Paramāra dynasty of Malwa

Malwa

The Paramāras emerged in the ninth century as Rāṣṭrakūṭa feudatories and became independent as that empire declined, ruling the Malwa plateau from Dhārā. Their position between Gujarat, the Deccan and the Ganga plain made them a permanent party to the wars of the region, and they fought the Chaulukyas, Kalachuris and Chalukyas of Kalyāṇi in turn.

The dynasty claimed origin from the Agnikula, the fire-born lineage said to have arisen from a sacrificial pit on Mount Abu — a story that appears in later texts and is one of the standard origin claims of the Rajput houses.

Bhoja

Bhoja ruled for some forty-five years in the eleventh century and became, in Indian memory, the type of the learned king. More than eighty works are attributed to him, and while the attributions cannot all be genuine, several substantial texts are securely his or from his court: the Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra on architecture and mechanics, the Sarasvatīkaṇṭhābharaṇa on poetics, the Yogasūtravṛtti, and works on grammar and medicine.

He founded a Sanskrit college at Dhar — the Bhojaśālā — and built the great lake at Bhojpur, an artificial reservoir of some two hundred and fifty square kilometres impounded by earth and stone dams, later cut by the Malwa sultans. The unfinished Bhojeśvara temple at the same site, with the largest liṅga in India and its construction ramp and mason's drawings still in place, is the best surviving evidence anywhere of how a medieval Indian temple was actually built.

The proverb that the age of Bhoja was the age of learning survived him by centuries, and a whole literature of Bhoja anecdotes grew up, in which he is less a king than a figure of legend.

End

Malwa was invaded repeatedly after Bhoja's death, and the Paramāras were reduced to a regional house. The dynasty ended around 1305 when Alauddin Khalji annexed Malwa to the Delhi Sultanate; the region later became the independent Malwa Sultanate with its capital at Mandu.