Do Chola kings represent a culturally united Hindu India? It's a modern fantasy

The Print

3 days ago

To understand the recent political bonanza about the Cholas, first we need to understand what they've left behind—and the many ways in which we've understood this over the decades. Most of what we know about the Cholas derives from donative inscriptions that adorn the walls of medieval Tamil temples.
There is a loud chorus, at least on social media, that the Cholas—and South India in general—haven't gotten their due in the national historical imagination. But there's more going on than meets the eye. The fact is that celebrating the conquests of the Cholas misses the woods for the trees. Rather than encourage a deeper understanding of regional histories, we are instead forcing a remarkable medieval society into today's culture wars.
History has rarely been away from the headlines over the last few weeks, whether through the rewriting of NCERT textbooks or PM Modi's tribute to the Chola dynasty of medieval South India. The coming month will see the millennial celebrations of the 11th-century Chola emperor Rajendra I, specifically of his conquests in Southeast Asia.
Interestingly, most Chola-period donative inscriptions were not commissioned by the Chola court, but a broad, shifting spectrum of Tamil-speaking society. Through these inscriptions, we can see broad social trends. As historians Noboru Karashima, Y Subbarayalu, and James Heitzman have shown, most temple affairs—and, by extension, village affairs—depended on local collectives, rather than royal officials. These might be collectives of Vellala cultivator families, or Brahmin landlords, or merchants. These collectives, as we'll see soon, were not mute recipients of royal commandments.
Temple donors were fairly diverse in the early 10th century (when the Chola dynasty was rising), sometimes including shepherds and washer-people. Over time, temple activities were steadily taken over by men of elite martial or landed backgrounds, often linked to the Chola court. These families were progenitors of some dominant castes in Tamil Nadu today. Inscriptions also show growing discrimination against landless groups such as the Paraiyar, today a Scheduled Caste. Throughout this time, indeed well after the end of the empire, collective assemblies were a major social and political force in Tamil Nadu.
Many temple inscriptions also included eulogies to Chola kings, especially at the height of expansion in the early 11th century under Rajaraja I and Rajendra I. To KA Nilakanta Sastri, grandfather of Chola studies in the 1930s, royal eulogies showing up in temple donations managed by local collectives proved the Chola court was centralised, competently led, and yet respectful of local self-government. This was very much the kind of independent Indian state envisioned by many freedom fighters at the time.
In the decades after, however, rigorous epigraphical studies revealed a more surprising explanation. In particular, Tamil and French scholars at the French Institute of Pondicherry have noted that there are clear patterns to Chola royal eulogies. Philologist Whitney Cox, at the University of Chicago, has demonstrated that eulogies were constantly issued and updated by the court, portraying the king not just as a religious figure but also as a political and military one. Indeed, if you were to look at a Chola temple donation, you'd be struck by how most of the preambles describe the king's wars: in the medieval mind, royal devotion and battlefield success were intertwined.
Cox also argues that the degree to which local collectives reproduced royal eulogies depended on their political equation with the Chola king—rather than blind devotion to royal authority. And so, Chola kings had to keep conquering so as to be able to make temple gifts, through which they ensured their subjects' support for the imperial project. Grand edifices such as Rajaraja I's Brihadishvara temple at Thanjavur received gifts of war loot from the king as well as a huge cross-section of elite Tamil society. Later Chola kings could rarely summon such a degree of support for their temples.
In the constant push-and-pull between ruler and collective, in the entangling of temple patronage, war, caste and property, medieval Tamil inscriptions reveal a society of extraordinary dynamism. It is a dynamism that is being quickly forgotten.
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Evidence and beliefs
If all this sounds surprising, it's because since Sastri's magisterial The Cōḷas (1935), the perception of the Cholas has been extensively shaped by Tamil pop culture, nostalgia, and politics—in which English news media (outside of Tamil Nadu) were, until recently, largely uninterested. Indeed, despite Sastri's work being nearly a century behind the recent scholarship, he is still one of the bestselling historians of South India. As the distinguished contemporary Tamil historian AR Venkatachalapathy points out, Sastri wrote at a time when historical materials were not interrogated as they are today. Yet Sastri's work has continued to resonate with 20th and 21st-century nationalist yearnings. I will return to this point momentarily.
First, I would like to ask the question: how were the Cholas remembered before 20th-century nationalisms? The picture of the Cholas in the Tamil tradition is complex and varied, depending on the social position of storytellers. Shaivite sources are extremely favourable to the dynasty, crediting them with establishing temples, settling Brahmins, rediscovering and promoting Shaivite texts. However, the Chola kings of the Shaivite tradition are a mix of both historical figures and culture heroes. Outside of the Shaivite tradition, the picture is somewhat darker. In the Mackenzie manuscripts of Tamil stories, collected in the late 1800s, one Chola king (Kulottunga I) is described as having either a dancing-girl or a demoness for a lover, and giving their son a kingdom. Srivaishnava legends accuse a Chola king of conspiring to kill the Srivaishnava saint Ramanuja. Another is believed to have killed the son of the famed poet Kamban, author of the Tamil Ramayana. And, as I've written previously in Thinking Medieval, a peasant tradition praises twin heroes who are believed to have killed a cruel Chola king.
To be clear, many of these are literary or storytelling tropes applied generally to royal figures. But that is exactly my point: Before the 20th century, the Cholas were not totemic figures of an ethnic or cultural identity. And their seagoing expeditions played no role in popular culture. Indeed, as Dr Venkatachalapathy told me, when the first Indian steamship company was established by VO Chidambaram Pillai in 1906, the educated Tamil middle class had no idea that the Cholas were seafarers of any sort.
All this changed from the 1930s onwards, when the Cholas received sustained academic and pop culture attention. Historians Nilakanta Sastri and RC Majumdar both saw the Cholas as representing an enlightened Indian imperialism with a sustained overseas presence—in stark contrast to the British Raj. Kalki Krishnamurthy, freedom fighter and author of Ponniyin Selvan, wrote of the Chola king Rajaraja I with 'the Mahatma's nobility, Nehru's charisma, Patel's steel, Rajaji's integrity, and the compassion of Buddha and Ashoka'. As noted above, the epigraphic corpus of the Chola period was picked up and studied by decades-long multinational academic collaborations, summarised in the previous section.
Yet academic findings, especially the notion of critical interrogation of sources, did not percolate into pop culture. Within dominant Tamil media, the Cholas came to represent a politically-useful, 'perfected' notion of Tamil history: one where caste discrimination, temple politics, gendered violence, and warfare against other Indian states either didn't exist, or weren't that much of a problem. Dalit cultural figures who have questioned this depiction, such as director Pa Ranjith, have had to face court cases for outraging sentiments. The Cholas became foundational figures of Tamil legend, similar to Shivaji in Maharashtra. But while Shivaji has long been integral to Hindutva history as an opponent of the Mughals, the reinvention of the Cholas was largely confined to Tamil Nadu—until recently.
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Tribute or appropriation?
I will try to summarise, as fairly as possible, the view of the Cholas now projected by the Union government. First and foremost, they were great Shaivite Hindu kings, exemplified by their massive temples, which were built for devotional purposes. Second, they conquered abroad and projected Indian influence into Southeast Asia. To do this, they used a large royal navy (on which, more in future). Third, they were patrons of the arts, responsible for divine bronzes as well as prestigious Tamil arts such as Bharatanatyam. Fourth, they were great administrators who ruled a fair and just system. It is impossible not to see the overlap between the Tamil nationalist view of the Cholas and the Hindutva view. Essentially, what we are seeing now is an attempt to integrate a regional nationalist narrative based on pop culture into a subcontinental nationalist narrative—which is based on a much more vociferous pop culture.
There are, however, two important differences. Hardline Tamil nationalists reject the notion that the Cholas patronised Sanskrit learning or Brahminical institutions, though this does not find support in the evidence. (Teenage adherents of this view have commanded me on Instagram, in no uncertain terms, that Rajaraja I's imperial temple must be called only by the Tamil name, Peruvudaiyar, rather than the Sanskrit Brihadishvara—never mind that both of these mean the same thing and originated well after the end of the empire.) More broadly, and with more evidence, Tamil nationalists have also never seen the Cholas as anti-Muslim figures, whether as part of a cultural competition or as rivals to Muslim powers.
In recent weeks, however, a bestselling North Indian writer of mythological fantasy, with ties to the ruling establishment, has announced a work of 'speculative' fiction where the Cholas undertake a surgical strike against Mahmud of Ghazni. Since this is 'speculative', one can hand-wave away the strong-arming of this remarkable medieval power into modern political buzzwords. One can ignore the fact that Chola inscriptions show absolutely no interest in happenings in North India. One does not need to address the unique structure of Tamil society and its amazing political dynamism. Instead, we can indulge in the modern fantasy of the Cholas as ideal kings with bulging biceps, representing a culturally united Hindu India, and beating up the 'bad guys' of Hindutva history. We are also treated to North Indian politicians tweeting photos of Chola temples, claiming that the South has been ignored—with vociferous support from dominant caste Tamil influencers. Personally, much as I would like to delight in regional histories getting the spotlight, I am not sure whether this is a 'celebration' of Chola history, or yet another reinvention.
The fact is that what's happening to the Cholas isn't particularly new. Chest-thumping about medieval royalty, fantasy fiction, and textbook rewriting have long been used by regional political parties to promote linguistic pride and secure votes. But this comes at a cost. In twisting the medieval 1 per cent into today's culture wars, the medieval 99 per cent, with all their foibles and uniqueness, are simply flattened into an undifferentiated mass of devotees and willing foot soldiers for military and cultural projects that appeal to dominant interests.
The stories we tell of the past always say more about us than they do about our ancestors. Indian democracy could easily fund studies and exhibitions about medieval architects; conduct ground-penetrating LIDAR scans of medieval settlement mounds; excavate known Chola palace sites to learn about daily life; or sponsor multinational studies of medieval Tamil diaspora sites. There are plenty of ways to pay tribute to history that allow history to be history, instead of a warped and fractured rehash of our own culture wars. What does it say about us that we choose, again and again, to celebrate warrior-kings and their temples?
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of 'Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire' and the award-winning 'Lords of the Deccan'. He hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti and is on Instagram @anirbuddha.
This article is a part of the 'Thinking Medieval' series that takes a deep dive into India's medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)