The Chalukya restoration of the Paramaras in Malwa

01Enemies turned allies

Karna and the Chaulukya Bhima I had taken Dhara around 1055 and fallen out over the spoils. Bilhana’s Vikramankadevacharita says that the king of Malava, driven from his kingdom, came to the Chalukya court for refuge, and that the young prince Vikramaditya led an army north and restored him. The restored king is identified with Jayasimha, whose Mandhata plates of 1055–56 show him ruling. Fear of Karna had made Bhoja’s enemies into his family’s protectors.

02A prince’s first war

This was among the first campaigns of Vikramaditya VI, who would later rule the Chalukya empire for fifty years and whose court poet Bilhana made him the hero of an epic. The arrangement did not last long. Within a decade the Chalukyas were backing a different claimant, and the Paramaras only recovered under Udayaditya, Bhoja’s kinsman, who built the Nilakantheshvara temple at Udaypur. Jayasimha’s own reign was short, and only a handful of his records survive.

Person · 11th century CE (fl. c. 1065–1100)BilhanaBilhana left Kashmir as a young scholar, wandered the courts of north and west India, and became chief pandit to Vikramaditya VI at Kalyani. His Vikramankadevacharita is a verse life of that king, and his Chaurapanchashika, fifty love poems that each begin ‘even now’, has been copied and painted for centuries.Read →