These tribes are referred to in the later epics and the Purāṇās as occupying the country to the South of the Vindhyas, beginning from a little to the north of the mouth of the Godāvarī in the east to the mouth of the Narmadā in the west. But this knowledge of a few tribes to the South-east of the Vindhya range on the part of the author of the Aitarēya Brāhmaṇa hymn does not count for much. For, Pāṇini, whose date on the most liberal calculation[1] of Dr. R. G. Bhandarkar is taken to be 700 B. C, makes mention in his sūtras of Kacca, Avanti, Kōsala, Karūṣa, and Kaliṅga as the farthest countries in the South. Dr. Bhandarkar writes "Supposing that the non-occurrence of the name of any country farther south in Pāṇini's work is due to his not having known it, a circumstance, which looking to the many names of places in the North that he gives appears probable, the conclusion follows that in his time the Aryans were confined to the north of the Vindhya but
- ↑ For instance, Dr. Washburn Hopkins of the Yale University tries to ascribe Panini to the 3rd century B. C. He writes: "But no evidence has yet been brought forward to show conclusively that Pāṇini lived before the 3rd century B.C." Vide The Great Epic of India, p. 391.
ascribed to Kaṭha, the same Muni to whom the beginning of the Āryaṇyaka is said to have been revealed. There are some traces which would lead to the supposition that the Taittirīya Veda had been studied particularly in the South of India, and even among people which are still considered as un-Aryan in the Brāhmaṇa of the Ṛg Vēda. In the Taittirīya Āraṇyaka different readings are mentioned which are no longer ascribed to different Śākhās but to certain countries in the South of India, like those of the Drāvidas, Āndhras and Karnāṭakas. This fact by itself would throw some doubt on the antiquity and genuineness of the class of Vedic writings at least in that form in which we now possess them."
