Prabandha Chintamani

01Tales told to monks

Merutunga, a Jain acharya of Gujarat, says he wrote because the old stories, told again and again, had grown stale for listeners, and he wished to set down tales of men nearer his own time. He drew on earlier collections and on what was told among the monks and learned laymen of Gujarat, and he records that the monk Gunachandra made the first fair copy. He finished the work in Vikram Samvat 1361, 1304–05 CE, at Vardhamanapura, today’s Wadhwan in Saurashtra. Alauddin Khalji’s army had taken Anahilwad Patan only a few years before. Merutunga was writing down a royal world that had just ended.

02What a prabandha is

A prabandha is a short piece of Sanskrit prose built round one person or one event, told plainly and quickly, and very often ending in a verse that people remembered and quoted. Many of those verses are older than the prose around them, and some are in Apabhramsha, the spoken poetry of the day. The first prakasha begins far back, with Vikramaditya of Ujjayini and Shatavahana of Pratishthana, then comes down to the kings of Gujarat and Malwa. Merutunga often adds a Vikram Samvat date for a king’s accession, and these dates are one reason historians still keep the book on their desks.

03Munja and the boy Bhoja

The best-known tales in the book are of Munja, poet-king of Dhara. An astrologer reads the horoscope of his nephew Bhoja and declares that the boy will rule the south and Gauda for fifty-five years, seven months and three days. Munja, fearing for his own son’s throne, hands Bhoja to executioners. At night, in the forest, they pity him and tell him to remember his chosen deity, and the boy writes a verse on a leaf: Mandhata is gone, and Rama who bridged the ocean, and Yudhishthira, and the earth went with none of them; perhaps it will go with you. The verse reaches Munja, who weeps and calls Bhoja back. Later Munja is captured by Tailapa of the Deccan and put to death, and Merutunga gives his last verses as he goes.

04Bhoja of Dhara and Bhima of Gujarat

The second prakasha sets Raja Bhoja of Dhara beside his rival Bhima I of Gujarat. Bhoja’s court is full of poets and riddles, verse contests and generous gifts, with the Jain poet Dhanapala among the learned, and Merutunga mentions the Sarasvatikanthabharana, the temple-school of learning at Dhara. Bhima sends clever envoys who answer Bhoja’s taunts in verse, and the two kings test each other with wit as often as with armies. The tales of Bhoja’s court that are told across India today come largely from this book and from the later Bhojaprabandha. Merutunga loves them, and does not pretend they are all sober history.

05Mularaja and the house of Patan

The spine of the book is the Chaulukya, or Solanki, house of Anahilwad Patan. Mularaja, nephew of the last Chavda king, takes the throne in the tenth century and wars with Lakha Phulani of Kutch. His descendant Bhima I is king when Mahmud of Ghazni attacks Somnath in 1026; Bhima’s minister Vimala later builds the marble temple to Adinatha at Mount Abu. Merutunga records the queens, ministers and treasurers of each reign, the tanks they dug and the temples they raised, often with the date and the cost. Copper-plate grants of the Chaulukyas bear him out on many names and on the order of the kings.

06Siddharaja Jayasimha

The third prakasha is given to Siddharaja Jayasimha, Gujarat’s most celebrated king, who conquered Malwa, built the Sahasralinga lake at Patan and the Rudramahalaya at Siddhpur, and asked Acharya Hemachandra for a grammar worthy of Gujarat, the Siddhahemashabdanushasana. One prabandha shows the king, troubled that every sect praised itself and blamed the others, asking Hemachandra which faith is true. Hemachandra answers with a Puranic katha: a wife whose husband had been turned into a bull fed him every plant in the shade of a tree Shiva had pointed out, and one of them restored him, though no one knew which. So, he says, in the Kali age devotion to all paths brings release.

07Kumarapala and Hemachandra

The fourth prakasha opens with Kumarapala, hunted as a young man by Siddharaja and sheltered, the tales say, by Hemachandra, who foretold his kingship. Once on the throne he takes Hemachandra as his teacher, forbids the killing of animals across his realm, and rebuilds the Somnath temple in stone; an inscription of 1169 at Somnath records that work. Merutunga, a Jain monk, tells these tales with warmth, and also shows Kumarapala honouring Mahadev at Somnath alongside Hemachandra. The prakasha then follows the Vaghela chiefs Lavanaprasada and Viradhavala, and their ministers the brothers Vastupala and Tejapala, poets and builders of the Luna Vasahi temple at Dilwara on Mount Abu and of shrines on Girnar and Shatrunjaya.

08Poets, scholars and other lands

The fifth prakasha is a miscellany. Here are Lakshmanasena of Gauda and his minister-poet Umapatidhara, Jayachandra of Benares and Kannauj, the astronomer Varahamihira, the birth of Bhartrihari, the physician Vagbhata, and tales of Jain merchants whose faith was tested. Some are history, some are teaching stories, some are both. Taken together with the four prakashas before, the book gives the fullest picture that survives of how the courts of medieval Gujarat and Malwa remembered themselves: who was generous, who was clever, who was cruel, and which verse was spoken at the moment that mattered.

09Read, checked and translated

Later Jain writers took the Prabandha Chintamani as their model, Rajashekhara’s Prabandhakosha of 1349 above all. Colonial historians of Gujarat, from Alexander Forbes in his Ras Mala onward, leaned on it, and modern historians read it as the memory of Gujarat’s courts, checking its dates and names against copper plates and temple inscriptions wherever they can. C. H. Tawney’s English translation appeared in the Bibliotheca Indica between 1894 and 1901; Muni Jinavijaya’s critical edition of 1933 in the Singhi Jain Granthamala is the standard text, and Hazari Prasad Dwivedi’s Hindi translation brought it to Hindi readers.

What it contains

1. 1
   Prakasha 1

   Vikramaditya of Ujjayini and Shatavahana of Pratishthana, the Chavda kings of Gujarat, and Munja of Malwa with the tale of the boy Bhoja. It closes with Mularaja, founder of the Chaulukya house, and his war with Lakha of Kutch.

2. 2
   Prakasha 2

   Raja Bhoja of Dhara and Bhima I of Gujarat: the poets and contests of Bhoja’s court, Bhima’s envoys, and the rivalry of the two kings. Short tales of learned men and of the Jain teacher Manatunga close the chapter.

3. 3
   Prakasha 3

   Siddharaja Jayasimha: his building works, his war with Malwa, his ministers Santu and Udayana, his questions to Hemachandra on the true faith, and many small tales of his reign.

4. 4
   Prakasha 4

   Kumarapala’s hard youth and long reign, Hemachandra’s guidance, the restoration of Somnath and of the temples on Shatrunjaya. Then the Vaghelas Lavanaprasada and Viradhavala and the ministers Vastupala and Tejapala.

5. 5
   Prakasha 5

   Miscellaneous prabandhas: Lakshmanasena and Umapatidhara, Jayachandra of Benares, Varahamihira, Bhartrihari, Vagbhata, and tales of charity and faith. It ends with the author’s colophon.