Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c9.s4.13

c9.s4.13

According to this tradition, Bhoja ruled over both Gauḍa and Dakṣiṇāpatha for a little over 55 years. The real implication of the verse has so long been misunderstood by scholars. There is no doubt that it speaks of Bhoja’s lordship over Gauḍa in the sense of North India and over Dakṣiṇāpatha or South India; that is to say, Bhoja claimed to have ruled over the whole of India including both Northern and Southern India. This was merely the conventional way of saying that Bhoja was a *cakravartin*, i.e. an imperial ruler. The Indian *cakravartins* were conventionally represented as the ruler of the ‘whole earth’ which only meant the *cakravarti-kṣetra* bounded by the Himalayas and the sea. Sometimes Āryāvarta or North India was conceived as an independent *cakravarti-kṣetra* for North Indian rulers and South India bounded by the three seas (the Indian Ocean, the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea) for the rulers of the Deccan.¹ In the verse quoted above, Bhoja is represented as the lord of both the *cakravarti-kṣetras* of the north and the south of India. Like similar claims of other monarchs, the claim on Bhoja’s behalf does not mean that the Paramāra king acutally ruled over any part of South India or over Gauḍa in Bengal in the narrow sense of the term. Here Bhoja merely claims to have been a *cakravartin* which means nothing more than an imperial ruler of any part of India.