Nadia

Nadia, or Nabadwip, 'the new island', stands where the Bhagirathi meets the Jalangi in the rice country of lower Bengal. Tradition remembers it as a capital of the Sena kings, and for centuries it was the town where Bengal's Sanskrit scholars gathered. Teachers kept their tols, small schools in thatched houses, and students came from across eastern India to study logic, grammar and law.

In the fifteenth century the logic of Nabadwip reached its height. Raghunatha Shiromani, working in the decades around 1500, made its new school of logic, Navya-Nyaya, the most precise tool of Indian debate. The saint Chaitanya was born in the town in 1486 and taught here as a young scholar. He led crowds through the streets singing the name of Krishna, and when the Muslim magistrate tried to stop the singing, Chaitanya persuaded him to relent. In 1510 he took the vows of a renunciant and left for Puri. His followers carried the devotional movement across Bengal, and pilgrims came to his birthplace after him. In the eighteenth century the rajas of Nadia supported Brahmin scholars and poets at nearby Krishnanagar while Nabadwip remained a place of study.