Avanti

Avanti was one of the great janapadas of ancient India, a realm roughly corresponding to the present-day Malwa region of central India. Buddhist tradition, in the Anguttara Nikaya, counts it among the sixteen mahajanapadas of the sixth century BCE, and the Mahabharata describes its people as mahavala, very powerful. The country was divided by the Vindhya mountains into a northern part with its capital at Ujjayini, the modern Ujjain, and a southern part centred on Mahishmati on the Narmada. The Puranas associate the earliest rulers with the Haihayas, a confederation of five clans dominated by the Vitihotras; the last of them at Ujjayini, Ripunjaya, was overthrown by his minister Pulika, who placed his son Pradyota on the throne. Avanti thereafter appears in Buddhist and Jain literature as a rival of Magadha and as an important centre of learning and trade. The state was eventually absorbed into the expanding Magadhan empire in the fourth century BCE, and Ujjain went on to become one of the great cities of ancient India as a provincial capital and a focus of Sanskrit culture.