Akash Bhushan Dubey
ABSTRACT
This paper undertakes a measurement-based comparison of two Paramara-period Malwa temples, the Bhojeshwar Temple at Bhojpur, ascribed to King Bhoja (r. c. 1000–1055 CE), and the Udayeshvara Temple at Udayapur, founded by King Udayaditya in 1059 CE and consecrated in 1080, against the proportional system set out in Chapter 56 of Varāhamihira’s Bṛhat Saṃhitā. Drawing on a complete reading of that chapter, the paper extracts its explicit proportional rules and tests them against Bhojeshwar’s published architectural dimensions, finding that its sanctum occupies a proportionally larger share of the temple’s footprint (64.7%) than the text’s general rule implies (50%), with correspondingly thinner walls. For Udayeshvara, no published metric dimensions could be located, but its documented plan geometry, a thirty-two-point stellate form with seven bāṛhūmi tiers, is itself compared against the Bṛhat Saṃhitā’s considerably simpler square-plan system, revealing a structural elaboration the earlier text does not anticipate at all. The paper’s original conception anticipated a direct comparison against the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra specifically; this remains only partly possible, since the available copy of that text could not be fully parsed, and the paper states this limitation explicitly rather than substituting invented figures.
Keywords: Bhojeshwar Temple; Udayeshvara Temple; Bṛhat Saṃhitā; Paramara architecture; Bhūmija; temple proportion; measurement fidelity.
