Puru

In the Ṛgveda

The Puru are among the most frequently named peoples in the Ṛgveda, settled along the Sarasvati and in the Punjab river country. They are addressed both as sacrificers in their own right — hymns are composed for Puru patrons — and as adversaries, which is a reminder that the hymn collection is not the voice of a single people but an anthology assembled from several competing courts.

Their best-known appearance is in the dāśarājña, the Battle of the Ten Kings, in which a confederation led by the Purus is defeated on the Ravi by the Bharata king Sudās. The hymn is fragmentary and allusive, and almost every reconstruction of what actually happened rests on filling its gaps.

Afterwards

Later tradition treats Puru as an ancestor rather than a tribe: the Purāṇic genealogies make him a son of Yayāti and the founder of the Paurava line, from which the Kurus and thus the epic houses descend. This is lineage-making after the fact, of the kind these texts perform routinely, and it should not be read as a record of political succession.

The name resurfaces in the classical sources as Porus, the king whom Alexander fought on the Jhelum in 326 BCE. Whether this reflects an unbroken Paurava polity across a millennium or simply the reuse of a prestigious dynastic name is not established.