Rediscovering the Cholas

The history of the south, in Indian popular imagination at least, is often either seconded to that of the Gangetic plains or glorified to excess. But, as Anirudh Kanisetti’s book Lords of Earth and Sea vividly details, the truth is in the middle and can be far more interesting. For instance, it gets touted that the Chola empire was in some ways an inverted precursor to the colonial age; overlords of swathes of southeast Asia using naval power. In 1025 CE, there was one expedition to a trading principality called Kedah, now in Malaysia, however it was an exception. Instead, the reason South India had such political and cultural influence overseas, says the book, was because of traders, who also provided the ships for that conquest. All of which does not diminish the scale of the Chola empire. The Kedah conquest was itself a sequel to Rajendra Chola marching an army across land from Tamil Nadu to conquer kingdoms all the way up to Bengal and to bring back the waters of the Ganges to feed a reservoir of a new capital. The Cholas thought big—it took them just a hundred years from being not even minor kings to emperors.

The man who sets it off is Parantaka Chola, whose family had only lately transposed from being landowners in a small town called Uraiyur to self-appointed kings, the name Chola borrowed from the memory of another empire of the past. Parantaka expands through marital alliances and relentless wars. He is dependent on farmers to make up for his army when they aren’t cultivating fields. Annual raids provide plunder. This is around 900 CE. By 1010, says the books, his grandson Rajaraja Chola would become “possibly the richest man on Earth”.

Why was Parantaka able to carve out a kingdom? Kanisetti says historical change is rarely dependent on just gifted individuals, the great man theory. It is a result of larger patterns and processes. “Very often if the right person is there at the right time, you see massive historical change,” he says. In the 9th century, when the Chola family is initially rising, the main political centres were around Kanchipuram under the Pallava dynasty and Madurai under the Pandya dynasty. In between was the riverine frontier ruled by village assemblies. “The Pandyas and the Pallavas fight a battle near the Kaveri floodplain. The Pandya king is disgraced, the Pallava king dies soon after. There’s a huge political vacuum. Essentially, the Pallava kingdom has no ruler, which means that there is all this territory ripe for conquest. While the Pandyas do have a ruler, they also have a tradition of sharing kingship among different brothers, which makes them less united. So, when the Cholas really begin, especially with Parantaka Chola, there’s a systematic attempt at creating marriage alliances with a lot of these local powers. They’re able to establish political unity and quickly expand to fill out the political vacuum,” he says.

While Chola men were expanding territory through war, their women were consolidating it through a unique mechanism—temple patronage. The earliest inscriptions of the oldest shrines in the Kaveri area tend to be by queens. They would build a temple over the course of their lifetime but the pattern changed in the 970s CE with the ascent of Sembiyan Mahadevi after her son Uttama Chola became king. With access to the Chola treasury, she built a dozen temples that were geographically distributed. Temples were the nerve centres of society then. The focus of her enterprise was to display her devotion, patronage and interest in her subjects. “She also builds temples in the frontier regions where the Cholas are seeking to expand their power. By making temples that fit to a consistent visual template, by having a consistent set of inscriptions on them, which present an image of the dynasty, she is able to create almost a rudimentary media network where temples act as spaces from which the charisma of the dynasty radiates out into the countryside. There is really no parallel to this anywhere else in the medieval world. A queen who had such a good understanding of what today we would call public relations and media strategy,” he says.

Rajaraja Chola, with whom the Chola empire is synonymous, comes in as the successor of Uttama Chola, becoming sole ruler in 987 CE, once again at the right time. The Rashtrakuta empire had collapsed 15 years earlier and the Deccan was up for grabs allowing him to expand in that direction. Across the sea was Lanka and its capital Anuradhapura in decline, the city silting up, the irrigation canals not maintained, unable to produce food for its people. He invaded and set up an outpost, a new capital, to rule the region. “He was capable of thinking repeatedly out of the box in the most creative ways. He sent an embassy to China. It’s not something Indian kings, at least we have no records, had done for the last 200 years or so before he came to the throne. He is clearly a once in a generation figure in a world in sufficient turmoil that he’s able to bend and change to his will,” says Kanisetti.

The towering symbol of his reign remains the Brihadishvara Temple at Thanjavur, built at an unimaginable scale for those times. The book states, “To build the Rajarajeshwara, 49,000 cubic metres of granite needed to be mobilised, weighing 1,30,000 tonnes. (The average Kaveri temple had 450 cubic metres.) And Rajaraja pushed for the temple to be completed fast, by the 275th day of his twenty-fifth regnal year—exponents of the number five, which held metaphysical significance in his preferred order of Shaivism. Construction began on May 11, 1003, two years after his Andhra campaign, with a ritual sighting of the Sun used to set up the main axis. Every year for seven years, the Chola state extracted, dressed, moved, carved and assembled an average of 6,254 tonnes of stone at the Rajarajeshwara site—17 tonnes per day. From quarries 45 kilometres upriver, rough-cut blocks were floated down in huge coracles and barges.” It was probably the second tallest structure in the world in the eleventh century after the Pyramids of Giza.

The empire hit its peak with Rajaraja’s successor Rajendra Chola. The logistics for his sea expedition to plunder Kedah was managed by a merchant body group called Five Hundred who rejigged their ships to accommodate soldiers. This goes against the conventional impression that the Cholas had a navy but Kanisetti says he only went where the research took him. “Increasingly, I found what the actual evidence shows is a picture that is absolutely fascinating and completely different from anything that our political agendas could have told us. We simply have not been able to open our eyes to it because we are very fixed in how we want the past to be.”

He found no evidence of a Chola state having a foothold overseas except in Sri Lanka but there was also a rider. “There is evidence of something completely different, which is merchant settlements in northern Sumatra. These are very extensive. They were building temples in a Chola, in a Tamil style. But there’s no inscriptions that mention any Chola king. They (the merchants) are levying taxes on ships that are coming in. They are setting the prices of various goods. They are undertaking expeditions into the interior. These are all suggested to us by anthropological studies, by archaeological excavations. Yet, because it is not a state’s outpost, we don’t really seem to know what to do with this information.” The answer, to him, was obvious—a diaspora centuries ahead of its time in how outgoing and curious it was about the world, with a hunger to explore new frontiers, something that continued up to the present. “It’s not a coincidence that when the British come and set up shop in Burma, that they’re using Tamils as their administrators and bankers. This is one of the most amazing stories in human history. But because we want kings to be the sole protagonists of history, we don’t want to talk about what all these merchants were doing. While these are not colonies in the way that we would understand them, these are certainly outposts that are intended to further commercial interests and to secure easy access to valuable resources,” he says.

The Kedah expedition catapulted Rajendra Chola’s status as an emperor but after him, the story was one of holding on and then decline. Kanisetti attributes several factors to it. “I devote a third of the book to analysing in great detail why did the Cholas fall and what are the various ways, both negative and positive, in which they impacted the history of South India in that process. Essentially over the course of the 11th century the Chola state had to make a number of ad hoc decisions to keep the momentum going. One of those really big decisions is that, because it’s not able to extract sufficient manpower from the rice fields, it turns to hunter-gatherers to provide military manpower. In the 12th century you begin to see the flip side of this process where now these warlords from the hills have enormous amounts of wealth secured through war. At the same time the Chola state itself has less wealth because it spent it all on these endless campaigns. So, you have a very interesting situation where these warlords begin to buy up villages and then they start to do what the Cholas once did, which is to invest their wealth in new temples.”

And then they go on to exploit a loophole in which temples were exempt from taxes. They put their lands in the name of temples they controlled, thus paying no taxes which meant loss of revenue for the king. On the other hand, the loophole couldn’t be removed because the king had become weak. The empire shrinks with every consecutive succession until the last emperor Rajendra III vanishes from history after a last inscription in 1279 CE. But Kanisetti says the Chola imprint is still present. “If you look at the whole Kaveri region, the entire urban agglomeration is based around 12th and 13th century temples. This is not restricted to Tamil Nadu. If you go to Bengaluru, you see some of its oldest temples were actually imitating Chola styles, whether it is the Gopuram that today is present in pretty much every South Indian temple even outside of Tamil. The fact that Nataraja today is seen as an icon of Hinduism is because the Cholas first use him as an icon of their dynasty and their power. The presence of a global Tamil diaspora, the dishes that are cooked in our homes, the offerings made to the gods like camphor—these are all Chola period developments that continue to percolate into daily life today. You cannot understand the history of South India unless you understand the Cholas.”

Anirudh KanisettibooksCholasIndian history