समराङ्गणसूत्रधार (महाराज भोज - वास्तु, स्थापत्य एवं यंत्र शास्त्र)

xiii mountains and stored into a reservoir by building an embankment on the fourth side. The fame of this wonderful lake resounded in popular memory throughout the medieval times and has been preserved upto our own times in the Hindi saying: Tāla to Bhopāla tāla aur sab talaiyā (ताल तो भोपाल ताल और सब तलैया). (i. e. amongst lakes the foremost is the one called Bhopal Tal or the lake built by King Bhoja, round which was planned the city of Bhopal, the others are mere ponds of water). The art of building embankments for artificial lakes has reached its perfection in medieval India and its greatest example was that planned and erected by Bhoja, that was perhaps equalled later on by the Rājasamudra lake of King Rājasamudra of Chittor. Of the other monuments raised by Bhoja and now in ruins or lost in oblivion, it is tempting to speak in detail from the point of view of architecture but that should await an exhaustive scientific survey by trained archaeologists who should correlate the actual monuments with the detail furnished in the texts of the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra. The civil and religious architecture envisaged in the present text was no figment of imagination but rooted in the solid facts of the state policy pursued by King Bhoja for bestowing on his people as many different kinds of architectural monuments as possible, both in the civil and religious fields. It appears that his soul had some point of affinity with the traditional architect of ancient times namely Viśvakarmā and he felt specially delighted when some civil building with all the perfection of art known in his time was brought into existence. I wish to endorse fully the remarks of the previous editor about the beautiful style of Sanskrit found in the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra which it is a pleasure to go through and relish its classical flavour : “Generally the language of extant Śilpa works is ungrammatical, but the present work is free from grammatical solecisms and written most in a sweet and beautiful style. The work will prove to be of immense benefit to students of Indian architecture as well as to those who wish to follow it in practice”. Chapter 31 entitled ‘Yantra Vidhāna’ deals with a number of mechanical contrivances, some of which at least seem to have been a fact of life, others perhaps imaginary like the flying plane. This topic is unique to the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra and nothing similar to this is found in any other Śilpa text. Dr. V. Raghavan has written a special exposition of its contents to which we shall refer in our commentary on this work to be published as volume two. I feel grateful to Dr. B. J. Sandesara for entrusting to me the editorship of this second revised edition of the Samarāṅgaṇa Sūtradhāra which had long become out of print. I now hope that this new edition together with its