Gopala becomes king: the rise of the Pala dynasty

After the kingdom of Shashanka of Gauda, the enemy of Harsha, collapsed in the 7th century, Bengal fell apart. The Khalimpur copper plate, issued by Gopala’s son Dharmapala in his 32nd regnal year, names Gopala’s grandfather Dayitavishnu and his father Vapyata, ‘destroyer of enemies’, and says that to put an end to mātsyanyāya — the ‘law of the fishes’ — the prakritis made Gopala take the hand of Lakshmi, the goddess of royal fortune. Who the prakritis were is debated: the people at large or, as a number of historians (N. K. Sengupta among them) think, a group of chieftains who chose one of their number; A. M. Chowdhury doubted that there was an election at all. Tibetan tradition, recorded by Taranatha in the 17th century, tells a legendary story of the election and makes Gopala a devout Buddhist and the builder of the monastery of Odantapuri, but historians regard these late accounts as unreliable.

Because Pala inscriptions give only regnal years, the dates are uncertain: R. C. Majumdar placed Gopala’s reign in about 750–770, others in 755–783 or 756–781. His son Dharmapala made the Palas a power in northern India, installing his protégé Chakrayudha on the throne of Kannauj in rivalry with the Pratiharas and the Rashtrakutas, and founded the monasteries of Vikramashila and Somapura. Under the Palas Nalanda reached its height, and Bengal became a centre of Mahayana Buddhism whose teachers travelled to Java and Tibet.