290. Medieval India’s Alexander The Great: The Cholas (Part 2)

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0:29Hello and welcome to this very special empire where we are in person. We're together. We're on the same kind of sofa thing. It doesn't happen often. Doesn't happen often. Yeah, I know. He's the Britain-India. I'm the Indian in Britain. I mean, that was the premise that we started. But now you're the Indian-India. I'm here. I know. I know. And now I'm actually leaning. I've just noticed I'm leaning on my Essex roots. Whenever anyone asks me, what's your good name and where are you from? I just say Essex just to see what happens. The confusion that follows is something to behold. Our very special guest, though.

0:58Again, we're very lucky. We've got Anirudh Kensethi, who's with us, who has been talking us through the Chola Empire. I love Sembian who is this woman who you kind of teased us with the Chola queen who puts them on the map and you sort of tease this out that she creates something of brand Chola that didn't exist before tell us just a little bit more about how that happens what I find so fascinating about the Cholas is that they're a thousand years away from us but the way in which they rose and the way in which they fell has a lot to do with very modern ideas and I think Sembian exemplifies the dynasty's successful development of a media strategy.

1:34So, Nataraja, keep in mind, was the Shiva, the king of dance, was not a god of the Kaveri floodplain. He was a god of the swamp, a little further north. So, he was essentially a blank canvas, waiting to be picked up by a royal family, and was associated with nobody else other than the Cholas. The next big step of Sembion's strategy was that while earlier Chola queens only built one temple over the course of their lifetimes, Sembian built 12. And she chose these temples to be in places where people are sure to see them. So something like selecting where your billboard is going to be based on who the maximum number of people are.

2:09And these were massive blingy affairs. We're not talking about sort of little humble things. We're talking about huge statements. Well, no, not as blingy as they're later become. How important? 25, 30 feet tall. It's the men who follow who build the big temples. She plants the seed. It's the men who've got something to prove. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Anir, come again. So she's laying out the seeds of this sort of propaganda for her family and the new god that her family has brought. And the idea that her family are the foremost devotees of Shiva. Right. And therefore, whatever they're doing to build their temples, which very often involves appropriating village lands.

2:45Moreover, to oppose the Cholas is to oppose the god. To oppose god himself, interesting. You can really see a remarkable mind here. This is a woman who has grown up in the shadow of these aristocratic women with all these ideas about aesthetics. And what she does instead are these very no-frills attached temples with the same standard template. But the benefit of the standard template is that these are, without question, Sembians temples. It's a media campaign. It's a total media campaign. It is a media campaign. But Ali Rud, let's be honest about this. She's an amazing, an amazing woman. And we have this figure.

3:21but it is her great nephew who is the superstar who really creates the Chola Empire. Raja Raja Chola, the king of kings. Raja Raja, so good they named him twice. Okay, yes. Tell us about Raja Raja then. Well, the interesting thing about Raja Raja and about the rise of the empire to superstardom is that it wouldn't have happened if not for the financial base that Sambian sets up. She generates this goodwill and she sets up this self-reinforcing system where the cholas are able to display their piety to local audiences and therefore get taxes and get local talent to join them. But what Raj Raja does is that while Sembian and her son, who was the actual king, would recruit the more, let's say, peaceable among the Tamil gentry, the folks who are good at finance, the guys who are good at money and accounting, Raj Raja recruited guys with a different kind of talent, the guys who had a talent for organized violence.

4:15He's a boy's boy. Oh, right. Okay. So are we talking sort of thug army? So he's much more of a man's man. The only surviving depiction we have of him, which is a spectacular mural in the temple that he later builds. I've crawled into that little crevice to have a look at it. It's quite difficult to light. But he's depicted as this bull of a man with the dusky gold skin and these thick, sensuous lips and dark eyes. And a big hairdo piled up in a sort of beehive, rather like a sort of B-52. A big, thick hair bun, yeah. And he was a man's man. He grows up in the shadow of this dynasty that's, while it's becoming popular, it has become far less aggressive than it once was.

4:54And it seems that he grows up with this yearning to be an adventurer. Now, what we see in the years that follow is extraordinary conquest. The Cholas burst out of the Calvary Delta to conquer not only the whole of South India, but project their power into Southeast Asia, into Northern India. Is there some great military development that they master to overcome their enemies? or is it just that they've got more resources now and can have bigger armies? Well, I think it's both. And one thing I really spent a lot of time doing in this book is exploring how medieval Indian states worked because it's nothing like what we expect.

5:27Raj Rajah, like his aunt, is compelled to indulge in a good PR strategy. But what he's able to do is break the limitations of Sembian's system because Sembian was constrained by how much tax revenue she could extract and in medieval times there's a limit to how much you can do with agriculture. But what Raja Raja does is he's a conqueror. So a single successful campaign will give him the loot he needs to build dozens of temples. So I've heard him described as sort of India's Alexander the Great. Do you think that's a fair... I think it's an accurate... That is Adirudh's own phrase. I think it's an accurate description of him because he comes to the throne in a time of political turmoil.

6:04All the great empires, especially the great Deccan empires that used to lord it over the Cholas are collapsing. And while Sembian was not willing to sanction campaigns, Rajaraja absolutely is. And you repeatedly see him go to war occasionally with reverses, but he keeps going back to the battlefield. He's a man of endless determination and tenacity for conquest. Take us through those conquests. In the 990s, the first big campaign is over the Western Ghats and into the harbors of Kerala, burning the ships as they're sitting in the harbor. but rather like sort of the Israelis bombing the Egyptian air force even before the six-day war begins.

6:43It's a kind of preemptive strike. Absolutely. And I think that Rajaraja had an audience in mind for this. I think that you can already see during Sambian's reign that Tamil merchants are getting more and more interest in the Cholas. You see them picking up the idea of the Nataraja on the temple wall and incorporating that into their own temple renovations. And soon after Rajaraja comes to the throne and does a spectacular act where he burns their rival's ships, The Tamil merchants all of a sudden are now closely associated with Chola army regiments. Your interpretation is that this is done to win over the 500, this very, very rich guild which forms such an important part of the story.

7:18Because they need ships, they need transport. And if you're the people who are looking after the ships from the pirates, then you're the one who's going to get the punch. Moreover, you need the money of these very rich guilds, and you're winning over the merchant classes. But previously, you've just been talking to the peasants and getting the taxes on the land. Now you're getting the real money out of the merchants. And getting the real merchants to worship the swamp god. You know, if that's the insignia that makes you feel safe, the dancing Nataraja, it is like wearing a uniform. I'm with him.

7:47I'm with the Cholos. In most of the sources from the late 10th, early 11th century, the answer has been staring us in the face. We've always wondered how Chola expansion happened. But there's this very clear indication from the Chulavamsa, which is a Buddhist chronicle written in Sri Lanka. and it says that Rajaraja knew what the right time to invade the island was because a horse trader told him. Right. It says that. It says that. They knew why they were invaded. It was a Tamil-speaking horse trader who saw that Anuradhapura was in chaos and then went and told Rajaraja. Strike now. So just to clarify, so in Sri Lanka, there's an interregnum, the king has died.

8:23A horse trader makes it all the way to Tanjore. We can imagine him on his horseback charging down the road to Tanjore along the river and he comes into the court and he says, now is the time to act, Raja Raja. And it was the perfect time for him to come with this news because Raja Raja had just tried to attack South Karnataka up in the Deccan, this great rival of his, and was defeated. And he was hungering for a fight he wanted to conquer. But Anirudh, in your telling of the tale, it's then the actual merchant guilds that provide the shipping to get him to Surinacar. Now, this is something that's got you in some trouble with Indian nationalists who like to imagine that Raja Raja Chola had a sort of great big navy, like sort of, you know, the British at the time of Trafalgar.

9:03Why do you think that's a mistaken notion? Well, medieval Tamils loved documenting things. They loved writing on temples. And we have dozens and dozens of inscriptions where Chola army regiments, keep in mind this impulse to organize things collectively extends right down to the way the armies work. You have regiments that take charge of particular temples and make temple gifts. And they give themselves names. And they give themselves names. They have the Karnataka strongheads. Sounds like a baseball team. Juventus versus the Karnataka strongheads. You can imagine that their team spirit would have been very similar.

9:38You know, you go back to the fields, but then you get together the boys once the planting is done, and then you go to war under the big boss's banner. And you have so many inscriptions of army regiments, army officers, military, like infantry generals, making gifts to temples, but maybe one or two that might vaguely refer to somebody associated with chips. Because you do, in the early Buddhist period, which I've studied, you get these Mahanavakas who leave inscriptions. They're not there in the same way. There's no sign of them in the Chola inscriptions. Even in Nagabhat in the great Chola port, you have mentions of merchants who are making gifts, but there's nobody who seems to bear the title of a member of a standing Chola.

10:16So in your telling of the story, not only do the merchants tip off Raja Raja Chola about, this is the moment to invade. They even provide the shipping to get him there, rather like the merchants of Venice, I suppose, in the Fourth Crusade. And they profit tremendously. Right after the conquest of Lanka, you have merchant inscriptions showing up on the northern shore of the island. And the northern shore is also where pearl fisheries are. For those who don't know what they are, it literally is what it sounds like. You have people diving for oysters, picking up pearls on some of the finest pearls in the world, which are then And right after that, you begin to see for the first time, these spectacular gifts of tens of thousands of pearls woven into necklaces.

10:56Like you can imagine what a foot thick being gifted to the idols that Raj Raja is giving to various temples. Right, right, right. Now, Anirudh, in some accounts of medieval India, there's very much this image that India was this peaceful Eden until the arrival of the Muslims, who in a sense sort of inject warfare into the system. But the image you paint in this book is one of warring kingdoms who are constantly attacking each other. And the Chola conquest of Sri Lanka, in your understanding, and you provide contemporary chronicle evidence for this, is an extremely violent affair involving the sacking of temples and the stealing of gems and bringing all the money and all the loot back to Tanjore.

11:40I mean, are there accounts of massacres of civilians and those who aren't? I mean, or is it only death in warfare? What do we know about the questions? Well, I would say that to the Indian nationalists, that they should read the primary sources that they're basing their sentiments on because the Cholas are absolutely unapologetic about conquest. And I don't mean to pass a moral judgment on this. This was the way that medieval polities worked. In fact, the Cholas considered themselves descendants of the sun. So in their inscriptions, they are portrayed as smiting their enemies with heat. Surya, the sun god, they're descended from him, is what they think.

12:14Yes, very distantly. They claim to defeat their enemies in hot battle, to incinerate their cities effortlessly, almost as if it's a matter of play. But only on the battlefield, I don't know. The thing that the Mughals, by today's standards, they are often criticised by, is that, you know, the barbarism towards civilian populations, women, children, old men who weren't doing any fighting. Do we know what the Cholus, you know, were like? We have Chalukia inscriptions and other of their neighbors who are being invaded by the Cholas specifically accusing them of raping Brahmin women. So that is the evidence.

12:45And to the nationalists who say that, look, this is their enemies accusing them of this. There are Chola court texts that talk about as the armies advance, gardens being incinerated, rivers dried up by heat and villages fleeing in terror and hiding in the forests. and it's baffling to expect that a medieval polity that doesn't have telegraphs or regular standing armies that are well trained to a martial court it would be baffling to expect that these armies that the red mist would suddenly clear yeah that why would why would the boys be disciplined Williams touched on this but it is almost climate is almost dangerous to say this about the chawlers that the chawlers were anything other than these sort of golden gem and pearl bandolier wearing heroes who pushed you know the hinduism the noble hinduism the glorious period of hindu expansion can we go as far as to say it's actually dangerous the kind of stuff that you're you're showing people from the historical record can get you into some hot water there's obviously loudmouths on twitter always but i don't think they represent the mainstream of indian readers i think that most indian readers are open to arguments if it's well presented and if there's evidence yeah sure sure but when you're when i mean do you do for people who don't read your twitter feed are people as angry as all that you say you can't even say this about the churlis you can't say there were anything other than noble peaceable i think i think we should say clearly here that ali rood is one of the best-selling young authors in india that his work is extremely popular so uh it isn't as if you know you're you're sufficiently upsetting people that they're not buying your books they're buying books and i don't doubt it for a second that's why you're on the pod because you're so fabulously important.

14:23But I'm talking about the febrile atmosphere in India at the moment. There are those who are definitely upset. Yeah, and I think it depends on where in India and which constituency you're talking about. Because a book deal that we were talking about with a Tamil publisher who wanted to do an edition of Lords of Earth and Sea fell through because they're worried about offending readers potentially. So Sri Lanka is looted according to the Mahavamsa, is it? The Chulavamsa. The Chulavamsa, which is the continuation of the Mahavamsa, which is this great Sri Lankan chronicle, which gives us everything we really know about ancient Sri Lankan history.

14:57The temples are raided, the eyes of the idols and gems, the gold of the statues, which are being melted down, are brought back to Tanjore, where they finance the building of one of the very greatest temples ever built in India. After the break, we're going to ask Anirudh Kanaseti about the building of the great temple of Tanjore.

15:25Welcome back. Well, Anirudh, tell us about this extraordinary temple at Tanjore, which Raja Raja Chola builds with the loot of his conquest. You write, I think, that it's 216 feet whole, assembled of 130 ,000 tons of granite, and it's second only to Egypt's pyramids in height at this time. Here's the thing about Rajaraja is that while most medieval Indian kings would be happy to go and loot and levy tribute from a puppet ruler, Rajaraja seems to have this idea from the very beginning that the political conditions exist for him to create an empire. So he's interested in creating institutions. He's interested in extracting resources in a long-term manner and funneling them into this grand imperial project that will symbolically and cosmically declare him to be Raja Raja, king of kings.

16:22And the project that he settles upon is this colossal temple, 40 times larger than anything that had ever been built, 40 times larger than anything that Sembian Mahadevi built, but with this completely innovative architectural style that draws on tamil precedents but also brings in ideas from the telugu coast up further north which he had conquered about a decade prior and it's very clearly conceived as this imperial edifice because if you were to look at its inscriptions not only does raja raja make quite a song and dance about his conquests but he also talks about the staff of the temple and the staff are very deliberately hand-picked from different parts of the empire oh that's clever again that's brand building and you know you all have a role here that's messaging very clear messaging it's also resources from across the empire so rice from particular regions pearls from particular regions but all the capital that's concentrated in the temple is also very interestingly redirected and reinvested so for example we know that rajiraja owned thousands of sheep it was just something that he owned and what he does with these thousands of sheep is that he invests them in the hinterland in the drier regions with the idea being that these sheep he's looted from elsewhere will create new herds from which he can continue to draw ghee and oil for the temple.

17:43When I visit Chola territory today, you're often confronted with lots of vegetarian restaurants, the famous gorgeous Thali restaurants of Tanjore and thereabouts. Was Raja Raja Chola a veggie or would he have eaten these sheep? It's difficult to say because the inscriptions all focus on the offerings of the temple, which had to be vegetarian, of course. But I don't think that a martial man who's going out there conquering and raiding, has the luxury of choosing what he eats. I think that he needs a protein-rich diet, and if he gets that from sheep, then so be good. And if it's lamb, mutton fry, or whatever it is.

18:14Absolutely. Peppery lamb fry. Well, he's not going to need the jumpers, is he, in that kind of climate, so something would be useful. But when you go there today, even now, even in the 21st century, the temple rises up among the flat floodplains of the Carburi, just like when you drive through northern France you see Chartres Cathedral in the distance with that great Gothic spire rising still dominating the whole landscape. And at the top of that great spire there is this enormous single is it a single stone or is it a it's an enormous finial isn't it? Well according to legend it's a single stone but if you go up and see it's actually eight massive blocks that have been jointed together.

18:57In a sort of jigsaw puzzle. Yeah. And you destroy the lovely idea, which I've always grown up with, that an enormous ramp was built. I thought that the finial got there by being sort of like the pyramids with the ramps being hauled up by oxen and so on. You say that's a total myth, it's cranes. It just doesn't make sense from an engineering point of view. So it must have been elephant-powered cranes, which is an even harder idea to think about. I'll go with that. So we're now going to move on from the great Raja Rajachola to his son, who's even more sort of military minded and an even more ambitious conqueror.

19:32Tell us about Rajendra Chola. What I really enjoyed doing in this book is because of the density of the inscriptions that these people left behind, it's possible for us to guess at their personalities. Like we have a fairly good sense of who Sambian was, who Raja Rajah was. But Rajendra is a little more of a complex character because being a martial man, he's lionized by Hindu nationalists today. But he grows up in a court that has suddenly gone from being a minor part to one of the dominant parts of the subcontinent. And his father Rajaraja makes no secret of this in his inscriptions. A lot of women were captured in their raids.

20:09And this fundamentally changed the balance of power in the Chola court. where while Raj Raja had been practically raised by powerful women, Rajendra isn't. He grows up in a court where he's surrounded by martial men. And women are enslaved and captured. So it's a different, completely different. Just to be completely clear about this, they're often referred to rather discreetly in modern Indian history books as the service women. What were their lives involving in reality? Well, a lot of service. It takes a lot of work to run a palace. It takes constant cooking and cleaning and garland making.

20:47The king also needed to be bathed ceremonially. So you're talking about slavery. Let's just call it what it is. It is slavery. That's all it is. It is slavery. And these women are forced to do what slaves all over the world have been doing since the beginning of time. They're captured. They're forced into servitude. It's slavery. These are enslaved women who are forced to do the work that aristocrats don't want to do. Are they sex slaves as well as doing the washing and making garlands? I think sex slaves, it sounds vicarious. That's it's yes, these women did face sexual assault. There's no question about that.

21:19A lot of inscriptions talk about their children, but very almost no inscriptions talk about their husbands or their fathers. So these are women who, by the patriarchal standards of time, are considered to be uprooted. But that doesn't strip them entirely of their agency, because to your point, Anitha, about these women being slaves, these aren't slaves in the Western conception of them. These are women who still have ties to other more powerful women. These are women who still have some form of wealth. I'm not sure if they got salaries or if their employers gave them gifts. But these are women who also become temple patrons.

21:52So we know about them from their inscriptions. We know about them from inscriptions that they commission. So their names are on temples saying so-and-so, from so-and-so built or gave money for this temple. So-and-so of such-and-such service retina attached to such-and-such royal who is the mother of such-and-such bodyguard and such and such other service woman is making this gift. You say such and such a service retinue. Are they organized in sort of regiments like the army? They're organized in retinues and regiments. And these also have names. So we know of the Rajaraja Select Pandya Service Retinue of the Sacred Bath.

22:22Oh my God, that's catchy. They've given up on the branding. Branding is now a thing of the past, isn't it? Of the Sacred Bath. And they have to give the bath to the king. These are not simply barbaric conquerors. These are sophisticated people with ideas of symbolism and of cosmological significance. To be a conqueror meant to be able to seize wealth. And you're not only taking your enemy's elephants and gold, but you're also taking his women, which is a part of the wealth. You're also absorbing his martial luster. There's this very interesting line in Raja Raja's inscriptions, which his son continues, where they talk about being so resplendent, having deprived the Pandyas, their enemies, of their splendor.

23:01they have become so resplendent that they're worthy to be worshipped everywhere. So there is this idea that as descendants of the sun, glowing with wealth and jewels and women that have been secured from defeated enemies, that they are in a way semi-divine. They are the companions of the gods in the temples. And the conquests continue. And the famous conquest after which he names himself and indeed the new town and the new temple that he builds to rival his father, he does this massive campaign northwards to the river Ganges. Tell us about this. Once again, it comes from this unrivaled Chola ability to imagine, to think of new frontiers.

23:43We do have these vague legends and claims that such and such ancient king carved his name on the Himalaya and whatnot. But realistically speaking, there was no way that a medieval Tamil army could have reached all the way to the Gangetic plains. But in Rajendra's case, it's a lot more feasible because of the alliance with the merchants. It seems that the Chola connection to the 500 merchant corporation gives their forces a speed and a range that their rivals simply could not comprehend. And in your telling of the story, they're going up the coast. So they're being supplied by the 500 merchants in ships operating out of Nagapattinam and Mambalipuram.

24:20An army of tens of thousands isn't going to subsist on air. They need to be fed. And where would the food have come from? A part of it must have come from looting because you have plenty of claims from Rajendra himself of the towns that fell to his banner. But more likely, Tamil merchants were following in fleets of ships along the coast. And after conquering the Ganges, as you said, which you think could even mean projecting his power into modern Bangladesh, there's some claims that he burnt Sampura Mahavihara, one of the last great Buddhist sites. So what Rajendra does is that he doesn't actually manage to get all that far, but his army sends a political shockwave into the region because the Bengalis didn't expect them to be coming.

25:02You quickly have a collapse of the ancient Pala kingdom and all these mercenaries who went up north with the Chola set up their own little kingdoms in the ruins. And all these guys is believed to have burned the greatest of the Buddhist ones. And we mentioned in the last episode, your great heroes, the Rashtrakutas who build the great temple of Allura. The cholas at this point, under a gendered chola, smash the Rastrokutas. And rather like the Romans reducing Carthage and plowing salt into the fields of Carthage so that Carthage will never rise again. And to this day, archaeologists are finding that Carthage, nothing survives of Hannibal's Carthage.

25:40Your guys, the Rastrokutas who are based in Maniacheta, suffer the full wrath of the cholas. and Maniketa is destroyed so thoroughly that we're not even quite sure where it is today. So they've got to the Ganges, they've possibly reached as far as Bengal, they've got the capital of the Rastrakutas and reduced it to ashes. And now in the most ambitious of all their projects, there is a inscription on the Great Temple in Tanjore, which claims that Rajendra Chola invades Southeast Asia. And there's this great, I'll read a tiny fragment of but there's this long list of port cities that he destroys.