the information is high in the Rgveda. Its 1028 hymns don't offer any narrative continuity when read sequentially. Hence, the Rgveda is a difficult text to traverse. In contrast, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, are a collection of Adhyayas offering reasonably good narrative continuity.

The purpose of the book is not to understand the Rgveda hymn by hymn, for which the readers have to consult a good translation of the Rgveda. The book is not focusing on the philosophical or literary dimensions. It aims to understand the Rgveda geographically and chronologically using maps and charts. The book will help the reader to create a geographical impression of the Rgveda with the rivers as its backbone. The Rgvedic events such as the Battle of the Ten Kings or the deeds of the Rgvedic Devatas related to each river will be discussed. The names of the kings and chiefs, the names of the Rsis, poets, and composers, and the names of the Devatas will be referred wherever they add clarity.

The chronological analysis of Rgveda is not the direct focus of this book. But it is inseparably tied up with geography. It is inherent in the expansions and the migrations of people from one river to another. Hence, the chronology of the Rgveda will be discussed partially in this book to illuminate the geographical expansion of the Rgvedic territory.

While my primary passion and expertise is with the Itihasa Mahabharata, the Rgveda has captivated my attention at different stages of my life. My first study of Rgveda was done in 2006. It was based on the essays of Sri Aurobindo and the Samskrt recitation of the famous Rgvedic Suktas like the Manyu Sukta, Purusa Sukta, Nlasadiya Sukta and so on. The concept of Rta (the principle of the natural order that governs the cosmos and forms the basis of all its laws), as well as the Manyu Sukta (describing Manyu, an aspect of Indra and a deification of Indra's Vajra weapon), captured my attention. In 2006 I named my newborn son as Rtamanyu having greatly influenced by the concept of Rta and the Manyu Sukta.

In 2011 I analyzed the Rgveda in more detail using the English translation of Ralph Griffith. I studied 1416 unique nouns in the Rgveda by tracing their occurrences in each of the 10 Mandalas, 1028 hymns, and 10552 verses. The data was published as 1416 hyperlinked web pages, one page for one noun. Each such noun page listed all the verses containing the noun. The whole of Rgveda was then rendered as hypertexts in 110 pages. Whenever any of the 1416 nouns are encountered in any of the 10552 verses, they are hyperlinked to the noun pages. This network of connected web pages is called a Wiki. The Rgveda Wiki was thus created. It contains a total of 1526 pages. They were structured to serve as a research tool to study Rgveda. For more details of this work see Appendix: The Rgvedic Studies done in 2011.

This is my first book. Since 2004, I have contributed all my research data including the geographical maps to Wikipedia. These were mainly related to the Janapadas mentioned in the Mahabharata. Since 2010 I have created my own Wiki websites. The Wiki format allows rendering research data as well-structured multi-dimensional hyper-text which is impossible in the book format. I published all my research data on the Rgveda (1526 pages), the Yajurveda - both the Krsna and Sukla recensions (978 + 1138 = 2125 pages), the Sama Veda (339 pages), the Atharva Veda (1443 pages), the Ramayana (3420 pages), the Mahabharata (10,802 pages), the Visnu Purana (2923 pages); the Eighteen Upanisads, the Tamil texts Tirukkural and Silappatikaram (jointly 1790 pages); the Greek epics Iliad and Odyssey, the Avestan texts Vendidad, Visperad, Yasna and Yast (jointly 4012 pages) as individual Wikis spanning into three websites - AncientVoice (25,376 pages), Naalanda (1790 pages) and Takshasila (4012 pages). All of this spans 31,178 web pages containing geographical maps, lineage trees, graphical illustrations, and tabulated research data.

Since 2016 I have authored eight research papers, three of which are now published as part of conference proceedings and others on the way to publishing. These were related to the geography of the Mahabharata and Ramayana. The geographical maps published in these papers identify and locate hundreds of ancient places (rivers, lakes, seas, mountains, villages, towns, cities, and kingdoms) on them.

In 2020 I started writing a book on the Ramayana and another on the Mahabharata. I chose to write both books together so that I can cross-correlate the geographical and chronological data in both Itihasas. While writing them, I realized the need to validate the conclusions derived from the Itihasas with the geographical and chronological data in the Rgveda. Without first focusing on the geography and the chronology of the Rgveda, the conclusions derived solely based the Itihasa-Puranas may not be solid. This propelled me to write this particular book focused on the Rgveda as my first book.

The book will refer to information from the Rgveda, Ramayana, the Mahabharata or other relevant source-texts. Since this book is focusing on the Rgveda, any reference from the Rgveda we will drop its prefix. For example, RV 6.1.2 will be written in the main body of the text as 6.1.2, referring to the 6th Mandala (book), 1st Sukta (hymn), 2nd Rk (verse) of the Rgveda. To refer to an entire Rgvedic hymn, the two-number notation will be used. Thus, 10.75 refers to the 10th Mandala's 75th hymn. Any reference from outside of the Rgveda will retain the prefix. Thus, VRM 1.1.3 refers to the 1st Kanda (book), 1st Sarga (chapter) and the 3rd Sloka (verse) of the Ramayana. MBH 3.3.16 refers to the 3rd Parva (book), 3rd Adhyaya (chapter) and the 16th Sloka (verse) of the Mahabharata. In the footnotes and endnotes, all the prefixes of the source texts will be retained.

The term Aitihasic is used to refer to any information derived from the Mahabharata or Ramayana. The term Rgvedic is used to refer to any information derived from the Rgveda. Thus, the term Rgvedic Samtanu means the Samtanu mentioned in the Rgveda and Aitihasic Samtanu means the Samtanu mentioned in the Mahabharata. The term `Rgvedic Sarayu' means the Sarayu mentioned in the Rgveda and Aitihasic Sarayu means the Sarayu mentioned in the Ramayana or Mahabharata. Careful readers can also note that the Rgvedic Sarayu ends with the short vowel 'u' and the Aitihasic Sarayu ends with the long vowel ‘u’.

Many interconnections of events mentioned in the Rgveda with those mentioned in the Itihasas - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata - is highlighted in this book. The Rgvedic and Aitihasic chronologies are corroborated with the current archaeological studies. It is quite common these days to exaggerate the Veda-Itihasa-Puranic chronology by ignoring what archaeology and the links of Veda-Itihasa-Puranic lineages with the historical kings like Chandragupta Maurya have to say. This book tries to be faithful to archaeological records and the lineage links to avoid exaggerations in the chronologies.

The book uses IAST notations. Hence, the word 'Rigveda' is rendered as 'Rgveda'. The word 'Sanskrit' is rendered as 'Samskrtam' or as 'Samskrt'. The notations used in this book are summarized in the succeeding section to help the reader.

Vedic geography comes of age!

For many of the best Indian historians, philologists, and philosophers, their present line of research was a second choice. First, they got a degree in Science or Engineering, usually to please their parents. Often they were also professionally active in this first discipline, before throwing themselves into the field where they were to gain fame. Thus, Jijith Nadumuri Ravi was a productive space scientist before making his mark as a philologist and historian.

The geography of the Rgveda had already aroused the interest of the first translators into Western languages. Back then, the maps they prepared were often distorted by historical hypotheses prompted by extra-textual factors, particularly the Aryan Invasion scenario that dominated Vedic history's reconstruction from ca. 1840. Thus, whereas the text passages about the historical Battle of the Ten Kings (incidentally near the Ravi river, right on the present Indo-Pak border) repeatedly have the Vedic king Sudas come from the East and his Iranian-named enemies from the West, the translators insisted on having Suclas come from the West and fight against the Eastern "Aboriginals".

A revolution, or rather a sensational return to normality, realigning with what the text itself says, was achieved by Shrikant Talageri in the annus mirabilis 2000. He showed that the main center of Vedic life was the Sarasvati basis in present-day Haryana and that the Vedic tribe's forays to its East and West showed a clear gradient: the oldest texts showed familiarity with the Ganga basin, whereas it is the later texts that show familiarity with the Northwest and Afghanistan. As a bank clerk without scholarly training and with no more than amateurish knowledge of Sanskrit, he mainly brought his common sense and superb logic to bear on the geographical question that had puzzled the Western scholars. This way, several historical facts inside and outside the Rgvedic text (Mitanni, correspondence between Vedic and Avestan accounts of the Varsagira Battle) combined to give a compelling scenario of not just Vedic history, but even of the later part of the Indo-European language family's expansion from its Homeland.

Thus far, Talageri's argumentation has not made a dent into the stonewalling attitude of the Indo-Europeanist and Indological establishment. Indeed, the latest English translation of the Rgveda, from 2014, completely ignores his findings and repeats the mistakes of 19th-century translators. But it becomes ever more difficult to ignore this analysis of the Vedic data after its scientific make-over by Jijith Nadumuri Ravi. The good thing about Indian historians having an Engineering background is that they bring thoroughness and systematicity into their new research field. The task before us now is to draw the establishment's attention to Ravi's research findings and make them see that a Vedic geography is no longer an object of wild speculation. It has gained a factual seriousness that cannot be ignored anymore.

The primary focus of this book is the Rgvedic Rivers. It also aims to familiarize the readers with the basics of Rgvedic Geography and Rgvedic Chronology. It will familiarize them with the Rgvedic kings, the Rgvedic Rsis and the Rgvedic Devatas. Equipped with this knowledge, the readers are taken into the vast expanse of the Rgvedic Geography using the Rgvedic Rivers as the primary guides.

The Rgveda is the oldest repository of information regarding the civilization that thrived on the river banks of Sarasvati, Sindhu, and their tributaries. It is the oldest text and the oldest literature available to us regarding this civilization which we identify as ours. The Rgveda is a liturgical text whose hymns and verses are sacred and invoked as Mantras, capable of bestowing certain powers to our intellect. This is the primary objective of Rgveda.

Like in the days of yore, even today the Rgvedic Mantras are capable of expanding and ascending our consciousness. Yet, it encodes within it, the geography and chronology of an ancient period, when the ancient Bharata clan reigned supreme. The name of our country Bharata emerged from them. Their patron goddess Bharati is now worshipped as Bharat Mata, who is the deified consciousness of a billion Bharatiyas following the Sanatana Dharma.

The version of Rgveda available to us is arranged into 10 books with 1028 hymns and 10552 verses in total. The books of the Rgveda are called the Mandalas. The word Mandala means section, zone, circle, etc. The hymns are called the 'Suktas'. The word Sukta (su-ukta) means 'good speech', 'good recitation', or generally 'a song of praise'. The Rgvedic verses are called the 'Rks' loosely translated as 'the right utterances'. It has the meaning of 'praise', 'illumination (of information)', and so on. Each Mandala contains a collection of Suktas and each Sukta contains a collection of Rks.

The order of the Mandalas 1 to 10 in which they are listed today is not the order in which they are composed. Some of the Mandalas like the Mandela 3, 6, and 7 are older than some other Mandalas like 8, 9, and 10. But in the popular traditional view, this internal chronology of the Rgveda is not regarded as important. Instead, the entire Rgveda (along with the other three Vedas) is considered as existing eternally and revealed through the Rsis who first see these Rks in their inner consciousness. Hence, these Rsis are called the Mantra Drstas (the seers of the Mantras in the form of the Rks) and the Vedas are called Apauruseya (literally 'not derived from Purusa or human', and hence implying that they are 'divine and eternal').

Such a notion is correct in the realm of consciousness where time doesn't flow and everything remains in an uncreated unmanifested eternal present. Even otherwise, the essence of the four Vedas distilled through the Brahmanas, and Aranyakas which are finally collected into the Upanisads as the Vedantic insights, are indeed eternal and Apauruseya. Thus, the wisdom found in the words like - Prajnanam Brahma: Insight is Brahman; Ayam Atma Brahma: This Self is Brahman; Tat Tvam Asi: That (essence) is You; Aham Brahmasmi: I am Brahman; - these are indeed eternally true and hence Apauruseya.

In contrast, the river-names, place-names, the names of kings and sages mentioned in the Rgveda are bound to space and time. They cannot be eternal or Apauruseya, because they belong to the material world. They have a definite origin in the time axis of our physical, material world and they are located in definite geography. Thus, the emergence of the Rgveda into our material world obeys all the physical laws of space and time. It follows the chronological flow of time. It is confined to a specific period. It is confined to a specific geography.

When viewed from the perspective of our physical world, the Mantra Drsta Rsis are the composers of the Rgvedic hymns. They are the inspired poets who use their composed hymns as a poetic device capable of invoking the divine beings (the Rgvedic devatas) for the benefit of their patrons. These patrons are the Rgvedic kings and chiefs such as Divodasa, Pratardana, and Sudas.

If a patron gets victory in battles or gains wealth as a result of the poet pleasing a Devata through his hymns, the poet is rewarded by the patron with wealth. Upon receiving such wealth, the poet in return praises the patron king or chief through his hymns. Such praise is called a Danastuti. Such Danastutis of the poets like Kanva, Gautama, and others are found throughout the Rgvedic hymns. This praise is often appended towards the end of a hymn or sometimes appears interspersed throughout the hymn. However, the major portions of the hymns will be focused on praising the Devata who is to be invoked through the hymn. The poet then expects certain favors from the Devata (Indra, Agni, and others) in return for his praise. Such expectations of the poet too are found throughout the Rgvedic hymns. These are the general characteristics of the Rgvedic hymns.

**Contents and Sample Pages**