01A king who wrote
More than twenty works carry his name. The Samarangana Sutradhara is a manual of architecture and town-planning, with chapters on temple types and on mechanical devices. The Sarasvati Kanthabharana and the Shringara Prakasha are on poetics and grammar; the Yuktikalpataru covers statecraft, ships and gems; the Rajamartanda deals with yoga and with astronomy. At Dhara he built a hall of learning dedicated to Sarasvati, remembered as the Bhojshala. Merutunga’s Prabandha Chintamani, written two and a half centuries later, is full of tales of poets at his court; they are tales, but they show how his name was carried.
02Bhojpur and the wars
South-east of Bhopal, on a rock above the Betwa, stands the Bhojeshwar temple with one of the largest Shivlingas in India, its sanctum walls and dome never finished. The quarry and the earthen ramp the builders used are still beside it, and drawings for the temple are cut into the surrounding rock. Bhoja fought the Kalyani Chalukyas, the Chaulukyas of Gujarat, the Chandelas and the Kalachuris, and won more often than he lost. His end came in about 1055, when Bhima I of Gujarat and the Kalachuri Lakshmikarna fell on Malwa together; he died during the war, and Dhara was taken.
