History of Patna
Patna, the capital of Bihar state, India, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in the world and the history of Patna spans at least three millennia. Patna has the distinction of being associated with the two most ancient religions of the world, namely, Buddhism and Jainism. The ancient city of Pataliputra was the capital of the Mauryan, Shunga, and Gupta Empires.
It has been a part of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughal Empire and has seen the rule of the Nawabs of Bengal, the East India Company and the British Raj. During British rule, the Patna University, as well as several other educational institutions, were established. Patna was one of the nerve centers of First War of Independence, participated actively in India's Independence movement, and emerged in the post-independent India as the most populous city of East India after Kolkata.
Prehistory and origin
The first accepted references to the place are observed more than 2500 years ago in Jain and Buddhist scriptures. Recorded history of the city begins in the year 490 BCE when Ajatashatru, the king of Magadha, wanted to shift his capital from the hilly Rajgriha to a more strategically located place to combat the Licchavi of Vaishali. He chose a site on the bank of the Ganges and fortified the area which developed into Patna.File:Ascetic Bodhisatta Gotama with the Group of Five.jpg|thumb|Gautama Buddha undertaking extreme ascetic practices before his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, on the bank of river Phalgu in Bodh Gaya, Bihar
From that time, the city has had a continuous history, a record claimed by few cities in the world. During its history and existence of more than two millennia, Patna has been known by different names: Pataligram, Pataliputra, Palibothra, Kusumpur, Pushpapura, Azimabad, and the present-day Patna. Gautam Buddha passed through this place in the last year of his life, and he had prophesied a great future for this place, but at the same time, he predicted its ruin from flood, fire, and feud.
Etymology
, Patna derives its name from the word Pattan, which means port in Sanskrit. It may be indicative of the location of this place on the confluence of four rivers, which functioned as a port. It is also believed that the city derived its name from Patan Devi, the presiding deity of the city, and her temple is one of the shakti peethas.Patali is the name of the trumpet flower. A very few ascribes the origin of Patna to a mythological king, Putraka, who created Patna by a magic stroke for his queen Patali, literally Trumpet flower, which gives it its ancient name Pataligram. It is said that in honour of the firstborn to the queen, the city was named Pataliputra. Gram is the Sanskrit for a village and Putra means a son.
The Haryankas
According to tradition, the Haryanka dynasty founded in 684 BCE, whose capital was Rajagriha, later Pataliputra, the present-day Patna. This dynasty lasted until 424 BCE when it was overthrown by the Nanda dynasty. This period saw the development of two of India's major religions that started from Magadha.Bimbisara was responsible for expanding the boundaries of his kingdom through matrimonial alliances and conquest. The land of Kosala fell to Magadha in this way. Bimbisara was imprisoned and killed by his son Ajatashatru who then became his successor, and under whose rule the dynasty reached its largest extent. Ajatashatru went to war with the Licchavi several times. Ajatashatru is thought to have ruled from 491 to 461 BCE and moved his capital of the Magadha kingdom from Rajagriha to Pataliputra. Udayabhadra eventually succeeded his father, Ajatashatru, under him Pataliputra became the largest city in the world.
The Nandas
The Nanda dynasty was established by an illegitimate son of the king Mahanandin of the previous Shishunaga dynasty. Mahapadma Nanda was a man of fabulous wealth known by various epithets like "Ekarat" and "Sarvakshatrantak". According to Arthashastra of Chanakya, the Nanda dynasty was of Shudra origin. During the reign of Mahapadma Nanda, Alexander the Great invaded India. The soldiers of Alexander were not in the favour of facing the Magadhan army which included elephants and a large number of foot soldiers besides cavalry and chariots. Hence, they departed without a face-off though they had already ravaged almost entire western India. Mahapadma Nanda died at the age of 88, ruling the bulk of this 100-year dynasty. The next ruler Dhanananda was not popular among his subjects and he is described as cruel in various contemporary works. The Nandas were followed by the Maurya dynasty.The Mauryas
With the rise of the Mauryan empire, Patna, then called Pataliputra became the seat of power and nerve center of the Indian subcontinent. From Pataliputra, the famed emperor Chandragupta ruled a vast empire, stretching from the Bay of Bengal to Afghanistan. Chandragupta established a strong centralized state with a complex administration under the tutelage of Kautilya.Early Mauryan Pataliputra was mostly built with wooden structures. The wooden buildings and palaces rose to several stories and were surrounded by parks and ponds. Another distinctive feature of the city was the drainage system. Water course from every street drained into a moat which functioned both as defence as well as sewage disposal. According to Megasthenes, Pataliputra of the period of Chandragupta, was "surrounded by a wooden wall pierced by 64 gates and 570 towers— surpassed the splendors of contemporaneous Persian sites such as Susa and Ecbatana".
Chandragupta's son Bindusara deepened the empire towards central and southern India. Patna under the rule of Ashoka, the grandson of Chandragupta, emerged as an effective capital of the Indian subcontinent.
File:Bindusar.jpg|thumb|A pictographic depiction of Bindusara, the second ruler of Mauryan Empire.
Emperor Ashoka transformed the wooden capital into a stone construction around 273 BCE. Chinese scholar Fa Hein, who visited India sometime around 399-414 CE, has given a vivid description of the stone structures in his travelogue.
According to Pliny the Elder in his "Natural History":
Learning and scholarship received great state patronage. Pataliputra produced several eminent world-class scholars.
Scholars:
- Aryabhata, the famous astronomer and mathematician who gave the approximation of Pi correct to four decimal places.
- Ashvaghosha, poet and influential Buddhist writer.
- Chanakya, or Kautilya, the master of statecraft, described by Prime Minister Jawahar Lal Nehru as Indian Machiavelli—he was the guru of Chandragupta Maurya and author of the ancient text on statecraft, Arthashashtra.
- Pāṇini, the ancient Hindu grammarian who formulated the 3959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. The Backus–Naur form syntax used to describe modern programming languages have significant similarities to Pāṇini's grammar rules.
- Vatsyayana, the author of Kama Sutra.
The Guptas
Before the Guptas
When the last of the Mauryan kings was assassinated in 184 BCE by Pushyamitra Shunga, India once again became a collection of unfederated kingdoms, though most of the core Magadha territories remained in control of the Shunga Empire who engaged in conflicts with the Indo-Greeks to secure the borders of India. During this period, the most powerful kingdoms were not in the north, but in the Deccan to the south, particularly in the west. The north, however, remained culturally the most active, where Buddhism was spreading and where Hinduism was being gradually remade by the Upanishadic movements, which are discussed in more detail in the section on religious history. The dream, however, of a universal empire had not disappeared. It would be realized by a northern kingdom and would usher in one of the most creative periods in Indian history.The Gupta Dynasty (240–550)
Under Chandragupta I, the empire was revived in the north. Like Chandragupta Maurya, he first conquered Magadha, set up his provincial capital where the Mauryan capital had stood, and from this base consolidated a kingdom over the eastern portion of northern India. In addition, Chandragupta revived many of Ashoka's principles of government. It was his son, however, Samudragupta, and later his grandson, Chandragupta II, who extended the kingdom into an empire over the whole of the north and the western Deccan. Chandragupta II was the greatest of the Gupta kings; called Vikramaditya, he presided over the greatest cultural age in Classical India.This period is regarded as the golden age of Indian culture. The high points of this cultural creativity are magnificent and creative architecture, sculpture, and painting. The wall-paintings of Ajanta Cave in the central Deccan are considered among the greatest and most powerful works of Indian art. The paintings in the cave represent the various lives of the Buddha, but also are the best source we have of the daily life in India at the time. There are forty-eight caves making up Ajanta, most of which were carved out of the rock between 460 and 480, and they are filled with Buddhist sculptures. The rock temple at Elephanta contains a powerful, eighteen-foot statue of the three-headed Shiva, one of the principal Hindu gods. Each head represents one of Shiva's roles: that of creating, that of preserving, and that of destroying. The period also saw dynamic building of Hindu temples. All of these temples contain a hall and a tower.
The greatest writer of the time was Kalidasa. Poetry in the Gupta age tended towards a few genres: religious and meditative poetry, lyric poetry, narrative histories, and drama. Kalidasa excelled at lyric poetry, but he is best known for his dramas. We have three of his plays; all of them are suffused with epic heroism, with comedy, and with erotics. The plays all involve misunderstanding and conflict, but they all end with unity, order, and resolution.
The Guptas tended to allow kings to remain as vassal kings; unlike the Mauryas, they did not consolidate every kingdom into a single administrative unit. This would be the model for later Mughal rule and British rule built on the Mughal paradigm.
The Guptas soon faced a wave of migrations by the Huns, a people who originally lived north of China. The Hun migrations would push all the way to the doors of Rome. Beginning in the 400's, the Huns began to put pressure on the Guptas. They were initially defeated by Skandagupta. However, by 480 they conquered large parts of Northwestern India. Western India was overrun by 500, and the last of the Gupta kings, presiding over a vastly diminished kingdom, perished in 550. However, the Huns were soon defeated by Yasovarman and later Baladitya, scion of the Guptas. A strange thing happened to the Huns in India as well as in Europe. Over the decades they gradually assimilated into the indigenous population and their state weakened.
File:Hephthalite horseman on British Museum bowl 460-479 CE.jpg|thumb|The depiction of a Hepthalite horseman who were defeated by Skandagupta from the British Museum.
Harsha, who was a successor of the Guptas, quickly moved to reestablish an Indian empire. From 606 to 647, he ruled over an empire in northern India. Harsha was perhaps one of the greatest conquerors of Indian history, and unlike all of his conquering predecessors, he was a brilliant administrator. He was also a great patron of culture. His capital city, Kanauj, extended for four or five miles along the Ganges River and was filled with magnificent buildings. Only one-fourth of the taxes he collected went to administration of the government. The remainder went to charity, rewards, and especially to culture: art, literature, music, and religion
Because of extensive trade, the culture of India became the dominant culture around the Bay of Bengal, profoundly and deeply influencing the cultures of Burma, Cambodia, and Sri Lanka. In many ways, the period during and following the Gupta dynasty was the period of "Greater India", a period of cultural activity in India and surrounding countries building on the base of Indian culture. This medieval flowering of Indian culture would radically change course in the Indian Middle Ages. From the north came Muslim conquerors out of Afghanistan, and the age of Muslim rule began in 1100.