Q1.
You can now recognise ‘the great mountain in the north’, and it should not be difficult to identify ‘Cape Kumari’.
Answer
Both are easy once you have Fig. 5.2 in front of you.
| Phrase in the Tamil poem | What it is | Where it is |
|---|---|---|
| “the great mountain in the north” | The Himalayas | The snow-capped arc labelled across the top of Fig. 5.2 — the same ‘snowy mountains’ (himādri) of the Viṣhṇu Purāṇa verse |
| “[Cape] Kumari in the south” | Kanniyakumari (Cape Comorin) | The southernmost tip of the Indian peninsula, in today's Tamil Nadu — the point at the very bottom of Fig. 5.2, just north of Sri Lanka |
| “the oceans on the east and on the west” | The Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea | Both labelled on Fig. 5.2, on either side of the peninsula. At Kanniyakumari they meet the Indian Ocean |
Why the book asks this. Put the two descriptions side by side:
| Viṣhṇu Purāṇa (Sanskrit) | Tamil poem (about 2,000 years ago) | |
|---|---|---|
| North | “south of the snowy mountains” | “the great mountain in the north” |
| South | “north of the ocean” | “from [Cape] Kumari in the south” |
| East and west | not stated | “from the oceans on the east and on the west” |
What this proves: a poet in the far south, writing in Tamil, and a text composed in Sanskrit describe the same country with the same boundaries. Neither is copying the other. That is real evidence that people in different parts of this land, speaking different languages, already shared one picture of where their country began and ended. It is also the sentence the chapter draws its conclusion from: “It looks like ancient Indians knew their geography well!”
Did you know? The praise is of a king whose fame is said to reach from Kumari to the Himalayas — that is, from one edge of the known land to the other. Poets used this ‘sea-to-mountain’ formula as the highest possible compliment, which only works if listeners already knew the shape of the whole country.