How an Indian dynasty created a cultural and economic superpower

It is the year 1000, the heart of the Middle Ages.

Europe is alive. The powerful nations we know today – like the fragmented territories that would become Norman-ruled England and France – did not yet exist. The great Gothic cathedrals have not yet been erected. Apart from the distant and prosperous city of Constantinople, few large urban centers dominate the landscape.

However, that year, on the other side of the world, a southern Indian emperor was preparing to build the world’s most colossal temple.

Completed 10 years later, it stood 216 feet (66 m) tall, carved from 130,000 tons of granite: Second only to the height of the Egyptian pyramids. At its heart was a 12-foot-tall symbol of the Hindu god Shiva, covered in gold encrusted with rubies and pearls.

In its lamp 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 were snatched from the defeated kings throughout the southern peninsula of India, making the emperor the richest man of the time.

He was called Raja-Raja, King of Kings, and belonged to one of the most amazing dynasties of the medieval world: the Cholas.

His family transformed how the medieval world worked, but they are unknown outside of India.

XI. Before the 19th century, the Cholas’ Kaveri floodplain, a large body of silt that runs through the present-day Indian state of Tamil Nadu, was one of many power struggles that dotted it. But what set the Cholas apart was their endless capacity for innovation. By the standards of the medieval world, the Chola queens were also remarkably prominent as the public face of the dynasty.

Traveling to Tamil villages and rebuilding small, old mud-brick shrines on polished stones, he “reinstated” the family of the Chola widow Sembiyan Mahadevi—Rajaraja’s great-aunt—as Shiva’s chief devotee, and won a popular following.

Sembiyan prayed to Nataraja, the hitherto unknown form of the Hindu god Shiva as the King of Dance, who was prominent in all his temples. The trend took over. Today Nataraja is one of the most popular symbols of Hinduism. But to the medieval Indian mind, Nataraja was really a symbol of the Cholas.

Emperor Rajaraja Chola shared his aunt’s taste for public relations and devotion, with one notable difference.

Rajaraja was also a conqueror. In the 990s, he led his army over the Western Ghats, among the hills that protect the west coast of India, and burned his enemy’s ships while they were in port. Next, taking advantage of the turmoil within the island of Lanka, he established a Chola outpost there, becoming the first mainland Indian king to establish a permanent presence on the island. Eventually, he entered the rugged Deccan plain – from Germany to Italy on the Tamil coast – and claimed part of it for himself.

The spoils of conquest were dumped in his great imperial temple, now known as Brihadishvara.

In addition to its precious treasures, the great temple received 5,000 tons of rice annually from the conquered territories of southern India (you’d need a fleet of twelve Airbus A380s to carry that much rice today).

This allowed Brihadishvara to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, a tool of the Chola state to channel Rajaraja’s vast wealth into new irrigation systems, agricultural expansion, and vast new herds of sheep and buffalo. Few states 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 Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, forged alliances with Tamil merchant corporations: a partnership between merchants and government power that foreshadowed the East India Company—the powerful British trading corporation that later ruled large parts of India—that would come more than 700 years later.

In 1026, Rajendra put his troops on merchant ships and sacked Kedah, a Malay city that dominated the global trade in precious timber and spices.

Although some Indian nationalists have claimed the Chola “conquest” or “colonization” of Southeast Asia, archeology suggests a strange picture: the Cholas seem to have had no army of their own, but beneath them, a wave of Tamils. diaspora traders spread across the Bay of Bengal.

XI. By the end of the 19th century, these merchants ran independent ports in northern Sumatra. A century later, they moved deeper into present-day Myanmar and Thailand, and worked as tax collectors in Java.

XIII. In the 17th century, the Mongols ruled China under Kublai Khan’s descendants, Tamil merchants ran successful businesses in the port of Quanzhou, and even built a Shiva temple on the coast of the East China Sea. It was no coincidence that the XIX. During the 19th century British Raj, 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 giant, the nexus of global trade networks.

Chola aristocrats invested the spoils of war in a wave of new temples that yielded the riches of a truly global economy that connected the farthest corners of Europe and Asia. The copper and tin for their bronzes came from Egypt, perhaps even from Spain. Camphor and sandalwood for the gods were extracted from Sumatra and Borneo.

Tamil temples became large complexes and public spaces, surrounded by markets and lined with rice fields. In the Kaveri region of the Chola capital, which corresponds to the present-day city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of a dozen temple cities supported a population of ten thousand, perhaps surpassing most European cities at the time.

These Chola cities were surprisingly multicultural and multi-religious: Chinese Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Tunisian Jews, Bengali tantric masters traded with Lankan Muslims. Today, Tamil Nadu is one of the most urbanized states in India. Many cities in the state grew up around the 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-era temples, is perhaps the most beautiful ever wrought by human hands, with artists rivaling Michelangelo or Donatello in their appreciation of the human figure. To glorify the Chola kings and worship the gods, Tamil poets developed notions of holiness, history, and even magical realism. You would have got the Chola period if the Renaissance had happened 300 years earlier in South India.

It is no coincidence that Chola bronzes – especially Nataraja bronzes – are found in most major museum collections in the West. Scattered around the world, they are the remains of an era of great political innovations, the remains of maritime expeditions that connected the world; of titanic sanctuaries and fabulous riches; of merchants, rulers and artists who shaped the planet we live in today.

Anirudh Kanisetti is an Indian author and writer, the latest Lords of Land and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire