It is 1000 CE – the heart of the Middle Ages.
Europe is underway. Powerful nations as we know them today – such as Norman-ruled England and the splintered territories that would become France – did not yet exist. High Gothic cathedrals have yet to rise. Apart from the distant and prosperous city of Constantinople, several large urban centers dominate the landscape.
However, that year, on the other side of the globe, an emperor from southern India was preparing to build the most colossal temple in the world.
Completed just 10 years later, it stood 216 feet (66 m) tall, composed of 130,000 tons of granite: second only to the Egyptian pyramids. At the heart was a 12-foot-tall emblem of the Hindu god Shiva, encrusted with gold encrusted with rubies and pearls.
In its illuminated hall there were 60 bronze sculptures, decorated with thousands of pearls collected from the conquered island of Lanka. In his treasuries several tons of gold and silver coins, as well as necklaces, jewels, trumpets and drums snatched from defeated kings throughout the southern Indian peninsula, making the emperor the richest man of the era.
He was called Raja-Raja, the king of kings, and he belonged to one of the most wonderful dynasties of the medieval world: the Chola.
His family changed the way the medieval world worked – but they are largely unknown outside of India.
Before the 11th century, the Cholas were one of the many feuding powers that studded the floodplain of the Kaveri, a large mud body that flows through the present-day Indian state of Tamil Nadu. But what set Chole apart was their endless capacity for innovation. By the standards of the medieval world, Chola queens were also extremely prominent, serving as the public face of the dynasty.
Traveling to Tamil villages and restoring small, old clay-brick shrines in glittering stone, the Chola widow Sembiyan Mahadevi—Rajaraja’s praunda—effectively “rebranded” the family as Shiva’s greatest devotees, winning them a popular following.
Sembiyan prayed to Nataraja, the hitherto little-known form of the Hindu god Shiva as the King of Dance, and all her temples prominently displayed him. The trend has persisted. Today Nataraja is one of the most recognizable symbols of Hinduism. But to the medieval Indian mind, Nataraja was actually a symbol of the Cholas.
Emperor Rajaraja Chola shared his great-aunt’s taste for public relations and loyalty—with one significant difference.
Rajaraja was also a conqueror. In the 990s, he led his army across the Western Ghats, a range of hills that protect the west coast of India, and burned his enemies’ ships while they were in port. Then, taking advantage of the internal turmoil on the island of Lanka, he established a Chola outpost there, becoming the first Indian king to establish a permanent presence on the island. At last he broke into the rugged Deccan plateau—from Germany to Italy on the Tamil coast—and seized part of it for himself.
The spoils of conquest were scattered on his great imperial temple, now known as Brihadishvara.
In addition to its precious treasures, the great temple received 5,000 tons of rice a year, from conquered territories throughout southern India (today you would need a fleet of twelve Airbus A380s to transport that much rice).
This enabled Brihadishvara to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, an instrument of the Chola state, intended to channel Rajaraja’s vast wealth into new irrigation systems, into the expansion of cultivation, into vast new herds of sheep and buffalo. Few countries in the world could imagine economic control on such a scale and depth.
The Cholas were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to inner Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, built alliances with Tamil trading corporations: a partnership between merchants and government forces that foreshadowed the East India Company—a powerful British trading corporation that later ruled large parts of India—that was to come more than 700 years later.
In 1026, Rajendra took his troops aboard merchant ships and sacked Kedah, a Malay city that dominated the global trade in precious trees and spices.
While some Indian nationalists have proclaimed this Chola “conquest” or “colonization” of Southeast Asia, archeology suggests a stranger picture: the Cholas did not seem to have a navy of their own, but under them, a wave of diaspora Tamil traders spread across the Bay of Bengal.
By the late 11th century, these traders were running independent ports in northern Sumatra. A century later, they were deep in present-day Myanmar and Thailand, working as tax collectors in Java.
In the 13th century, in Mongol-ruled China under the descendants of Kublai Khan, Tamil merchants ran successful businesses in the port of Quanzhou, and even built a Shiva temple on the shores of the East China Sea. It was no coincidence that, under the British Raj in the 19th century, Tamils made up the bulk of Indian administrators and workers in Southeast Asia.
Conquests and global connections made Chola-ruled southern India a cultural and economic behemoth, the center of planetary trade networks.
Chola aristocrats invested the spoils of war in a wave of new temples, which received fine goods from a truly global economy linking the farthest shores of Europe and Asia. The copper and tin for their bronze came from Egypt, perhaps even from Spain. Camphor and sandalwood for the gods came from Sumatra and Borneo.
Tamil temples grew into huge complexes and public spaces, surrounded by markets and endowed rice estates. In the region of the Chola capital on the Kaveri, which corresponds to the present-day city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of a dozen temple-towns supported a population of ten thousand, probably surpassing most cities in Europe at the time.
Those Chola cities were astonishingly multicultural and multireligious: Chinese Buddhists mingled with Tunisian Jews, Bengali tantric masters traded with Lankan Muslims. Today, the state of Tamil Nadu is one of the most urbanized states in India. Many cities in the state were built around shrines and markets of the Chola period.
These developments in urban planning and architecture were paralleled in art and literature.
Medieval Tamil metalwork, produced for Chola period temples, is perhaps the finest ever made by human hands, and the artists rival Michelangelo or Donatello in their appreciation of the human figure. To celebrate the Chola kings and worship the gods, Tamil poets developed notions of sacredness, history, and even magical realism. The Chola period was what you would get if the renaissance happened in South India 300 years before its time.
It is no coincidence that Chola bronzes – particularly Nataraja bronzes – can be found in most major Western museum collections. Scattered across the globe, they are remnants of a period of brilliant political innovation, of seafaring expeditions that connected the world; titanic sanctuaries and fabulous wealth; traders, rulers and artists who shaped the planet we live on today.
Anirudh Kanisetti is an Indian writer and author, recently from Lords of Land and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire
