Person · Paramara king & patron · India
Raja Bhoja of Dhar
The Paramara king of Malwa, ruling from Dhar, under whose name some eighty Sanskrit works survive — on architecture and mechanics, poetics, grammar, medicine, yoga, prosody and astronomy. The number is large enough that he almost certainly ran a workshop, which makes him the one Indian ruler who is also his own court intellectual.
- Date
- 1010–1055
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Paramara
- Condition
- historical person
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered — established ruler; some textual attributions debated
- Location
- 22.600, 75.300
Worth knowing
The Samaranganasutradhara attributed to him has chapters on temple planning and on machines, including a passage on a wooden flying device that is regularly over-read. He also built the Bhojeshwar temple at Bhojpur and left it unfinished, with the construction ramp and the masons' drawings still on the rock beside it.
About the place
Placed at Dhar, the Paramara capital he ruled from in the early eleventh century and where the Bhojshala and the surviving Sanskrit inscriptions attributed to his court are.
Connections (2)
- PatronageBhojeshwar Mahādev, Bhojpur
Bhoja's Bhojpur temple was never finished, so its earthen construction ramp is still in place and the architects' working drawings are still incised on the surrounding rock — the rarest thing in Indian architecture, a building caught mid-construction. He is also credited with the Samarāngana Sūtradhāra, a treatise on architecture and mechanical devices, which makes the unfinished temple a text and a building by the same hand.
- PatronageDhār
Bhoja's Dhar is the clearest Indian instance of a court as a research institution: the Samaranganasutradhara on architecture and machines, the Sarasvatikanthabharana on poetics, the Rajamartanda on yoga, works on medicine, grammar and prosody, and a Sanskrit college attached to it. Eighty works under one king's name is a workshop, and the workshop was here.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bhoja”. Bhoja, Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra and Sarasvatīkaṇṭhābharaṇa; Michael Willis on the Dhar and Bhojpur inscriptions.
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