Ancient Universities of India: Nalanda, Takshashila, PYQs

Long before the first modern college opened in India, the subcontinent ran great residential centres of learning where students from Central Asia, China, Tibet, Korea and South-East Asia came to study. Three of them are asked about again and again: Takshashila in the north-west, Nalanda in Magadha and Vikramashila in eastern Bihar. They were not universities in the present sense, with faculties and degrees, but mahaviharas and teacher-centred schools where admission depended on an entrance test and teaching was free, paid for by villages granted by kings. The examinable material is the pairing of each centre with its founder, its patron dynasty, its famous teachers and students, its foreign visitors and the manner of its decline.

Takshashila

Takshashila, written as Taxila in Greek and English sources, stood in the region of Gandhara, in the Rawalpindi district of present-day Pakistan. It was already a famous seat of learning by the sixth century BCE, in the age of the Buddha, and it belonged to the Mahajanapada of Gandhara. It had no central administration: a student attached himself to a particular teacher, paid in service rather than fees, and left when the teacher declared his course complete. Its subjects were the three Vedas and the eighteen arts, with medicine, archery, military science, law, astronomy and accountancy among them. Tradition links Panini, the grammarian of the Ashtadhyayi, Kautilya, the author of the Arthashastra and the mentor of Chandragupta Maurya, and Jivaka, the physician of the Magadhan king Bimbisara, to Takshashila. The city fell to repeated invasions and was finally ruined in the fifth century CE by the Hunas. Its mounds were excavated in the twentieth century under Sir John Marshall, and the site was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1980.

Nalanda

Nalanda stood in Magadha, near Rajgir in the present Nalanda district of Bihar. It was founded as a mahavihara by the Gupta ruler Kumaragupta I in the fifth century CE and was enlarged by later Guptas, by Harshavardhana of Kannauj in the seventh century and by the Pala kings of Bengal and Bihar afterwards. It was a residential monastic university of Mahayana Buddhism, though logic, grammar, medicine, astronomy and the philosophy of rival schools were taught as well, and an applicant had to satisfy the gatekeeper scholar before he was admitted. Its library, called Dharmaganja, is described in later accounts as three buildings named Ratnasagara, Ratnodadhi and Ratnaranjaka. The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who travelled in India in the reign of Harshavardhana, studied at Nalanda under the aged head of the monastery, Shilabhadra, and the pilgrim I-tsing stayed there in the later seventh century; both left descriptions of its routine. Nagarjuna, Aryadeva, Dharmakirti and Dharmapala are among the teachers associated with it. Nalanda was destroyed by the forces of Bakhtiyar Khalji at the end of the twelfth century. The excavated ruins were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016, and a modern Nalanda University was set up at Rajgir under an Act of Parliament of 2010.

Vikramashila

Vikramashila was founded by the Pala king Dharmapala about the turn of the ninth century, at Antichak in the Bhagalpur district of Bihar, and it is said to have been set up because standards at Nalanda were thought to be slipping. It specialised in tantric Buddhism, and its gates were guarded by scholars called dvarapanditas, whose duty was to examine those who came to debate or to study. Its most famous teacher was Atisha Dipankara Srijnana, who left for Tibet in the eleventh century and reformed Buddhism there. Vikramashila too was destroyed by Bakhtiyar Khalji at the beginning of the thirteenth century, and its mound at Antichak was excavated in the twentieth century. With Odantapuri, founded by the first Pala king Gopala, and Somapura at Paharpur, also founded by Dharmapala, it formed the chain of Pala mahaviharas whose teachers carried Buddhism into Tibet.

What the ancient system looked like

Teaching in these centres was oral and based on debate; a student was tested at the gate before admission, lived in the monastery or with the teacher, paid nothing, and was supported by royal grants of revenue from villages. Degrees were not awarded, and reputation rested on public disputation with visiting scholars. The subjects mixed the sacred and the practical: the Vedas and the Buddhist canon alongside grammar, logic, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, metallurgy and statecraft. Besides the three famous centres, Valabhi in Gujarat under the Maitrakas, Kanchipuram in the south, Ujjain, Varanasi, Nagarjunakonda in Andhra, Pushpagiri in Odisha, Jagaddala in Bengal and the Sharada Peeth in Kashmir drew students from far away. The system weakened as royal patronage disappeared, as Buddhism itself declined in India, and finally with the destruction of the Bihar monasteries at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century, after which learning moved to smaller temple schools, mathas and madrasas.