There is in the Rig Veda a historical event that emerges through several hymns with sufficient precision for researchers to agree on its real character: the battle of the ten kings, Dasharâja. It is one of the rare moments in the Vedic corpus where concrete political history surfaces through sacred poetry, where one can see behind the cosmic metaphors the outlines of a human conflict that is undated but predates the urban period, with its alliances, its betrayals, its stakes of territory and resources, and its resolution that shaped for centuries the human map of the Vedic territory.
The facts, as they can be reconstructed from the hymns, are as follows. King Sudas of the Bharatas, aided by his Purohita the rishi Vasishtha, faces a coalition of ten kings on the banks of the river Parushni, the present-day Ravi in the Punjab. This coalition brings together five peoples who were members of the Puru federation, of which the Bharatas themselves were part, allied with five other non-Arya peoples. It is therefore a civil war within a confederation, combined with an alliance with outside peoples. Sudas and the Bharatas prevail. Union is then formed within the Purus under the leadership of the victorious Bharatas. It is from this people that the name Bharata comes, which still designates India in Hindi today.
The hymns that give us the most information about this event are principally in the seventh mandala, that of the Vasishtha family, whose head was precisely the Purohita of Sudas. This is not a coincidence. Vasishtha and his family had very concrete reasons to celebrate the victory of Sudas, since it was under their spiritual direction that it had been won. But beyond the dynastic propaganda that one can legitimately suspect in these hymns, there is a description of the event that says something important about the nature of conflicts of that era and about the reasons they broke out.
The war of the ten kings was not a war of religion, nor an ideological war. It was a war of resources and territory. The Vedic territory, between 4000 and 3500 BCE, was a space of finite resources in which growing populations competed for access to water, pastures and agricultural land. The river Parushni on whose banks one of the battles takes place is not chosen by chance as the terrain of the confrontation. It is a river whose water was vital for the agriculture of the surrounding regions. To fight for the Parushni, as for the Yamuna, was to fight for control of a water resource without which the peoples who depended on it could not survive. The conflict of the ten kings is, in this reading, a resource conflict dressed up as a political and military conflict, exactly like most wars in human history.
The coalition of the ten kings is perhaps the most instructive element of this event. Bringing together ten different peoples in a military alliance against a common enemy is a considerable organisational achievement, and the fact that this coalition ultimately lost raises a question about the nature of its weaknesses. The hymns give us some indications. The coalition brought together peoples with divergent interests, some members of the same federation as the Bharatas, others completely outside this tradition. What united them was not a shared vision of the world, not shared values, not a common experience of Brahman. It was immediate interest, the common threat represented by the rising power of the Bharatas. And coalitions founded on immediate interest without shared vision are fragile coalitions, that disintegrate as soon as the pressure diminishes or the interests diverge.
Sudas, for his part, had Vasishtha. This is not an anecdotal detail. To have the greatest rishi of his generation as spiritual counsellor and Purohita is to have access to a coherent worldview, to an understanding of the Truth that gave political and military decisions a direction and a depth that simple tactics cannot produce. Vasishtha and his family composed the hymns that mobilised the collective energy of the Bharatas, that kept their common identity alive, that gave them the sense of fighting for something greater than their immediate survival. This is a form of power that the ten kings did not have. They had warriors, horses and chariots. They did not have a Vasishtha.
This contrast between a fragmented coalition united by immediate interest and a people united by a shared vision carried by its rishis says something important about the conditions of victory in long-term conflicts. Raw military power is necessary but not sufficient. What makes the difference over time is the coherence of the vision, the quality of cultural and spiritual transmission, the capacity to keep alive a collective identity that gives meaning to the sacrifices and the effort. The Bharatas had this. Their adversaries did not, or not to the same degree.
There is in Vasishtha’s victory hymns a grandeur and an exuberance that can make the contemporary reader uncomfortable. The victory is celebrated with a joy that leaves little room for compassion for the defeated. This is dynastic propaganda, certainly, but it is also the reflection of an era in which war, even in a civilisation as remarkable as the Vedic one, was part of reality. The first nine mandalas are not pacifist in the naive sense of the word. They describe a society in which violence existed, in which conflicts between peoples were real, in which military force was a component of political power. What distinguishes them from the militarist texts of other civilisations is that violence is never glorified for its own sake. It is always contextualised, justified by the defence of the Truth, by the protection of one’s own, by the necessity of preserving what deserves to be preserved.
The resolution of the war of the ten kings is perhaps even more instructive than the war itself. After the victory of the Bharatas, union is formed within the Puru federation. The defeated are not exterminated, nor reduced to slavery. Integration takes the place of elimination. It is a political and spiritual choice consistent with the Vedic vision: the enemies of yesterday can become the allies of tomorrow if the shared vision is strong enough to integrate them. The war of the ten kings did not produce an empire founded on domination and exploitation. It produced an enlarged federation, stronger and more coherent than what it had replaced.
What the battle of the ten kings says about our era is troubling in its precision. We live in a moment of history in which resource wars are multiplying: water, agricultural land, the raw materials necessary for the energy transition, maritime zones rich in fishery resources. And we live at the same time in a moment of fragile coalitions, of alliances founded on immediate interest without shared vision, that form and dissolve according to circumstances. The question that Dasharâja poses to our era is the one that Vasishtha posed to his: what is the shared vision, sufficiently deep and sufficiently common, to hold a coalition together beyond immediate interest? What is the contemporary version of the Truth that could give collective efforts a direction and a meaning that transcend the divergent interests of the actors? And where are the Vasishthas of our time, those whose vision is clear and deep enough to be the guiding thread of a coalition that holds?
Le Rig Veda 
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