Cholas: How a dynasty in India created a cultural and economic superpower
Getty ImagesIt’s 1000 CE- the spirit of the Middle Ages.
Europe is in flow. The strong countries that we know today, such as Norman-ruled England and the squabbling regions that will become France, do not yet emerge. Gothic churches with towers have not yet erected. Aside from the remote and rich city of Constantinople, some fantastic industrial centres dominate the landscape.
However, that same year, an Indian prince from southern India was gearing up to construct the largest church in the world.
Completed just 10 years later, it was 216ft ( 66m ) tall, assembled from 130, 000 tonnes of granite: second only to Egypt’s pyramids in height. A 12 foot high Hindu god Shiva sign was enshrined in gold and embellished with gems and pearls at its core.
There were 60 bronze sculptures with thousands of jewels from Lanka, which were adorned in its illuminated house. In its bonds, some kilograms of gold and silver coins, as well as earrings, jewels, trumpets and drums torn from defeated kings across India’s southern coast, making the king the richest person of the time.
He was called Raja-Raja, King of Kings, and he belonged to one of the most remarkable kingdoms of the mediaeval world: the Cholas.
His family altered how the mediaeval world operated, but they are generally unfamiliar outside of India.
Getty ImagesPrior to the 11th Century, the Cholas had been one among the many fighting power that dotted the Kaveri floodplain, the wonderful system of sand that flows through India’s present-day state of Tamil Nadu. However, what made the Cholas unique was their unending ability for development. By the standards of the feudal earth, Chola queens were likewise extremely popular, serving as the kingdom’s people face.
Travelling to Tamil villages and rebuilding little, old mud-brick shrines in gleaming marble, the Chola duchess Sembiyan Mahadevi – Rajaraja’s great-aunt – properly “rebranded” the home as the main devotees of Shiva, winning them a favorite next.
Sembiyan prayed to Nataraja, a societies little-known variety of Hindu god Shiva as the King of Dance, and all her churches featured him strongly. The pattern persisted. Now, Nataraja is one of Hinduism’s most recognizable images. Nataraja was, however, actually a Cholas mark in the feudal American mind.
With one notable change, the king Rajaraja Chola shared his great-aunt’s love for public relationships and passion.
Rajaraja was even a king. He led his forces over the Western Ghats, a range of hills that protect India’s west coast, in the 990s, and burned the boats of his enemies while they were in interface. Then, he used the inner strife of the island of Lanka to create a Chola outpost that, becoming the first continent Indian king to establish a sustained presence there. Finally, he finally broke into the steep Deccan Plateau, which is where Germany meets Italy on the Tamil coast, and seized a piece of it for himself.
Getty ImagesThe treasure of conquest was lavished on his excellent royal church, known now as the Brihadishvara.
In addition to its precious treasures, the great church received 5, 000 tonnes of wheat annually, from conquered province across southern India (you’d have a fleet of twelve Airbus A380s to have that much grain now ).
This allowed the Brihadishvara to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, an instrument of the Chola state, intended to channel Rajaraja’s vast fortunes into new irrigation systems, into expanding cultivation, into vast new herds of sheep and buffalo. Few nations on earth could have imagined economic control on such a large and deep scale.
The Cholas were just as significant to inner Eurasia as the Mongols were to the Indian Ocean. Rajaja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, established alliances with Tamil merchant banks, a partnership between traders and the government that foreshadowed the East India Company, a powerful British trading company that later oversaw large parts of India, that was to follow more than 700 years later.
In 1026, Rajendra sacked Kedah, a Malay city that dominated the world trade in priceless woods and spices, by placing his troops on merchant ships.
While some Indian nationalists have proclaimed this to be a Chola” conquest” or” colonisation” in Southeast Asia, archaeology suggests a stranger picture: the Cholas didn’t seem to have a navy of their own, but under them, a wave of Tamil diaspora merchants spread across the Bay of Bengal.
By the late 11th Century, these merchants ran independent ports in northern Sumatra. A century later, they were deep in present-day Myanmar and Thailand, and worked as tax collectors in Java.
AFPIn the Mongol-ruled China in the 13th century, Tamil merchants operated successful businesses in the port of Quanzhou and even constructed a temple to Shiva on the coast of the East China Sea. It was no coincidence that Tamils made up the majority of Indian administrators and workers in Southeast Asia during the British Raj in the 19th century.
South India, which was the nexus of planetary trade networks, was transformed by Chola-ruled India thanks to globalization and conquests.
Chola aristocrats poured war-loot into a wave of new temples that sourced fine goods from a truly global economy that connects the world’s furthest shores with Asia and Europe. Egypt, or perhaps even Spain, supplied copper and tin for their bronzes. Sumatra and Borneo were the sources of the gods ‘ sandalwood and camphor.
Tamil temples developed into enormous complexes and public spaces, which were surrounded by markets and had rice-estates. In the Chola capital region on the Kaveri, corresponding to the present-day city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of a dozen temple-towns supported populations of tens of thousands, possibly outclassing most cities in Europe at the time.
These Chola cities had an astonishing diversity of religions and were rife with Bengali tantric masters who traded with Lankan Muslims and Chinese Buddhists who rubbed shoulders with Tunisian Jews. Today the state of Tamil Nadu is one of India’s most urbanised. Many of the state’s towns grew around Chola-period shrines and markets.
Getty ImagesThese changes in urbanism and architecture were found in literature and art alike.
The artists ‘ appreciation of the human figure rivals Michelangelo or Donatello in the production of medieval Tamil metalwork for Chola-period temples, which is perhaps the finest ever produced by human hands. To praise Chola kings and adore the gods, Tamil poets developed notions of sainthood, history and even magical realism. If the Renaissance had taken place in south India 300 years before its time, you would get what you would get.
It is not a coincidence that Nataraja bronzes, especially Chola bronzes, can be found in the majority of the most significant Western museum collections. They are the remnants of a period of brilliant political developments, of maritime expeditions that spanned the globe, of titanic shrines and incredible wealth, of merchants, rulers, and artists who have shaped the world we live in today.
Anirudh Kanisetti is an Indian writer and author, most recently of Lords of Earth And Sea : A History of The Chola Empire
