Place · Paramara capital · India
Dhār
Also known as Dhar, Dhara, Bhojshala, Bhojasala
The Paramara capital of Malwa and Raja Bhoja's seat in the eleventh century, from which an unusually large body of texts is attributed — on architecture, poetics, grammar, medicine, yoga and mechanics. Bhoja is credited with founding a Sanskrit college here, the building now called the Bhojshala.
- Date
- 1010–1055
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Traditional / narrative attribution
- Location
- 22.598, 75.302
Worth knowing
The Samaranganasutradhara, attributed to Bhoja, includes chapters on mechanical devices and on temple planning, and the Sarasvatikanthabharana on poetics; the number of works under his name is large enough that he probably ran a workshop rather than writing them all. The Bhojshala building is a contested site, claimed as a Saraswati temple and as the Kamal Maula mosque, and is under litigation.
The attribution of some eighty works to Bhoja is traditional and is generally understood as the output of a court rather than of one author.
Connections (1)
- PatronageRaja Bhoja of Dhar
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, “Dhar”. Bhoja, Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra and Sarasvatīkaṇṭhābharaṇa; Michael Willis on the Bhoja inscriptions at Dhar and Bhojpur.
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