Who ruled Patna?

Patna, the capital of the state of Bihar in India, stands on the south bank of the Ganges near its meeting with the Son and Gandak rivers. As ancient Pataliputra it was the capital of the kingdom of Magadha and of the two great empires of early India, the Mauryas and the Guptas, and in the third century BCE it was among the largest cities in the world. Abandoned and later revived, it is today a city of over three million people.

According to Buddhist tradition, Ajatashatru, king of Magadha, fortified a village called Pataligrama on the Ganges around 490 BCE, moving his base from the hill city of Rajagriha to fight the Licchavis of Vaishali. The same texts say the Buddha passed through in the last year of his life and foretold the town's greatness, as well as its ruin by flood, fire and feud. Jain and Hindu sources credit Ajatashatru's son Udayin with making it the capital of Magadha. Archaeological evidence for urban growth here, however, is generally no earlier than the fourth or third century BCE. Under the Shishunaga and Nanda dynasties the city remained the seat of an expanding kingdom.

Pataliputra reached its height under the Maurya Empire, founded by Chandragupta Maurya around 320 BCE. The Greek envoy Megasthenes, who lived there, described a city stretching along the river for about ten miles, enclosed by a broad moat and a wall with 570 towers and 64 gates; Strabo added that the walls were of timber, and stretches of a wooden palisade several kilometres long have been found by archaeologists. Modern estimates of its population under Ashoka range from about 150,000 to 400,000. Ashoka, a great builder, may have replaced much of the wooden palace with stone, and the palace remains show decorative influences from Achaemenid Persia. Buddhist texts record that a Buddhist council met in the city during his reign.

After the Mauryas the city served the Shunga dynasty and later the Gupta Empire, from about 320 CE. The Chinese pilgrim Faxian, visiting around 400, found its people prosperous and praised its free hospitals for the poor.

By the time Xuanzang visited in 637, the old city lay in ruins, with only a small walled town of perhaps a thousand people by the river. Historians suggest several causes: the Ganges changing course away from the city, a fall in trade, a great flood on the Son river recorded in a Jain text, and possibly destruction by Huna invaders in the early sixth century. The Pala kings of the ninth century knew the place as a river port and camp, but at Kumhrar excavations have found no sign of settlement from about 600 until the 1600s. Bakhtiyar Khalji's conquest of Bihar in the twelfth century ended whatever prestige remained.

The city was refounded in the mid-sixteenth century by Sher Shah Suri, who built a fort and a mosque that still stands and gave the town the name Patna. Under the Mughal Empire it became a thriving provincial centre, famous for paper, glass and its rice; Akbar came there in 1574 to subdue the Afghan chief Daud Khan. In 1704 Aurangzeb allowed his grandson Azim-ush-Shan, the governor, to rename it Azimabad. Guru Gobind Singh, the tenth Sikh Guru, was born in Patna in 1666, and the city remains a major Sikh pilgrimage site.

European traders arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the Portuguese had a factory there by 1580, and the English East India Company opened one in 1620 to deal in cotton cloth, silk and later saltpetre. As Mughal power waned the city passed to the Nawabs of Bengal. In 1763 Nawab Mir Qasim had around 45 Company employees and 200 sepoys put to death in the Patna massacre, and after the Battle of Buxar in 1764 the Company gained the right to collect the revenues of Bengal and Bihar. Patna came under direct Company rule in 1793. When Bengal was divided in 1912 it became capital of the new province of Bihar and Orissa.

The city took part in the independence movement, including the Quit India campaign of 1942, and remained capital of Bihar after 1947 and after Jharkhand was separated in 2000. Much of ancient Pataliputra still lies under the modern city, with excavated remains at Kumhrar, Bulandi Bagh and Agam Kuan.