Any Logic in Treating These References to River Names as Establishing Some Kind of Historical Chronology?

 

Any Logic in Treating These References to River Names as Establishing Some Kind of Historical Chronology?

 Shrikant G. Talageri 

Koenraad Elst (who treats every utterance of certain Scientists as Historical Revelations as long as the utterances abound in Puranic names) has apparently reposted the following tweet:

https://x.com/Jijith_NR/status/2000962019487588468

“Rivers remember rulers, long after kings are forgotten. In early Indian memory, rivers are not passive geography. They are political statements encoded in poetry. When Gaṅgā is called Jāhnavī, it is not a mythological accident. It records Kuśika dominance over the Gaṅgā basin: Jahnu > Jāhnavī - a name anchored to the lineage of Viśvāmitra, the Kuśika seer-warrior of the Early Ṛgveda. The same political language repeats later: • Bhagīratha > Bhāgīrathī: - Ikṣvāku control of Gaṅgā • Gaṅgā as wife of Śantanu: - Kuru sovereignty over the Gaṅgā heartland. Each renaming marks who commanded the river corridor at that time. Poetry preserved what inscriptions did not. This places Viśvāmitra’s Kuśika phase earliest, before Ikṣvāku and long before the Kurus. Early Ṛgveda (3rd Maṇḍala) supports this sequence. Viśvāmitra appears as the military-political adviser of Sudās, whose territory lay between Yamunā and Sutlej. East of him lay Kikata, not yet Pañcāla land. Viśvāmitra’s campaign pushed Kuśika influence toward the Gaṅgā, remembered as Jāhnavī. Only much later does Gaṅgā become the Kuru river. #Vedic #history”.

9:41 PM · Dec 16, 2025

 

I have no doubt that “Rivers remember rulers, long after kings are forgotten. In early Indian memory, rivers are not passive geography. They are political statements encoded in poetry”. But what exactly does the rest of the tweet show in this respect? I am a bit confused.

Does this mean that Jāhnavī (urf Jahnāvī) is the oldest name of the Gaṅgā river? That it is named Jahnāvī on the basis of an ancestral (to Viśvāmitra) person named Jahnu? That it acquired this name after the period of Sudās, when “Viśvāmitra’s campaign pushed Kuśika influence toward the Gaṅgā, remembered as Jāhnavī”? And that the river came to be known as Gaṅgā in much later (Kuru) times on the basis of Śantanu acquiring control of the area?

The fact is that both the names, Gaṅgā and Jahnāvī, are old names of the river (perhaps for different parts of the river) and, for what it matters, the name Gaṅgā is the older one at least in record since it is already mentioned as an old name of a traditionally known river (with the bushes on its banks already a subject of idiomatic imagery) in the Oldest Book 6, long before Viśvāmitra of Book 3, and definitely very long before Śantanu of the latest Book 10 (and the period of the Kurus). And Jāhnavī is already mentioned by Viśvāmitra in Book 3 as an existing name of the river associated with the east (i.e. as symbolically the direction whence the Aśvins accompany the rising Sun, or Uṣas the Goddess of the Dawn, as her charioteers).

Whether Jahnu is the actual name of a king who ruled the area (and was an ancestor of Viśvāmitra) is again uncertain: his name appears only in later literature, and the people of the area are already referred to as Jāhnavas in post-Rigvedic Vedic texts (indicating their residence in the area of that river rather than as the name of an ancestral king whose name was given to the river) long before the name of any such king appears in the records. Clearly, the name of the river predates (at least as a matter of record) the name of any king of that name. That he was an ancestor of Viśvāmitra is again a matter of Epic-Puranic myths as part of the lore about Viśvāmitra originally being a king who was in conflict with the rishi Vasiṣṭha, which again has no basis in any Vedic reference.

 

I specially mention this because the name of the river precedes the related name of any dynasty or king, and any association of the origin of the name of this river as being derived from the name of this “king” is part of Puranic lore rather than of Vedic record. And because I have already made this point before in reply to Witzel’s notorious ”review”, in 2001, of my book published in the year 2000.

I will quote the relevant portion from my reply to his review, in which he accused me of having a “Purāṇic mindset” and an “Amar Chitrakatha” type of view of Vedic history, and I pointed out that it was in fact his own interpretation which reeked of a “Purāṇic mindset” and an “Amar Chitrakatha” type of view of Vedic history:

“III.1.a) Jahnāvī  and the dolphin:

Witzel sharply rejects my identification of RV jahnāvī  as the Gangā , and in the process, of the śiṁśumāra as the Gangetic dolphin, and devotes a whole section (§4) as well as numerous other references (particularly in §5) to the subject. These two words (jahnāvī  and śiṁśumāra) provide the context for repeated references to my “purāṇic preconceptions” “lack of grammatical and linguistic expertise”, and all the numerous references to my ignorance on “zoological” matters.

To begin with, he rejects (§4) on “linguistic” grounds my “claim that RV jahnāvī  > post RV jāhnavī.” According to him, “the meaning of that word can .... be explained along simple linguistic and grammatical lines as follows: female derivatives of masculine names often have vṛddhi in the second last syllable ... That is all there is to it.”

But who has disputed the fact that RV jahnāvī is a “female derivative” of a masculine name, and how does this negate, on linguistic grounds, its connection with post-RV jāhnavī which is also a “female derivative” of the same name? The only difference is that jahnāvī is RV and jāhnavī is its post-RV form. Just like manāvī is the older form of mānavī.

Then Witzel insists that jahnāvī in the RV refers to “the wife or a female relation of jahnu or otherwise connected to him or his clan” (§4): a broad category-reference (anything but the river!) to a woman totally unknown to the whole of Sanskrit literature and to all traditional and almost all modern commentators on the RV, but so important that she is mentioned twice in the RV (and in obscure contexts where her womanhood is difficult to envisage) while “jahnu” and his clan (both of whose very existence Witzel assumes on the basis of post-RV literature) do not merit a single mention!....

…. It is difficult to know where the Purāṇas enter into the picture: the Jāhnavī is a river of U.P. (also, and more commonly, known as the Gaṅgā) as simply as the Yamunā is a river of U.P. — But the Purāṇas do figure in Witzel’s claim that the word refers to the “wife or female relation of Jahnu” (a “chieftain” or person known only from the Purāṇas as an eponymous ancestor of the Jāhnavas referred to in post-Samhita Vedic literature).”