Jayasimha Siddharaja’s conquest of Malwa

01The old rivalry settled

Gujarat and Malwa had raided each other for a century. Under Jayasimha Siddharaja, the strongest of the Chaulukya kings, the feud became a war of conquest. The Jain chroniclers, writing a little later, say it went on for years before Dhara fell. Yashovarman, the Paramara king, was taken prisoner. An inscription of Jayasimha found at Ujjain, dated Vikrama 1195 (1138 CE), shows Malwa governed by his officers, and he now called himself Avantinatha. Hemachandra, the great Jain scholar of his court, recounts the war in his Dvyashraya.

02Bhoja’s library

The prabandha tradition tells that among the spoils of Dhara were the books of Bhoja’s library, and that Jayasimha, seeing a grammar written by the Paramara king, asked why Gujarat had none of its own. Hemachandra answered with the Siddha-Hemachandra, a Sanskrit and Prakrit grammar named for king and author, carried through the streets of Anahilapataka on an elephant. The same reign built the Sahasralinga tank at Patan and the Rudra Mahalaya at Siddhpur. The Paramaras won Malwa back two generations later, but the Chaulukyas remained the leading power of western India until the Delhi Sultanate.