Paramara Dynasty

At a glance

Where did the Paramaras rule?

The Paramaras ruled Malwa, the fertile black-soil plateau between the Vindhya hills and the Aravallis, crossed by the Narmada River in the south. It was rich farmland and lay on the routes linking the Ganges plain with the ports of Gujarat and the Deccan, which made it valuable and exposed. Ujjain, one of the seven sacred cities of Hinduism, was the old centre. Under Bhoja the capital was Dhara, today's Dhar: Trivedi notes that his grant of 1017/18 is the first issued while the king was "residing at Dhārā". In the thirteenth century the kings increasingly used Mandu, a fortified plateau above the Narmada valley.

The Persian scholar al-Biruni, writing around 1030, knew the city: he wrote of "Dhārā, the capital of Mālava, which is in our days ruled by Bhojadeva". The borders shifted constantly. At Bhoja's height Paramara grants were issued in the northern Konkan near Nasik and in Lata (south Gujarat), and his son-in-law's Udaipur inscription claims rule "from Kailāsa to the Malaya hills", which Trivedi calls "merely a poetic way of expression".

Where did the Paramaras come from?

From the service of the Rashtrakuta emperors, most historians agree, though their deeper origins are disputed. Three views compete.

The fire-born warrior. Around the year 1000 the court poet Padmagupta told a famous origin story in his Navasāhasāṅkacarita, a poem written for King Sindhuraja. On Mount Abu, the sage Vasishtha's wish-granting cow was stolen by Vishvamitra. Vasishtha made an offering into the sacred fire, and a warrior "with bow and crown and golden armour" sprang from the flames and recovered the cow. Vasishtha named him Paramāra, "slayer of the enemy". The epigraphist H. V. Trivedi calls the story "purely legendary" and observes that "Padmagupta appears to be the originator of this myth". The earliest Paramara records, from 949, say nothing of it. The later bardic version, in which four Rajput clans, the Paramaras, Pratiharas, Chalukyas and Chahamanas, all sprang from the same fire-pit, is younger still; the historian Pratipal Bhatia calls its main source, the Pṛthvīrāja Rāso, in its present form "a forgery of the fifteenth or sixteenth century".

Rashtrakuta descent. The Harsola plates of 949 open by praising the Rashtrakuta emperors and continue "in that family" (tasmin kule) with the Paramara pedigree. In 1933 the historian D. C. Ganguly argued from this that the Paramaras were themselves Rashtrakutas. Bhatia replied in 1970 that the phrase is grammatically broken and text is probably missing, and that the later king Munja's use of Rashtrakuta titles could be a victor's appropriation. Trivedi allows a link "probably on his mother's side".

Brahmins turned warriors. The court scholar Halayudha called Munja brahma-kṣatra-kulīna, of a family both Brahmin and Kshatriya, and the clan claimed Vasishtha's gotra. Bhatia concluded that the Paramaras were "neither Agnivaṃśīs … nor Gurjaras; nor can we prove their Rāṣṭrakūṭa origin", and were probably Brahmins who became Kshatriyas.

What is certain is that the early Paramaras were vassals. In 949 Siyaka II called himself mahāmaṇḍalika-cūḍāmaṇi, "crest-jewel of the great feudatories", while already using grander titles.

What do the Harsola plates tell us?

The Harsola copper plates, found at Harsola near Ahmedabad and edited in 1927–28, are the earliest dated Paramara records. They consist of two grants, each on two copper plates, dated "Saṃvat 1005, Māgha vadi 30, Budhe", which the editors convert to Wednesday, 31 January 949. They record that Siyaka II, returning from a successful campaign against a ruler named Yogaraja, camped on the Mahi River and granted two villages near Modasa to a Brahmin father and son of Anandapura (Vadnagar).

The plates matter for three reasons. They give the earliest firm date for the dynasty. They show Siyaka still acknowledging Rashtrakuta overlordship. And they name his ancestors: Bappaiparaja (Vakpati I), Vairisimha and Siyaka, giving the first secure pedigree of the line. Earlier kings named in later inscriptions, from the founder Upendra onwards, cannot be dated reliably; estimates for Upendra range from about 800 to about 925.

How did the Paramaras become independent?

By sacking the capital of their overlords. In 972 Siyaka II marched south against the Rashtrakuta emperor Khottiga, defeated his army at Khalighatta on the Narmada and plundered his capital, Manyakheta (Malkhed in today's Karnataka). The date comes from a remarkable colophon. The Jain poet Dhanapala finished his Prakrit dictionary, the Pāiyalacchī, "when one thousand years of the Vikrama era and twenty-nine besides had passed and at the time when Mānyakheṭa was plundered in consequence of an attack by the lord of Mālwa", that is, in 972.

The victory may have been less complete than later Paramara praise suggests. Ganguly and Trivedi cite an inscription in which a Ganga ally protected Khottiga's camp, and Trivedi concludes that "Siyaka's success cannot be regarded as more than temporary". But the Rashtrakuta empire collapsed within a year, and the Paramaras never again acknowledged an overlord.

Who was Munja, and how did he die?

Munja, also called Vakpati II and Utpala, succeeded Siyaka around 973 and was the first great Paramara king. His inscriptions call him by the old Rashtrakuta titles Amoghavarṣa and Pṛthvīvallabha. He fought the Kalachuris of Tripuri, the Guhilas of Mewar, whose capital Aghata he destroyed, and the Chaulukyas of Gujarat, and his court included the poets Padmagupta, Dhanapala and Halayudha and the dramatic theorist Dhananjaya.

His death is one of the best-known stories in Indian tradition. The Jain monk Merutunga, writing in 1304/05, told it in his Prabandhacintāmaṇi. Munja had beaten Tailapa II, the king of the Western Chalukyas of the Deccan, six times. Against the advice of his minister Rudraditya, he crossed the Godavari for a seventh campaign and was captured. Imprisoned in a wooden cage, he fell in love with Tailapa's widowed sister Mrinalavati, who betrayed his escape plan; he was then paraded from house to house as a beggar and executed. A verse said to have been spoken at his death became proverbial: "When Munja, the home of fame, has passed away, Sarasvati [learning] will be without a support."

The core of the story is historical: Rudraditya is named as minister in Munja's own grants, and Chalukya inscriptions confirm that Munja was captured and killed by Tailapa II. The romance is not. Nor are two other tales Merutunga tells, that Munja was a foundling discovered in muñja grass and that he tried to have the young Bhoja murdered; the translator of Merutunga, C. H. Tawney, noted that "this story of the wicked uncle Muñja is now disproved". Munja died between 994 and 998, probably about 995–997.

His brother Sindhuraja, for whom Padmagupta wrote the Navasāhasāṅkacarita, recovered the territory lost to the Chalukyas and reigned until about 1000 or 1010. No inscription of his own survives.

When did Bhoja reign?

Bhoja's dated records run from 1011 to 1055. The earliest is a copper-plate grant of 1011, the latest a work dated Śaka 977 (1055), and his successor Jayasimha I issued a grant in 1055/56. A much-repeated reign of fifty-five years, from about 1000, comes from a horoscope in Merutunga's chronicle. The historian Michael Willis has pointed out that "the first dated inscription of Bhoja belongs to 1011" and that the longer reign "is based on a wish to preserve the veracity of Merutuṅga". This entry follows the inscriptions: Bhoja reigned from about 1010 to about 1055.

Merutunga and the later Bhoja-prabandha have Bhoja succeed his uncle Munja directly. In fact his father Sindhuraja reigned in between.

What did Bhoja achieve as a king?

Bhoja made Malwa the leading power of central India for a generation, though not without defeats. The Udaipur inscription of his successor's reign lists victories over the Kalachuri king of the Chedis, the Chaulukya Bhima of Gujarat, the lord of Lata, the Karnatas and the "Turushkas", that is Turks.

• The Konkan. Two of his grants of 1020 were issued to celebrate the "conquest of the Konkan", and a feudatory held 1,500 villages near Nasik under him. The Chalukya Jayasimha II claimed in 1024 to have taken it back.
• The Deccan coalition. A Chalukya inscription of 1028 boasts that Jayasimha II routed "the combined forces of the Cholas, Gangeya and Bhojaraja". Many accounts call this an alliance of Bhoja, Rajendra Chola and the Kalachuri Gangeya; the only evidence for it is this enemy's claim. Bhoja later fought Gangeya himself.
• Gujarat. Merutunga tells that Bhoja's general Kulachandra sacked Anahilapataka, the Chaulukya capital, while its king was away.
• Defeat. Around 1047 the Chalukya Someshvara I sacked Dhara itself, and the court poet Bilhana wrote that "king Bhoja fled".

According to Merutunga, at the end of his reign the Kalachuri Karna and the Chaulukya Bhima I attacked Malwa together, and Bhoja fell ill and died as Dhara was taken. The inscriptions place the disaster after his death.

Did Bhoja fight Mahmud of Ghazni?

Probably not, and the claim rests on weak evidence. When Mahmud of Ghazni returned from sacking the temple of Somnath in Gujarat in 1026, a late-sixteenth-century Persian history, the Tabaqāt-i Akbarī, says he "learned that Parama Dev, one of the greatest Rājas of Hindustan, was preparing to intercept him" and turned away through Sind. Some historians identify "Parama Dev" with Bhoja, reading the name as "Paramara-deva". Ganguly read it instead as Bhima I of Gujarat, and other candidates have been proposed. No Paramara inscription mentions Mahmud. The "Param Dev" story is best treated as an unproven identification.

Was Bhoja really a scholar-king?

He was a great patron of learning, and some works were certainly written in his name; whether he wrote all of them is another matter. Tradition credits Bhoja with as many as eighty-four books on grammar, poetics, architecture, yoga, astronomy, medicine and the arts. Willis notes that the figure of eighty-four rests "solely on the assertion" of a later commentator who quotes Hemacandra and so wrote no earlier than the twelfth century.

Among the works attributed to him are:

• the Sarasvatīkaṇṭhābharaṇa, a title shared by a grammar and a treatise on poetics;
• the Śṛṅgāraprakāśa, a vast work on poetics;
• the Rājamārtaṇḍa, a commentary on the Yoga Sūtras;
• the Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra, a treatise on architecture and town planning;
• the Yuktikalpataru, on arts and crafts, including ships and gems.

The attributions are not all equally secure. The Yuktikalpataru quotes "Bhoja" as an outside authority, which suggests it was compiled later in his name. A colophon of 1042 dates an astronomical handbook, the Rājamṛgāṅka, to his reign. Bhatia's careful conclusion is that "though it is difficult to believe that he could have written so many books", they bear witness to the range of interests at his court.

What were the Bhojpur temple and Bhoja's lake?

The most spectacular monument associated with Bhoja is the Bhojeshwar temple at Bhojpur, south-east of Bhopal: a vast unfinished Shiva temple on a sandstone ridge above the Betwa River. India placed it on its UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List in 2024. According to that nomination it stands on a square plan of 20.1 by 20.1 metres, its sanctum holds a liṅga about 2.3 metres high on a pedestal about 8 metres high, and drawings of the planned temple are engraved on the surrounding rocks, with the earthen ramp used to raise the stones still in place. Willis writes that, "if completed, the temple would have been about twice the size of those at Khajurāho".

The temple carries no dedicatory inscription; its attribution to Bhoja rests on tradition, on the town's name, and on a fragmentary inscription on a Jain image nearby that names rājādhirāja Bhojadeva.

Below the temple, dams once held back one of the largest artificial lakes in India. In 1888 the British writer W. Kincaid described it as once the largest and most beautiful sheet of water in India; Bhatia repeats that it "is said to have been the largest and the most beautiful sheet of water in India". According to the contemporary Persian historian Shihab Hakim, the Malwa sultan Hoshang Shah breached the dam in the 1430s at the request of merchants harassed by robbers who sheltered on the lake's island; some scholars argue that this account refers to the lake at Bhopal instead.

What is the Bhojshala at Dhar, and why is it disputed?

The Bhojshala, or Kamal Maula mosque, is a building in Dhar that is now at the centre of one of India's best-known religious disputes. It is a hypostyle hall built largely from reused temple pillars, beside the tomb of the Chishti saint Kamal al-Din (c. 1238–1330). Within it, slabs carry Paramara texts: a Prakrit poem attributed to Bhoja, grammatical charts carved in the shape of serpents under Udayaditya, and part of a play by the court poet Madana from about 1213.

Hindu tradition identifies the building as Bhoja's temple of Sarasvati, goddess of learning, and as a school. Willis traces the word "Bhojśālā" itself to a report of 1903, calling it "the first recorded use of the word". A sculpture of a goddess found at Dhar in 1875, now in the British Museum, has long been described as Bhoja's Sarasvati; its inscription of 1034/35 names Bhoja, but Willis and other scholars read it as recording an image of the Jain goddess Ambika. Willis concludes that "the current location of the Sarasvatī from Dhār remains an interesting mystery".

The site is a protected monument. Since 2003 an order of the Archaeological Survey of India allowed Hindu worship on Tuesdays and on Basant Panchami and Muslim prayers on Fridays. In 2024 the Madhya Pradesh High Court ordered the Archaeological Survey to carry out a scientific survey; news reports say its report found that the mosque was built using parts of earlier temples. On 15 May 2026 the High Court held that the disputed area is a temple of the goddess Vagdevi (Sarasvati). Muslim parties appealed to the Supreme Court of India, which in July 2026 ordered that Friday prayers be held on an adjoining plot for the time being. As of the latest reports consulted for this entry, the appeals were pending. The history of the building before the fourteenth century remains a matter of scholarly as well as legal debate.

What happened after Bhoja?

The kingdom collapsed and was restored, more than once. Bhoja's successor Jayasimha I issued his first grant in 1055 and was killed around 1070 fighting a coalition of the Kalachuri Karna and the Chalukyas. Udayaditya, who restored Paramara rule after him, is described in the inscriptions as Bhoja's kinsman and, in one, as his brother. The Madhya Pradesh government's tourism page calls him Bhoja's son and the 1908 Imperial Gazetteer his grandson; Trivedi and most epigraphists now regard him as a brother.

Udayaditya, who reigned from about 1070 to about 1093, built or completed the great Udayeshvara temple at Udayapur in Vidisha district. An inscription of 1080 records the hoisting of its flag. A doctoral thesis on the temple calls it one of the earliest temples of the Bhumija style surviving in its entirety; in this style the tower is covered with rows of miniature spires.

His son Naravarman (c. 1094–1133), a poet and devotee of the goddess Charchika, suffered repeated losses to the Chandellas, the Chahamanas and Gujarat. Under his son Yashovarman, Malwa was conquered by the Chaulukya king Jayasimha Siddharaja of Gujarat. The inscriptions place the conquest between November 1135 and April 1136, when Siddharaja first called himself "Lord of Avanti". According to Merutunga, Siddharaja broke the southern gate of Dhara with an elephant and carried Yashovarman to his capital bound "with six cords".

For about forty years Malwa was largely a Gujarati province. A ruler named Ballala, whose identity is unknown, held Dhara until the Chaulukya Kumarapala's men killed him around 1150, and the Vadnagar inscription of 1151 says the head of the Malava king was hung at Kumarapala's palace gate. A side branch of the family, the Mahākumāras, held on in the Bhopal and Vidisha area.

How did the Paramaras recover in the 13th century?

Under Vindhyavarman, who retook Dhara from Gujarat around 1175, and his successors. A later grant plays on the double meaning of dhārā, the edge of a sword: his sword's two edges gained a third, the town of Dhara. His son Subhatavarman raided Lata and Gujarat around 1200 and carried off the golden finials of a temple at Dabhoi.

Arjunavarman (c. 1210–1215) brought the kingdom to a last cultural flowering. His coronation grant of February 1211 was issued from the fortress of Mandu; another of 1213 from Broach on the Gujarat coast. He wrote a commentary on Sanskrit love poetry and called himself "lamp of the family of Bhoja". His preceptor Madana composed the play Pārijātamañjarī, which celebrates Arjunavarman's victory over a Gujarati king, and whose first two acts survive on a slab found in the Bhojshala in 1903. The play was first performed, its text says, at the spring festival in the temple of Sarasvati at Dhara.

His successor Devapala (c. 1218–1235) reunited the main line with the Mahākumāra branch. In his reign the Delhi Sultanate reached Malwa for the first time. The historian Juzjani, writing a generation later, records that Sultan Iltutmish of the Mamluk dynasty "led the hosts of Islam towards Malwah, and took the fortress and town of Bhilsan, and demolished the idol-temple", then advanced to Ujjain and destroyed the temple of Mahakala, carrying statues back to Delhi. The raid is dated to 1234 or 1235. The historian Peter Jackson concludes that "this campaign had no permanent results", and a later Paramara grant says Devapala killed a Muslim commander near Bhilsa.

How did the Paramara dynasty end?

Slowly, and then suddenly. In the mid-thirteenth century Malwa was raided in turn by the Yadavas of Devagiri, the Vaghelas of Gujarat, who sacked Dhara around 1250, and the Chahamanas of Ranthambhor. Jayavarman II (c. 1255–1274) issued grants from Mandu. After him, according to the Persian historian Wassaf, "dissension arose between his son and minister", and the kingdom was divided.

The end came in the reign of Alauddin Khalji of Delhi, the second ruler of the Khalji dynasty. The poet Amir Khusrau, writing in about 1311, says that "Rai Mahlak Deo of Malwa and Koka Pardhan [the minister] had a permanent army of thirty or forty thousand chosen horsemen". Koka was killed in battle and his head was sent to Delhi. Alauddin appointed 'Ain al-Mulk Multani governor of Malwa and ordered him to take Mandu, where the king had withdrawn. A spy led the Delhi troops up the hill by night. Mahlak Deo's son was killed; the king "fled to the stream of Sar, where he was slain. This event occurred on Thursday, the 5th of Jamadiul Awwal, 705 A.H." That is 23 or 24 November 1305.

A last flicker followed. An inscription of 1309/10 at the Udayeshvara temple names a Mahārājādhirāja Jayasimha. Jackson reads it as evidence that "the Paramara dynasty survived here in the north-eastern part of the country"; Trivedi doubts that this Jayasimha belonged to the family. By 1338 a mosque inscription at Udayapur names Muhammad bin Tughluq of the Tughlaq dynasty as sovereign. In 1401 Malwa's Delhi governor Dilawar Khan Ghuri declared independence, founding the Malwa Sultanate, whose capital became Mandu.

Dates are approximate; several of the early kings are known only from later genealogies.

What is the Paramara legacy?

Bhoja as a legend. Bhoja became the archetype of the learned king. The Bhoja-prabandha of Ballala, a later collection of stories, imagines poets competing at his court, even placing the much earlier poet Kalidasa there. In the Siṃhāsana-dvātriṃśikā, the "Thirty-two Tales of the Throne", it is King Bhoja of Dhara who finds the buried throne of the legendary Vikramaditya and is told its stories by thirty-two statuettes; the American scholar Franklin Edgerton thought the original probably not earlier than the thirteenth century.

Clans claiming descent. The Maratha Puar (Pawar) families who founded the princely states of Dhar and Dewas in the 1720s–1740s claimed descent from the Paramaras. The Imperial Gazetteer of 1908 reports the claim; there is no documentary link across the four centuries after 1305.

Modern memory. In 2011, marking what it called a thousand years since Bhoja's coronation, the Madhya Pradesh government set up a statue of him at the Upper Lake in Bhopal and renamed the lake "Bhojtal". The tradition that Bhoja built the lake and that Bhopal takes its name from him is old, but the Ramsar sheet for the Bhoj Wetland says only that the lake was created "in the 11th century", and the 1908 Gazetteer records the founding of Bhopal by Bhoja as tradition.

Common myths about the Paramaras

Timeline of the Paramara dynasty

What the map shows next

The border data draws the Paramara kingdom from 980 to 1235; at 1108 on the map it covers Malwa under Naravarman. Its northern rival appears at Chauhan dynasty, and the Gujarati kingdom that conquered Malwa in 1135/36 at Chaulukya dynasty. To the south, the Deccan power that killed Munja is at Western Chalukya Empire, and the Delhi Sultanate that ended the dynasty in 1305 at Khalji dynasty.