Places and geography · Mahabharata questions
Where was Indraprastha?
Indraprastha is traditionally located in Delhi, at or near the Purana Qila. A village called Indarpat stood inside those walls until the early twentieth century, and excavations at the site have produced Painted Grey Ware of roughly the period associated with the epic.
When Dhritarashtra divides the kingdom to keep the peace, the Pandavas are given Khandavaprastha, a tract of wilderness rather than a share of the settled country. They burn the Khandava forest, and on the cleared ground the architect Maya, spared from the fire, builds them a city and a hall of illusions. The city is Indraprastha, and the Sabha Parva describes the assembly hall in detail, including the polished floor Duryodhana mistakes for water, the stumble that Draupadi laughs at and that the tradition remembers as a cause of the war.
The traditional identification is with the area of the Purana Qila in Delhi, on the old bank of the Yamuna. Until the 1910s, when New Delhi was built, a village named Indarpat existed within the fort walls, and the name is attested well before that. Excavations at the Purana Qila by B. B. Lal in the 1950s and again by the Archaeological Survey of India in later seasons found Painted Grey Ware sherds beneath the later historical levels, the same horizon as Hastinapur.
The Painted Grey Ware presence shows early settlement at the site. It does not show a palace, a hall of illusions or a Pandava dynasty, and nothing excavated in Delhi has been tied to a named person in the epic.
Delhi later accumulated a tradition of seven cities, and Indraprastha is counted as the first of them, which is why the name is attached to so much in the modern capital.
The city does not last in the story either. It is lost at dice along with everything else, held by Duryodhana through the exile and the war, and at the very end it is given to Vajra, the great-grandson of Krishna, when the Pandavas leave for the mountains.