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HistoriCity: How Patna’s importance continued across centuries
Patna, one of the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities, is named after a trumpet-shaped yellow flower (Patali). Over 2,000 years ago, it transformed from a village (Pataligrama) into an imperial capital. Puranic legends ascribe its founding to King Putraka, who named it after his queen Patali, following the birth of their firstborn son.
Historical evidence suggests Ajatshatru (5th century BCE), the patricidal son of Bimbisara of the Haryanka Dynasty, likely founded the city. Ajatshatru, believed to have been a contemporary of Mahavira and the Buddha, shifted his capital from Rajgir to Pataligrama, and its name changed to Pataliputra.
The relevance over centuries
Patna remains important in today's politics as the capital of Bihar. It was the setting for one of the most significant events in independent India—socialist leader Jayprakash Narayan's student-led movement against corruption. The movement evolved into a challenge to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's government in the 1970s.
Ashoka, India's first emperor (268 BCE-232 BCE), and the greatest until Akbar (16th century), emerged from the same region, known as Magadh, for most of its over 2500-year history. Born to King Bindusara and Subhadrangi, Ashoka unified kingdoms and regions. He brought a large swathe of the subcontinent under Magadh's domination.
Historian Romila Thapar writes in her seminal work, ‘Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas', that the impetus to crafts was one of the more important results of the political unification of India under the Mauryas, and the control of a strong centralised government. “With the improvement of administration, the organisation of trade became easier and the crafts gradually assumed the shape of small-scale industries.”
The Shungas, Kanvas, Mitras, and Mahameghavahanas followed in quick succession after the decline of the Mauryas around 185 BCE. The Guptas (3rd- 6th CE) matched the Mauryas in scale and size. Bengal's Palas (8th-12th CE) managed to maintain some of Pataliputra's importance. It was one of several important cities within their kingdom. The others were Gauḍa, Vikramapura, Munger, and Tāmralipta.
Loss of political centrality
Bakhtiar Khilji's campaign hastened the Pala Empire's disintegration (12th century) as Patna slipped away from the political centre stage into the fringes. North India's power centers shifted to Allahabad, Agra, and Delhi. But Patna remained a provincial centre of river and land trade due to its strategic location near the confluence of the Ganga, Son, Gandak, and Punpun rivers.
Afghan noble Sher Shah Suri chose Patna in the 16th century as he sought to establish the capital of his fledgling and ultimately short-lived kingdom. He revived its fortunes. Patna's peak had passed long ago in the 7th century. But its location still afforded it the status of a market town or a Pattana.
Patna remained an important regional center through the Sultanate (13th-16th CE) and the Mughal (16th-19th CE) periods. In 1704, Emperor Aurangzeb's son, Azim-us-Shan, renamed it Azimabad as the provincial governor.
The Colonial Patna
The British East India Company, its French, Portuguese, and other European counterparts, were vying for Bihar's cotton, calico, saltpetre, and other goods in less than a century. The British eventually prevailed before their authority was challenged. The British retook Patna after a massacre in 1763. Their presence was cemented after the 1764 Battle of Buxar.
William Fullerton, a surgeon who eventually returned to Scotland with over 30,000 pounds as his personal fortune, was, by all accounts, the sole British survivor of the massacre of British captives at Patna on October 5, 1763. He had survived the Black Hole tragedy in which dozens of Britishers died of suffocation in Calcutta in 1756.
The Patna massacre (at least 45 Britishers and over 200 Indians were killed) remained a marginal footnote in both Patna's and the general colonial history. J M Bulloch and C O Skelton write in their monograph, Lieutenant John Gordon of the Dundurcus family Massacred at Patna 1763, that the trouble arose through their interference with the local conditions in the sacred name of civilisation. “In 1761, we replaced the famous Mir Jaffir [Jafar], Nawab of Murshidabad, by his son-in-law, Mir Kassim [Qasim], who, we imagined, would prove more pliable for our purpose,” they wrote. “But so far from being grateful, he declined to play the puppet or to let the strings be pulled by us. He soon let us see that he had a will of his own, and that he cherished dreams of independence.”
A British deserter, Walter Reinhardt (nicknamed Sombre due to his dark complexion), led the assault against the British captives. He is held responsible for it along with Qasim in a commemorative inscription in Patna. The inscription notes, “In the memory of [names of the dead Englishmen follow], who with many other captives were on the nights of the fifth or sixth, and the eleventh of October 1763 brutally massacred near this spot by the troops of Mir Kasim, Nawab Subadar of Bengal under command of Walter Reinhardt, alias Samru, a base renegade”.
Reinhardt joined the British forces in the first half of the 18th century. He deserted the British in Madras and joined the French. Reinhardt left them and worked for the Swiss in Calcutta before entering the army of Nawab Safdarjung of Awadh. A skilled military man proficient in artillery and modern techniques, Reinhardt, whom the Indians called Sumroo, was never short of work. The Muslim chiefs of Purnea employed him in the aftermath of the Battle of Plassey.
The British and their collaborators deposed Siraj-ud-Daulah of Bengal after this battle in 1753. They replaced him first with Jafar and then with Qasim, who ultimately became their arch-enemy. Qasim and his other allies, Raja Balwant Singh (Banaras), Shuja-ud-Daulah (Awadh), and Shah Alam II, the Mughal emperor, lost to the British East India Company. Qasim died in obscurity in 1773, and Reinhardt a year later, after working for the Jat king Jawahir Singh and receiving the rights to Sardhana, a small principality near Meerut, from emperor Shah Alam.
HistoriCity is author Valay Singh's column narrating the story of a city in the news, going back to its documented history, mythology, and archaeological digs. The views expressed are personal.
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Source: HindustanTimes
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