Ancient Bihar: Magadha, Mauryas, Guptas and Pataliputra

The land that is Bihar today was the political centre of ancient India for almost a thousand years. Magadha grew here from one of the sixteen mahajanapadas into the first empire of the subcontinent, and three capitals of that story, Rajagriha, Vaishali and Pataliputra, all stand in modern Bihar. Examiners come back to this topic every year because almost every fact in it is fixed: a ruler, a dynasty, a capital, a council, a pillar.

Why Magadha rose

Magadha lay in the present districts of Patna, Gaya, Nalanda and Jehanabad. It had iron ore in the hills to the south, rich alluvium along the Ganga, elephants from the forests and rivers that carried trade. Its first capital, Rajagriha or Girivraja, modern Rajgir, sits in a bowl of five hills and was naturally fortified. Later rulers moved to Pataliputra at the meeting of the Ganga and the Son, a water fort that could not easily be stormed. Magadha defeated in turn Kosala, the Vajji confederacy and Avanti, and by the fourth century BCE it had no rival in the north.

The dynasties before the Mauryas

The Haryanka dynasty under Bimbisara, a contemporary of both the Buddha and Mahavira, built the kingdom through marriage alliances with Kosala, Vaishali and Madra. His son Ajatashatru took the throne by killing him, fought a long war against the Lichchhavis of Vaishali and gave his patronage to the First Buddhist Council at Rajgir. Udayin shifted the capital to Pataliputra. The Shishunagas followed; Shishunaga annexed Avanti, and under Kalashoka the Second Buddhist Council met at Vaishali. The Nandas came next: Mahapadma Nanda, called Ekarat and the uprooter of all kshatriyas, built a huge army and treasury, and the unpopular Dhana Nanda was the ruler whom Chandragupta Maurya and Chanakya overthrew.

The Mauryan empire

Chandragupta Maurya founded the empire around 322 BCE with Chanakya, the author of the Arthashastra, as his guide. He defeated Seleucus Nicator, the Greek general who had taken Alexander's eastern provinces, and received territory in the north-west; Seleucus sent Megasthenes as ambassador to Pataliputra, and his account Indica describes the city as a long rectangle of wooden walls with many towers and gates. Chandragupta became a Jaina in his last years and is said to have fasted to death at Shravanabelagola in Karnataka with the monk Bhadrabahu. Bindusara, titled Amitraghata, held the empire and received another Greek envoy, Deimachus.

Ashoka, the third emperor, ruled from Pataliputra for about four decades in the third century BCE. His war on Kalinga, dated to about 261 BCE, is described in his own Thirteenth Rock Edict, the only inscription in the world in which a victorious king records his remorse. He then propagated dhamma, appointed dhamma mahamatras, sent missions abroad including his son Mahendra and daughter Sanghamitra to Sri Lanka, and hosted the Third Buddhist Council at Pataliputra under Moggaliputta Tissa. His edicts call him Devanampiya and Piyadasi. The Brahmi script of those edicts was deciphered by James Prinsep in 1837.

Mauryan remains in Bihar

Bihar keeps more Mauryan stone than any other state. Ashokan pillars stand at Lauriya Nandangarh and Lauriya Areraj in West Champaran, at Rampurva, and at Kolhua in Vaishali. Kumhrar in Patna has the plinth of an eighty-pillared hall of polished sandstone, and the Didarganj Yakshi, a life-size figure with the famous Mauryan polish, was found on the bank of the Ganga at Patna. The Barabar caves near Gaya, the oldest rock-cut caves in India, were cut in the time of Ashoka for Ajivika monks. The Lion Capital that India uses as its state emblem, however, comes from Sarnath in Uttar Pradesh, which is a standard trap in the paper.

From the Shungas to the Guptas

The last Mauryan, Brihadratha, was killed by his commander Pushyamitra Shunga around 185 BCE. The Shungas and then the Kanvas ruled a shrunken kingdom, and after the Kushanas and a long gap the Guptas made Pataliputra a capital again. Chandragupta I took the title Maharajadhiraja, married the Lichchhavi princess Kumaradevi and began the Gupta era counted from 319 to 320 CE. Samudragupta, whose achievements Harisena recorded on the Prayag or Allahabad pillar inscription, conquered from the Himalaya to the Deccan and was called the Indian Napoleon by V. A. Smith; his coins show him playing the veena. Chandragupta II Vikramaditya destroyed the Shaka power in the west, kept a second capital at Ujjain and received the Chinese pilgrim Fa-Hien. Kumaragupta I founded the Nalanda Mahavihara, and Skandagupta beat back the Hunas.

The classical achievement

The Gupta centuries are called the classical or golden age for their Sanskrit poetry, temple architecture, metallurgy and mathematics rather than for conquest. Aryabhata, who wrote the Aryabhatiya, worked at Kusumapura, the old name for Pataliputra, and the Nalanda Mahavihara that Hiuen Tsang later described drew students from across Asia. For an aspirant the Bihar thread is the point: the same soil carries Magadha's first fort, the Mauryan capital, Ashoka's pillars and the greatest university of the ancient world.