The first Bengal kingdom
Śaśāṅka established an independent kingdom in Bengal around 590 CE with its capital at Karṇasuvarṇa, near modern Murshidabad, and extended it west into Magadha and Odisha. This is the first time Bengal appears as a unified political actor rather than as a frontier of some other power, and the name Gauḍa attaches to the region afterwards.
He was involved in the killing of Rājyavardhana of Thanesar and in the seizure of Kannauj, which made him Harṣa's principal enemy and is why he appears at all in the northern sources.
The persecution charge
Xuanzang and the Buddhist tradition portray Śaśāṅka as having cut down the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya, destroyed a Buddha image and expelled monks from Magadha. Bāṇa, writing for Harṣa's court, is equally hostile on political grounds.
Both sources are those of his enemies, which is a standing problem with the evidence. Against them, Śaśāṅka's own coins and a copper-plate grant show conventional Śaiva patronage without any indication of a programme, and the Bodhi tree survived — Xuanzang describes it standing. Historians differ on how much of the charge to accept; treating it as an established fact goes beyond what the sources support, and dismissing it entirely goes beyond them in the other direction.
After
Śaśāṅka died around 637 and his kingdom did not survive him. Bengal then entered the period the Pāla records call mātsyanyāya, the law of the fishes, in which the strong devoured the weak — a century of disorder ended when the chiefs of the region, according to the Khalimpur plate, elected Gopāla as king and founded the Pāla dynasty.
Further reading
- Coedes, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. University of Hawaii Press, 1968
- Dimock, Edward C. The Place of the Hidden Moon. University of Chicago Press, 1966
- Hawley, John Stratton. A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement. Harvard University Press, 2015
- Samuel, Geoffrey. The Origins of Yoga and Tantra. Cambridge University Press, 2008
- Sen, Tansen. Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade. University of Hawaii Press, 2003
See also
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.