Mahendrapala I’s conquest of Magadha and north Bengal

01Records in the Pala land

No account of a battle survives. The conquest is read from stone: inscriptions dated in the regnal years of Mahendrapala have been found at Ramgaya and Guneria near Gaya, at Itkhori in Hazaribagh, and at Paharpur in Varendra, the site of the Somapura Mahavihara founded by the Pala Dharmapala. Records of the Pala Narayanapala, meanwhile, vanish from Magadha for a span of years. Historians take this as a Pratihara occupation of Magadha and part of north Bengal.

02The empire at its height

Under Mahendrapala the Pratihara empire ran from Saurashtra, where his feudatories issued grants, to Bengal, the widest extent it ever reached. His court at Kanyakubja was a centre of Sanskrit and Prakrit letters; the poet and critic Rajashekhara, author of the Karpuramanjari and the Kavyamimamsa, calls himself the king’s teacher. The Palas recovered Magadha in the next generation, as Pratihara strength was spent against the Rashtrakutas.

Person · Reigned c. 836–885 CEMihira BhojaBhoja I, called Mihira and Adivaraha, ruled the Pratihara empire from Kanyakubja for nearly fifty years, from Haryana to Malwa and Kathiawar. An Arab merchant who visited India in 851 called his the finest cavalry in the land and his country the safest from robbers.Read →