Madra

The kingdom

Madra lay between the Ravi and the Chenab, with its centre at Śākala, in ancient India (modern-day Sialkot, Pakistan) — a city that reappears in the historical record as the capital of the Indo-Greek king Menander and as a stop on the route between the Indus and the Ganga plain. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad refers to the northern country as a place students travelled to for instruction in speech, and later grammarians treat north-western usage as a distinct standard.

In the Mahābhārata

Madra's place in the epic is domestic before it is military: Mādrī, the second wife of Pāṇḍu, is a Madra princess and the mother of Nakula and Sahadeva, which makes the Madra king Śalya the Pāṇḍavas' maternal uncle. He nonetheless fights for the Kaurava side, having been manoeuvred into the obligation by Duryodhana, and is killed on the eighteenth day. The epic's treatment of the northwesterners is often disparaging, and its Madra passages include some of the sharpest of these asides, which later readers have taken as evidence of a real cultural distance between the Punjab and the Doab.

Madra does not survive as an independent state into the historical period; the Punjab kingdoms encountered by Alexander are differently named, and Śākala's later history belongs to the Indo-Greeks and their successors.