India, Oct. 8 -- By Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik - Author, Speaker, Illustrator, Mythologist

About a thousand years ago, when Rajasekhar wrote his discourse on poetry, the Kavya Mimansa, Aryavarta stretched from the Himalayas down to the Vindhya mountains, bounded on the east and west by the seas of Bengal and Gujarat.

He knew little of the southern regions and spoke of them scarcely at all. For him, the Antar-Vedi, the core of Aryavarta, lay between the Ganga and Yamuna, with its meridian passing through Kanyakubja (modern Kanpur). Varanasi marked the east, Dwaraka the west, Mahishmati on the Narmada the south and to the north lay the lands beyond Prithudaka, the flatlands of Haryana.

Prithudaka takes its name from Prithu, an ancient king me...