DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

124 KURU AND KOSALA [5.4
land-burning in the grand Aryan manner. At the request of the jaded firegod
himself, who had developed indigestion from too much butter
swallowed at previous sacrifices, so was unable to consume the Khandava
forest (on the Jumna river, not far from Delhi), Krsna and the Pandavas
set out to burn that forest down to restore Agni’s vitality. The forest
had been under Indra’s protection and sheltered, among others, the
great Cobra Taksaka. Having set it afire on all sides, the heroes shot
down all living creatures that tried to run away or fight their way out.
Only six escaped the holocaust alive : Asvasena, Maya (an Asura,
brother to Namuci killed by Indra, a clever architect who later built
the assembly-hall where the Pandavas gambled away their kingdom) and
four sarnga birds. Everything else, even the fishes in the water, had been
consumed by fire or slaughtered by the sacrificers. The Naga Taksaka
was saved by the accident of having been away at the time.
This brings us to geographical considerations. The Videhas and
Kosalas survived into historic times in modern Bihar and U.P. They
have deep connections with the epics, probably because the epics were
rewritten to please chieftains who claimed descent (with brahmin help)
from ancestors whose respectability had to be guaranteed by suitably
rewritten epic tradition. Vedic genealogies had been dosed a long time
earlier, the original vedic tribes having vanished or being regarded as
barbarians by newer brahmins. Rama’s mother was a princess of Kosala,
though the later Kosala moved south to the modern Mahanadi, while
the northern Kosala was centered in Buddhist times about the modern
Gonda and Bahraich districts of U.P., extending thence as a kingdom
from the Himalaya to the Ganges. The abducted heroine Sita was
daughter of Janaka, king of Videha, who turned her up while
ploughing tiie soil; sita means ‘plough-furrow’. The one group that
occurs in almost all sources is the Kurus. Their existence in Rgvedic
days has to be inferred from the name KuruSravana (‘ glory of the
Kurus’) in RV. 10.32.9 and 10. 33.4. That king was son of Mitratithi,
descendant of a king Trasadasyu, and had a son Upamagravas. The seer
was none other than Kavasa Ailusa, once accused of being son of a Dasa