Battle of the Ten Kings

The Battle of the Ten Kings (दाशराज्ञ युद्ध) is a battle, first alluded to in the 7th Mandala of the Rigveda (RV), between a king of the Bharatas (tribe) and a confederation of tribes. It resulted in a decisive victory for the Bharatas and subsequent formation of the Kuru polity. It is possible that the Battle of the Ten Kings, mentioned in the Rigveda, may have "formed the 'nucleus' of story" of the Kurukshetra War, though it was greatly expanded and modified in the Mahabharata's account. In Book 3, the Bharatas are noted to have crossed Beas and Sutlej, in their progress towards Kurukshetra where they came across a nascent (and temporary) inter-tribal alliance. This led to the battle, which is described in the 18th hymn (verses 5-21) of Book 7; the exact motivations are doubtful — Michael Witzel argues that it might have been a product of intratribal resentment or intrigues of an ousted family-priest while Ranabir Chakravarti argues that the battle was probably fought for controlling the rivers, which were a lifeline for irrigation. The hymns also makes mention of the tribes seeking to steal cows from the Bharatas. Hanns-Peter Schmidt, whom Witzel deems to have produced the most "detailed, and ingenious reinterpretation" of the hymns, locates a unique poetic moment across the RV corpus, in their extraordinarily abundant usage of sarcastic allusions, similes and puns to mock the tribal alliance. Some of those allusions seem to be heavily context-specific and (still) remain unrecognized; there exist considerable disputes about interpretations of particular words, in light of the employed figures of speech and other poetic devices. The first phase of the battle took place on the banks of the river Ravi (then Parusni) near Manusa, west of Kurukshetra. The Bharata King and their priest are respectively mentioned as Sudas Paijavana and Vasistha, in the Rig Veda; however the names change in Samaveda and Yajurveda Samhitas. The principal antagonist is doubtful and names of the participating tribes are difficult to retrieve, in light of the phonological deformations of their names.