How India's dynasty created a cultural and economic superpower

It is the year 1000 AD – the heart of the Middle Ages.

Europe is in a constant state of change. The powerful states we know today—such as England under Norman rule and the fragmented lands that would become France—no longer existed. Towering Gothic cathedrals had not yet risen. Aside from the distant and thriving city of Constantinople, there are a few major urban centers that dominate the landscape.

However, that year, on the other side of the globe, a South Indian emperor was preparing to build the world's largest temple.

Completed only 10 years later, it was 216 feet (66 m) high, assembled from 130,000 tons of granite, second only to the pyramids of Egypt in height. At its heart was a 12-foot-tall emblem of the Hindu god Shiva, encased in gold and studded with rubies and pearls.

In its lamp-lit hall were 60 bronze sculptures decorated with thousands of pearls collected from the open island of Lanka. In his vaults were several tons of gold and silver coins, as well as necklaces, jewellery, trumpets and drums torn from defeated kings across the southern peninsula of India, making the emperor the richest man of the era.

He was called Raja Raja, King of Kings, and he belonged to one of the most surprising dynasties in the medieval world: the Cholas.

His family changed the way the medieval world worked, but they are largely unknown outside India.

Before the 11th century, the Cholas were one of several warring powers that dotted the Kaveri floodplain, the large alluvial expanse that flows through the present-day state of Tamil Nadu in India. But what sets the Chola family apart is their endless capacity for innovation. By the standards of the medieval world, Chola queens were also remarkably prominent, serving as the public face of the dynasty.

While traveling to Tamil villages and rebuilding small ancient mud-brick shrines in lustrous stone, the widow Chola Sembian Mahadevi – Rajaraja's great-aunt – effectively “rebranded” the family as major devotees of Shiva, gaining them a popular following.

Symbian prayed to Nataraja, a hitherto unknown form of the Hindu god Shiva as the King of Dance, and all her temples featured him prominently. I caught the trend. Today Nataraja is one of the most recognizable symbols of Hinduism. But to the medieval Indian mind, Nataraja was actually a symbol of the Cholas.

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

Rajaraja was also a conqueror. In the 1990s, he led his armies over the Western Ghats, a range of hills that protect India's western coast, and burned his enemies' ships while they were in port. Then, taking advantage of internal unrest on the island of Lanka, he established a Chola outpost there, becoming the first mainland Indian king to establish a permanent presence on the island. Finally, he stormed the rugged Deccan Plateau – which stretches from Germany to Italy on the Tamil coast – and seized part of it for himself.

The spoils of conquest were lavished on his great imperial temple, known today as Brihadeshvara.

In addition to its precious treasures, the Grand Temple received 5,000 tons of rice annually, from occupied territories across southern India (you would need a fleet of a dozen Airbus A380s to carry that much rice today).

This allowed Brihadeshvara to function as a massive ministry of public works and welfare, and an instrument of the Chola state, intended to channel Rajaraja's vast fortunes into new irrigation systems, and into the expansion of agriculture, into vast new herds of sheep and buffalo. Only a few countries in the world could have imagined economic control on this scale and depth.

The Chola people were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to inland Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola's successor, Rajendra, built alliances with the Tamil trading companies: a partnership between merchants and government power that foreshadowed the East India Company—a powerful British trading company that later ruled large parts of India—which was to come more than seven hundred years later. .

In 1026, Rajendra placed his forces on merchant ships and sacked Kedah, a Malay city that dominated the world trade in valuable timber and spices.

While some Indian nationalists have declared this to be a Chola “invasion” or “colonization” of Southeast Asia, archeology suggests a more bizarre picture: the Cholas apparently did not have a navy of their own, but beneath them, there was a wave of Tamils. . Diaspora traders spread across the Bay of Bengal.

By the late 11th century, these merchants were operating independent ports in North Sumatra. A century later, they were deep within what is today Myanmar and Thailand, working as tax collectors in Java.

In the 13th century, in Mongol-ruled China under the descendants of Kublai Khan, Tamil merchants ran successful businesses in the port of Quanzhou, and even erected a Shiva temple on the coast of the East China Sea. It was not a coincidence that, under British rule in the nineteenth century, Tamils ​​constituted the bulk of Indian administrators and workers in Southeast Asia.

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

Chola aristocrats invested the spoils of war in a wave of new temples, which brought luxury goods from a truly global economy linking the far shores of Europe and Asia. The copper and tin for making bronze came from Egypt, and perhaps even from Spain. Camphor and sandalwood for the gods were obtained from Sumatra and Borneo.

Tamil temples grew into vast complexes and public spaces, surrounded by markets and stocked with rice plantations. In the area of ​​the Chola capital on the Kaveri River, opposite the present-day city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of dozens of temple towns supported a population numbering in the tens of thousands, perhaps outdistancing most cities in Europe at the time.

These Chola cities were surprisingly multicultural and multireligious: Chinese Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Tunisian Jews, and Bengali tantric gurus traded with Lankan Muslims. Today the state of Tamil Nadu is one of the most urbanized regions in India. Many cities of the state grew around shrines and markets in the Chola period.

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

Medieval Tamil metalwork, produced for Chola period temples, is perhaps the finest ever created by human hand, with the artists rivaling Michelangelo or Donatello in their appreciation of the human figure. To glorify the Chola kings and worship the gods, Tamil poets developed notions of sacredness, history, and even magical realism. The Chola period was what you would get if the Renaissance occurred in southern India 300 years before its time.

It is no coincidence that Chola bronzes – especially Nataraja bronzes – can be found in most major Western museum collections. They are spread throughout the world, and are the remains of a period of brilliant political innovations and maritime expeditions that connected the globe. Of gigantic shrines and fantastic wealth; The merchants, rulers and artists who shaped the planet we live on today.

Anirudh Kanisetti is an Indian writer and author Masters of Land and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire