The epic city
In the Mahabharata, Hastinapura is the capital of the Kuru kingdom, named after an ancestor, Hastin. It is the court where the Kaurava and Pandava cousins grow up, where the dice game is played, and where Yudhishthira rules after the war. The Puranas add that a later king, Nichakshu, moved the capital to Kaushambi after the Ganges washed Hastinapura away.
The excavations
Between 1950 and 1952 the archaeologist B. B. Lal excavated a large mound at Hastinapura as part of a project to test the archaeology of the epic sites. He found a sequence of five periods. Period II was a settlement of the Painted Grey Ware culture, a grey pottery with black painted designs widespread in the upper Ganges valley in the early first millennium BCE, associated with houses of mud and mud brick, and with domestic animals including horses. This period ended with a flood that cut away part of the mound, after which the site was abandoned for a time. Lal dated the flood to around 800 BCE.
Lal argued that the flood matched the Puranic tradition of Hastinapura being washed away, and that the Painted Grey Ware sites, found at many places named in the epic, represented the material culture of the epic period. His dating and the identification have been widely discussed. Other archaeologists have accepted the link between Painted Grey Ware and the later Vedic Kuru-Panchala region while cautioning that an epic composed and expanded over centuries cannot be tied to a single archaeological layer.
Later periods
Lal's project went on to sample other places named in the epic, among them Ahichchhatra, Mathura, Kurukshetra and Kampilya, and found Painted Grey Ware at many of them. In the 1970s he directed a similar project for the Ramayana sites. These excavations set the terms of a debate that continues: how far the archaeology of the Ganges valley can be used to test the geography and chronology of the epics.
After the gap, the site was reoccupied in the period of Northern Black Polished Ware and continued into the early historic and medieval periods. The town declined after the medieval period.
Jain Hastinapura
Hastinapura is an important place of pilgrimage for Jains. By Jain tradition the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth tirthankaras, Shantinatha, Kunthunatha and Aranatha, were born there, and the first tirthankara, Rishabhanatha, broke his year-long fast there when King Shreyamsa offered him sugarcane juice, an event commemorated in the festival of Akshaya Tritiya. Modern Jain temples, including a large model of the Jain cosmos, the Jambudvipa, have been built in the town.
Further reading
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
- Brockington, John. The Sanskrit Epics. Brill, 1998
- Chakrabarti, Dilip K. The Oxford Companion to Indian Archaeology. Oxford University Press, 2006
See also
- Kuru Kingdom — The Kuru Kingdom was both a historically attested late Vedic polity of the upper Ganga-Yamuna doab, centred on Hastinapura and Kurukshetra, and the legendary ruling lineage of the Mahabharata, tracing descent from the Chandravansha (lunar dynasty).
- Janapadas after the Kurus — The Janapadas were the polities of Iron Age North India that succeeded the Vedic-era Kuru kingdom, sixteen of which, the Mahajanapadas, dominated the subcontinent before Magadha absorbed them into the first pan-Indian empire.
- Jainism — Jainism is an Indian religion holding that every living thing possesses an eternal soul bound by karma, and that liberation is reached through non-violence, self-restraint and ascetic discipline.
- Tirthankara — A tirthankara is, in Jain belief, a liberated teacher who establishes the ford across the ocean of rebirth, twenty-four of whom appear in each half-cycle of time.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.