Takht Sri Patna Sahib, and a Library of Manuscripts

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.