Narmada enters the book not as the setting of a narrated episode but through its geographical notes. The commentary identifies it with the modern Nerbudda and invokes its banks when discussing where the Pulinda peoples were said to live, placing the river within a historically framed map of central India.

Identification and Geographic Setting

A translator’s note identifies the Narmada with the modern Nerbudda. This identification anchors the name in a recognizable river geography, distinct from the poem’s cosmological account of the world. Elsewhere, that account describes Jambudvipa as the central continent and Mount Meru at its center; the Narmada reference belongs instead to commentary on peoples and regions.

The Pulinda Reference

In discussing the Pulindas, the notes describe them as a broad category associated with wild or forest-dwelling peoples. They cite Wilson’s account, which places some Pulindas in desert regions along the Indus, while noting that Pulindas are also found in multiple other locations, especially the mountains and forests of central India—the stated habitats of the Bhils and Gonds. A further geographical claim, attributed to Ptolemy, places Pulindas along the Narmada’s banks and toward the frontiers of Larice, glossed as Khandesh and part of Gujarat. The river thus serves as one landmark in a discussion of a population whose locations vary across sources.

Textual and Historical Significance

The notes distinguish versions of the poem’s geography rather than presenting a single settled map: they report that the Bengal recension places Pulindas in both the south and north, while the other recension discussed there names northern Pulindas. Narmada’s significance is therefore documentary and comparative. It helps locate one strand of the commentary’s account of the Pulindas, but the evidence does not make the river the site of a narrated event or establish that every geographical identification refers to the same historical population.