30.Multan and moolasthana

The multi-talented great scholar (“Mahapandit”) Indologist, multilinguist (he knew thirteen languages), and widely traveled Kedarnath Pande (1893-1963) was born at Pandah village in Azamgarh district of Uttara Pradesh as a bhumihar Brahmin on 9April1893. He mastered Sanskrit, Hindi and its various dialects of Hindi like Bhojpuri, Malavi, Avadhi, Maithilli, Braj, Rajasthani and Nepali. He studied Pali and Sinhalese languages and read Buddhistic texts in the original form. He converted to Buddhism and changed his name to “Rahul Sankrityayan”. Rahul was the name of Buddha’s son and ‘sankrityayan’ means the assimilator.
“Volga se Ganga” (Original in Hindi, also translated to Kannada “Volga Ganga”) is one of his best works that traces the migration and evolution of Indian people from 6000 BC to present.
Multan is one of the places cited in his work Volga se Ganga.Multan at present is a city and district headquarters in Punjab province of Pakistan. Multan is the simplified version of the Sanskrit name “moolasthan” meaning the original inhabitation.
The original settlers of the ancestral Indian subcontinent in this area called this place as their moolasthan (also written variously as “mūlsthan” or “mūlstan”).The word tan or than was their in Prakrit. It has been traveled along with migrating ancestral Indians absorbed into Marathi and Kannada languages as “thana” or “thane”.
Migrant Tulu tribes retained the moolasthan concept from the original homeland of northwestern Indian subcontinent (now part of Pakistan) and carried it to their subsequent homeland, Tulunad in the Karavali of Karnataka. The early settlements of Tulu tribes in Karavali(coastal Karantaka) are called moolasthanas.(cf:Post).

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