Patna

Pataliputra was the largest city in India and probably in the world when a Greek ambassador described it in the fourth century BCE, a timber walled capital on the Ganges with hundreds of towers, from which the Mauryan empire was administered. Its most consequential ruler was Ashoka, who after a war of conquest in Kalinga renounced further warfare and had his declarations cut into rock faces and polished stone pillars across the subcontinent.

Those inscriptions are the earliest datable written statements of religious policy in Indian history, and their content is not what a reader might expect. They rarely mention doctrine. They enjoin restraint in speech about other people's sects, provision of medical care for people and animals, respect for parents and for ascetics of every school, and the appointment of officers to look after the welfare of religious communities including Brahmins, Jains and Ajivikas. Ashoka records giving caves to the Ajivikas, a movement that has since vanished.

Theravada tradition places the third Buddhist council at Pataliputra under his patronage, at which a president named Moggaliputta Tissa is said to have settled disputed points and after which missions were despatched, one of them led by Ashoka's son to Sri Lanka, where the Pali canon was later written down. Jain tradition sets an early council in the same city, convened to collect the teachings before they were lost, and the failure of that effort to command universal assent lies behind the division between the Digambara and Svetambara traditions.

Guru Gobind Singh was born in Patna in 1666, while his father Guru Tegh Bahadur was travelling in the east, and he spent his early childhood in the city. The house is now the gurdwara Takht Sri Patna Sahib, and it is one of the five takhts, the thrones of Sikh temporal authority whose custodians may issue directives binding on the community, alongside the Akal Takht at Amritsar and three others. Objects associated with the tenth guru are kept there and shown, including weapons and a cradle, and the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth in 2017 brought several hundred thousand people to the city.

That a takht should stand a thousand kilometres from the Punjab is a reminder that the Sikh gurus moved constantly and that the community was never confined to one province.

Patna also holds a collection of a different kind. The Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Public Library, opened in 1891 from a private collection, holds thousands of Arabic and Persian manuscripts, among them Quran copies, works of law and medicine, and Mughal painting, and it is one of the principal repositories of Islamic manuscript material in South Asia. Nearby Phulwari Sharif has been a centre of Sufi teaching for centuries. Bihar's name comes from the Sanskrit for a Buddhist monastery, and the ruins of Nalanda and Vikramashila lie within a few hours of the city.