The Deccan

Dakṣiṇāpatha (दक्षिणापथ), in Pali Dakkhiṇāpatha, is the Sanskrit name of the south of India, a compound of dakṣiṇa, “south,” and patha, “road, way.” It names at once a country and a route: the southern lands beyond the Vindhyas and the great trade-road that ran down into them from the north. The Pali canon sets the brahmin Bāvari in the Dakkhiṇāpatha, on the bank of the Godāvarī; the Arthaśāstra reckons the southern road the richer of the kingdom’s two arteries, for the diamonds, gold, shells, and fine cloth that came up it. The bare adjective dakṣiṇa, “south,” carried through the Prakrit dakkhiṇa, is the direct ancestor of the modern name “Deccan.”

The Deccan is thus, in its oldest name, defined by direction and by the road that reached it, a region seen and named from the north that lay above it. It is the southern half of the subcontinent as the Gangetic heartland knew it, “the south” plain and simple. The name’s reach is almost entirely internal to India, traveling out of the country only once, in the handbook of a Greek merchant who caught it at the western ports; but it has outlasted every kingdom that bore it, and a traveler today still crosses into “the south” by the same word the Arthaśāstra used for the southern road.

Greek Dachinabádēs (Δαχιναβάδης) is the Deccan as set down in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, the merchant’s handbook of the Indian Ocean trade written in Greek in the first century. Beyond the great western port of Barygaza, the author reports, lies an inland region called Dachinabades, with the market-towns Paithana, the Sanskrit Pratiṣṭhāna, and Tagara; and he supplies, almost in passing, the gloss that fixes the name’s meaning: dachanos, he writes, in the language of the country, means “south.” It is a direct transcription of the Sanskrit Dakṣiṇāpatha, and the author’s own note confirms he understood it as “the southern region.”

This is the cleanest piece of transmission on the eastern pages of this atlas, because the receiver shows his working. Where most exonyms are foreign sounds copied without comprehension, here a Greek-speaking sea-captain wrote down an Indian regional name and its meaning, correctly translating dakṣiṇa as “south” two thousand years before the philologists confirmed him. The Deccan crossed into the Western record exactly once, in this one sailor’s logbook, and it crossed understood. His Dachinabádēs and the modern “Deccan” are the same Sanskrit word for south, caught at the beginning and the end of its journey out of India.