Bhoj Shala
Encyclopedia
The Bhojaśālā or 'Hall of Bhoja' is a term used to describe the centre for Sanskrit
studies and temple of Sarasvatī, the goddess of learning associated with king Bhoja
, the most celebrated ruler of the Paramāra dynasty
in central India. Since the early years of the 20th century, the Kamāl Maula masjid in Dhar
has been identified as the site of the Bhojaśālā.
, who ruled between circa 1000 and 1055, was an exceptional ruler by medieval standards. Tradition has ascribed a large number of works on philosophy, astronomy, medicine, yoga, architecture and other subjects to Bhoja, the most extensive in the field of poetics being the highly influential Śṛṅgaraprakāśa. Bhoja also began the temple at Bhojpur
, near Bhopāl. If completed, the temple would have been twice the size of those at Khajuraho
. Bhoja enjoyed a high reputation among his immediate successors with king Arjunavarman
(circa 1210-15) claiming that he was a reincarnation of Bhoja himself. Medieval histories give some idea of his character and ambitions, notably Merutuṅga's Prabandhacintāmaṇi, completed in the early years of the fourteenth century. Post-medieval narratives, such Ballāla’s Bhojaprabandha, composed at Benares in the 17th century, extolled Bhoja's greatness, a tradition that was picked up in the mid-20th century as India began to search for indigenous cultural heroes. In the words of K. K. Munshi, '... during Bhoja’s rule civilization in Mālwā had risen to a magnificent pitch. Our appreciation of Bhoja for having portrayed a faithful picture of the most glorious period of medieval Indian History [in the Śṛṅgāramañjarīkathā] is heightened when we take into consideration that he worked and stood for all that was glorious in Hindu Culture’. As a consequence, any site or object connected with Bhoja has great cultural potency and is intimately connected with modern Hindu identity. More particularly, the identification of the site has been a focal point of communal tensions since at least 1952.
language, show that materials were brought from a wide area to construct the building. The finds, particularly of the inscriptions, prompted Lele to describe the building as the Bhojaśālā or Hall of Bhoja because king Bhoja was the author of a number of works on poetics and grammar, among them the Sarasvatīkaṇṭhābharaṇa or 'Necklace of Sarasvatī'. The term Bhojaśālā was taken up by C. E. Luard and published in his Gazetteer of 1908 although Luard noted that it was a misnomer. Being an official publication, Luard's statements have been repeated in more recent gazetteers and have enjoyed popular currency. William Kincaid, who spent most of his life in the region and recorded folk-stories about Bhoja, published his notes on Māṇḍū and Dhār in 1879. In this he mentions the Akl ka kua or 'Well of Wisdom' in the Kamāl Maula precinct, observing, in passing, that the Muslim custodian was a very talkative person. Of the mosque, however, he only says '... close by is a small masjid'. This shows there was no oral tradition about the Bhojaśālā current in the nineteenth century.
The inscription on the sculpture is damaged, but it is clear that it mentions king Bhoja and Vāgdevī, another name for Sarasvatī. A careful study of the inscription was undertaken by H. C. Bhayani, a well-known Sanskrit and Prakrit scholar. This was published in 1981 in an article co-authored with Kirit Mankodi. This showed that inscription records the making of a sculpture of Ambikā after the making of three Jinas and Vāgdevī. In other words, although Vāgdevī is indeed mentioned, the inscription's main purpose is to record the making of an image of Ambikā. That the sculpture is Ambikā is confirmed by the iconographic features, notably the lion and elephant goad. The text of the inscription has been subject to further study and the reading is as follows:
In mentioning three Jinas, the text of this inscription indicates that the Vāgdevī at Dhār was dedicated to the Jain form of this deity. This is confirmed by Merutuṅga in the Prabandhacintāmaṇi. This reports that Dhanapāla, the celebrated savant and author, showed king Bhoja eulogistic tablets in the Sarasvatī temple engraved with his poem to the first Jina. Because an inscribed poem to the Jina would only appear in a temple sacred to Jainism, the presence of the inscription shows that the Vāgdevī at Dhār was indeed the Jain form of the goddess.
There are famous and ancient Sarasvatī temples at several locations in India, notably Maihar
in eastern Madhya Pradesh and in Kashmir. The latter is known as the Śāradā pīṭha, popularly the Sharada Peeth
. Envoys from Gujarat visited this temple in the 12th century to collect texts so the western Indian scholar Hemacandra could compose his comprehensive grammar, the Siddhahema. A more aggressive approach was taken by the Solanki and Vāghelā rulers toward Dhār. They sacked the city repeatedly in the dying days of the Paramāra regime, removing the libraries to their own cities where Paramāra texts were copied, studied and preserved. The inscription of Vīsaladeva from Kodinar dated 1271 records the creation of a pleasure garden (ketana) and college (sadas) sacred to Sarasvatī. This suggests that in addition to removing books, the western Indian kings also took away the sacred image of Sarasvatī, installing her in a new temple in Saurashtra, not far from Somnath
. The practice of moving religious images is well testified. Aside from the examples explored by Richard Davis, attention may be drawn to Jinaprabhasūri (d. 1333) who states that an image of the Jina Candraprabha came to Somnāth from Valabhi along with figures of Ambā and Kṣetrapāla.
British Museum, collections online http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx?objectid=182355&partid=1&searchText=Ambika&fromADBC=ad&toADBC=ad&numpages=10&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database.aspx¤tPage=1
University of Tokyo, photo album http://www.ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~islamarc/WebPage1/htm/dhar.htm
Sanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
studies and temple of Sarasvatī, the goddess of learning associated with king Bhoja
Bhoja
Bhoja was a philosopher king and polymath of medieval India, who ruled the kingdom of Malwa in central India from about 1000 to 1050 CE. Also known as Raja Bhoja Of Dhar, he belonged to the Paramara dynasty...
, the most celebrated ruler of the Paramāra dynasty
Paramara dynasty
The Paramāra dynasty was an early medieval Indian royal house that ruled over the Malwa region in central India. This dynasty was founded by Upendra in circa 800; the most significant ruler was Bhoja I. The seat of the Paramāra kingdom was Dhārānagara, the present day Dhar city in Madhya Pradesh...
in central India. Since the early years of the 20th century, the Kamāl Maula masjid in Dhar
Dhar
Dhār is located in the Malwa region of western Madhya Pradesh state in central India. It is the administrative headquarters of Dhar District. The town is located west of Mhow, above sea level...
has been identified as the site of the Bhojaśālā.
Bhoja's reputation
There can be little doubt that king BhojaBhoja
Bhoja was a philosopher king and polymath of medieval India, who ruled the kingdom of Malwa in central India from about 1000 to 1050 CE. Also known as Raja Bhoja Of Dhar, he belonged to the Paramara dynasty...
, who ruled between circa 1000 and 1055, was an exceptional ruler by medieval standards. Tradition has ascribed a large number of works on philosophy, astronomy, medicine, yoga, architecture and other subjects to Bhoja, the most extensive in the field of poetics being the highly influential Śṛṅgaraprakāśa. Bhoja also began the temple at Bhojpur
Bhojpur, Madhya Pradesh
Bhojpur is a town of historical and religious importance in Raisen District of Madhya Pradesh, India.-History:Bhojpur is named after its founder, the Parmara king Bhoj .- Bhojeshwar temple :...
, near Bhopāl. If completed, the temple would have been twice the size of those at Khajuraho
Khajuraho
The Khajuraho Group of Monuments in Khajuraho , a town in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, located in Chhatarpur District, about southeast of New Delhi, are one of the most popular tourist destinations in India. Khajuraho has the largest group of medieval Hindu and Jain temples, famous for...
. Bhoja enjoyed a high reputation among his immediate successors with king Arjunavarman
Arjunavarman
Arjunavarman was a king in central India, ruling from Dhar in Malwa between circa 1210-15. He belonged to the Paramara dynasty and claimed in his inscriptions to be an incarnation of his illustrious ancestor king Bhoja. He is best known from a eulogistic inscription of his reign which takes the...
(circa 1210-15) claiming that he was a reincarnation of Bhoja himself. Medieval histories give some idea of his character and ambitions, notably Merutuṅga's Prabandhacintāmaṇi, completed in the early years of the fourteenth century. Post-medieval narratives, such Ballāla’s Bhojaprabandha, composed at Benares in the 17th century, extolled Bhoja's greatness, a tradition that was picked up in the mid-20th century as India began to search for indigenous cultural heroes. In the words of K. K. Munshi, '... during Bhoja’s rule civilization in Mālwā had risen to a magnificent pitch. Our appreciation of Bhoja for having portrayed a faithful picture of the most glorious period of medieval Indian History [in the Śṛṅgāramañjarīkathā] is heightened when we take into consideration that he worked and stood for all that was glorious in Hindu Culture’. As a consequence, any site or object connected with Bhoja has great cultural potency and is intimately connected with modern Hindu identity. More particularly, the identification of the site has been a focal point of communal tensions since at least 1952.
Dhār and the Bhojaśālā
In 1903, K. K. Lele, Superintendent of Education in the Princely State of Dhār, found a Sanskrit and Prakrit inscription from the time of Arjunavarman in the walls of the Kamāl Maula mosque at Dhār. The text of the inscription includes part of a drama called Vijayaśrīnāṭikā composed by Madana, the king's preceptor who also bore the title 'Bālasarasvatī'. The inscription reports that the play was performed before Arjunavarman in the temple of Sarasvatī. This a priori suggests that the inscription could have comes from the site of the mosque when that building was constructed sometime in the 14th century. However, the variety and size of pillars, and additional inscribed tablets recovered by Lele from the site, among them a serpentine inscription giving grammatical rules of the SanskritSanskrit
Sanskrit , is a historical Indo-Aryan language and the primary liturgical language of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.Buddhism: besides Pali, see Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Today, it is listed as one of the 22 scheduled languages of India and is an official language of the state of Uttarakhand...
language, show that materials were brought from a wide area to construct the building. The finds, particularly of the inscriptions, prompted Lele to describe the building as the Bhojaśālā or Hall of Bhoja because king Bhoja was the author of a number of works on poetics and grammar, among them the Sarasvatīkaṇṭhābharaṇa or 'Necklace of Sarasvatī'. The term Bhojaśālā was taken up by C. E. Luard and published in his Gazetteer of 1908 although Luard noted that it was a misnomer. Being an official publication, Luard's statements have been repeated in more recent gazetteers and have enjoyed popular currency. William Kincaid, who spent most of his life in the region and recorded folk-stories about Bhoja, published his notes on Māṇḍū and Dhār in 1879. In this he mentions the Akl ka kua or 'Well of Wisdom' in the Kamāl Maula precinct, observing, in passing, that the Muslim custodian was a very talkative person. Of the mosque, however, he only says '... close by is a small masjid'. This shows there was no oral tradition about the Bhojaśālā current in the nineteenth century.
Sarasvatī
After Lele and Luard had identified the Bhojaśālā with the Kamāl Maula masjid, O. C. Gangoly and K. N. Dikshit published an inscribed sculpture in the British Museum, announcing that it was Raja Bhoja's Sarasvatī from Dhār. O. C. Gangoly was a celebrated art historian and K. N. Dikshit the Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, so their discovery was universally accepted and had a significant impact. The British Museum sculpture was repeatedly identified as Bhoja's Sarasvatī in the years that followed, most notably by C. Sivaramamurti, one-time Director General of the National Museum of India.The inscription on the sculpture is damaged, but it is clear that it mentions king Bhoja and Vāgdevī, another name for Sarasvatī. A careful study of the inscription was undertaken by H. C. Bhayani, a well-known Sanskrit and Prakrit scholar. This was published in 1981 in an article co-authored with Kirit Mankodi. This showed that inscription records the making of a sculpture of Ambikā after the making of three Jinas and Vāgdevī. In other words, although Vāgdevī is indeed mentioned, the inscription's main purpose is to record the making of an image of Ambikā. That the sculpture is Ambikā is confirmed by the iconographic features, notably the lion and elephant goad. The text of the inscription has been subject to further study and the reading is as follows:
(1) auṃ | srīmadbhojanāreṃdracaṃdranagarīvidyādharī[*dha] rmmadhīḥ yo ----- [damaged portion] khalu sukhaprasthāpanā-
(2) y=āp(sa)rāḥ [*|] vāgdevī[*ṃ] prathama[*ṃ] vidhāya jananī[m] pas[c] āj jinānāṃtrayīm ambā[ṃ] nityaphalā(d)ikāṃ vararuciḥ (m)ūrttim subhā[ṃ] ni-
(3) rmmame [||] iti subhaṃ || sūtradhāra sahirasutamaṇathaleṇa ghaṭitaṃ || vi[jñā]nika sivadevena likhitam iti ||
(4) saṃvat 100 91 [||*]
Auṃ. VararuciVararuciVararuci is a name associated with several literary and scientific texts in Sanskrit and also with various legends in several parts of India. This Vararuci is often identified with Kātyāyana...
, King Bhoja's religious superintendent (Dharmmadhī) of the Candranagarī and Vidyādharī [branches of the Jain religion], the apsaras [as it were] for the easy removal [of ignorance? by...?], that Vararuci, having first fashioned Vāgdevī the mother [and] afterwards a triad of Jinas, made this beautiful image of Ambā, ever abundant in fruit. Blessings! It was executed by Maṇathala, son of the sūtradhāra Sahira. It was written by Śivadeva the proficient. Year 1091.
In mentioning three Jinas, the text of this inscription indicates that the Vāgdevī at Dhār was dedicated to the Jain form of this deity. This is confirmed by Merutuṅga in the Prabandhacintāmaṇi. This reports that Dhanapāla, the celebrated savant and author, showed king Bhoja eulogistic tablets in the Sarasvatī temple engraved with his poem to the first Jina. Because an inscribed poem to the Jina would only appear in a temple sacred to Jainism, the presence of the inscription shows that the Vāgdevī at Dhār was indeed the Jain form of the goddess.
There are famous and ancient Sarasvatī temples at several locations in India, notably Maihar
Maihar
Maihar is a city and a municipality in Satna district in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Maihar is known for the temple of revered mother goddess Sharda situated on Trikuta hill of Maihar.- Origin :...
in eastern Madhya Pradesh and in Kashmir. The latter is known as the Śāradā pīṭha, popularly the Sharada Peeth
Sharada Peeth
Sharada Peeth , located near Sharda, was the famous temple of the goddess Sarasvatī in Northern Kashmir on the banks of what is known as the Neelum River in Pakistan . Its ruins are now in the Neelum District of Pakistan Administered Kashmir near the Line of Control and Gurez, India...
. Envoys from Gujarat visited this temple in the 12th century to collect texts so the western Indian scholar Hemacandra could compose his comprehensive grammar, the Siddhahema. A more aggressive approach was taken by the Solanki and Vāghelā rulers toward Dhār. They sacked the city repeatedly in the dying days of the Paramāra regime, removing the libraries to their own cities where Paramāra texts were copied, studied and preserved. The inscription of Vīsaladeva from Kodinar dated 1271 records the creation of a pleasure garden (ketana) and college (sadas) sacred to Sarasvatī. This suggests that in addition to removing books, the western Indian kings also took away the sacred image of Sarasvatī, installing her in a new temple in Saurashtra, not far from Somnath
Somnath
The Somnath Temple located in the Prabhas Kshetra near Veraval in Saurashtra, on the western coast of Gujarat, India, is one of the twelve Jyotirlinga shrines of the God Shiva. Somnath means "The Protector of Moon God". The Somnath Temple is known as "the Shrine Eternal", having been destroyed...
. The practice of moving religious images is well testified. Aside from the examples explored by Richard Davis, attention may be drawn to Jinaprabhasūri (d. 1333) who states that an image of the Jina Candraprabha came to Somnāth from Valabhi along with figures of Ambā and Kṣetrapāla.
External links
Archaeological Survey of India http://asi.nic.in/British Museum, collections online http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database/search_object_details.aspx?objectid=182355&partid=1&searchText=Ambika&fromADBC=ad&toADBC=ad&numpages=10&orig=%2fresearch%2fsearch_the_collection_database.aspx¤tPage=1
University of Tokyo, photo album http://www.ioc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~islamarc/WebPage1/htm/dhar.htm