Bengal, the early 700s. For the better part of a century there has been no king anyone obeys. Every chief fights every other; the strong swallow the weak.
People have a name for it: matsyanyaya, the law of the fishes, where the big fish eat the small.
And then the chiefs of Bengal do something remarkable. They agree on one man, and make him king.
That man was Gopala, and the dynasty he founded around 750 CE, the Palas, would rule Bengal for four hundred years. At its height the Pala empire stretched across the Gangetic plain to Kannauj, its monasteries drew students from Tibet to Sumatra, and its poets wrote the oldest Bengali that survives.
Before the Palas: Shashanka of Gauda
The first great king of Bengal was Shashanka, who ruled Gauda in the early seventh century from his capital at Karnasuvarna, near today’s Murshidabad. He was a match for the mighty Harshavardhana of Kannauj, and Buddhist writers of Harsha’s side, the pilgrim Xuanzang among them, painted him as a villain. Historians treat those accounts with caution.
Many historians link Shashanka to the Bengali calendar: the Bangabda era begins in 593–594 CE, which some take to be the start of his reign. Others credit the Mughal emperor Akbar with the calendar’s reform. When Shashanka died, Bengal fell into the chaos the Palas would end.
Gopala: the chosen king
A copper plate issued by Gopala’s son, found at Khalimpur, says Gopala was made king by the prakriti, the people, to end matsyanyaya. Historians think it was most likely the chieftains, not the whole population, who chose him. Even so, a king who owed his throne to agreement rather than conquest was rare in the eighth century, and Bengal is proud of it.
Dharmapala and Devapala: an empire across the north
c. 750–770
Gopala founds the dynasty and brings order to Bengal.
c. 770–810
Dharmapala fights for Kannauj, the prize of north India, against the Pratiharas and the Rashtrakutas, and puts his own man on its throne. He founds the monastery of Vikramashila and is credited with the great Somapura Mahavihara at Paharpur.
c. 810–850
Devapala takes the empire to its height. A king of Sumatra and Java, Balaputradeva, asks him for land at Nalanda for a monastery, and he grants it.
c. 988–1036
Mahipala I recovers lost territory and revives the dynasty.
late 1000s
A revolt led by Divya, a Kaivarta chief, kills a Pala king and seizes Varendra in north Bengal. Ramapala wins it back; the poet Sandhyakar Nandi tells the story in Ramacharita.
1100s
The Palas fade, and the Senas take Bengal.
Atisha, the Bengali who crossed the Himalayas
The most famous scholar of Pala Bengal was Atisha Dipankara Srijnana, born in Bikrampur, near Dhaka, in the late tenth century. A teacher at Vikramashila, he travelled to Tibet in his sixties at the invitation of its rulers, spent the rest of his life there and helped shape Tibetan Buddhism. He is still revered in Tibet today.
The first Bengali: the Charyapada
In 1907 the scholar Haraprasad Shastri, searching the royal library in Kathmandu, found a palm-leaf manuscript of songs by Buddhist siddhas, the mystic poets of the Pala age. These songs, the Charyapada, are written in the earliest form of Bengali anyone has found. Every Bengali book, from Tagore to today’s newspaper, descends from them.
Pala Bengal also produced a school of sculpture all its own: figures carved in smooth black stone and cast in bronze, with a grace that influenced art from Nepal to Java. The Indian Museum in Kolkata has some of the finest.
The Senas: Jayadeva’s kings
The Senas came, by their own account, from Karnataka in the south, and served the Palas before replacing them. Vijayasena reigned for over sixty years in the 1100s; his son Ballalasena took Gauda and is remembered in tradition for organising the kulin system of caste ranking. The last great Sena, Lakshmanasena (c. 1179–1206), kept a court of poets, among them Jayadeva, whose Gita Govinda, the love songs of Radha and Krishna, is sung across India to this day.
Eighteen horsemen
Around 1203–04, a Turkish general of the Ghurid sultans, Bakhtiyar Khalji, rode into Nadia, where the old king Lakshmanasena was staying. According to the chronicler Minhaj-i-Siraj, he arrived with just eighteen horsemen, so few that they were taken for horse traders, and reached the palace gate before anyone raised the alarm. The king, at his meal, slipped out by a back door and fled to east Bengal.
The main army arrived soon after, and Bengal passed to the Delhi Sultanate. The Senas held on in east Bengal for a few more decades, but the age that began with Gopala was over.
Where to see this age today
- The Indian Museum, Kolkata, for Pala stone and bronze sculpture.
- Jagjivanpur, Malda, where archaeologists excavated a Pala monastery, the Nandadirghika mahavihara, along with a copper plate of the Pala king Mahendrapala.
- Karnasuvarna (Rajbaridanga), Murshidabad, the site of Shashanka’s capital and of the Raktamrittika monastery.
- Gaur, Malda, capital under the Senas and later the Sultans. Most of the ruins you see there, such as the Bara Sona Masjid, are from the later Sultanate.
- The great Pala monasteries themselves lie outside West Bengal: Vikramashila and Nalanda in Bihar, Somapura (Paharpur) in Bangladesh.