To Know everything.

Raja Bhoja — The King Who Wanted to Know Everything

Imagine an Indian king in the 11th century who was expected to fight wars, govern a kingdom, settle disputes and protect his people.

But when the day's duties were over, this king did something rather unusual.

He studied.

And he did not confine himself to one subject.

He turned his attention to poetry, grammar, astronomy, medicine, yoga, philosophy, architecture and engineering. He encouraged scholars, patronised learning and was himself remembered as one of medieval India's great scholar-kings.

This was Raja Bhoja, the celebrated Paramāra ruler of Malwa, whose capital was Dhāra.

His reign is generally placed in the first half of the 11th century, around 1000–1055 CE. 

A king with a scholar's mind

Bhoja's intellectual interests were astonishingly wide.

Among the works traditionally associated with him are texts dealing with:

Sanskrit grammar

poetics and aesthetics

medicine

astronomy

yoga

philosophy

architecture and town planning

One of the most remarkable is the Samarāṅgaṇasūtradhāra.

It is not simply a book about buildings.

It is an enormous Sanskrit treatise dealing with architecture, town planning, houses, palaces, temples, sculpture, painting and engineering. Its surviving form contains 83 chapters and thousands of verses. 

And then comes something particularly fascinating.

The work contains a chapter on yantras — mechanical devices.

It describes ingenious mechanical contrivances and even automata: mechanical birds and bees, fountains and figures capable of performing various actions. We should be careful not to read these descriptions as evidence that every such machine was actually constructed, but they certainly reveal the extraordinary range of mechanical imagination present in the text. 

From books to buildings

Bhoja's interest in architecture was not confined to writing.

At Bhojpur, near present-day Bhopal, stands the unfinished Bhojeshwar Temple, traditionally associated with him.

Nearby are remarkable architectural drawings engraved on the surrounding rocks. Modern scholarship has studied these drawings because they offer clues about how monumental temples were designed and constructed. 

It is almost as though Bhoja wanted knowledge to move in both directions:

from the mind to the manuscript,

and from the manuscript to stone.

And then came water

Perhaps even more astonishing was his association with one of medieval India's great water-engineering projects.

At Bhojpur, an enormous reservoir was created by constructing major dams. An account preserved by the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts describes the reservoir as having once covered an extraordinary area of about 250 square miles. 

Think about that.

More than a thousand years ago, a king was thinking not only about palaces and temples, but about water management on a gigantic scale.

For a civilisation dependent upon the monsoon, water was not merely a convenience.

Water was security.

Water was agriculture.

Water was prosperity.

Water was life.

The real wonder of Raja Bhoja

What fascinates me most about Bhoja is not the number of books attributed to him.

It is the breadth of his curiosity.

A person can become an expert in one subject.

It is much rarer to find someone who looks at the world and asks questions about everything.

How should a city be planned?

How should a temple rise?

How should poetry express beauty?

How does the human body work?

What is yoga?

How should language be structured?

How can water be harnessed?

How might machines work?

Bhoja seems to have believed that knowledge had no walls.

Architecture could meet mathematics.

Medicine could meet observation.

Poetry could meet philosophy.

Engineering could meet imagination.

And a king could be a student all his life.

A different idea of greatness

We often remember kings for the territories they conquered.

Raja Bhoja gives us another measure of greatness.

What did a king leave behind in the minds of people?

His kingdom disappeared.

His political boundaries changed.

But manuscripts survived.

Temples survived.

Engineering works left their traces.

And the name Bhoja became almost synonymous with the ideal of the learned king.

Perhaps that is the most beautiful lesson from Raja Bhoja:

A great ruler does not have to choose between power and learning.

He can wield the sword when duty demands it — and still keep a book open on his desk.

Raja Bhoja was not merely a king who knew many things.

He was a king who believed that there was always something more to know.

That is a beautiful quality for a king — and an even more beautiful quality for any human being.