PATNA, a city, the capital of the province of Behar and Orissa, British India, situated on the right bank of the Ganges. Pop. (1931) 159,690. Patna was selected as the capital of Behar and Orissa on the creation of that province in 1912. A high court was established in 1916 and a university in 1917. The greater part of Patna consists of the city proper, which stretches along the river bank for 9 miles. Its main street is filled by a succession of small shops and houses, broken by public institu tions and cultivated fields, with little to suggest the importance of a capital. Its trade is declining and now depends on local products. Its manufactures and industries are also on a small scale; at the census of 1921 there were only 15 concerns with ten or more employees, and their total labour force was only 1,000. West of it lies the civil station of Bankipur, and south west of the latter the new capital. The new capital is well laid out and spacious : its main roads are 150 ft. wide and a central avenue has a length of nearly a mile and a width of 200 ft. The principal buildings are Government house, the Secretariat, the Council Chambers, the High Court and the Patna museum. The well-known Patna Oriental museum is in the city proper, as also other buildings and institutions mentioned later.
History.—Patna stands on the site of the ancient Pataliputra, the Palibothra of Megasthenes, who was sent there about 302 B.C. as an envoy to Chandragupta by Seleukos Nikator. According to his account, the city had a circuit of 251 miles and the royal palace was more magnificent than those at Susa and Ecbatana. Under Asoka, Pataliputra was the capital of an empire extending from the Hindu Kush to the Bay of Bengal. The seat of government was moved to Ajodhya by Chandragupta II. towards the close of the 4th century A.D., and Pataliputra, which was a flourishing city in the next century, subsequently fell into ruin; the causes of its fall are obscure, but excavations show the effects of fire and flood. The Chinese pilgrim, Hiuen Tsiang, in the 7th century described it as an old city long deserted, with monasteries and temples in ruins. Patna rose to greatness after A.D. 1541, when Sher Shah
made it the capital of Behar. By 1586, when Ralph Fitch visited it, Patna was "a very long and a great town." Under the Moguls it was the seat of the viceroy of Behar and a centre of commerce, which led to factories being established by both the English and Dutch. Its seizure by the English agent, Ellis, in 1763, precipitated war with the nawab of Bengal, Mir Kasim Ali Khan. The recapture of the city by his forces was followed by the ghastly tragedy known as "the massacre of Patna;" under the nawab's orders nearly 200 English prisoners were murdered in cold blood by one of his officers, an Alsatian named Reinhardt, who was known to Indians as Samru. Patna was finally taken by the British forces under Major Knox in 1763. The ancient Pataliputra lies buried deep under the silt of the Ganges, but most interesting remains have been unearthed in the south-west suburbs as the result of excavations in 1892-99 and 1912-16. Among them is the hall of a hundred columns built by the emperor Asoka, the ruins of which have been found to bear a similarity to those of the palace of Darius at Persepolis.