Now the USA is hell-bent to erase its bitter memory of 1971 and give it another shot.
Is Banga the place in the forest where the big forest giants come to die?
The history of Alexander the Macedonian's encounter with the Gangaridai or Gangaridi has been recorded, among other texts the following 300 B.C. piece by Megasthenes. In Indika, written around 300 B.C., Megasthenes describes the country of Gangaridi with precision when he states:
"India, again, possesses many rivers both large and navigable, which, having their sources in the mountains which stretch along the northern frontier, traverse the level country, and not a few of these, after uniting with each other, fall into the river called the Ganges. Now this river, which at its source is 30 stadia broad, flows from north to south, and empties its waters into the ocean forming the eastern boundary of the Gangaridai, a nation which possesses a vast force of the largest-sized elephants.
Owing to this, their country has never been conquered by any foreign king: for all other nations dread the overwhelming number and strength of these animals. [Thus Alexander the Macedonian, after conquering all Asia, did not make war upon the Gangaridai, as be did on all others; for when he had arrived with all his troops at the river Ganges, and had subdued all the other Indians, he abandoned as hopeless an invasion of the Gangaridai when he learned that they possessed four thousand elephants well trained and equipped for war.]"
---Megasthenes: Indika, J. W. McCrindle's translation---.
Ganges, Megasthenes says, "empties its waters into the ocean forming the eastern boundary of the Gangaridai". Today, Ganges becomes Padma in Bangladesh and empties through the channel created by the three of the mightiest rivers in this part of the world, the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna. If we see this map of Bangladesh attached below for our convenience, we will see that the Ganges empties through the middle, or on the east of the middle part of the present day Bangladesh.
It is true that two thousand years ago Ganges may not have emptied exactly through the current channel, but that argument may go either way. Because the arguments that suggest that around 14th century AD the principal flow of the Ganges started to flow into the now dominant Padma prong, before that the principal flow emptied through the Bhagirothi prong now in West Bengal, India fails to confirm that the river did not direct its principal flow into the Padma prong. There is not just enough information available for such claims.
It would be safe, therefore, to take the both branches of Ganges to mean the river Ganges because if we consider the length of the Ganges, the Bhagirathi Padma division of it is only a very minor part and besides, the distance between these two branches is minimal.
In any case it is more likely then not that the variation would not be that great as history in nowhere tells that Ganges was ever outside the Bengal.
Map of Present Day Bangladesh with the Three major River Systems
And the 'vast force of the largest-sized elephants' that Megasthenes describes would be today's a vast force of M1 Abrams battle tanks that USA in 2016 possesses.
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