Kumarpal and Acharya Hemchandra

The opening of the story

In the royal city of Patan, on the day the king remembered his dead father, three hundred wandering ascetics sat in a long row in the palace courtyard. King Siddharaj Jaysinh, lord of Gujarat, had invited every holy man in the city to be fed and honoured in memory of King Karna, and he himself went down the row with a vessel of water, washing their feet one by one. The courtiers admired his humility. They did not know that the king was also searching.

Siddharaj was the greatest king Gujarat had known for generations. He had taken Dhara, the proud city of Malwa, and he had filled Patan with scholars and books. But he had no son. The man next in line was a distant kinsman named Kumarpal, the son of Tribhuvanpal, a descendant of the old king Bhimdev, who had grown up in the small town of Dadhisthali. The readers of bodily signs had told Siddharaj that this Kumarpal would rule after him. The chronicles give different reasons why the king could not bear it, but on one thing they agree: he had made up his mind that Kumarpal would never sit on his throne. Kumarpal knew it, and he had fled. For years he had wandered in the dress of a Shaiva ascetic, with matted hair and ash on his skin, and no one at court had seen his face.