Ancient Uttar Pradesh: Mahajanapadas and Buddhist Sites

Ancient Uttar Pradesh is the heart of the northern plain, and almost every stage of early Indian history left a site in it. For an examination the topic breaks into three blocks: the early excavated settlements, the mahajanapadas with their capitals, and the Buddhist and Jain places. Each block is asked as a pairing of a name with a place, so the facts below are arranged that way.

The earliest settlements

Alamgirpur in Meerut district, on the Hindon river, is the eastern most site of the Harappan civilisation. Koldihwa in the Belan valley near Prayagraj and Lahuradewa in Sant Kabir Nagar have given some of the earliest evidence of cultivated rice in the subcontinent. Mesolithic burials and tools come from Sarai Nahar Rai, Mahadaha and Damdama in the Pratapgarh and Prayagraj tract. Later, the Painted Grey Ware culture of the iron age is known from Hastinapur in Meerut, Atranjikhera in Etah and Ahichchhatra in Bareilly, the sites that connect the archaeology of the plain with the later Vedic age.

The mahajanapadas of Uttar Pradesh

The Buddhist text Anguttara Nikaya lists sixteen mahajanapadas, and the Jain Bhagavati Sutra gives a similar list. Of these, several lay wholly or partly in modern Uttar Pradesh. Kashi had its capital at Varanasi, Kosala at Shravasti with Saketa or Ayodhya as a second centre, Vatsa at Kaushambi near Prayagraj, whose famous ruler was Udayana, Surasena at Mathura, Panchala at Ahichchhatra in the north and Kampilya in the south, Malla at Kushinara, and the Kuru country reached Hastinapur in Meerut. Magadha, by contrast, lay to the south of the Ganga in what is now Bihar, and it was Magadha that finally absorbed Kashi, Kosala and Vatsa.

Buddhism in Uttar Pradesh

The Buddha was born at Lumbini in the Nepal tarai, but the greater part of his preaching life was spent in the country that is now Uttar Pradesh. He delivered his first sermon, the setting in motion of the wheel of law, in the deer park at Sarnath near Varanasi to five ascetics. He passed most of the rainy season retreats at Shravasti, where the merchant Anathapindika built the Jetavana monastery for the order. He preached at Kaushambi, where the Ghositarama monastery stood, and at Sankisa in Farrukhabad, and he attained mahaparinirvana at Kushinagar in the Malla country, a death traditionally dated to 483 BCE. Four of the eight great places of Buddhist pilgrimage, Sarnath, Shravasti, Sankisa and Kushinagar, therefore lie in Uttar Pradesh. Ashoka raised a pillar at Sarnath whose Lion Capital was adopted as the State Emblem of India on 26 January 1950, and the wheel from its abacus stands at the centre of the national flag.

Jainism in Uttar Pradesh

Jain tradition places the birth of five tirthankaras, beginning with Rishabhanatha or Adinatha, at Ayodhya. Parshvanatha, the twenty third tirthankara and the predecessor of Mahavira, was born at Varanasi, and three tirthankaras are linked with Hastinapur. Mathura was a great Jain centre, and the mound of Kankali Tila there has yielded the remains of a Jain stupa and a mass of inscribed images. Deogarh in Lalitpur preserves a large group of Jain temples of later centuries. Under the Kushanas, Mathura became a second capital and the home of the Mathura school of sculpture in red sandstone, while in the Gupta age Sarnath developed its own school in cream Chunar sandstone and the brick temple of Bhitargaon in Kanpur was built.