1. Situated in the northwestern delta north of the Padma River, Varendra included the territories now constituting the districts of Malda, Pabna, Rajshahi, Bogra, Dinajpur, and Rangpur. The Bhagirathi-Hooghly basin included several ancient cultural subregions—Suhma, Vardhamana, Raḍha, and Gauḍa—corresponding to the modern districts of Midnapur, Howrah, Hooghly, Burdwan, Birbhum, and Mur-shidabad. Ancient Vanga, or Central Bengal, included the area corresponding tothe modern districts of Dhaka, Faridpur, Jessore, Bakarganj, Khulna, Nadia, andTwenty-four Parganas. Samatata included the hilly region east of the Meghna River in the southeastern delta, corresponding to modern Comilla, Noakhali, and Chittagong. Harikela referred to the delta’s northeastern hinterland, including modern Mymensingh and Sylhet. On the ancient subregions of Bengal, see Barrie M. Morrison, Political Centers and Cultural Regions in Early Bengal (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1970), esp. ch. 4, and Susan L. Huntington, The “Pala-Sena” Schools of Sculpture (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 171. For a discussion of Bengal’s physical subregions, see O. H. K. Spate and A. T. A. Learmonth, India and Pakistan: A General and Regional Geography, 3d ed. (London: Methuen, 1967), 571–73. [BACK]

2. Aitareya Brāhmaṇa 7.6, cited in S. K. Chatterji, Origin and Development of the Bengali Language (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1926), 1: 62. [BACK]

3. These include the Āyāraṃa Sutta and Gaina Sūtras, cited in Chatterji, Origin and Development, 1: 71. [BACK]

4. Chatterji, Origin and Development, 1: 67. [BACK]

5. P. C. Das Gupta, The Excavations at Pandu Rajar Dhibi (Calcutta: Directorate of Archaeology, West Bengal, 1964), 14, 18, 22, 24, 31. The site is located on the southern side of the Ajay River, six miles from Bhedia. The archaeological record reveals prehistoric rice-cultivating communities living all along the middle Gangetic Plain. Excavations in the Belan Valley south of Allahabad have found peoples cultivating rice (Oryza sativa) as early as the middle of the seventh millennium B.C., which is the earliest-known evidence of rice cultivation in the world. G. R. Sharma and D. Mandal, Excavations at Mahagara, 1977–78 (a Neolithic Settlement in the Belan Valley), vol. 6 of Archaeology of the Vindhyas and the Ganga Valley, ed. G. R. Sharma (Allahabad: University of Allahabad, 1980), 23, 27, 30. [BACK]

6. Ram Sharan Sharma, Material Culture and Social Formations in Ancient India (New Delhi: Macmillan India, 1983), 118. [BACK]

7. See Arlene R. K. Zide and Norman H. Zide, “Proto-Munda Cultural Vocabulary: Evidence for Early Agriculture,” in Austroasiatic Studies, ed. Philip N. Jenner, Laurence C. Thompson, and Stanley Starosta, pt. 2 (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1976), 1324. The authors show that Munda terms for uncooked, husked rice (Oryza sativa) have clear cognates in the language’s sister Austroasiatic branch, Mon-Khmer. They also conclude that “the agricultural technology included implements which presuppose the knowledge and use of such grains and legumes as food, since, the specific and consistent meanings for ‘husking pestle’ and ‘mortar’ go back, at least in one item, to Proto-Austroasiatic.” [BACK]

8. Te-Tzu Chang, “The Impact of Rice on Human Civilization and Population Expansion,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 12, no. 1 (1987): 65. [BACK]

9. Spate and Learmonth, India and Pakistan, 47. [BACK]

10. Romila Thapar, From Lineage to State: Social Formations in the Mid-First Millennium B.C. in the Ganga Valley (Bombay: Oxford University Press, 1984), 68. Although fire could have been used for clearing forests of their cover, permanent field agriculture required the removal of tree stumps, for which the use of iron axes and spades would have been necessary. Sharma, Material Culture, 92. [BACK]

11. Sharma, Material Culture, 92–96. [BACK]

12. Ibid., 96–99. [BACK]

13. Michael Witzel, “On the Localisation of Vedic Texts and Schools,” in India and the Ancient World: History, Trade and Culture before A.D. 650, ed. Gilbert Pollet (Leuven: Departement Oriëntalistiek, 1987), 173–213; and id., “Tracing the Vedic Dialects,” in Dialectes dans les littératures Indo-Aryennes, ed. Colette Caillat (Paris: Collège de France, Institut de civilisation indienne, 1989), 97–265. [BACK]

14. Romila Thapar, “The Image of the Barbarian in Early India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 13, no. 4 (October 1971): 417. The text is the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. [BACK]

15. These include the Mārkaṇdeya Purāṇa and the Yajṅavalkya Smṛti 3.292. Cited in Thapar, “Image,” 417. [BACK]

16. For example, the eastern frontier of Indo-Aryan country in the ṛg Veda was the Yamuna River; in the Paippalāda Saṁhitā, it was Kasi (Benares region); in the Saunakīya Saṁhitā, it was Anga (eastern Bihar); and in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (7.18), it was Pundra, or northern Bengal. See Witzel, “Localisation,” 176, 187. [BACK]

17. Today modern Bengali, an Indo-Aryan language, is surrounded on all sides by a number of non-Indo-Aryan language groups—Austroasiatic, Dravidian, Sino-Tibetan—suggesting that over the past several millennia the non-Indo-Aryan speakers of the delta proper gradually lost their former linguistic identities, while those inhabiting the surrounding hills retained theirs. On the other hand, the survival of non-Indo-Aryan influences in modern standard Bengali points to the long process of mutual acculturation that occurred between Indo-Aryans and non-Indo-Aryans in the delta itself. Such influences include a high frequency of retroflex consonants, an absence of grammatical gender, and initial-syllable word stress. As M. H. Klaiman observes, “descendants of non-Bengali tribals of a few centuries past now comprise the bulk of Bengali speakers. In other words, the vast majority of the Bengali linguistic community today represents present or former inhabitants of the previously uncultivated and culturally unassimilated tracts of eastern Bengal.” M. H. Klaiman, “Bengali,” in The World’s Major Languages, ed. Bernard Comrie (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 499, 511. See also Chatterji, Origin and Development, 1: 79, 154; and F. B. J. Kuiper, “Sources of the Nahali Vocabulary,” in Studies in Comparative Austroasiatic Linguistics, ed. Norman H. Zide (Hague: Mouton, 1966), 64. For a map showing the modern distribution of the Bengali and non-Indo-Aryan languages in the delta region, see Joseph E. Schwartzberg, ed., A Historical Atlas of South Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 100. [BACK]

18. Cited in Witzel, “Localisation,” 195. [BACK]

19. Colin P. Masica, “Aryan and Non-Aryan Elements in North Indian Agriculture,” in Aryan and Non-Aryan in India, ed. Madhav M. Deshpande and Peter E. Hook (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1979), 132. [BACK]

20. This is not to say that anything resembling today’s caste system suddenly appeared at this early date, although the ideological antecedents for that system are clearly visible in this framework. [BACK]

21. See Thapar, From Lineage to State, chs. 2 and 3. Some of the new cities and states included Campa of Anga, Rajghat of Kasi, Rajgir of Magadha, and Kausambi of Vatsa. It has been suggested that the new urbanized areas appeared so suddenly because of competition among former Indo-Aryan lineage groups for wealth and power, which in turn created a need for centralized political systems that could sustain war efforts. See George Erdosy, “The Origin of Cities in the Ganges Valley,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 28, no. 1 (February 1985): 96–103. [BACK]

22. Northern Black Polished ware has been discovered in Chandraketugar in the Twenty-four Parganas, Tamluk in Midnapur, Bangarh and Gaur in Malda, Mahasthan in Bogra, and Khadar Pather Mound and Sitakot in Dinajpur. See Clarence Maloney, “Bangladesh and Its People in Prehistory,” Journal of the Institute of Bangladesh Studies 2 (1977): 17. [BACK]

23. Ramaranjan Mukherji and Sachindra Kumar Maity, Corpus of Bengal Inscriptions Bearing on History and Civilization of Bengal (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1967), 39–40. [BACK]

24. Gayatri Sen Majumdar, Buddhism in Ancient Bengal (Calcutta: Navana, 1983), 11. [BACK]

25. R. C. Majumdar, History of Ancient Bengal (Calcutta: G. Bharadwaj & Co., 1971), 522–23. See Schwartzberg, ed., Historical Atlas, 18, 19. [BACK]

26. Puspa Niyogi, Brahmanic Settlements in Different Subdivisions of Ancient Bengal (Calcutta: R. K. Maitra, 1967), 4, 19–20. [BACK]

27. As D. D. Kosambi noted, Brahman rituals were accompanied by “a practical calendar, fair meteorology, and sound-working knowledge of agricultural technique unknown to primitive tribal groups which never went beyond the digging-stock or hoe.” D. D. Kosambi, “The Basis of Ancient Indian History,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 75, pt. 1 (1955): 36. See also ibid., pt. 4, 236n. Kosambi was the first to observe that “the major historical change in ancient India was not between dynasties but in the advance of agrarian village settlements over tribal lands, metamorphosing tribesmen into peasant cultivators or guild craftsmen.” Ibid., 38. [BACK]

28. A similar process has been noted for neighboring Assam. Analyzing inscriptions of the fifth to thirteenth centuries, Nayanjot Lahiri notes “an irresistible correlation between the peasant economy and the principles involved in the caste structure in Assam. There is no group of tribesmen in this region which has not involved itself in the caste structure in some form or the other after the adoption of wet rice cultivation. In the process of detribalisation and their inclusion in the traditional Hindu fold the Brahmins were extremely significant. Detribalization involved, among other things, a renunciation of tribal forms of worship and the acceptance of traditional Hindu gods and goddesses.” Nayanjot Lahiri, “Landholding and Peasantry in the Brahmaputra Valley c. 5th-13th centuries A.D.,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 33, no. 2 (June 1990): 166. [BACK]

29. Although most Pala copper plates from ca. 750 to ca. 950 were issued from Magadha in modern Bihar, literary sources place the dynasty’s original home in Varendra, over which the Palas continued to exercise authority until the mid twelfth century. Majumdar, History of Ancient Bengal, 99, 159. [BACK]

30. Ahbar as-Sin wa l-Hind: Relations de la Chine et de l’Inde, trans. Jean Sauvaget (Paris: Société d’édition “Les Belles Lettres,” 1948), 13. [BACK]

31. Mas‘udi, Les Prairies d’or [Murūj al-dhahab], trans. Barbier de Meynard and Pavet de Courteille, corrected by Charles Pellat (Paris: Société asiatique, 1962), 1: 155. “Dans le royaume du Dharma [i.e., Pala], les transactions commerciales se font avec des cauris (wada‘), qui sont la monnaie du pays. On y trouve le bois d’aigle (‘ūd), l’or et l’argent; on y fabrique des étoffes d’une finesse et d’une délicatesse inégalées. Les Indiens mangent sa [i.e., the elephant’s] chair, et ils sont imités par les Musulmans qui habitent ce pays, parce qu’il est de la même espèce que les boeufs et les buffles.” [BACK]

32. Sauvaget, Ahbar as-Sin wa l-Hind, 13; Mas‘udi, Prairies 1: 155. [BACK]

33. M. R. Tarafdar, “Trade and Society in Early Medieval Bengal,” Indian Historical Review 4, no. 2 (January 1978): 277. The evidence for Chandra coinage is based on a horde of about 200 silver coins discovered at Mainamati “in a level,” writes A. H. Dani, “which clearly belongs to the time of the Buddhist Chandra rulers of East Bengal, who had their capital at Vikramapura.” The mint-place given on some of these coins is Pattikera, the name of a village still extant in Comilla District. See Dani, “Coins of the Chandra Kings of East Bengal,” Journal of the Numismatic Society of India 24 (1962): 141; Abdul Momin Chowdhury, Dynastic History of Bengal, c. 750–1200 A.D. (Dacca: Asiatic Society of Pakistan, 1967), 163 and n.5. See also Bela Lahiri, “A Survey of the Pre-Muhammadan Coins of Bengal,” Journal of the Varendra Research Museum 7 (1981–82): 77–84. [BACK]

34. Frederick M. Asher, The Art of Eastern India, 300–800 (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1980), 91. [BACK]

35. Barrie M. Morrison, Lalmai, a Cultural Center of Early Bengal: An Archaeological Report and Historical Analysis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974), 27. For a discussion of Buddhist civilization in ancient Samatata, see Puspa Niyogi, “Buddhism in the Mainamati-Lalmai Region (with Reference to the Land Grants of S. E. Bengal),” Journal of the Varendra Research Museum 7 (1981–82): 99–109. [BACK]

36. Haroun er Rashid, “Some Possible Influences from Bengal and Bihar on Early Ankor Art and Literature,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh 22, no. 1 (April 1977): 9–19. [BACK]

37. For example, Dharmapala’s son Devapala (812–50) received an envoy from the Buddhist king of Srivijaya in Java-Sumatra, who requested the Pala king to grant a permanent endowment to a Buddhist monastery at Nalanda. Similarly, during the reign of Ramapala (1072–1126), the ruler of the Pagan Empire in Burma, Kyansittha (d. ca. 1112), sent a considerable quantity of jewels by ship to Magadha for the purpose of restoring the Buddhist shrines in Bodh Gaya. Hirananda Shastri, “The Nalanda Copper-Plate of Devapaladeva,” Epigraphia Indica 17 (1924): 311–17. Janice Stargardt, “Burma’s Economic and Diplomatic Relations with India and China from Early Medieval Sources,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 14, no.1 (April 1971): 57. [BACK]

39. Notes by Chinese pilgrims in Bengal attest to the drop in the number of Buddhist monasteries there, and also to the emergence of Brahmanic temples. Writing in the early fifth century, Fa-hsien counted twenty-two monasteries in Tamralipti. Two centuries later, Hsüan-tsang counted just ten monasteries there, compared with fifty Brahmanic temples. By 685, the number of monasteries in Tamralipti had dropped to just five or six, as recorded by the pilgrim I-Ching. A similar pattern held in North Bengal (Varendra), where Hsüan-tsang counted twenty monasteries and a hundred Brahmanic temples, and in southeast Bengal (Samatata), where he counted thirty monasteries and a hundred temples. The decline in court patronage of monasteries might not have been so serious, however, had there been a fervent and supportive Bengali Buddhist laity. But what is conspicuously absent in the history of East Indian Buddhism as recorded by Taranatha, a Tibetan monk who wrote in 1608, is any evidence of popular enthusiasm for the religion. Rather, the author seems to have identified the fate of Buddhism with that of its great monasteries. The withdrawal of court patronage for such institutions thus proved fatal for the religion generally. See Chinese Accounts of India: Translated from the Chinese of Hiuen Tsiang, trans. Samuel Beal (Calcutta: Susil Gupta, 1958), 4: 403, 407, 408; A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practiced in India and the Malay Archipelago (A.D. 671–695) by I-Ching, trans. J. Takakasu (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1966), xxxiii; and Taranatha’s History of Buddhism in India, ed. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (Calcutta: K. P. Bagchi & Co., 1980), xiii-xiv. [BACK]

40. Huntington, “Pala-Sena” Schools, 179, 201. Most of the art patronized by Pala kings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries was Brahmanic in subject matter, with Vaishnava themes outnumbering the rest three to one. Ibid., 155. [BACK]

41. H. C. Ray, The Dynastic History of Northern India (Early Medieval Period), 2d ed. (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1973), 1: 354–58. [BACK]

42. Huntington, “Pala-Sena” Schools, 179, 201. [BACK]

43. Ronald Inden, “The Ceremony of the Great Gift (Mahādāna): Structure and Historical Context in Indian Ritual and Society,” in Marc Gaborieau and Alice Thorner, Asie du sud: Traditions et changements (Paris: Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1979), 131–36. [BACK]

44. Ibid., 133. [BACK]

45. Ibid., 134. See also Ronald Inden, “Hierarchies of Kings in Early Medieval India,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 15, nos. 1–2 (1981): esp. 121–25. [BACK]

46. Swapna Bhattacharya, Landschenkungen und staatliche Entwicklung im frühmittelalterlichten Bengalen (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1985), 165. [BACK]

47. Morrison, Political Centers, 108. [BACK]

48. See Nani Gopal Majumdar, Inscriptions of Bengal, vol. 3 (Rajshahi: Varendra Research Society, 1929), 52–53. [BACK]

49. Ibid., 54. [BACK]

50. Today, unfortunately, only a few architectural fragments remain of what must have been a magnificent edifice, situated at Deopara some seven miles northwest of Rajshahi town, on a road leading to Godagari. Ibid., 42, 54–55. [BACK]

51. Thus we read that Lakshmana Sena had made a donation of cultivated, tax-free lands “as fee for the ceremony of the Great Gift in which a golden horse and chariot were given away, on this auspicious day, after duly touching water and in the name of the illustrious god Narayana [Vishnu], for the merit and fame of my parents as well as myself, for as long as the moon, sun and the earth endure, according to the principle of Bhumichchhidra [tax-exempt status], to Iśvaradevaśarmman, who officiated as the Acharya [priest] in the ‘Great Gift of gold horse and chariot.” ’ Ibid., 104. [BACK]

52. Cited in Niyogi, Brahmanic Settlements, 41. [BACK]

53. Bhattacharya, Landschenkungen, 168. [BACK]

54. Morrison, Political Centers, 98. [BACK]

55. Ibid., 17, 99. Bhattacharya, Landschenkungen, 168. [BACK]

56. Morrison, Lalmai, 124. [BACK]

57. Spate and Learmonth, India and Pakistan, 575. [BACK]

58. Ibid., 63; Anil Rawat, “Life, Forests and Plant Sciences in Ancient India,” in History of Forestry in India, ed. Ajay S. Rawat (New Delhi: Indus Publishing Co., 1991), 246. [BACK]

59. Bhattacharya, Landschenkungen, 167–68. [BACK]

60. The Ganges cult is of great antiquity, and the associations of water with life, fertility, and the Goddess are traceable to the Indus Valley civilization. We know from the Arthaśāstra (4.3), composed between the fourth century B.C. and the third century A.D., that prayers were offered to the Ganges as a remedy for drought. By the sixth century, figures of the goddess Ganga figured prominently as guardians on temples of the Gupta dynasty (ca. 300–550 A.D.). Steven G. Darian, The Ganges in Myth and History (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1978), 88. [BACK]

61. S. C. Majumdar, Rivers of the Bengal Delta (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1942), 66. See also Surinder Mohan Bhardwaj, Hindu Places of Pilgrimage in India (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), 36–37, 81; Schwartzberg, ed., Historical Atlas, 34. [BACK]

62. Asher, Art of Eastern India, 99. Huntington, “Pala-Sena” Schools, 200. [BACK]