Śālva

Attestation

The Śālvas appear in the Brāhmaṇa literature, in Pāṇini's grammar as a group whose name forms a recognised class of derivatives, and repeatedly in the Mahābhārata, where a Śālva king is an antagonist in the Kṛṣṇa cycle and Śālva contingents appear on the field. The epic's Śālva of Saubha, who attacks Dvārakā in a flying city, belongs to its mythological register rather than to any recoverable politics.

Their country is placed, on the strength of these references, in the dry belt between the Aravallis and the Yamuna — a region that recurs in the sources as a corridor rather than a centre.

A minor realm

No Śālva capital, coinage or inscription has been securely identified, and the people do not appear among the sixteen mahājanapadas. They belong to the second rank of the later Vedic political landscape: named often enough to be certainly real, documented too thinly to reconstruct. Like several of their neighbours they seem to have been absorbed into the larger states of the Ganga plain during the centuries before the Mauryas.