If the measure of the man is reflected in the circle of his friends then Sandy Morton is impressively out-size. The turn-out for his memorial service was large and varied and the prevailing mood was warm and pleasingly nostalgic. Sandy would very definitely have enjoyed it. The choice of St George's Church, Bloomsbury was appropriate and fitting as was the relaxed reception later in the British Museum's Islamic Gallery. Sandy's presence could be felt appreciatively basking in the gentle tide of warm reminiscences as friends, family, and colleagues mixed easily and exchanged anecdotes and memories. The mood was light and relaxed and it contrasted with the more respectfully sombre memorial service which had combined hymns, Persian verse and eulogies from his brothers, William and James and colleagues Narguess Farzad and Charles Melville. In St George's the atmosphere was reflective and emotions were heightened. Even Charles Melville's courtly and measured address cracked and stumbled as a particularly poignant memory broke through his famously unflappable façade. Emotional but not oppressively so, the service reminded us of our loss but also informed us of our gains and the many ways Sandy had entered and enriched our lives.

The Kālacakra Tantra was the last Buddhist tantra to appear in India, before the disappearance of Buddhism there, roughly a thousand years ago. This is the third book on Kālacakra by Vesna Wallace. We must be very grateful to her for another helpful contribution to our knowledge of this complex system. Her first one, The Inner Kālacakratantra: A Buddhist Tantric View of the Individual (New York, 2001), provides an overview of the whole system, drawing on all five chapters of the Kālacakra Tantra. Her next one, The Kālacakratantra: The Chapter on the Individual together with the Vimalaprabhā (New York, 2004), presents a translation of the second chapter of the Kālacakra Tantra along with the indispensable Vimalaprabhā commentary thereon. The Kālacakra Tantra is written entirely in the sragdharā metre, in which the length of every syllable is regulated. When a complex system is presented in a complex metre, we have a text that is hard to understand in the extreme. It would be almost incomprehensible without the full and detailed Vimalaprabhā commentary.

John Michael Gullick (who died at his home in Woodford Green, Essex, on 8 April 2012, aged 96) had careers in the colonial service, business and the law, and was the last in a remarkable line of Malayan scholar-administrators.

Towards the end of the eleventh chapter of the Śṛṅgāraprakāśa, there is an aside in gāthās that surveys the genres that king Bhoja accepts as constituting the complete range of literary form. The passage is long, 14 pages in Raghavan's edition, and gives us some idea of the unusual flavour of the Śṛṅgāraprakāśa as a whole. Much of it is taken over en bloc from the Nāṭyaśāstra's eighteenth adhyāya, although with considerable reorganisation and occasional rewriting by Bhoja to account for the spectrum of forms said to be prekṣya ‘visible’ or abhineya ‘performable’. When the text next moves to the anabhineya or ‘non-performable’ types (that is, what other genre surveys, following Kāvyādarśa 1: 39, would call śravyakāvya), Bhoja composes his own verses, though continuing in a very similar style to the old Bhāratīya gāthās, to account for the rest of his typology.

The Tilakamañjarī, Dhanapāla's poem in prose (gadyakāvya) is one of the masterpieces of classical Sanskrit literature and deserves to be better known. What he says in one of the introductory verses about his contemporary audience is also true about the readers of our time: “People, smelling danger, turn away from prose which contains a forest of unbroken lines (i.e. compounds filling whole lines) and lots of descriptions, as they keep away from the many-coloured tiger which lives in the dense Daṇḍaka forest”. Although Dhanapāla shows more restraint in his descriptions and in the use of alliteration and long compounds than his illustrious predecessor Bāṇa, the extremely intricate plot of the Tilakamañjarī might discourage those who otherwise appreciate Sanskrit poetry. I am certain, however, that once a taste for gadyakāvya is acquired all these deterring factors turn into sources of delight.

This copperplate charter of Raṇasiṃha came to my attention in the spring of 2008 when I was asked to study and translate the inscription. The plates are presently in a private collection and the direct study of the inscription has not been possible. Nonetheless, good quality digital photographs of the plates were made available to me and these form the basis of the present article.

On the edge of the old city of Vidiśā are the ruins of a large temple known as the Bijamaṇḍal. Only the plinth of the temple survives (Fig. 1). On top of the plinth, on the western side, is a small mosque which was constructed in the fifteenth century to judge from the design of the miḥrāb. The pillars used in the prayer-hall are of various sizes and dates and have not been studied comprehensively. One pillar is notable as it carries an inscription of Naravarman, the Paramāra king who ruled from circace 1094 to 1134. A study of the inscription and the pillar on which it is carved provides a point of departure for considering several important questions about the dedication and history of the Bijamaṇḍal. The inscription also draws our attention to the tutelary goddesses of the Paramāra kings, a subject unstudied hitherto.

On the ancient ramparts of the city of Dhār, overlooking the moat, is the tomb of a saint called Shaykh Changāl (Fig. 1). The tomb has been rebuilt in recent times, but stands on a high stone platform dating to the fifteenth century. The long staircase up to the tomb has two arched gates. A Persian inscription is placed in the upper gate over the door and is protected nowadays by a metal door. Written in forty-two verses, it is dated ah 859/ 1454–55. The verses were composed in the reign of the Maḥmūd Shāh Khaljī, the Sultan of Mālwā from 1436 to 1469. The purpose of this essay is to provide the text of this inscription with a new translation and commentary.

The Bhojśālā or ‘Hall of Bhoja’ is a term used to describe the centre for Sanskrit studies associated with King Bhoja, the most celebrated ruler of the Paramāra dynasty. The Bhojśālā is also linked to Sarasvatī – the goddess of learning – whose shrine is said to have stood in the hall's precinct. Since the early years of the twentieth century, the mosque adjacent to the tomb of Kamāl al-Dīn Chishtī in the town of Dhār has been identified as the Bhojśālā. This has turned the building into a focal point of religious, social and political tension. Access to the site, currently under the protection of the Archaeological Survey of India, has been marked by communal friction and disputes in the press and in the courts. My aim in this paper is not to chart this sorry tale of events; I only need note that the legal and political wrangles, not to mention a steady flow of inflammatory assertions, have formed a toxic backdrop to the scholarly publications cited in the pages that follow. A second issue beyond the scope of this paper is how the medieval history of Dhār has played its part in the wider ‘invention of tradition’ and formation of modern Hindu identity. Stepping back from these concerns, my ambition here is rather modest: I seek only to explore how the mosque at Dhār has come to be described as the Bhojśālā and, on this basis, to undertake an assessment of that identification. Along the way, I will touch on a number of problems concerning the history, architecture and literary culture of central India.