How a dynasty in India created a cultural and economic superpower

It is 1000 CE – the heart of the Middle Ages.

Europe is changing. The powerful countries we know today – like Norman-dominated England and the divided territories that would become France – do not exist. Gothic cathedrals have not yet been built. Apart from the distant and prosperous city of Constantinople, only a few urban centers dominate the landscape.

However, that year, on the other side of the world, a southern Indian king was planning to build the largest temple in the world.

Completed just 10 years later, it was 216ft (66m) tall, assembled from 130,000 tonnes of granite: second only to the Egyptian pyramids in height. At its heart was a 12ft tall symbol of the Hindu god Shiva, made of gold encrusted with rubies and pearls.

In its lamp hall there were 60 bronze statues, decorated with thousands of pearls collected from the conquered island of Lanka. His treasury contained several tons of gold and silver coins, as well as beads, jewels, trumpets and broken drums from the conquered kings of southern India, making him the richest man of the time. .

He was called Raja-Raja, King of Kings, and he was one of the most mysterious kings of the ancient world: the Cholas.

His family changed the way the old world worked – yet they are not known outside of India.

Since the 11th century, the Cholas have been the most powerful people involved in the dispute over the Kaveri river, which is part of the river that flows through India today in Tamil Nadu. But what set the Cholas apart was their endless ability to innovate. By the standards of the medieval world, the Chola queens were also well-known, acting as the face of the public.

By going to the Tamil countryside and rebuilding small mud shrines in polished stone, the Chola dowager Sembiyan Mahadevi – Rajaraja’s aunt – “recasted” the family as Shiva devotees, winning them a popular following.

Sembiyan prayed to Nataraja, the Hindu god Shiva who is still unknown as the Dancing King, and all his temples were in great shape. This experience continued. Today Nataraja is one of the most famous symbols of Hinduism. But to the ancient Indian mind, Nataraja was really the symbol of the Cholas.

Emperor Rajaraja Chola shared his great aunt’s taste for friendship and devotion – with one major difference.

Rajaraja was also a conqueror. In the 990s, he led his army across the Western Ghats, a mountain range that hides the west coast of India, and burned enemy ships in port. Then, taking advantage of the internal chaos of the island of Lanka, he established a Chola stronghold there, becoming the first Indian king to establish the island. Finally, he entered the Deccan Plateau region – Germany to the Tamil coast of Italy – and claimed another territory for himself.

A trophy of victory was found at his great royal temple, known today as Brihadishvara.

In addition to its precious treasures, the great temple received 5,000 tons of rice a year, from the conquered regions of southern India (you would need a fleet of a dozen Airbus A380s to transport that much rice today).

This allowed Brihadishvara to function as the chief minister of public works and health, an instrument of the Chola government, whose purpose was to channel Rajaraja’s vast wealth into new systems of irrigation, expansion of cultivation, and large herds of sheep and buffaloes. . Few countries in the world would have thought of managing the economy on such a scale and depth.

The Cholas were as important in the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were in Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, created an alliance with the Tamil business community: an alliance between businessmen and state power that represented the East India Company – a powerful British trading organization that later controlled much of India – that came over the years 700 later.

In the year 1026, Rajendra put his soldiers on merchant ships and captured the Malay city of Kedah, which was trading in precious trees and spices.

Although some of the Indians declared this to be the “conquest” or “conquest” of the Chola in Southeast Asia, archeology reveals a strange picture: the Cholas did not seem to have their own army, but under them, a wave of Tamils. diaspora traders spread across the Bay of Bengal.

By the end of the 11th century, these merchants had independent ports in northern Sumatra. A hundred years later, they were in present-day Myanmar and Thailand, and they worked as tax collectors in Java.

In the 12th century, in Mongol-controlled China under the descendants of Kublai Khan, Tamil merchants were doing a successful trade in the port of Quanzhou, and they also built a Shiva temple on the shores of the East Sea. China Sea. It is no coincidence that, under the British Raj in the 19th Century, Tamils ​​formed the largest group of rulers and workers in India in Southeast Asia.

Conquests and global connections made the Chola kingdom of southern India a social and economic, global trade union.

The Chola nobles spent war money on new temples, which gained good fortune from the global economy connecting the farthest coasts of Europe and Asia. The copper and tin used to make their bronzes came from Egypt, and possibly Spain. Camphor and sandalwood of the gods came from Sumatra and Borneo.

Tamil temples grew into large and public places, surrounded by markets and surrounded by rice fields. In the district of the Chola capital on the Kaveri, in the vicinity of the modern city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of twelve temple towns were supported by thousands of people, perhaps more than most cities in Europe at the time.

These Chola cities were incredibly diverse and religious: Chinese Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Tunisian Jews, Bengali trading lords and Lankan Muslims. Today the state of Tamil Nadu is one of the most urbanized regions in India. Many state towns grew up around Chola-era shrines and markets.

This trend in urbanism and architecture was similar in art and literature.

Medieval Tamil metalworks, designed for Chola temples, are perhaps the finest ever created by human hands, artists rivaling Michelangelo or Donatello for appreciation of the human form. Praising the Chola kings and worshiping the gods, Tamil poets introduced ideas of sainthood, history and even real magic. The Chola period is what you would find if the Renaissance took place in South India 300 years before its time.

It is no coincidence that Chola bronzes – especially Nataraja bronzes – are found in the great collections of Western museums. Scattered all over the world, they are remnants of an era of political dynamism, of sea voyages that connected the world; of titanic shrines and wonderful treasures; entrepreneurs, rulers and artists who created the world we live in today.

Anirudh Kanisetti is an Indian author and writer, very recently Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire