Trigarta

A long-lived name

Pāṇini's grammar lists Trigarta among the corporations of the northwest that live by arms, and includes a group of six Trigarta subdivisions, which suggests a confederation rather than a single unit. The name is generally understood as 'three hollows', taken to refer to the valleys of the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej or their tributaries.

The Mahābhārata gives Trigarta a king, Suśarman, who fights on the Kaurava side and whose forces open the Virāṭaparvan by raiding Matsya's cattle. The Rājataraṅgiṇī, many centuries later, refers to Trigarta as a neighbouring realm of Kashmir.

Continuity and its limits

The Katoch rajas of Kangra claimed descent from the Trigarta line and used the name into the modern period, which makes Trigarta one of the longest-asserted dynastic identities in India. Such claims are made retrospectively and cannot be verified across the gaps in the record; what is documented is a polity of this name in the Punjab hills in the last centuries BCE, and a Kangra house asserting the inheritance from the medieval period onward.

The intervening centuries are largely blank, and the honest position is that the name is continuous while the institution is not demonstrably so.