Bihar

Bihar holds founding sites for four religions within a few hundred kilometres, which few regions of comparable size anywhere can match.

At Bodh Gaya, on the bank of the Neranjana, the Buddha is held to have reached awakening under a tree, and the Mahabodhi temple stands on the spot with a descendant of that tree beside it. Sarnath, where he first taught, is just over the border in Uttar Pradesh, but the rest of the early Buddhist landscape is here: Rajgir, where kings patronised the new community, Vulture Peak above it, and Nalanda, the monastic university that taught thousands of monks from across Asia until it was destroyed in the twelfth century.

Mahavira, the twenty-fourth Tirthankara and the historical founder of Jainism in its present form, taught in the same country at the same period, and Pawapuri, where he is held to have died, is among the tradition's principal pilgrimage sites. Vaishali, associated with his birth, was also a republic whose assembly the Buddhist texts describe.

Patna, the ancient Pataliputra, was the capital of the Maurya empire under Ashoka, whose edicts are the earliest datable evidence for Buddhism as a state-supported religion. It is also the birthplace of Guru Gobind Singh, which makes it one of the five seats of Sikh temporal authority. Islam entered with the sultanates and remains a substantial presence.

Bodh Gaya is the clearest case in the atlas of a site whose custody became a legal question, and the dispute is not settled by the law that settled it.

Buddhism largely disappeared from India after the twelfth century, and the Mahabodhi temple passed into the care of a Hindu monastic establishment, a Shaiva mahant whose lineage had held it for generations and who conducted worship there in Hindu form. In the 1890s Anagarika Dharmapala, a Sri Lankan Buddhist reformer, began a campaign to restore the site to Buddhist control, using courts, publicity and international Buddhist opinion, and Alan Trevithick's study traces how the campaign built the modern idea of Bodh Gaya as a global Buddhist centre in the course of trying to reclaim it.

The compromise came after independence. The Bodh Gaya Temple Act of 1949 vested management in a committee with equal numbers of Hindu and Buddhist members, chaired ex officio by the district magistrate, who at the time of drafting was required to be Hindu. Buddhist organisations have campaigned since for exclusive control, arguing that no other religion's principal site is managed by a body half drawn from another tradition; the counter-argument points to centuries of continuous Hindu custody and to the site's local significance.

The temple is now a World Heritage site and receives pilgrims from every Buddhist country, under an arrangement neither side describes as final.