Reading Comprehension

The Pala empire, which ruled much of north-eastern India from the eighth to the twelfth century, has, like the Vijayanagara empire of a later period and a different region, occupied an oddly modest place in the standard narratives of medieval Indian history. The reasons are partly the same — modern historiography has organised the period around polities for which sources were more accessible to early modern scholars — and partly distinctive to the Pala case. The Palas were Buddhist in their court patronage at a time when Buddhism was, in much of the subcontinent, in retreat, and the framing through which medieval India has come to be presented has had less use for a major Buddhist polity than the surviving evidence might have warranted.

The empire's contribution to the broader Buddhist world was, by any reasonable accounting, substantial. Nalanda, Vikramashila, Odantapuri — the monastic universities whose names recur in the Tibetan sources — flourished under Pala patronage and produced teachers whose work shaped subsequent Buddhist scholarship in regions as far apart as Tibet, Java, and northern Bengal. Pala-period bronzes are recognisable across the eastern Indian Ocean trade routes; Pala-period manuscripts are among the principal surviving sources for several traditions of Indian Buddhist philosophy. The empire was not merely a regional state with religious sympathies; it was, for several centuries, the principal sustaining institution of a religious tradition with substantial international reach.

A second factor concerns how the empire has been read by historians whose own framings shaped what they emphasised. The category through which the Palas have most often been treated — 'the last great Buddhist kingdom in India' — has tended to organise the empire around its end. The narrative shape, with the Palas figuring as a prelude to Buddhism's twelfth-century decline in the region, has obscured what the empire actually was for most of its history: a prosperous, militarily capable polity whose Buddhist patronage was not a doomed last stand but an ordinary feature of its administration over several productive centuries.

The corrective work is not to deny the empire's eventual decline or the changing religious landscape in which it operated. It is to study the Palas on their own terms, attending to the administrative practices, the patronage of monastic universities, the diplomatic and trade relations that sustained the empire across centuries, rather than reading the four-hundred-year history backwards through the lens of its end. That work has, of late, begun to be done. It has yet to displace the older framings in which the Pala empire continues to appear, when it appears at all, as a brief Buddhist footnote.