Temples, Treasures and Trade: The Surprising Legacy of India’s Chola Dynasty

This was in 1000 BC. Is – the heart of the Middle Ages.

Europe is in flux. The powerful nations we know today – such as Norman-ruled England and the fragmented territories that would become France – did not yet exist. The towering Gothic cathedral has yet to rise. Apart from the distant and prosperous city of Constantinople, few great urban centers dominate the landscape.

Yet that year, on the other side of the world, an emperor in southern India was preparing to build the world’s largest temple.

Completed just 10 years later, it stood 216 feet (66 m) tall, assembled from 130,000 tons of granite: second only to the Egyptian pyramids in height. At its center was a 12-foot-tall icon of the Hindu god Shiva, gilded with rubies and pearls.

Its lamplit hall contained 60 bronze statues, adorned with thousands of pearls collected from the conquered island of Ceylon. Its treasury contained several tons of gold and silver coins, as well as necklaces, jewels, trumpets, and drums of the defeated kings in the southern peninsula of India, making the emperor the richest man of that era.

They were called Raja-Raja, King of Kings, and they belonged to one of the most astonishing dynasties of the medieval world: the Cholas.

His family changed the way the medieval world worked – yet they are largely unknown outside India.

Before the 11th century, the Cholas were one of several feuding powers that spanned the Kaveri floodplain, a large body of silt that flows through the present-day state of Tamil Nadu, India. But what set the Cholas apart was their limitless capacity for innovation. By the standards of the medieval world, the Chola queens were also remarkably prominent, serving as the public face of the dynasty.

Traveling to Tamil villages and rebuilding small, old mud-brick temples in gleaming stone, the Chola dowager Sembiyan Mahadevi – Rajaraja’s aunt – effectively “re-branded” the family as the foremost devotees of Shiva, thereby He gained a popular following.

The Sembians prayed to Nataraja, a hitherto little-known form of the Hindu god Shiva as the king of dance, and he is prominently depicted in all their temples. The trend took hold. Today Nataraja is one of the most recognizable symbols of Hinduism. But for the medieval Indian mind, Nataraja actually symbolized the Cholas.

Emperor Rajaraja Chola shared his aunt’s penchant for public relations and devotion – with one important difference.

Rajaraja was also a conqueror. In the 990s, he led his armies across the Western Ghats, the range of hills sheltering the western coast of India, and burned his enemies’ ships while they were in port. Subsequently, taking advantage of the internal turmoil of the island of Lanka, he established a Chola outpost there, becoming the first chief Indian king to establish a permanent presence on the island. Eventually, he penetrated the rugged Deccan Plateau – from Germany to Italy on the Tamil coast – and seized a part of it for himself.

The spoils of conquest were lavished on his great royal temple, known today as Brihadisvara.

In addition to its priceless treasures, the Great Temple received 5,000 tons of rice annually from the conquered region of southern India (to carry that much rice today you would need a fleet of twelve Airbus A380s).

This allowed Brihadishvara to function as a vast ministry of public works and welfare, an instrument of the Chola state, aimed at channeling Rajaraja’s vast fortune into new irrigation systems, expansion of farming, vast herding of sheep and buffalo. Had to be included in the new herds. Only a few states in the world could have imagined economic control on such a large scale and depth.

The Cholas were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to inner Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, formed an alliance with Tamil merchant corporations: a partnership between merchants and government power that foreshadowed the East India Company – a powerful British trading corporation that later ruled large parts of India – which existed from 700 More were to come years later.

In 1026, Rajendra set his forces on the ships of merchants and plundered the Malay city of Kedah, which dominated the global trade in precious woods and spices.

While some Indian nationalists have declared this the Chola “conquest” or “colonization” of Southeast Asia, archeology suggests a strange picture: the Cholas did not have a navy of their own, but under them, there was a wave of Tamil diaspora. Traders were spread across the Bay of Bengal.

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

In the 13th century, under Kublai Khan’s descendants in Mongol-ruled China, Tamil merchants ran successful businesses in the port of Quanzhou, and even built a temple of Shiva on the shore of the East China Sea. It was no coincidence that, under the British Raj in the 19th century, Tamils ​​constituted the largest share of Indian administrators and workers in Southeast Asia.

Conquests and global connections made Chola-ruled South India a cultural and economic giant, the nexus of planetary trade networks.

The Chola elite invested war-spoils in a series of new temples, bringing in fine goods from a truly global economy linking the distant coasts of Europe and Asia. Copper and tin for the bronze came from Egypt, perhaps also from Spain. Camphor and sandalwood for the deities were brought from Sumatra and Borneo.

Tamil temples grew into huge complexes and public spaces, surrounded by markets and endowed with rice-wealth. In the Chola capital region on the Kaveri, corresponding to the present-day city of Kumbakonam, a group of a dozen temple-towns supported a population of thousands, probably outnumbering most cities in Europe at the time.

These Chola cities were astonishingly multicultural and multireligious: Chinese Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Tunisian Jews, Bengali Tantric gurus traded with Lankan Muslims. Today the state of Tamil Nadu is one of the most urbanized states of India. Many towns in the state developed around Chola-period temples and markets.

These developments in urbanization and architecture were paralleled in art and literature.

The medieval Tamil metalwork produced for Chola-period temples is perhaps the finest ever created by the human hand, the artist rivaling Michelangelo or Donatello for appreciation of the human figure. To praise the Chola kings and worship the gods, Tamil poets developed notions of sainthood, history, and even magical realism. If the Renaissance in South India had happened 300 years before its time, you would have got the Chola period.

It is no coincidence that Chola bronzes – particularly Nataraja bronzes – can be found in most major Western museum collections. Scattered around the world, they are relics of an era of brilliant political innovations, of maritime expeditions that connected the world; Of vast pilgrimage sites and wonderful wealth; Of the traders, rulers and artists who shaped the planet we live in today.

Aniruddha Kanisetty is an Indian writer and author, most recently Lords of Earth and Sea: History of the Chola Empire