How a dynasty in India created a cultural and economic superpower

This is AD 1000 – the heart of the Middle Ages.

Europe is in flux. The powerful states we know today – such as England, ruled by the Normans, and the fragmented territories that would become France – did not yet exist. High Gothic cathedrals have not yet appeared. 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, assembled from 130,000 tons of granite: second only to the Egyptian pyramids in height. At its center was a 12-foot emblem of the Hindu god Shiva, covered in gold, encrusted with rubies and pearls.

In its lamp-lit hall there were 60 bronze sculptures decorated with thousands of pearls collected from the conquered island of Lanka. His coffers contained tons of gold and silver coins, as well as necklaces, jewels, trumpets and drums plucked from defeated kings in the southern peninsula of India, making the emperor the richest man of the era.

His name was Raja-Raja, King of Kings, and he belonged to one of the strangest dynasties of the medieval world: the Cholas.

His family changed the way the medieval world operated, but they are almost unknown outside of India.

By the 11th century, the Cholas were one of the many feuding states that dotted the Kaveri floodplain, the great muddy mass that flows through the modern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. But what set Chola apart was their limitless capacity for innovation. By the standards of the medieval world, the Chola queens were also extremely famous, serving as the public face of the dynasty.

Traveling through Tamil villages and restoring small old mud-brick shrines in shining stone, Chola’s widow Sembiyan Mahadevi – Rajaraja’s great-aunt – effectively “rebranded” the family as the foremost devotees of Shiva, winning them popularity.

Sembian prayed to Nataraja, a hitherto little-known form of the Hindu god Shiva as the King of Dance, and was prominently depicted in all her temples. The trend has caught on. Today, Nataraja is one of the most recognizable symbols of Hinduism. But to the medieval Indian mind, Nataraja was really a Chola symbol.

Emperor Rajaraja Chola shared his aunt’s taste for PR and loyalty – with one significant difference.

Rajaraja was also a conqueror. In the 990s, he led his troops through the Western Ghats, a chain of hills protecting the western coast of India, and burned the ships of his enemies 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 lasting presence on the island. Finally, he invaded the rugged Deccan Plateau – from Germany to the Tamil coast of Italy – and seized part of it for himself.

The spoils of conquest were scattered over his great imperial temple, known today 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 (today you would need a fleet of twelve Airbus A380s to transport that much rice).

This allowed Brihadishwara to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, a tool of the Chola state that intended to channel Rajaraja’s vast wealth into new irrigation systems, expanded cultivation, 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 inner Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, forged alliances with the Tamil trading corporations: a partnership between traders and government power that foreshadowed the East India Company—the powerful British trading corporation that later ruled much of India—that was to come more than 700 years later.

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

While some Indian nationalists have heralded this as a Chola “conquest” or “colonization” of Southeast Asia, archeology offers an entirely different picture: the Cholas do not appear to have had a navy of their own, but had a wave of Tamil navies under them. traders from the diaspora spread across the Bay of Bengal.

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

In the 13th century under the Mongol rule of China, under the descendants of Kublai Khan, Tamil merchants ran a successful business in the port of Quanzhou and even built a Shiva temple on the coast of the East China Sea. It is no coincidence that during British rule in the 19th century, Tamils ​​constituted the largest proportion of Indian administrators and workers in Southeast Asia.

Conquests and global connections made Chola-ruled southern India a cultural and economic behemoth, a nexus of planetary trade networks.

Chola aristocrats invested in a wave of new temples that supplied fine goods from a truly global economy that connected the farthest shores 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 obtained from Sumatra and Borneo.

Tamil temples turned into huge complexes and public spaces, surrounded by markets and provided with rice estates. In the Chola metropolitan region on the Kaveri, which corresponds to the modern city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of a dozen temple cities supported a population of tens of thousands, perhaps surpassing most cities in Europe at the time.

These Chola cities were surprisingly multicultural and multi-religious: Chinese Buddhists interacted with Tunisian Jews, Bengali Tantric masters traded with Lankan Muslims. Today, Tamil Nadu is one of the most urbanized states in India. Many towns in the state grew up around the shrines and markets of the Chola period.

These developments in urban planning and architecture took place in parallel in art and literature.

The medieval Tamil metalwork made for Chola period temples is perhaps the finest ever produced by human hands, the artists rivaling Michelangelo and Donatello for their appreciation of the human figure. To praise the Chola kings and worship the gods, Tamil poets developed notions of holiness, history, and even magical realism. The Chola period is what you would get if the Renaissance took place in southern India 300 years before its time.

It is no accident that Chola bronzes – especially Nataraja bronzes – can be found in most major Western museum collections. Scattered across the globe, they are the remnants of a period of brilliant political innovation, of maritime expeditions that connected the globe; titanic shrines and fabulous riches; traders, rulers and artists who shaped the planet we live on today.

Anirudh Kanisetty is an Indian writer and author, most recently with Lords of Land and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire