Panchala

The realm

Panchala occupied the country east of the Kuru lands, running roughly from the Ganga across Rohilkhand and the upper Doab. Its name is usually read as "the five," a reference to the clan confederation from which the kingdom was assembled — the Krivi, Turvasha, Keshin, Srinjaya and Somaka are named in various lists, though the sources do not agree and the count may be a formula rather than a census.

By the later Vedic period the kingdom had divided into a northern half around Ahichchhatra and a southern half around Kampilya, on the Ganga. Both sites have been excavated and both yield Painted Grey Ware, the pottery that archaeologists associate with the settlements of this period in the Doab.

Kuru–Panchala

The compound "Kuru-Panchala" appears often enough in the Brāhmaṇa literature to be treated as a single cultural region: the place where correct speech was spoken, where the śrauta sacrifices were performed to the highest standard, and against which other regions were measured. It is in this milieu that the great sacrificial ritual reached its most elaborate form and that much of the later Vedic corpus was compiled.

The two kingdoms were rivals as well as partners. The Mahābhārata makes the enmity structural — Drupada of Panchala and Drona of the Kuru court, the division of Panchala, and Draupadi's marriage into the Pandava line, which binds the two houses together at the moment the war begins. How much of this reflects any remembered politics is not recoverable, but the epic clearly assumes an audience for whom the pairing meant something.

Kings and philosophers

Panchala's most cited figure in the Vedic texts is Pravahana Jaivali, a king who appears in the Chāndogya and Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣads instructing brahmins on the doctrine of the two paths of the dead. The passage is often read as evidence that speculative doctrine was not a monopoly of the priestly class, though the reading is contested and may simply be a literary device.

By the age of the mahājanapadas Panchala survives as one of the sixteen great realms, and Buddhist sources treat it as a going concern. It appears afterwards to have passed into a period of local rule under chiefs who issued their own coins, the so-called Mitra kings of Ahichchhatra, before being absorbed into the expanding Magadhan and then Mauryan state.