Anirudh Kanisetti's 'Lords of Earth and Sea' explores legacy of the Cholas

LORDS OF EARTH AND SEA: A HISTORY OF THE CHOLA EMPIRE

Author: Anirudh Kanisetti

Publisher: Juggernaut

Pages: 343  Price: ₹899

  Despite the many contestations over Indian history, everyone agrees on one thing: Southern Indian history is an understudied subject. In 2022, Anirudh Kanisetti set about attempting to bridge this deficit with his debut book, Lords of the Deccan. In the introduction to that book, he wrote that in school textbooks, “we leap five hundred years from the Mauryas of the second century BCE to the Guptas of the third century CE. We then jump six hundred years from the end of the Gupta empire directly to the arrival of the Turkic sultans in north India in the twelfth century and thence move neatly to the Mughals, the British and then Independence”. 

With Lords of the Deccan, Kanisetti eloquently demonstrated, through the rise and fall of the Chalukyas, how a Deccani dynasty shaped northern and peninsula India’s political and cultural landscape in lasting ways. With Lords of Earth and Sea, Kanisetti takes us to the fertile Kaveri floodplain where a peasant clan emerged from the patchwork of autonomous villages, or nadus (literally “countries”), around 850 CE. Conquering up the river to the Deccan highlands, tribes and merchants lavished on this upstart dynasty the resources to maintain powerful armies to commandeer allies and generate the surpluses to create breathtaking “imperial temples”, of which the Brihadesvara, the tallest free-standing structures on earth at the time, excepting the Pyramids, were but one example.

  The Cholas created a Tamil-speaking empire along the Tamil and Telugu coasts, foraying as far as Bengal, with its influence reaching the Malay peninsula and its reputation as far as China. Conventional histories parade names such as Rajaraja, Rajendra, Rajadhiraja, Vira Rajendra as scions of a powerful southern dynasty that “colonised” Lanka and parts of southeast Asia. Kanisetti’s book offers a nuanced corrective to this historical nationalism, but without diminishing the unique accomplishments of this dynasty.  

  It lasted more than 400 years (850 to 1279 CE), longer than the Mughal Empire. Among other things, it bequeathed to Hindu worship two legacies. One was the image of the Shiva Nataraja; the other was the concept of congregational worship in temples in contrast to the exclusivity of upper caste worship common in north Indian temples of the day.            

  Kanisetti begins his story from the early 10th century when the Rashtrakutas were the most powerful polity, “considered by Arab traders to be one of the Four Great Kings of the World”, the others being the emperors of China, Byzantium and the Abbasid Caliph. This was to change within a generation.

  The book opens with the arrival of a Chera (or Keralite) princess, Kokkilan Adigal, to the Chola court. She had been offered in marriage by her father, the Chera king, as part of an alliance with Parantaka, The Foe Destroyer. A third-generation Chola, Parantaka (907-955 CE), who established his base in a gleaming mansion in Thanjavur, was a creature of his time. His mother was a minor Rashtrakuta princess, and he had 10 wives, wealthy, cultivated ladies embodying local alliances and vassal kingdoms that expanded the Chola zone of power (and created a fiendishly complex family tree as a result).  

  Instead of a standard recounting of the conquests and expansion of the dynasty down the ages, Kanisetti also examines its growth through social trends and architectural innovation to build a vivid portrait of the times. Eloquent in prose and rich in scholarship, Kanisetti offers an intelligent popular history, without infantilising or glorifying his subject.    

  The mammoth temple-building projects are a potent example of the strategy of amassing wealth and projecting power. Since the Chola court was tied to a loose, shifting alliances of tribute-paying villages, they renovated and endowed local temples in return for a share of the harvest and manpower for military campaigns. To secure this relationship, the Cholas exercised their kingly privilege to “gift” collectively owned land to the village temple and appoint loyalists to collect dues.

  This practice influenced the Cholas in two ways. First, the dynasty began to patronise Shiva, The Destroyer, a god popular with the rural gentry, in place of their original patron war goddess, Nishumbha-Sudhani. Second, as temples became symbols of power, early Chola queens also built structures and lavished gold, precious stones and sheep to establish their personal power dynamics.

  Among them was Sembiyan Mahadevi, Parantaka’s younger daughter-in-law, whose son Uttama had ascended the throne following the political chaos of a Rashtrakuta invasion. To cement her son’s power, Sembiyan Mahadevi dedicated a temple to a form of Shiva she and her husband had chanced upon in a swampy village shrine near present-day Chidambaram – “that wild dancer, unbelievably lithe in bounding bronze, ropy hair in a blazing halo, leg raised in glorious rhythm”.

  The emergence of this energetic swamp god in the Chola pantheon changed the dynamics of religious worship in the region and the nature of the regime. In its search for wealth and power, it became more outward looking. But Kanisetti is careful to avoid the muscular retellings of “overseas” invasions backed by a “Chola navy”.

  The invasion of Sri Lanka circa 991 by Rajaraja Chola, administrator and temple builder extraordinaire, is one such example. “…Lanka and the mainland simply did not conform to our modern national boundaries: to Rajaraja Chola Lanka was as familiar as Gangawadi,” he points out. Nor did Lankan Buddhist or Rajaraja sources even mention a navy. Merchant shipping of the kind owned by the Five Hundred was “more than sufficient to move people between island and mainland”.

  The Five Hundred is a loose label for powerful merchant syndicates that predated the Cholas and established a symbiotic relationship with the dynasty, underwriting conquests and benefitting from them. In Lanka, for instance, Five Hundred helped Cholas exploit pearl fisheries and pepper. That is why the popular depiction of Chola’s overseas expeditions as heroic Indian colonisations are off the mark. These forays were “a much more conditional, complicated project,”

Kanisetti writes.

  To stay in power, the Cholas needed more conquests to keep the merchant syndicates in business. The prosperous southeast Asian trade offered one opportunity. At his glittering capital in Gangai-Konda-Chola-Puram, the ambitious Rajendra plotted his grand, risky attack on Kedah in Malaya, the world’s major source of wood and camphor. Again, it was on merchant syndicate trading ships that the Chola expeditionary force sailed circa 1025 to sack the kingdom so thoroughly that the confederation of Malay and Sumatran ports disintegrated.

  Though there is no evidence of a sustained imperial presence in Kedah, the political vacuum Rejendra’s conquest created turned out to be hugely profitable for the Five Hundred. No longer under the thumbs of local kings, they built ports and emporia and became dominant in southeast Asian trade.

  Beyond the lively empire-building narrative, Kanisetti offers a sobering portrait of medieval society built on slaves, the exploitation of women -- kings were served by “service retinues” of captured aristocratic women, for example – inequality and outright loot. He shows how the Chola’s strategy of temple-building caused their downfall. To mollify the gentry, the Cholas exempted temples from taxes. But extractive taxes on non-temple lands drove the poor to sell them to the gentry who then converted them into temple lands. The result was that tax revenues to the Cholas dwindled and shrank their power. It was simple tax evasion but it proves a salutary early lesson in the perils of cronyism.