No critic of Pococke has been able to answer that question. Yet the reason is simple. If the name of a place holds no meaning it is a corruption of its original name.
Hundreds of Sanskrit place names have with time, and the Islamization of Kashmir, taken distorted forms and lost their meanings. Kashmir had up to the medieval times been a land of Vedic rishis. With its academic peethas and sacred sites it was a thriving centre of Shaivism. The Vedic and Puranic rishis of Kashmir bestowed upon India a vast array of Sanskrit treatises, literature and manuscripts. A host of Vedic-Puranic-Sanskrit place names of those times have existed till recent times and are well recorded.
The process of dissolution of these ancient place names had commenced with the advent of Islam in Kashmir in the 1200s and had accelerated during the reign of Sikander Butshikast a century and half later in the mid 13-14000s. This process rose and ebbed for many centuries. In the current times terrorism and violence rose significantly in the 1990s and resulted in the last exodus, in a chain of seven exoduses, of Kashmiri Hindus from the valley. The custodians of Kashmir's Vedic-Sanskritic past were finally gone. What the future has in store for Kashmir is unknown, but the present remains bloody and violent.
The Puranas say Kashmir was built by draining the waters from a lake called Satisara which occupied the land of Kashmir. Geologists too confirm that the land that came to be known as Kashmir was totally submerged under a lake some 50000 years back. However, their belief is that the water receded from the valley due to a tectonic shift. No matter what the facts are, the names recorded in the ancient texts tell us that there certainly was human involvement in the reclamation of the land of Kashmir.
The Nilmata Purana dates to a time when people still had a memory of the time when the water was drained out by the engineers of those times. There are some details of this operation in the Nilmata Purana such as that the draining of Satisara was carried out by piercing a mountain with the help of a tool shaped like a ploughshare.
The word varaha (वराह) is commonly translated as boar. Yaksa, the Sanskrit grammarian and etymologist from the 3rd Century BC, stated that 'varaha' has its root in the word 'vhr' meaning to uproot or 'tear up'. Boars are known for tearing and rooting, hence they are known as varaha. In the Varaha avatar Vishnu is known to have undertaken many feats, which required either digging deep, such as to excavate a linga, most likely some sort of a device, which had appeared underground and required digging deep to reach it, or when he started the new eon after the time when mother-earth was taken to rasātalam (in the Ocean) and Vishnu released the earth above the waters by raising her with his teeth. The draining of the Satisara falls in the list of such projects undertaken in antiquity.
The channel that carries the water from Baramulla out of the Kashmir valley was appropriately named Vitasta (वितष्ट), Sanskrit for 'carved' or 'hewn', a river that was carved out from its source at Verinag. The Nilmata Purana states, " Sankara himself named her as Vitasta. Because Hara had excavated with the spear or a carving or hewing device a ditch measuring one Vitasti, through which the good river – gone to the Nether World – had sprung out, so she was given the name Vitasta by Svayambhu. Then, O king, the people in all the countries heard that the goddess Sati, after assuming the form of a river, had appeared in Kas’mira." (NIlmata Purana 260-262). Vitasti (वितस्ति) is an ancient unit of measure and according to the Vayua Purana one vitasti was equal to 12 angulas (fingers) and 64000 Vitastis make up for a single Yojana. If we consider a single Yojana to be 8 miles (~12.87km), one Vitasti would correspond to roughly 7.95 inches (~20.12cm). This corresponds to the present day unit called 'span'.
We refer to this river today by a relatively meaningless name Jhelum, incapable of adding any collateral to its history. Some sources say Jhelum is a corruption of 'jalam' (जलं ) or water. Folklore in neighboring areas of Jhelumabad says that Jhelum is a corruption of Jala (जल) water, and 'hima' (हिम) or snow referring to its path through the Himalayas, but the authenticity of such claims is questionable since this is not mentioned in any of the old texts..
As the water drained and the valley emerged, it left in its wake the remnants of Satisara in the form of thousands of smaller lakes, scattered through out its territory. When Kashmir became habitable, the indigenous Naga (नाग) race became its first dwellers. Naga (नाग) is sanskrit for 'serpent'. The Nagas were described as a highly intelligent ancient race with serpentine features. Nila was the king of the nagas of Kashmir. The Nilmata Purana itself gets its name from Nila, the name of this Naga king. The ancient name of Verinag, the source of the Vitasta, was Nilanag, the spring of King Nila. Verinag is a later name which dates to the 1600s when new names were added by Muhammadan rulers.
Second the word 'naga' has more than one meaning in Sanskrit. In the Sanskrit language there are 2000 root words, called dhatus or building blocks. One such dhatu is 'na' which means water, when it joins with 'ga' which means 'flow' or 'go', it forms naga, that which moves in water, hence naga means 'serpent' or a 'water spring'. The Kashmiri word 'nag' meaning 'spring' stems from Sanskrit. Not surprisingly the word 'naga' appears in the names of water bodies around the world. For more on this click here.
But now back to Vitasta. The Vitasta is known to have at least two more sources, apart from Verinag, the Panzeth Springs, ancient name Panchahasta, sometimes translated as five-hundred springs, but more likely has the meaning of 'shaped like five hands.' This spot was also called Vitastara, which corrupted to Vetavotur, but now goes by the name Wawathur. These are corruptions and have no meaning. The third point where the Vitasta emerged was at Narsasinhashrama. Narasimha is an avatara of Vishnu, and this avatara of Vishnu has to do with fine arts or the shilpashastra which includes the five principle hand (hasta) gestures of natyashastras- including siṃhamukha-hasta, tripataka-hasta, nrtta-hastas, vardhamāna hasta, and the anjali-hasta.
Of the thousands of lakes that sprang up after the draining of the Satisara, one of the most important was the Mahapadma (महापद्मा) or the 'giant lotus' lake! It goes by the name Wular today. The Wular which once extended to what is now known as the Mansabal lake, are both known even today for the abundance of lotuses. Hence the name Mahapadma, though the Nilmata states that a naga took on the name of Mahapadma and the lake is named after him, it just may be the other way round.
We now look at these names in greater detail:
The modern Baramulla, or Varmul as it is called in Kashmiri, or Varahamula-ksetra or Varaha-ksetra, in the ancient days, was a suburb of Huviskapura , modern Ushkur also called Ushkara. Huviskapura dwindled to a mere village with time. It is a village that Hiuen Tisang, the Chinese writer and explorer had spent some nights at. Ushkara is the point till the Vitasta is navigable after which it enters its mountainous course and becomes unnavigable. The name Huvishka stems from the Sanskrit root word 'vishka' (विष्क), Sanskrit for 'bolt of a door'. Vitasta could not be navigated beyond this point. Hence the name. meaningless.
It is said that the city of Sopor (Suyyapur) was named after Suyya. But this appears to be a slight twist of the truth. Suyyapur was built on the land reclaimed after the flood water of Vitasta was released by rebuilding the dam and regulating the water. Suya (सूय) is a Sanskrit root word meaning 'extract', 'restrict', 'bind', or 'regulate'. These words relate to the actions taken to restrain the Vitasta. Hence, the town came to be known as Suyapur or Suyyapur (सूयपुर). The engineer came to be referred as Suyya after his engineering feat.
16. Bahramgala - Bhairavgala
18. Drang - Karkota Dranga
19. Konsarnag - Krama-sara
20. Rahjauri - Raja Puri
21. Pusiana - Pusia-nanda
22.Bahram gala -Bhairav Gala
23. Kakodhar -Karkota dhara
24. Chambar -Sabambara
25. Uskur -Huska Pura
26. Naran That -Narayan Pura
27. Khadniyar - Yakshadhara
28. Dvarbidi - Dvaravati
29. Uskur -Huskapura
30. Pir Panjal Range - Panchala Dharmath
31. Jhelum river- Vitasta
32. Chenab River- Chandrabhaga
33. Poonch - Parnotsa
He further states, "Wherever inundation breaches were known to occur in times of flood, new beds were constructed for the river. One of these changes in the river-bed affected the confluence of the Vitasta and Sindhu, and this is specially explained to us in verses 97-100. The topographical indications here given by Kalhana are so detailed and exact that they enabled me to trace with great probability what I believe to have been the main course of the Vitasta before Suyya’s regulation.
"These have shown that while the new confluence which Kalhana knew in his own time, is identical with the present junction opposite Shadipur, the old one lay about two miles to the south-east of it, between the village of Trigani and the Paraspur plateau The latter is the site of the great ruins of Parihasapura... Trigam marks the position of the ancient Trigrami and a short distance south of it stands the temple ruin which I identify with the shrine of Visnu Vainiyavamin.