From an elected king in a lawless Bengal, the Pala Empire grew into northern India's dominant power and the last great Buddhist empire of the subcontinent. This is the story of Gopala, Dharmapala and Devapala, of the universities of Nalanda and Vikramashila — and of the long decline that ended with the Senas.
For almost four centuries, from the middle of the 8th century to the 12th, Bengal and Bihar were ruled by a single dynasty: the Palas. At its height in the early 9th century, the Pala Empire was the dominant power in northern India, its armies campaigning as far west as Kannauj and its overlordship acknowledged from Assam to Odisha. Yet the empire is remembered less for its conquests than for what it built and sustained: the great Buddhist monastery-universities of Nalanda, Vikramashila and Somapura, a school of sculpture and painting that shaped art from Nepal to Java, and a long tradition of religious toleration in a land where Buddhist kings endowed Brahmin priests and Hindu queens worshipped in Buddhist-founded cities. Historians count the Pala period among the golden ages of Bengali history.
The dynasty's story is also unusually well documented in its own voice — in copper-plate charters, pillar inscriptions and one remarkable Sanskrit poem — and unusually honest about its myths. The Palas were the last major Buddhist imperial power in India, and when they fell, the world they had maintained for four hundred years fell with them. This is how that world was made, and how it ended.
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The empire began in disorder. After the death of Shashanka, the powerful early 7th-century king of Gauda, Bengal broke apart into competing principalities. For more than a century the region knew no lasting overlord, and later sources remembered the period as matsyanyaya — "the law of the fish", in which the big fish devour the small. Independent chiefs ruled fragments of the country, and no single power could hold the delta.
Around 750 CE, the leading men of Gauda took a step that made the dynasty famous. According to the dynasty's own near-contemporary record, the Khalimpur copper plate of Gopala's son, the prakriti — the leading people of the land — "made Gopala take the hand of Lakshmi", the goddess of royal fortune: in plain terms, they chose him as king to put an end to the anarchy. Gopala, the son of a warrior named Vapyata, was no royal heir. He was, as far as the evidence goes, a successful military commander whom the chiefs of Bengal agreed to accept as their common ruler.
Later tradition turned this into something grander. The Tibetan historian Taranatha, writing some eight hundred years afterwards, described Gopala as democratically elected by the people of Bengal, and told a legend in which the chiefs' earlier choices were each killed on their first night by a serpent queen until Gopala slew her. Modern historians treat Taranatha's tale as legend: the "election" of Gopala was real, in the sense that he was raised to the throne by a consensus of feudal chiefs rather than by inheritance, but it was an act of the land's magnates, not a popular vote. Gopala spent his reign — conventionally dated to about 770 CE — consolidating Bengal under one rule, and tradition also credits him with founding the great monastery of Odantapuri in Bihar, though the attribution rests on later accounts rather than a surviving charter.
It was Gopala's son who made an empire of the kingdom. Dharmapala (reigned c. 770–810; some authorities, including Banglapedia, place his reign a decade later, c. 781–821 — Pala chronology is reconstructed from inscriptions and varies between scholars) took the full imperial titles Parameshvara, Paramabhattaraka and Maharajadhiraja, and carried Pala arms into the politics of all northern India.
His great arena was Kannauj, the symbolic capital of the north, contested for a century in the three-cornered Tripartite Struggle between the Palas, the Gurjara-Pratiharas of the west and the Rashtrakutas of the Deccan. Dharmapala's path there was not smooth: he was defeated first by the Pratihara king Vatsaraja and later worsted by the Rashtrakuta Govinda III. But he outlasted his reverses, occupied Kannauj, deposed its king Indrayudha and installed his own nominee, Chakrayudha, on its throne. The Khalimpur plate describes the imperial assembly he then held at Kannauj, attended by the rulers of much of northern India who bowed to the arrangement. For a moment, a king of Bengal was the arbiter of Hindustan.
Dharmapala's deeper legacy was built in peace. A devout Buddhist who kept the philosopher Haribhadra as his spiritual preceptor, he is credited with founding the monastery-university of Vikramashila in northern Bihar, with building the vast Somapura Mahavihara at Paharpur in what is now northern Bangladesh, and with restoring and richly patronising the older university of Nalanda. These foundations — like the Kannauj assembly — rest on strong and consistent tradition supported by archaeology and later inscriptions, even where no foundation charter survives.
Dharmapala's son Devapala (reigned c. 810–850 in the usual chronology) is generally regarded as the most powerful of the Pala kings. Under him the empire reached its greatest extent and its highest prestige. His inscriptions — the Monghyr copper plate and the Badal pillar record of his hereditary ministers — claim that his armies humbled the kings of Kamarupa in Assam and Utkala in Odisha and that his fame reached from the Himalayas towards the Vindhyan ranges. Court inscriptions are eulogies, and historians read them with care: the solid core of the claims is that Bengal and Bihar were ruled directly from the Pala court, while Assam and Odisha acknowledged a tributary overlordship, and Pala influence was felt across the northern plain.
Foreign observers confirm the scale of the power. The Arab merchant Sulaiman, whose account of India was written about 851 CE, knew the Pala kingdom as "Ruhma" — a name widely read as a rendering of "Dharma", from Dharmapala — and described it as a great state, at war with the Pratiharas and Rashtrakutas and rich in elephants and fine cloth. From the other end of Asia came another testimony: Devapala's Nalanda copper plate records that Balaputradeva, the Sailendra king of Suvarnadvipa — the Srivijaya world of Sumatra — had built a monastery at Nalanda for monks of his own country, and that Devapala granted five villages to maintain it. A Pala court that received endowments from Indonesia, appointed a scholar from Nagarahara in modern Afghanistan to head Nalanda, and was reported on by Arab merchants was plugged into every network of the Asian world.
The empire Devapala left was governed on lines inherited from the Guptas. The king stood at the head of a hierarchy of officials; the realm was divided into provinces called bhukti, subdivided into vishaya and mandala. The Badal pillar inscription preserves a striking detail: the prime ministership ran for generations in one Brahmin family — Garga, Darbhapani, Someshvara, Kedarmishra and Bhatta Guravamisra — a hereditary ministry serving Buddhist emperors, and a sign of how far administration was a matter of durable, semi-autonomous households rather than a centralised bureaucracy.
That was both the empire's strength and its structural weakness. The Palas ruled through samantas, feudatory chiefs who governed locally, maintained troops and owed service to the court; and they bound institutions to the throne with land grants, engraved on copper plates, to Brahmins, temples and above all to the great monasteries. The grants generated loyalty, learning and new cultivation, but every granted village was revenue the crown no longer collected directly, and every generation of samantas was a potential dynasty in waiting.
Prosperity rested on the delta's rice lands and on trade. Pala armies marched behind a famous corps of war elephants, and Pala ships served the Bay of Bengal in both war and commerce. Bengal's ports — Tamralipta above all, though its river was silting and its best days were passing, and the anchorages of the south-eastern coast near modern Chittagong that Arab writers knew — carried rice, textiles and pottery to Southeast Asia, while diplomats and monks moved between the Pala court, Tibet and the Abbasid world. One curiosity of the period, often noted by historians, is how little coinage the Pala kings themselves struck: in a rich agrarian economy lubricated by cowrie shells and regional currencies, the empire ran substantially on land, grants and kind.
The Palas were the last great imperial patrons of Buddhism in its Indian homeland. The kings professed Mahayana Buddhism, and in the later centuries Vajrayana — the Tantric form of the religion — flourished under their protection. But Pala patronage was never exclusive: the same kings who built monasteries granted villages to Brahmin scholars, and Hindu queens and ministers stood at the centre of the court. The religious toleration of the period is one of the features later Bengali historians, looking back from less tolerant times, praised most warmly.
Three institutions embodied the dynasty's devotion. Nalanda, founded under the Guptas centuries before the Palas, reached its greatest fame under their patronage, drawing students from China, Korea, Tibet and Southeast Asia. Vikramashila, Dharmapala's foundation on the Ganges in Bihar, became the empire's own university, celebrated for philosophy, logic and Tantric studies. And in Varendra, the Pala homeland of north Bengal, rose Somapura Mahavihara at Paharpur — a vast cruciform central shrine ringed by 177 monastic cells, among the largest monasteries anywhere south of the Himalayas and the architectural masterpiece of the age. Its ruins, in present-day Naogaon District, are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
From these universities, Pala Buddhism travelled. The most famous traveller was the Vikramashila teacher Atisha Dipankara Srijnana (982–1054), who journeyed to Tibet in 1042 and led a revival of Buddhism there. Because Indian Buddhism later vanished from the plains, it was in Tibet's monasteries — stocked with Pala texts, Pala images and Pala lineages — that the tradition the dynasty sponsored principally survived.
The monasteries generated one of the great art traditions of early medieval Asia: the Pala school. Its sculptors carved in a glossy black stone, producing serene Buddhas, bodhisattvas and Hindu deities framed by elaborately worked back-slabs; its bronze-casters, working by the lost-wax process at Nalanda and Kurkihar — where a hoard of more than two hundred bronzes has been unearthed — made images of a refinement that still anchors museum collections. The Tibetan historian Taranatha preserves the names of the age's master artists, Dhiman and his son Vitapala, painters, sculptors and bronze-founders at the courts of Dharmapala and Devapala.
Pala painters created something new: miniature painting. On the narrow leaves of palm-leaf manuscripts — above all copies of the Buddhist classic Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita, the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines — Pala artists painted small, luminous deities in sinuous line and subdued colour, producing some of the earliest miniature paintings in India. The terracotta plaques of Paharpur, meanwhile, show the other end of the culture: soldiers, lovers, farmers, acrobats and animals, a whole society modelled in clay on the monastery walls. Through monks and manuscripts, the Pala style travelled to Nepal, Tibet, Myanmar and island Southeast Asia; art historians can follow its line in the painting of Nepal and Tibet for centuries afterwards.
The empire's long second half was a story of ebb and rally. After Devapala, a disputed succession began a century of stagnation: five generations of kings held Bengal and Bihar but little more, and in the mid-10th century the Kamboja family carved out an independent domain inside the empire's own territory. Around the year 1000, however, Mahipala I (reigned c. 988–1038) restored the dynasty's fortunes so completely that Banglapedia calls him effectively its second founder. He recovered the lost provinces, refortified the kingdom and weathered the spectacular northern raid of the Chola emperor Rajendra I, whose inscriptions boast of victory on the Ganges but who came to plunder, not to stay. Mahipala's name lived for centuries in Bengali folk ballads — a rare immortality for a medieval king.
The end, when it came, came from inside. In the 1070s, under the weak Mahipala II, the feudatory order on which the empire rested turned against it: in the Varendra rebellion, the samantas rose, the Kaivarta chief Divya killed the king and seized north Bengal, and his successor Bhima held the Pala heartland as an independent ruler. Mahipala's brother Ramapala (reigned c. 1077–1120s), the last strong Pala emperor, spent years assembling a coalition of the very feudatories the crown could no longer command, then reconquered Varendra and killed Bhima — a campaign immortalised by his court poet Sandhyakara Nandi in the Ramacharitam, a Sanskrit poem that tells Ramapala's story and the epic hero Rama's in the same verses. Modern historians note the irony: Ramapala's victory proved the crown now survived only by courtesy of its vassals.
After Ramapala's death the disintegration could no longer be held. Province by province, the feudatories became kings. In the mid-12th century Vijayasena, founder of the Sena dynasty and himself a product of the Pala feudatory world, defeated the last Pala rulers of Bengal; Madanapala, the last known Pala emperor, lost northern Bengal and ended his reign confined to a fragment of Bihar. A shadow Pala line in Bihar flickers in the records until about 1161 — some reconstructions extend it to 1174 — and then disappears. The Hindu Sena kingdom that succeeded the Palas in Bengal would itself give way, two generations later, to the very different order of the Bengal Sultanate.
The Pala world outlived the Pala state only briefly. Within about fifty years of the dynasty's fall, the armies of Bakhtiyar Khalji swept through Bihar and sacked Nalanda, Vikramashila and Odantapuri, extinguishing the universities the Palas had sustained for four centuries. What survived was elsewhere — in Tibet's monasteries, in Nepal's art, in the bronze Buddhas and palm-leaf pages scattered through the world's museums, and in the brick terraces of Paharpur, where the cruciform shrine of Somapura still stands over the plain of Varendra: the monument of an empire that began with an election and ended as the last Buddhist empire of India.
