Person · Solanki king & patron · India
Jayasiṃha Siddharāja
The Solanki ruler under whom Gujarat reached its widest extent in the early twelfth century, who rebuilt the Rudra Mahalaya at Siddhpur and the Sahasralinga tank at Patan, and whose court sponsored Hemachandra's Sanskrit and Prakrit grammar — commissioned, tradition says, because Gujarat had to borrow a grammar from Malwa.
- Date
- 1092–1142
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Solanki / Chaulukya
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 23.850, 72.120
Worth knowing
He is remembered as much for holding a court of debate as for the campaigns: Jain, Shaiva and Vaishnava scholars argued before him and the grammar was the result. His Sahasralinga tank at Patan held water from the Saraswati through a channel system and has almost entirely gone.
About the place
Placed at Patan, the Solanki capital he ruled from, where the Rani ki Vav and the ruins of his Sahasralinga tank are. The Rudra Mahalaya he rebuilt is at Siddhpur, sixty kilometres north.
Connections (1)
- PatronageHemachandra
Hemachandra wrote the Siddha-Hema-shabdanushasana — a grammar of Sanskrit and six Prakrits — at Jayasimha's commission, and the tradition is that the king ordered it because Gujarat had had to import a grammar from the Paramara court at Dhar and he found that intolerable. Hemachandra went on to serve Kumarapala, produced lexicons, a poetics, a history of the dynasty and the Trishashtishalakapurusha charita, and is the reason Gujarat has a classical literature of its own.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Jayasimha Siddharaja”. Hemachandra’s Dvyashrayakavya and the Prabandhachintamani; Jutta Jain-Neubauer, The Stepwells of Gujarat (1981).
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