Person · Solanki king & Jain patron · India
Kumārapāla
Jayasimha's successor, who came to the throne after a disputed succession, took Hemachandra as his adviser and adopted Jain practice — banning animal slaughter across Gujarat, endowing Jain temples including the Ajitanatha at Taranga, and becoming the standard example in Jain literature of a king brought to the dharma.
- Date
- 1143–1172
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Solanki / Chaulukya
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 24.183, 72.758
Worth knowing
How far he actually converted is argued: the Jain sources make him a lay disciple and the Shaiva ones keep him a Shaiva, and he endowed both. What is not disputed is the slaughter prohibition, which is among the earliest state-imposed animal-protection measures recorded anywhere.
About the place
Placed at Taranga, whose Ajitanatha temple he built and which is the monument most securely his. He ruled from Patan.
Connections (1)
- Patronage networkVastupāla
Kumarapala's Jain endowments and those of Vastupala and Tejpala, ministers of the Vaghela successors sixty years later, are the two halves of how Gujarat's Jain architecture was paid for: by the king out of revenue, and by his officers out of the trade and treasury they controlled. The Luna Vasahi at Dilwara is Vastupala's and is finer than anything royal. In western India the minister's temple routinely outbuilds the king's.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kumarapala”. Hemachandra’s Dvyashrayakavya and the Prabandhachintamani; Jutta Jain-Neubauer, The Stepwells of Gujarat (1981).
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