Matsya

The kingdom

Matsya lay west of the Yamuna in the country around modern Jaipur and Alwar, one of the smaller of the sixteen great realms and the only one of them west of the Doab apart from the northwestern polities. Its capital Virāṭanagara is identified with Bairat, where excavation has revealed an early historic town and a circular Buddhist shrine.

Bairat carries two Aśokan inscriptions, including the Bhābrū edict in which the emperor names specific Buddhist texts he commends to the monks — one of the few places where an Aśokan inscription engages with doctrine rather than with conduct.

In the Mahābhārata

The Virāṭaparvan, the fourth book of the epic, is set entirely at the Matsya court: the Pāṇḍavas take service there in disguise for the thirteenth year of their exile, Yudhiṣṭhira as a courtier, Bhīma as a cook, Arjuna as a dance teacher in women's dress, and Draupadī as a queen's attendant. The book ends with the cattle raid in which Arjuna's identity is revealed on the last permitted day.

Matsya then fights on the Pāṇḍava side, and its king Virāṭa and his sons are killed in the war.

Afterwards

Matsya disappears as an independent state during the Magadhan expansion and is subsequently part of the Mauryan empire, as the Bairat edicts show. The name persisted regionally and was revived in 1948 for a short-lived union of four princely states in the same country, before its merger into Rajasthan.