Traditionally, Arya-varta or the land of the Aryan people was triangulated by the Himalayas, the Ganga and the Yamuna. We know this from the early Dharma-shastra texts, composed around the time of Ashoka.
While Ashokan edicts spoke of the land of Jambudvipa that he ruled over, and later Kharavela in Odisha spoke of Bharata as a land north of Odisha, the Brahmin texts kept referring to Arya-varta. They referred to the Punjab region as Brahma-varta, the old land of Saraswati, where the Rishis once lived. Arya-varta remained in the Ganga river basin. It expanded over time.
To the east of this early Arya-varta, in the land of Terai of Bihar and in the Sala forests of Jharkhand, emerged the monastic orders of Buddhism and Jainism. From here, ideas spread southwards. First to move were the Jains, then the Buddhists and finally the Hindus.
Epigraphic, archaeological evidence of southward spread
The southward spread of Buddhism and Jainism from their North Indian heartlands is not a matter of legend alone; it is firmly attested by archaeology. Both faiths originated in the Gangetic plain in the sixth century BCE, yet within a few centuries their footprints appear unmistakably across the Deccan and the far south.
The earliest evidence is epigraphic. Ashoka’s rock edicts at Yerragudi, Maski, Brahmagiri, Siddapura and Jatinga-Rameshwara, in present-day Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, carry the same Prakrit dhamma proclamations found in the north, written in Brahmi. The Maski edict is particularly important because it names Ashoka directly, confirming that Mauryan Buddhism reached the southern plateau by the third century BCE.
Stupa architecture further corroborates this. The great stupas of Amaravati, Nagarjunakonda, Bhattiprolu and Jaggayyapeta on the Krishna river, dating from the second century BCE onwards, replicate the form first developed at Sanchi and Bharhut.
Bhattiprolu’s relic caskets bear some of the oldest southern Brahmi inscriptions, recording donations from local guilds, evidence that the religion was adopted, not merely imposed. Rock-cut Buddhist viharas at Guntupalli, Sankaram and the Western Ghat caves at Karle, Bhaja and Kanheri trace a continuous chain of monastic settlement linking north and south.
Jain archaeology tells a parallel story. The Tamil-Brahmi cave inscriptions at Sittanavasal, Kazhugumalai, Anaimalai and the hills around Madurai, dating from the third century BCE to the second century CE, record gifts to Jain ascetics and describe stone beds carved for them in natural caverns. Tradition holds that Bhadrabahu led a Jain migration south during a Mauryan famine, and the colossal monolith of Bahubali at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka, along with the Chandragiri inscriptions, anchors that memory in stone.
Together, edicts, stupas, rock-cut caves and inscribed donations form an unbroken material record of two North Indian religions taking root in the soil of the south.
What images of Ganga and Yamuna in south reveal
What about Hinduism? A simple proof of this lies in the appearance of images of Ganga and Yamuna in South India after 500 CE. Ganga and Yamuna are North Indian rivers that flow from the Himalayas. In art, Ganga is shown riding a dolphin (makara), while Yamuna is shown riding a turtle.
After 500 CE, temples were built in South India where these images appear on door frames, and the shikhara of the temple represented the Himalayan mountains. Why were the people of the South recreating a North Indian geography? Because they had been told that the gods live in North India, between the Ganga and the Yamuna, and in the Himalayas. This was Aryavarta. This is how the Aryans came to South India.
So when people talk about the Aryan migration theory, we must also remember to refer to the migration from North India to South India. There were no Aryans in India before this period, and this is genetically supported by the Y-DNA haplogroup R1a-Z93 – a gene which emerges from the steppe region. It is found in almost every community of North India, but only in the elite communities of South India.
Myths of southward expansion
This migration gave rise to myths of how Kartikeya fought with his father and moved south. And how Agastya travelled south, forcing the Vindhya mountains to bow to him and make the passage easier. And how Parashuram killed all the Kshatriyas of North India and then travelled to the South to create a new Vedic world.
Manusmriti refers to a wider Arya-varta, the land where the black buck roams. This includes even the Malwa region. Later, Vishnu Purana refers to land between the Himalayas and the seas. This referred to the western sea and the eastern sea. Lands below the Vindhya mountains were seen as distant, even foreign, until Brahmins settled in those regions. They continued to refer to Kanyakabhuja and Kashi as their original homeland.
Saraswati, the mysterious river north of the tropics, was another homeland. That is why South India even today describes many temple cities as Dakshina-Kashi and many holy rivers as Dakshina-Ganga. It indicates a clear shift of ideas from North to the South from around 2000 years ago, which is 80 generations, a very long time.
(Devdutt is a renowned mythologist who writes on art, culture and heritage.)
Post read questions
1. Discuss the archaeological and epigraphic evidence that demonstrates the southward spread of Buddhism and Jainism from their North Indian heartlands.
2. Evaluate the role of archaeology in the religious and cultural history of early India. Illustrate your answer with suitable examples.
3. Evaluate the importance of inscriptions, cave architecture, and temple iconography as sources for studying religious expansion in early historic India.
4. Temple architecture often reflects cultural memory and sacred geography. Discuss this statement with reference to the depiction of Ganga, Yamuna, and the Himalayas in South Indian temples.
5. Discuss how myths and legends can serve as historical indicators of long-term cultural interactions. Illustrate with examples such as Agastya, Parashurama, and Kartikeya.
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Amaravati Stupa is the largest Buddhist stupa in South Asia (Left). Colossal sized monolithic statue of the Jain God Bahubali or Gomateshwara at the Jain pilgrimage site of Shravanabelagola near Bangalore (right). (Wikimedia Commons) 
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