Chola Empire

The return of the Cholas

The Chola name is old — the Sangam-age dynasty of the Kaveri delta had faded by the third century CE — and it returns in 848 when Vijayālaya took Tañjāvūr from a Muttaraiyar chief. His successors displaced the Pallavas, absorbed the Pāṇḍyas, and by the end of the tenth century held the Tamil country outright.

The delta was the foundation. The Kaveri's irrigated rice land, organised through village assemblies and temple corporations, produced a surplus that could support standing armies and permanent building, and the Chola state's remarkable documentary record — tens of thousands of inscriptions cut into temple walls — is largely a record of that agrarian economy.

Rājarāja and Rājendra

Rājarāja I, ruling from 985 to 1014, conquered the Chera and Pāṇḍya countries, took northern Sri Lanka, annexed the Gangavāḍi country from the Western Gangas, and mounted a naval expedition against the Maldives. He also ordered a comprehensive land survey and revenue settlement, and his inscriptions record the administration of the empire in exceptional detail.

His son Rājendra I marched an army north to the Ganga in 1023, brought back water from the river in pots, and founded a new capital called Gaṅgaikoṇḍa Cōḻapuram — the city of the Chola who took the Ganga. In the following decade he sent a naval expedition across the Bay of Bengal against Śrīvijaya, sacking ports along the Malay peninsula and Sumatra. It is the only sustained overseas military campaign mounted by an Indian state before the modern period, and its motive appears to have been the control of the trade route to China rather than conquest.

Chola embassies reached the Song court, and Tamil merchant guilds — the Ayyāvoḷe and the Maṇigrāmam — operated across Southeast Asia. A Tamil inscription of the period survives at Quanzhou in China, and another in Sumatra.

Temples and bronzes

The Bṛhadīśvara temple at Thanjavur, completed in 1010, is the great monument of the empire: a tower of thirteen storeys rising some sixty-six metres, built of granite in a country with no granite nearby, over a sanctum housing an enormous liṅga. Its walls carry the inscriptions recording Rājarāja's endowments — the names of four hundred dancers assigned to it, the villages granted, the weights of gold and jewels — which makes it also the most detailed surviving account of how a medieval Indian temple was financed and staffed.

Rājendra built its counterpart at Gaṅgaikoṇḍa Cōḻapuram, and the temple at Darasuram followed in the twelfth century.

Chola bronze casting, by the lost-wax method, produced the processional images that remain the most admired sculpture of India: the Naṭarāja, Śiva dancing in a ring of flame, above all. These were not made as art objects but as the mobile bodies of the deity, dressed, garlanded and carried through the streets on festival days, and many of them still are.

Government and decline

The Chola inscriptions describe a system of village assemblies — the sabhā of brahmin settlements, the ūr of others — with committees elected by lot for tanks, gardens and justice, and rules for eligibility and audit. The Uttiramerūr inscriptions, which set out this procedure in detail, are often cited as evidence of local self-government under the empire. How much real autonomy these bodies had, and how they related to central power, is debated: one influential account treats the Chola state as a segmentary polity in which the king's actual authority was limited and ritual sovereignty did much of the work.

The empire declined through the twelfth century under Chalukya and then Hoysala pressure, and the Pāṇḍyas ended it in 1279.