Bhoj Shala

The Bhojaśālā or 'Hall of Bhoja' is 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. The term first came into use in the early twentieth century.

Bhoja's reputation

There can be little doubt that king Bhoja, 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.[1] 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.[2] Medieval histories give some idea of his character and ambitions, notably Merutuṅga's Prabandhacintāmaṇi, completed in the early years of the fourteenth century.[3] Post-medieval narratives, such Ballāla’s Bhojaprabandha, composed at Benares in the 17th century,[4] 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’.[5] As a consequence, any site or object connected with Bhoja has great cultural potency and is intimately connected with modern Hindu identity.[6]

One of the serpentine inscriptions found by K. K. Lele at Kamāl Maula

Dhār and Inscriptions in the Bhojaśālā

In 1903, K. K. Lele, Superintendent of Education in the Princely State of Dhār, found a number of Sanskrit and Prakrit inscriptions in the walls and floor of the pillared hall at Kamāl Maula. The most important are displayed on the back wall of the building near the entrance.

The first of these records is a series of verses in Prakrit praising the Kūrma or Tortoise incarnation of the god Viṣṇu. The Kūrmaśataka is attributed to king Bhoja but the palaeography of the record suggests that this copy was engraved in the twelfth or thirteenth century. The text was published by Richard Pischel in 1905-06, with a new version and translation appearing in 2003 by V. M. Kularni.[7]

A second inscription is part of a drama called Vijayaśrīnāṭikā composed by Madana. The preceptor of king Arjunavarman, Madana bore the title 'Bālasarasvatī'.[8] The inscription reports that the play was performed before Arjunavarman in the temple of Sarasvatī. This suggests that the inscription could have come from the site of a Sarasvatī temple.[9] The variety and size of pillars, and the inscribed tablets recovered by Lele from the site, among them two serpentine inscriptions giving grammatical rules of the Sanskrit language, show that materials were brought from a wide area and a number of different structures.

The finds—and the serpentine grammatical inscriptions in the building—prompted Lele to describe the building as the Bhojśālā 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'.[10] 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.[11] Being an official publication, Luard's statements have been repeated in more recent gazetteers. 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.[12] 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 Bhojśālā current in the nineteenth century.[13] Nevertheless, Lele's identification of the Bhojśālā, buttressed by official gazetteers and the press, has enjoyed popular currency and made the building a focal point of communal tensions since at least 1952.[14]

A third inscription which may come from the Bhojśālā—and which seems to have been removed from the site prior to the time of K. K. Lele—is the Rāüla vela of Roḍa, a unique poetic work in the earliest forms of Hindi. This inscription is now lying in the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya in Mumbai.

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.[15] 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.[16]

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 Harivallabh Bhayani, a well-known Sanskrit and Prakrit scholar. This was published in 1981 in an article co-authored with Kirit Mankodi.[17] 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.[18] The text of the inscription has been subject to further study and the reading is as follows:[19]

(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. Vararuci, 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.[20] 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.[21] 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.[22] 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.[23] The inscription of Vīsaladeva from Kodinar dated 1271 records the creation of a pleasure garden (ketana) and college (sadas) sacred to Sarasvatī.[24] 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.[25]

Attempts to reactivate the monument

Although the monument has been under the protection of the Archaeological Survey of India and ceased to function as a formal religious structure for more than a century, religious activists have attempted to reactivate the building and in support of this have identified the tank in the middle of the courtyard as "a large Yagnakunda" and asserted that the inscriptions include "Vedic hymns and mantras." [26] There is considerable traffic on the internet with regard to these causes, with the Indian press reporting communal clashes on the ground at the time of certain festivals, especially Vasant Panchami.[27] The issue, however, has yet to be researched by social scientists and historians of religion.

References

  1. ↑ Venkatarama Raghavan, Bhoja’s Śṛṅgaraprakāśa, 3rd rev. ed. (Madras, 1940).
  2. ↑ E. Hultzsch, ‘Dhar Prasasti of Arjunavarman: Parijatamanjari-Natika by Mandana’, Epigraphica Indica 8 (1905-06): 96-122.
  3. ↑ C. H. Tawney, The Prabandhacintāmaṇi or Wishing-stone of Narratives (Calcutta, 1901)
  4. ↑ Louis H. Gray, The Narrative of Bhoja (Bhojaprabandha), American Oriental Series, vol. 34 (New Haven, 1950).
  5. ↑ K. K. Munshi, ed. Śṛṅgāramañjarīkathā, Siṅghī Jaina granthamālā, no. 30 (Bombay, 1959): 90.
  6. ↑ See, for example, Bhoj Shala - Ek Sangharsa Gatha on youtube.
  7. ↑ R. Pischel, Epigraphia Indica 8 (1905-06); V. M. Kulkarni, Kūrmaśatakadvayam: two Prakrit poems on tortoise who supports the earth (Ahmedabad: L.D. Institute of Indology, 2003).
  8. ↑ S. K. Dikshit, ed., Pārijātamañjarī alias Vijayaśrī by Rāja-Guru Madana alias Bāla-Sarasvatī (Bhopal, 1968).
  9. ↑ Zafar Hasan, EIM (1909-10): 13-14, pl. II, no. 2; Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy (1971-72): 81, no. D. 73.
  10. ↑ R. Birwé, ‘Nārāyaṇa Daṇḍanātha's Commentary on Rules III.2, 106-121 of Bhoja's Sarasvatīkaṇṭhābharaṇa’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 84 (1964): 150-62; the poetic text with this title, rather than the grammatical one, has been published as Sarasvatīkaṇṭhābharaṇam of King Bhoja, 3 vols., ed. and trans., Sundari Siddhartha (Delhi, 2009) ISBN 978-81-208-3284-8.
  11. ↑ C. E. Luard, Western States (Mālwā). Gazetteer, 2 parts. The Central India State Gazetteer Series, vol. 5 (Bombay, 1908): part A, pp. 494-500.
  12. ↑ History of Mandu, ed. William Kincaid, 2nd edition (Bombay, 1879): 101-02.
  13. ↑ Willis, Michael (2012). "Dhār, Bhoja and Sarasvatī: from Indology to Political Mythology and Back". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 22 (1): 129–153. doi:10.1017/S1356186312000041.
  14. ↑ ‘Bid to Enter the Bhojshala’, The Hindu (19 February 2003); ‘Centre steps in to solve Bhojshala imbroglio’, Times of India (1 April 2003).
  15. ↑ O. C. Gangoly and K. N. Dikshit, ‘An Image of Saraswati in the British Museum’, Rūpam 17 (January, 1924): 1-2
  16. ↑ C. Sivaramamurti, Indian Sculpture (New Delhi, 1961): 106.
  17. ↑ Kirit Mankodi, ‘A Paramāra Sculpture in the British Museum: Vāgdevī or Yakshī Ambikā?’, Sambodhi 9 (1980-81): 96-103.
  18. ↑ M. N. P. Tiwari, Ambikā in Jaina Art and Literature (New Delhi, 1989).
  19. ↑ The text and further comments published in Michael Willis, ‘New Discoveries from Old Finds: A Jain Sculpture in the British Museum’, CoJS Newsletter (SOAS) 6 (2011): 34-6.
  20. ↑ Tawney, Prabandhacintāmaṇi, p. 57.
  21. ↑ D. C. Sircar, The Śākta Pīṭhas (Delhi, 1973): 15.
  22. ↑ According to the Prabhāvakacarita, a text dated 1277-78; translation in S. Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (Berkley, 2006): 589.
  23. ↑ Pollock, Language of the Gods, p. 181.
  24. ↑ A. S. Gadre, Important Inscriptions from the Baroda State (Baroda, 1943) no. 10
  25. ↑ U. P. Shah, Jaina Rūpa Maṇḍana (New Delhi, 1987): 142; Richard Davis, Lives of Indian Images (Delhi, 1999).
  26. ↑ "Bhojshala Saraswati Temple Photos". Retrieved 17 February 2013.
  27. ↑ "Tight security in Dhar for Basant Panchmi," The Hindu (14 February 2013). Retrieved 28 March 2013.

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