The Pallavas and Palas: Temples and Learning

A recurring trap in this chapter is crediting Nalanda's founding to the Pala dynasty. It is not theirs: archaeological excavation traces Nalanda's monasteries to the Gupta period, three centuries before the Palas patronised and expanded it into the centre of religious sculpture it became. The Buddhist institution the Palas actually founded was Vikramashila, built new under Dharmapala rather than inherited from an earlier dynasty. A second, equally common trap is assuming Dravida temple architecture, the pyramidal towered style seen at Thanjavur's Brihadishvara temple, began with the Cholas. It did not: the earliest developed examples of the style are the seventh-century rock-cut shrines and the Shore Temple at Mahabalipuram, built by the Pallavas three centuries before Rajaraja Chola commissioned Thanjavur's great temple. Getting this sequence right, which dynasty founded which institution, and which dynasty originated which architectural style before a later empire perfected it, is what this chapter actually tests.

Regional Kingdoms of Medieval India, covered elsewhere on this site, already works through the Gurjara-Pratiharas, the Rashtrakutas, the Chandelas and the Paramaras of Malwa in real depth; this note covers the Pallavas and the Palas instead, the two dynasties from this chapter's own aliases that note does not touch.

The Pallavas: South India's early temple-builders

The Pallava dynasty ruled southern India from the early fourth century to the late ninth century CE. Its origins lie in the Deccan: the Pallavas began as subordinates of the Satavahanas there, moved into Andhra, and eventually settled at Kanchi, modern Kanchipuram in Tamil Nadu, where they became rulers in their own right. Kanchipuram then served as the Pallava capital from the third to the ninth century, a run long enough that the city later served as a Chola government headquarters too, once the Cholas succeeded the Pallavas as the dominant southern power. Genealogy in the dynasty's earliest phase is disputed, but two data points are reasonably firm: a Prakrit record mentions King Vishnugopa, defeated and then released by the Gupta emperor Samudragupta around the middle of the fourth century, and the Sanskrit Lokavibhaga records a later king, Simhavarman, reigning from 436 CE.

The Pallavas rapidly adopted Tamil ways and are described as the emperors of the Dravidian country. Their rule combined commercial enterprise, a limited colonising presence in Southeast Asia, and patronage across faiths: Buddhism, Jainism and the Brahminical tradition all received Pallava support, alongside music, painting and literature. Kanchipuram itself carried that reputation into its early years as a Jain and Buddhist centre of learning, well before it became one of the seven sacred cities of later Hindu tradition.

Mahendravarman I (reigned roughly 600 to 630) did more than any single ruler to establish the dynasty's artistic reputation. Born a Jain, he converted to Shaivism, and some of the most ornately carved monuments at Mamallapuram, especially those dedicated to Shiva, date to his reign. He introduced what the art historian Gabriel Jouveau-Debreuil later called the "Mahendra style" to Dravidian architecture, and he was a playwright as well as a patron: his Sanskrit farce Mattavilasa-prahasana (around 620), "The Delight of the Drunkards," survives and pointedly mocks Buddhist monastic life. His reign was also one of constant warfare, fought against the Western Chalukyas of Badami under Pulakeshin II.

His successor, Narasimhavarman I, also called Mahamalla or Mamalla (reigned roughly 630 to 668), reversed some of that military pressure directly: he captured Vatapi, the Chalukya capital, avenging the earlier Pallava defeat, and sent two naval expeditions from Mahabalipuram across to Sri Lanka to help the exiled king Manavamma regain his throne there, a rare direct instance of Pallava naval reach beyond the subcontinent. The five rathas at Mahabalipuram, monolithic temples carved to resemble processional chariots, were built during his reign, and the town itself later took his title, Mamallapuram, "the city of Mamalla."

Mahabalipuram (Mamallapuram) is the dynasty's most tested legacy. Founded as a Pallava port city on the Coromandel coast, its Group of Monuments was carved out of rock across the seventh and eighth centuries and inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1984. UNESCO's own description groups the site into five categories. The mandapas are rock-cut cave temples, introduced as an innovation under Narasimhavarman I, including the Varahamandapa and the Mahishamardhini cave, richly carved with figures such as Mahishamardhini, Bhuvaraha and Durga. The rathas are the five monolithic "chariot" temples described above. The rock reliefs, created chiefly under Mamalla's reign, include the famous Arjuna's Penance and the Descent of the Ganges, a giant open-air bas-relief UNESCO calls a unique artistic achievement comparable only to the sculpture at Elephanta. The structural temples, built later under King Rajasimha (Narasimhavarman II), culminate in the celebrated Shore Temple, a granite structure facing the Bay of Bengal that represents the most fully realised early example of a Dravida vimana. Excavated remains, uncovered as shifting sand has been cleared from around the Shore Temple over time, have added further structures and sculpture to the site in recent decades.

The architectural significance runs deeper than any single monument. Dravida, or South Indian, temple architecture, the style built around a square sanctuary crowned by a pyramidal, stepped tower, traces its origins to the Gupta period, but its earliest surviving developed examples are precisely these seventh-century rock-cut shrines at Mahabalipuram and the Shore Temple itself, dated to around 700. That places Pallava Mahabalipuram roughly three centuries ahead of the style's most celebrated later expression, the Brihadishvara temple built at Thanjavur around 1003 to 1010 under the Chola king Rajaraja I. The Pallavas did not simply build fine temples; they established the architectural grammar that a later, larger southern empire would go on to perfect.

Pallava power did not survive as a paramount southern force much beyond this architectural peak. Constant conflict with the Western Chalukyas drained the dynasty even as its temple-building programme flourished, and although later Pallava kings recovered some lost ground, the dynasty could not permanently withstand pressure from the Deccan. The Pallava dominions passed to the Chola kings by around 880.

The Palas: Buddhist patronage in Bengal and Bihar

The Pala dynasty ruled Bihar and Bengal from the eighth to the twelfth century, and unlike the Pallavas' slow crystallisation out of Satavahana subordination, its founding moment is unusually well documented for the period, thanks to a specific inscription.

Gopala, the dynasty's founder, rose to power in the mid-eighth century out of a documented condition of disorder. The Khalimpur copperplate inscription of Gopala's son and successor Dharmapala describes the state of Bengal before Gopala's rise as one of matsyanyaya, literally "the law of the fish," a condition in which the strong devoured the weak in the absence of any stable ruler. The inscription's own verse credits Gopala with ending this matsyanyaya by taking "the hand of Lakshmi," royal fortune, at the instance of the prakrti, a Sanskrit term scholars read as either the general populace or the region's principal officers; either reading points to some form of election or acclamation rather than straightforward conquest, though the exact mechanism remains debated. Gopala ruled for roughly twenty-five years, from around 756 to 781, long enough to consolidate a base his son could expand from.

Dharmapala (reigned roughly 770 to 810) greatly expanded the kingdom his father had stabilised and, for a period, controlled Kannauj itself, the prize at the centre of the long tripartite struggle fought between the Palas, the Rashtrakutas and the Gurjara-Pratiharas for control of the Gangetic heartland (the Pratihara side of that same struggle, including Nagabhata II's eventual capture of Kannauj, is covered in the Regional Kingdoms of Medieval India note referenced above). Dharmapala's successor, Devapala (reigned roughly 810 to 850), held Pala power at this peak, carrying out raids into the north, the Deccan and the peninsula and asserting Pala authority in the east.

The Palas are remembered above all as patrons of Buddhism. It was through missionaries sent out from their kingdom that Buddhism was finally established in Tibet, and a distinctive Pala school of religious art, in stone and cast metal sculpture, developed under their patronage and survives in real quantity today. Two Buddhist institutions carry that patronage most concretely, though they relate to the Palas in different ways worth keeping straight.

Nalanda, southwest of Bihar Sharif in central Bihar, is often loosely credited to the Palas, but this overstates their role. Archaeological excavation by the Archaeological Survey of India traces the foundation of Nalanda's monasteries to the Gupta period, in the fifth century CE, well before the Pala dynasty existed; the seventh-century ruler of Kannauj, Harshavardhana, is also recorded as a contributor, and the Chinese pilgrims Xuanzang and Yijing both left detailed accounts of the community there in the same century. What the Palas genuinely did was keep Nalanda flourishing: it continued as a major centre of learning under Pala patronage across the eighth to twelfth centuries and became, under that patronage, a noted centre of religious sculpture in stone and bronze. The site was sacked during Muslim raids on Bihar around 1200 and never recovered; its ruins were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.

Vikramashila, by contrast, was a genuine Pala foundation. Tibetan tradition credits its founding directly to Dharmapala, who is known to have carried the honorific title Vikramashiladeva, the epithet the institution's own name preserves; a contemporary Sanskrit text, Sarvajnamitra's Sragdhara-stotra, independently refers to the establishment as Shrimad Vikramashiladeva Mahavihariya. Its location has been identified archaeologically at Antichak in Bihar's Bhagalpur district, where excavation has uncovered a large monastic complex, roughly 330 metres square, with some 208 monastic cells arranged around a courtyard, a large chaitya, and a separate structure suspected to have served as a manuscript library, its walls fitted with ventilation channels to protect palm-leaf texts from damp. Construction work continued from the early ninth century into the twelfth. According to the Tibetan historian Taranatha, around a thousand monks resided there at its height, studying across 58 constituent institutions under roughly 108 resident scholars, with a particular reputation for Tantric Buddhist studies. Its most consequential alumnus was Dipankara Srijnana, known to history as Atisha, who translated his own works into Tibetan and became one of the central figures in transmitting Buddhism to Tibet, the same missionary current the Palas' Buddhist patronage is remembered for more broadly.

Pala power did not hold at this level indefinitely. It weakened after Devapala, with the Gurjara-Pratihara emperor Mahendrapala pushing as far as northern Bengal by the early tenth century, before Mahipala I (reigned roughly 988 to 1038) restored Pala strength as far as Varanasi. Ramapala (reigned roughly 1077 to 1120), the dynasty's last genuinely important king, strengthened Pala authority in Bengal and extended it into Assam and Odisha, and is remembered as the hero of a Sanskrit historical poem, the Ramacharita of Sandhyakara. After his death the dynasty was eclipsed by the rising Sena dynasty, though a residual Pala presence continued to rule in southern Bihar for a further forty years. The dynasty's main capital across much of this period was Mudgagiri, modern Munger, in eastern Bihar.

Where the Cholas fit

The Pallava dominions passed to the Chola kings by around 880, and the Cholas went on to build the most celebrated expression of the Dravida temple style the Pallavas had originated, the Brihadishvara temple at Thanjavur, completed around 1003 to 1010 under Rajaraja I, followed by the equally grand temple his son Rajendra I built at Gangaikondacholapuram around 1025. The Cholas also contended with the Deccan powers that had worn down the Pallavas and the Pratiharas alike, and by the mid-tenth century a Rashtrakuta king, Krishna III, was campaigning as far as Kanchipuram itself, a campaign covered from the Rashtrakuta side in the Regional Kingdoms of Medieval India note. A full treatment of Chola administration, its village assemblies, its temple economy, and its naval reach into Southeast Asia belongs to a separate, dedicated chapter on the Chola empire elsewhere on this site; what matters here is only the continuity, that the architectural and, in time, the political centre of gravity in the Tamil country passed from the Pallavas' Kanchipuram to the Cholas' river-basin heartland, without the underlying temple-building tradition itself resetting to zero.

Quick revision points

• Pallavas: ruled southern India, early 4th to late 9th century CE, capital at Kanchipuram (Kanchi) from the 3rd to 9th century. Emperors of the Dravidian country; patrons of Buddhism, Jainism and the Brahminical tradition.
• Mahendravarman I (c. 600 to 630): introduced the "Mahendra style" to Dravidian architecture; wrote the Sanskrit farce Mattavilasa-prahasana (c. 620); fought the Western Chalukyas under Pulakeshin II.
• Narasimhavarman I (Mahamalla/Mamalla, c. 630 to 668): captured the Chalukya capital Vatapi; sent naval expeditions to Sri Lanka to restore King Manavamma; built the five rathas at Mahabalipuram.
• Mahabalipuram (Mamallapuram): Pallava port city, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1984. Mandapas (rock-cut caves), rathas (5 monolithic chariot temples), rock reliefs (Arjuna's Penance, Descent of the Ganges), and the structural Shore Temple, built later under King Rajasimha (Narasimhavarman II).
• Dravida temple architecture's earliest developed examples are these 7th-century Pallava monuments, roughly three centuries before the Cholas' Brihadishvara temple at Thanjavur (c. 1003 to 1010).
• Pallava dominions passed to the Cholas by around 880.
• Palas: ruled Bihar and Bengal, 8th to 12th century, main capital at Mudgagiri (Munger). Founded by Gopala (c. 756 to 781), who ended a documented state of matsyanyaya (lawlessness), per the Khalimpur copperplate inscription of Dharmapala.
• Dharmapala (c. 770 to 810): controlled Kannauj for a period, one side of the tripartite struggle with the Rashtrakutas and Gurjara-Pratiharas (Pratihara side covered in Regional Kingdoms of Medieval India). Devapala (c. 810 to 850): raided the north, Deccan and peninsula.
• Nalanda: founded in the Gupta period (5th century), not by the Palas; flourished as a learning centre under Pala patronage (8th to 12th century); a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2016.
• Vikramashila: genuinely founded by Dharmapala, at Antichak, Bhagalpur district, Bihar; produced the scholar Dipankara Srijnana (Atisha), central to transmitting Buddhism to Tibet.
• Later Palas: Mahipala I (c. 988 to 1038) restored Pala strength to Varanasi; Ramapala (c. 1077 to 1120), the dynasty's last important king, is the hero of the Ramacharita. Eclipsed by the rising Sena dynasty.
• Exam trap: Nalanda was patronised, not founded, by the Palas; Vikramashila was their own genuine foundation.

Keep the founding-versus-patronage distinction at Nalanda and Vikramashila straight, and the Pallava-to-Chola architectural handoff at Mahabalipuram in mind, and this chapter's ruler-and-monument questions stop being a blur of similar-sounding names.