Gopala Was Made King of Bengal in the Mid-8th Century, According to His Son's Copper Plate, and the Pala Dynasty He Founded Backed Nalanda, Vikramashila and the 177-Cell Monastery at Paharpur

The Pala dynasty ruled Bengal and Bihar for about four centuries from the middle of the 8th century, according to Banglapedia, the encyclopaedia of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh. Its earliest long record came out of the ground by accident. A farmer ploughing a paddy field near the village of Khalimpur, close to Gaur in Bengal’s Malda district, turned up a single copper plate, and a civil servant named Dinesh Chandra Batavyal bought it from the farmer’s widow in November 1893. Franz Kielhorn of Göttingen edited it for Epigraphia Indica in 1896 to 1897 and called it the earliest extensive record of the dynasty found so far.

Made king, the plate says, to end the rule of the fishes

King Dharmapala issued it in his 32nd year from his royal camp at Pataliputra, now Patna. Its seal shows a wheel on a pedestal with a deer on either side, and its text calls Dharmapala a devout worshipper of Sugata, a name for the Buddha. Yet the grant itself went to a Vishnu temple. At the request of a chief named Narayanavarman, the king gave four villages in the Pundravardhana province to a temple of Narayana, a name of Vishnu. Banglapedia notes that the Palas, though Buddhists, also gave land and high posts to Hindu temples and Brahmins.

Verse 4 covers Dharmapala’s father. In Kielhorn’s translation, Gopala was a king “whom the people made take the hand of Fortune, to put an end to the practice of fishes.” Kielhorn’s note explains the phrase: a lawless state in which everyone was the prey of his neighbour. Upinder Singh reads the plate as saying Gopala was elected by the people, ending a spell of chaos that followed the death of King Shashanka around 637.

Banglapedia adds a caution. Prakriti, the Sanskrit word Kielhorn renders as “the people,” can also mean the principal officers, so who did the choosing is not settled. Romila Thapar sets the plate beside the Tibetan monk Taranatha, who wrote in 1608. His story has local leaders electing a king again and again, each killed by a demoness the night after, until Gopala was given a club by the goddess Chandi. Thapar reads it as a tale of a man chosen for his ability to protect, not a hereditary claim. For Gopala’s reign Banglapedia gives about 25 years, c. 756 to 781, while Thapar dates the dynasty’s founding to about 770.

Dharmapala and the fight for Kannauj

Singh dates Dharmapala to 770 to 810 and Banglapedia to about 781 to 821. Both agree on a rough start and a strong finish. Singh says he first lost to the Pratiharas and Rashtrakutas, then held a durbar at Kannauj, the city Harsha had made his capital, and installed a nominee named Chakrayudha. That contest among Palas, Pratiharas and Rashtrakutas for the city is called the tripartite struggle. Banglapedia places a Rashtrakuta victory over both Dharmapala and the Pratihara king Vatsaraja around 790.

On the Pala side, the Khalimpur plate says Dharmapala installed the king of Kanyakubja, as Kannauj was also called, “with a sign of his gracefully moved eye-brows” and with the approval of the Bhojas, Matsyas, Madras, Kurus, Yadus, Yavanas, Avantis, Gandharas and Kiras. Kielhorn points to the Bhagalpur plate of the later king Narayanapala, which says Dharmapala took Kannauj from an enemy named Indraraja and handed it to Chakrayudha. Banglapedia warns that the Khalimpur verse is poetry and that no other source confirms Dharmapala’s supremacy over the listed peoples. Singh’s reading is that Bengal and Bihar were his own, Kannauj a dependency, and the rest of the north a matter of acknowledged sovereignty.

In the end the Pratiharas won the city. Thapar writes that they took Kannauj from the Rashtrakutas, who had taken it from the Palas, and that Bhoja, the best known Pratihara, then held back both the Arabs and the Palas.

Devapala and five villages for Nalanda

Devapala’s Monghyr plate, from his 33rd year, has its own history. Colonel Watson found it at Monghyr in Bihar around 1780, and Charles Wilkins translated it in 1781. It was published in 1788, and Kielhorn believed it was the first Sanskrit inscription ever brought to the notice of European scholars. It has since been lost, so Kielhorn edited it from a printed lithograph. Its text names Devapala’s mother as a daughter of Parabala of the Rashtrakuta family and calls him Dharmapala’s son. Kielhorn notes that later Pala inscriptions call him Dharmapala’s brother’s son, a difference the sources leave open.

Devapala’s own inscriptions, Singh says, boast of tribute from the Himalayas to the Vindhyas, victories over the Utkalas, the conquest of Pragjyotisha, the humbling of the Hunas and the breaking of the pride of the Dravidas and Gurjaras. Banglapedia adds that the stock phrase of rule up to the mountain where the Ganga descends may not be literal. Singh dates Devapala to 810 to 850 and Banglapedia to about 821 to 861.

Hirananda Sastri of the Archaeological Survey found Devapala’s charter at Nalanda itself, in the portico of a monastery he was clearing. In Sastri’s translation, dated in year 39, Balaputradeva, king of Suvarnadvipa, had built a monastery at Nalanda and asked Devapala, through envoys, to endow it. The verses call Balaputradeva a Sailendra ruler of Yavabhumi (Java), and Sastri treats who the Sailendras were as an open question. Devapala gave five villages for the monks’ food, robes, bedding and medicines, for copying Buddhist texts and for repairs. Thapar links Pala support for Nalanda and the newer monasteries to Buddhist trade partners in Southeast Asia. Nalanda has its own article, and the arguments about whether centres like it were universities in the modern sense are in that piece and the one on Takshashila.

Vikramashila, and the teacher who went to Tibet

Singh writes that Tibetan tradition credits Dharmapala with founding the monastery at Vikramashila, identified with Antichak in Bhagalpur district, Bihar. Taranatha says the king built about fifty centres for the Buddhist teaching, among them Vikramashila on a hillock above the Ganga, with 108 temples and 108 scholars supported. Taranatha is a late and uneven source, giving Dharmapala 64 years, well past the inscriptions. Alaka Chattopadhyaya notes that a Tibetan colophon has been read as crediting Devapala, a reading she calls doubtful. Singh adds that Tibetan tradition ascribes the nearby Odantapuri monastery to Dharmapala as well, though other sources name Devapala or Gopala.

Digging has confirmed the size, though not the founder. Goutami Bhattacharya, Superintending Archaeologist of the Archaeological Survey’s Patna Circle, is quoted as saying its 1972 to 1982 excavation at Antichak revealed a huge square monastery. On 18 February 2024 the Press Trust of India reported that the Survey had resumed digging on 8 February, the first work there in about 42 years.

Atisha was the best known resident, and Tibetan lives place him at Vikramashila as its senior teacher. In Chattopadhyaya’s account the Tibetan chronicler ‘Gos lo-tsa-ba has him leave India for Tibet in 1040 and die there in 1054, while another reckoning puts his arrival in 1042. Tibetan lives name either Mahipala or Nayapala as the king who appointed him. In Tibet he wrote the Bodhipathapradipa, 66 verses, at the request of the Tibetan ruler Byang-chub-‘od. Dikshit adds that the Tibetan life of Atisha has him living for years at Somapura, the Paharpur monastery.

177 cells at Paharpur

Banglapedia’s entry on the Palas calls Paharpur the largest Buddhist vihara in the Indian subcontinent. K. N. Dikshit, who oversaw the Archaeological Survey’s digging there every season from 1926 to 1927, counted 177 cells around a courtyard, 45 on the north side and 44 on each of the others. Banglapedia gives the square as about 274 metres on a side, with a cruciform temple at the centre and more than 2,000 terracotta plaques still on its walls.

Clay seals found in the ruins gave the monastery its name. Dikshit reads them as issued by the community of monks of the great monastery of Somapura founded by Dharmapala. Tibetan tradition credits Devapala, and Dikshit judges it really his father’s work. Dikshit also notes that the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who described the region in the 7th century, mentions nothing like it, and he concludes that no monastery stood there then. On the temple basement Banglapedia counts 63 stone sculptures, almost all Brahmanical deities and one Buddhist image.

A Nalanda inscription adds a later chapter. Sastri translates it as saying that a monk of Somapura, Karunasrimitra, was burnt to death when a Bengal army set fire to his house. A later monk of the same Mitra line, Vipulasrimitra, records masonry work at Somapura and a temple of Tara. It does not say whose army it was or why it came.

UNESCO’s advisers at ICOMOS recommended Paharpur under three criteria, I, II and VI. In 1984 the World Heritage Committee had deferred it pending assurances about mining near the site. ICOMOS welcomed the Bangladesh Education Ministry’s letter of 14 August 1985, noted a buffer zone being acquired, and asked for immediate inscription. Banglapedia gives the inscription year as 1985.

Bronzes and painted manuscripts

Pala-era art survives in metal and on palm leaf. Bihar’s tourism department says a hoard of 226 bronzes was found at Kurkihar, near Gaya, in 1930, with inscriptions naming the Pala kings Devapala, Rajyapala and Mahipala. New York’s Metropolitan Museum holds a 12th-century Pala-period Tara from Bihar in bronze with silver inlay, 12.4 centimetres high.

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has a painted palm-leaf folio from an Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita manuscript. Its colophon records a gift by a lay devotee, Udaya Sinha, in the 36th year of King Ramapala, about 1120, and the museum thinks it probably came from Nalanda. Taranatha names two artists of Dharmapala’s and Devapala’s time, Dhiman of Varendra and his son Bitpalo, who cast metal, engraved and painted. Commentary in the Taranatha translation notes that surviving works show no clear difference between father’s and son’s styles.

How the dynasty ended

Singh says Pala power declined from the late 9th century and revived under Mahipala I in the late 10th. Thapar writes that Mahipala reached Varanasi but turned back to defend Bengal when Rajendra Chola’s northern march threatened it, an episode covered in the article on Rajendra Chola. Ramapala, who reigned over 40 years in Banglapedia’s account, recaptured northern Bengal after the Kaivarta rebellion, which Thapar says was barely put down.

Then the Senas, a family of Karnataka origin, took the east. Thapar adds that patronage of Buddhism declined in the late Sena period, and Dikshit reasons that the Sena revival of Brahmanical worship and the 13th-century Muslim occupation brought the monastery at Paharpur to its end. Banglapedia says Madanapala lost northern Bengal after his eighth year, 1152 to 1153, and credits Vallalasena with the final blow in Magadha, since Govindapala lost his kingdom in 1160.