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Before Delhi was Delhi, the throne of North India stood on the Ganga in what is now a modest district town of Uttar Pradesh famous mainly for perfume. Kannauj, ancient Kanyakubja, was for roughly half a millennium the supreme prize of Indian politics, the city whose possession defined an emperor, and its rise, its wars, and its long afterglow tell the first act of the story this batch begins, the age when the Gangetic plain was not merely India’s heartland but its capital.
The city’s antiquity runs deep, a Kanyakubja of legend and grammar known to the epics and to Patanjali, but its imperial hour opened in the seventh century, when Harsha, the young king of Thanesar, made it the seat of the last great empire of ancient North India. Harsha’s Kannauj was one of the wonders of Asia, and we possess an eyewitness, for the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang lived at his court and described a city of towers, gardens, and a hundred monasteries, where the emperor, a Shaiva house turned patron of all faiths, convened colossal assemblies of Buddhist and Brahminical scholars and emptied his treasury in ritual giving at Prayag, the scene this series met at the Sangam. Harsha’s empire died with him in 647, but the city’s rank survived him. To rule Kannauj, thereafter, was to claim the paramountcy of Aryavarta.
That claim produced one of the longest wars in Indian history, the tripartite struggle of the eighth to tenth centuries, in which the three great powers of the age, the Gurjara Pratiharas of the west, the Palas of Bengal, and the Rashtrakutas of the Deccan, fought across generations for the city the way later Europe would fight for Italy. The Pratiharas won the longest tenure, and under Mihira Bhoja in the ninth century, Kannauj capped an empire that Arab travellers rated among the strongest of the world, its cavalry the wall against which the caliphate’s eastward push had halted in Sindh. The struggle bled all three contestants, and the historians’ verdict has long been that the prize consumed the players, the endless war for the imperial city leaving the north exhausted before the storms to come.
The storms came from Ghazni. In 1018, Mahmud descended on Kannauj, whose ruler fled, and the city of Harsha was sacked, one shock among the many of that generation, and a rehearsal for the greater rupture at the century’s end, in which Kannauj’s last imperial house played the tragic lead. The Gahadavalas had restored the city to splendour in the twelfth century, their king Jaichandra ruling the plain from Kannauj to Banaras, his name entangled forever with the era’s legend, the tale of Prithviraj Chauhan’s abduction of his daughter Samyukta, and with the charge of treachery that folk memory, on no secure evidence, attached to him. What is certain is that after Prithviraj’s fall at Tarain in 1192, the Ghurid armies turned east, and at Chandawar on the Yamuna in 1194, Jaichandra was defeated and killed. Kannauj passed to the new order, and the seat of empire moved, this time permanently, to Delhi.
The city’s long afterlife has its own Indian poetry. Imperial Kannauj faded into a provincial town, remembered in the self designation of the Kanyakubja Brahmins, the great priestly lineage of the plain that carries the city’s name across the subcontinent wherever its diaspora settled. And the town found a second, gentler monopoly. Kannauj became, and remains, the perfume capital of India, its distillers producing by ancient hydro distillation the attars of rose, kewda, and khus, and above all the impossible one, mitti attar, the scent of the first rain on dry earth, captured from baked clay into sandalwood oil. The city that once distilled empire now distils the smell of the monsoon, and sells it in bottles the size of a thumb.
For the UP Files, Kannauj sets the batch’s theme in stone. The plain’s wealth made its cities the stakes of every imperial game, and the game’s winners and losers alike ended as layers in the same ground. Power on the Ganga has always been a tenancy, never a freehold, a lesson the town teaches with its mounds and its attar shops, and one that every subsequent capital in this series, Jaunpur, Agra, Lucknow, and at last Delhi itself, would learn on its own schedule.
