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

Summary

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Empire Podcast Episode 290: "Medieval India’s Alexander The Great: The Cholas (Part 2)"

Date: September 15, 2025
Hosts: William Dalrymple, Anita Anand
Guest: Aniruddh Kanesetti (historian, author of Lords of Earth and Sea)

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Overview

This episode takes listeners deep into the zenith and eventual decline of the Chola Empire—one of South Asia's most powerful dynasties. Building on the groundwork of its iconic queen Sembian Mahadevi and the branding of a dynasty around piety and power, the conversation centers on the lives, accomplishments, and contradictions of Raja Raja Chola and Rajendra Chola. Through expert insight and lively banter, the hosts and guest re-evaluate the legacy of this "medieval India's Alexander the Great," address modern nationalist myths, explore the interconnected world of the Cholas, and reflect on how empire shapes and is shaped by both violence and innovation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Sembian Mahadevi: Chola Queen and Architect of Dynasty Branding

[02:39–04:36]

• Sembian Mahadevi, an extraordinary queen, pioneers an early form of “media strategy” by building 12 distinct temples—well-situated for maximum visibility.
  • Aniruddh Kanesetti: "It's a media campaign." [04:36]
• She rebrands Nataraja (Shiva, Lord of Dance) as the dynasty’s exclusive deity, making Chola religious patronage a form of family propaganda.
• These temples help position the Cholas as Shiva’s foremost devotees, intertwining secular authority with spiritual legitimacy.
  • Aniruddh Kanesetti: “To oppose the cholas is to oppose the God himself.” [04:07–04:09]
• Sembian’s work lays the economic and cultural infrastructure upon which her successors would build a more martial empire.

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2. Raja Raja Chola: Conquest, Propaganda, and the Machinery of Empire

[04:37–13:09]

• “India’s Alexander the Great”
  • Raja Raja Chola is framed as a bold, ambitious ruler who merges inherited piety and new aggression.
    • Aniruddh Kanesetti: “I think it's an accurate description of him because he comes to the throne in a time of political turmoil… he's a man of endless determination and tenacity for conquest.” [07:20–07:44]
  • He mobilizes a new warrior elite (not mere accountants and gentry) to expand the empire.
  • Success is rooted in a combination of military innovation, PR savvy, and expanded extraction of wealth—from both peasants and newly-won merchant support.
• The burning of merchant ships in Kerala is compared to preemptive strikes in modern warfare; a calculated act to impress and attract the powerful "500" merchant guild.
  • William Dalrymple: “Rather like the merchants of Venice, I suppose. In the Fourth Crusade.” [11:38–11:48]

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3. Conquest, Violence, and the Merchants' Crucial Role

[08:58–15:50]

• The Cholas’ empire-building is enabled by merchant collaboration—local merchant guilds fund and supply military campaigns, especially in Sri Lanka.
  • Aniruddh Kanesetti: “There's a very clear indication from the Chulavamsa...Rajaraja knew what the right time to invade the island was because a horse trader told him.” [09:09]
• The myth of a vast state-run Chola navy is debunked; instead, shipping was outsourced to merchant fleets.
  • Aniruddh Kanesetti: "There's no sign of them [navy] in the Chola inscriptions...there's nobody who seems to bear the title of a member of a standing Chola navy." [11:26–11:38]
• The violence of conquest is foregrounded, challenging later myths of a pacific, golden Hindu past.
  • Temples sacked and loot (including pearls) funneled home. Civilians reportedly massacred and women captured.
  • Aniruddh Kanesetti: “The Cholas are absolutely unapologetic about conquest...In fact, the Cholas considered themselves descendants of the sun.” [13:09–13:32]
  • William Dalrymple: “We have Chalukya inscriptions...specifically accusing them of raping Brahmin women. So that is the evidence.” [13:57–14:06]
• Modern Indian nationalist discomfort with this violence is discussed; Kanesetti asserts the value of honest historical engagement.

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4. The Tanjore Temple: Monumental Architecture and Imperial Branding

[18:14–22:09]

• Raja Raja Chola’s temple at Tanjore is a core symbol of both religious and imperial might.
  • 216ft tall, 130,000 tons of granite, “second only to Egypt’s pyramids in height at this time.” [18:14–18:36]
  • Staffed with people from across the empire and built with looted wealth, it represents the entwining of cosmic kingship, economic redistribution, and public spectacle.
    • Aniruddh Kanesetti: “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...” [20:01]
  • The impressive engineering involved cranes (not massive ramps) and creative construction methods.
    • William Dalrymple: "You say that's total myth, it's cranes." [21:47]

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5. Rajendra Chola and Further Expansion: Ganges, Bengal, and Southeast Asia

[22:09–32:10]

• Rajendra, son of Raja Raja, oversees campaigns north to the Ganges and east to Southeast Asia.
  • The role of merchant guilds in provisioning and enabling these distant conquests is emphasized—the Cholas practice an early form of outsourced imperialism.
    • Aniruddh Kanesetti: "The Chola connection to the 500 merchant corporation gives their forces a speed and a range that their rivals simply could not comprehend." [26:25–26:59]
  • The famous Tanjore temple inscription claims conquest of ports in Malaysia, Sumatra, and beyond, but these should be read as political branding, not literal rule.
    • Aniruddh Kanesetti: “Branding doesn't always have to be based on truth, if you ask me.” [30:55]
  • Archaeology shows Tamil merchant colonies with deep linguistic and cultural penetration in Sumatra, more so than actual imperial governance.

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6. Society, Slavery, and Social Change

[23:13–25:20]

• The Chola conquests resulted in the enslavement of large numbers of women, who performed court labor (and were also subject to sexual violence).
  • Anita Anand: "So you're talking about slavery. Let's just call it what it is." [23:39]
  • Aniruddh Kanesetti: "It is slavery. And these women are forced to do what slaves all over the world have been doing." [23:43]
• These women did sometimes accumulate wealth and could become patrons of temples, complicating our notion of their status.

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7. Decline and Fall: Social Shifts and Tax Strategies

[32:40–35:03]

• The Chola decline was driven less by military defeat than by fiscal overreach and internal shifts.
  • Heavy taxation to fund wars, reliance on mercenary soldiers, and tax evasion (villages transferring land to tax-exempt temples) undermined state control.
    • Aniruddh Kanesetti: “...they raise taxes on the villages, which drives villages into bankruptcy. And the only people who have money left...are the hunter gatherers from the hills...they gift all the lands that they've bought to temples.” [34:15–35:03]
  • Social and religious changes followed in the empire’s wake—most major temple complexes in South India result not from Chola rise but from imaginative reinvention after collapse.
    • Aniruddh Kanesetti: “All the great complex that you see in south India today with the multiple courtyards, these are all products of the fall of the Chola empire, not of the rise.” [34:06]

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8. Legacy: From India to China and the World

[35:09–36:44]

• The Chola’s cosmopolitan legacy is reflected in a Tamil temple built in Guangzhou (China) by merchant groups under Mongol permission—evidence of medieval globalization, hybrid art, and enduring cultural networks.
  • Aniruddh Kanesetti: “...all the artisans were Chinese and so they depict the gods with Chinese faces. You see the famous story of Vishnu rescuing the elephant from the crocodile, but the crocodile is standing in a pool that's depicted with these swirling daoist style clouds.” [36:09–36:37]
• The Chola brand, Kanesetti notes, persists in memory, architecture, and continued debates about identity and history.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “To oppose the cholas is to oppose the God himself.”
  – Aniruddh Kanesetti [04:07]

• "It's a media campaign. It's a total media campaign."
  – Anita Anand [04:34]

• "He’s a boy’s boy."
  – William Dalrymple on Raja Raja Chola [05:36]

• "Raja Raja recruited guys with a different kind of talent, the guys who had a talent for organized violence."
  – Aniruddh Kanesetti [05:01]

• “The Cholas are absolutely, absolutely unapologetic about conquest…and I don’t mean to pass a moral judgment on this. This was the way that medieval polities worked."
  – Aniruddh Kanesetti [13:09]

• "We have Chalukya inscriptions… specifically accusing them of raping Brahmin women. So that is the evidence."
  – William Dalrymple [13:57]

• “Branding doesn’t always have to be based on truth, if you ask me.”
  – Aniruddh Kanesetti [30:55]

• “All the great complex that you see in south India today with the multiple courtyards, these are all products of the fall of the Chola empire, not of the rise.”
  – Aniruddh Kanesetti [34:06]

• “And it's this extraordinary relic of medieval globalization and the tremendous forces that Chola's unleashed.”
  – Aniruddh Kanesetti [36:38]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:39 — Sembian Mahadevi and the Chola media strategy
• 04:37 — Raja Raja Chola’s rise and approach to power
• 07:13 — “India’s Alexander the Great” and military expansion
• 09:09 — Merchants and the trigger for the invasion of Sri Lanka
• 13:09 — Acknowledging Chola violence: sacking, slaughter, slavery
• 18:14 — Building the great Tanjore temple
• 22:09 — Rajendra Chola's personality, court, and campaigns
• 26:25 — Southeast Asian campaigns: myth vs. archaeology
• 32:40 — The fall of the Cholas and the tax avoidance twist
• 35:09 — Chola temples in China and the age of medieval globalization

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Conclusion

This rich conversation busts nationalist myths, emphasizes the complexities of medieval power, and connects the rise and fall of the Cholas to broader dynamics of religion, trade, social change, and global history. Dalrymple, Anand, and Kanesetti make the case for a nuanced, evidence-based approach—one that finds value in exploring not just the glory, but also the contradictions, brutality, ingenuity, and far-reaching impact of an empire whose stories still resonate today.

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Transcript

[William Dalrymple]

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[Anita Anand]

Hello and welcome to this very special empire where we are in person, we're together, we're on the same kind of sofa thing.

[William Dalrymple]

It doesn't happen often.

[Anita Anand]

Doesn't happen often. Yeah, no, he's the Britain India. I'm the Indian in Britain. I mean that was the premise that we started this whole 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 where what's your good name? Or 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, again, we're very lucky. We've got Anirud Kensetti 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.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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. So Nataraja, keep in mind was 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 Sembian'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.

[Anita Anand]

And these were massive, blingy affairs. We're not talking about sort of little humble things. We're talking about huge statements, not as.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Blingy as they need to become.

[Anita Anand]

How important?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

25, 30ft tall.

[William Dalrymple]

It's the men who follow who build the big temples.

[Anita Anand]

She plants the seeds, the men have.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Got something to prove.

[Anita Anand]

Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Anira. 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.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

And the idea that her family are the foremost devotees of Shiva. And therefore whatever they're doing to build their temples, which very often involves appropriating village lands.

[William Dalrymple]

Moreover, to oppose the cholas is to.

[Anita Anand]

Oppose is to oppose the God himself. Interesting.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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 Sembian's temples.

[Anita Anand]

It's a media campaign. It's a total media campaign.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

It's a media campaign.

[William Dalrymple]

But Alirud, let's be honest about this. She's an amazing and amazing woman and we have this figure, but it is her great nephew who is the superstar who really creates the Chola empire. Raja Raja. Chola, the king of kings, Raja Raja.

[Anita Anand]

So good they named him twice. Okay, yes, tell us about Raja Raja then.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Well, the interesting thing about Raja Raja and about the rise of the empire to super stardom is that it wouldn't have happened if not for the financial base that Sambion 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 Rajaraja 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, Rajaraja recruited guys with a different kind of talent, the guys who had a talent for organized violence.

[William Dalrymple]

He's a boy's boy.

[Anita Anand]

Oh, right. Okay, so we're talking sort of thug.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Army thug like, 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 they later built.

[William Dalrymple]

I've crawled into that little crevice to have a look at it, and it's.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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.

[William Dalrymple]

Big hairdo piled up in a sort of beehive, rather like a sort of B52.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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. And it seems that he grows up with this yearning to be an adventurer.

[William Dalrymple]

Now, what we see in the years that follow is extraordinary conquest. The cholas burst out of the cavalry 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?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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. Rajaraja, 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 Rajaraja does is he's a conqueror. So a single Successful campaign will give him the loot he needs to build dozens of temples.

[Anita Anand]

So I've had him described as sort of India's Alexander the Great. Do you think that's a fair?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

I think that's a fair.

[William Dalrymple]

That is Ali Rudd's own phrase.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

I think it's an accurate description of him because he comes to the throne in a time of political turmoil. All the great empires, especially the great Dads, empires that used to lord it over the cholas, are collapsing. And while Sembian was not willing to sanction campaigns, Rajaraj 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.

[William Dalrymple]

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 harbour, rather like sort of the Israelis bombing the Egyptian Air Force even before the Six Day War begins. It's a kind of preemptive strike.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Absolutely. And I think that Rajaraja had an audience in mind for this. I think that you can already see during Sembian'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.

[William Dalrymple]

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, because they.

[Anita Anand]

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 patronage.

[William Dalrymple]

But 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, and now you're getting the real money out of the merchants and.

[Anita Anand]

You'Re getting them on sale 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, I'm with the cholos.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

In most of the sources from the late 10th, early 11th century, the answer's 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.

[William Dalrymple]

Right, it says that. It says that they knew why they were invaded.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

A Tamil speaking horse trader who saw Anuradhapura was in chaos and then went and told Rajaraja and then strike him down.

[William Dalrymple]

So, just to clarify, so in Sri Lanka, there's an interregnum. The king has died. A 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 Rajaraja.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

And it was the perfect time for him to come with his news because Rajaraja 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.

[William Dalrymple]

But Anirudh, in your telling of the tale, it's then the actual merchant guilds that provide the shipping to get him to Sri Lanka. Now this is something that's got you in some trouble with Indian nationalists who like to imagine that Rajaraja Chola had a sort of great big navy, like sort of, you know, the British at the time of Trafalgar. Why do you think that's a mistaken notion?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Well, medieval Tamils love 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.

[William Dalrymple]

And they give themselves names, and they give them names.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

They have the Karnataka strong heads.

[Anita Anand]

Ventus versus the Karnataka.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

You imagine that their team spirit would have been very similar. You know, you go back to the fields, 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 ships.

[William Dalrymple]

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.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

There's no sign of them in the Chola inscriptions. Even in Nagapattam, 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 navy.

[William Dalrymple]

So in your telling of the story, not only do the merchants tip off Rajaraja 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.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Absolutely.

[William Dalrymple]

In the Fourth Crusade.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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.

[Anita Anand]

For those who don't know what they are, it literally is. What it sounds like is that you have people diving for oysters, picking up pearls and some of the finest pearls in the world, which are then excavations.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

And right after that, you begin to see for the first time these spectacular gifts of tens of thousands of pearls woven into necklaces. Like you can imagine, they would have been about a foot thick, being gifted to the idols that Rajaraja is giving to various temples.

[Anita Anand]

Right, right, right.

[William Dalrymple]

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.

[Anita Anand]

I 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 crimes?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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, 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.

[Anita Anand]

Syria, the sun God. They're descended from him, is what they think, yes.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Very distantly. They claim to defeat their enemies in hot battle, to incinerate their cities effortlessly, almost as if it's a matter of.

[Anita Anand]

But only on the battlefield. And I know the thing that the Mughals are, by today's standing, they are often criticized by, you know, the barbarism towards civilian populations, women, children, Old men who weren't doing any fighting. Do we know what the cholas were like?

[William Dalrymple]

We have Chalukya inscriptions, another of their neighbors who are being invaded by the cholas, specifically accusing them of raping Brahmin women. So that is the evidence.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

And 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 code. It would be baffling to expect that.

[Anita Anand]

These armies and the red mist would suddenly clear.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Why would the boys be disciplined?

[Anita Anand]

Williams touched on this. But it is almost. Climate is almost dangerous to say this about the cholas, that the cholas 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 showing people from the historical record can get you into some hot water.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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.

[Anita Anand]

Yeah, sure, sure. But when you're, when, I mean, do you, for people who don't read your Twitter feed, are people as angry as all that at you saying you can't even say this about the cholas? You can't say they were anything other than noble, peaceable, conquering.

[William Dalrymple]

We should say clearly here that Ali Rudd is one of the best selling young authors in India, that his work is extremely popular. So it isn't as if, you know, you're sufficiently upsetting people that they're not buying your books, they're buying books.

[Anita Anand]

And I don't doubt it for a. That's why you're on the pod, because you're so fabulously important. But I'm talking about the febrile atmosphere in India at the moment.

[William Dalrymple]

There are those who are definitely upset.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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 SEEB fell through because they are worried about offending readers potentially.

[William Dalrymple]

So Sri Lanka is looted according to the the Mahavamsa is it, which is.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

The Chulavamsa, which is the Chulavamsa, the.

[William Dalrymple]

Continuation of the Mahavamsa, which is this great Sri Lankan chronicle which gives us everything we really know about ancient Sri Lankan history. The 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 Aniruddh Cannesetti about the building of the great temple of Tanjore.

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[William Dalrymple]

Welcome back. Well Anirud, tell us about this extraordinary temple at Tanjore which Rajaraja Chola builds with the loot of his conquest. You write I think that it's 216ft hall assembled of 130,000 tons of granite and it's second only to Egypt's pyramids in height at this time.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Here's the thing about Raja. Raja 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 of 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 Rajaraja, King of Kings. And the project that he settles upon is this colossal temple, 40 times larger than anything that had ever been built.

[William Dalrymple]

40 times larger?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

40 times larger than anything that Sembi and Mahadevi built, but with this completely innovative architectural style that draws on Tamil precedence, 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 have to look at its inscriptions, not only does Rajaraja 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.

[Anita Anand]

Oh, that's clever. Again, that's brand building. And you know, you all have a role here that's messaging, very clear messaging.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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 Rajaraja 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.

[William Dalrymple]

When 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 chala veggie or would he have eaten these sheep?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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 it.

[William Dalrymple]

And if it's lamb, mutton fry or.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Whatever it is, absolutely peppery lamb fries.

[Anita Anand]

Well, he's not going to need the jumpers you see in that kind of climate. So something would be useful.

[William Dalrymple]

But when you go there today, even now, Even in the 21st century, the temple rises up among the flat plood plains of the Kaveri. 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 like an enormous finial, isn't it?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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 in a sort of jigsaw puzzle. Yeah.

[William Dalrymple]

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 total myth, it's cranes.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Just doesn't make sense from an engineering point of view. So it must have been elephant barred cranes, which is an even odder idea to think about.

[William Dalrymple]

I'll go with that. So we're now going to move on from the great Rajaraja Chola to his son, who's even more sort of military minded and an even more ambitious conqueror. Tell us about Rajendra Chola.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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. We have a fairly good sense of who Sembian was, who Rajaraja 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 and this fundamentally changed the balance of power in the Chola court, where, while Rajaraja 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.

[Anita Anand]

Are enslaved and captured. So it's a different. Completely different.

[William Dalrymple]

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?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Well, a lot of service. It takes a lot of work to run a palace. It takes constant cooking and cleaning and garland making. The king also needed to be bathed ceremonially. The idea.

[Anita Anand]

So you're talking about slavery. Let's just call it what it is. It's slavery that's all it is.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

It is slavery. And these women are forced to do what slaves all over the world have been doing.

[Anita Anand]

They're not paid for it, they're captured, they're forced into servitude.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

These are enslaved women who are forced to do the work that aristocrats don't want to do.

[William Dalrymple]

Are they sex slaves? As well as doing the washing and making garlands?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

I think sex slaves. It sounds vicarious. Yes. These women did face sexual assault, there's no question about that. A lot of inscriptions talk about their children, but 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, Anita, 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. We're not sure if they got salaries or if their employers gave them gifts. But these are women who also become temple patrons.

[William Dalrymple]

So we know about them from the.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

We know about them from.

[Anita Anand]

So their names are temple saying so and so from so and so built or gave money for this temple.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

So and so of such and such service retinue attached to such and such royal who is the mother of such and such bodyguard and such and such other servicewoman is making this gift.

[William Dalrymple]

You say such and such a service retinue. Are they organised in sort of regiments like the army?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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.

[Anita Anand]

Oh my God. That was catchy. They've given up on the branding. Branding is now a thing of the past, isn't it?

[William Dalrymple]

Of the sacred bath. And they have to give the bath to the king.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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 enemies, elephants and gold, but you're also taking his women, which is a part of the wealth. You're also absorbing his martial lustre. There's this very interesting line in Rajaradya's inscriptions, which his son continues, where they talk about being so resplendent. Having deprived the Pandyas, their enemies, of their splendor, they 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 this, 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.

[William Dalrymple]

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.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Tell us about this once again. It comes from this unrivaled Chola ability to imagine, to think of new frontiers. We 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.

[William Dalrymple]

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 Nagapatnam.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

And army 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 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.

[William Dalrymple]

And after conquering the Ganges, as he says, which you think could even mean projecting his power into modern Bangladesh. There's some claims that he burnt Sompura Mahavihara, one of the last great Buddhist sites.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Well, so what Rajendra does is that he doesn't actually manage to get all that far. But his army sends this political shockwave into the region. The Bengalis didn't expect them to be coming. You quickly have a collapse of the ancient Pala kingdom. And all these mercenaries who went up north with the Cholas set up their own little kingdoms in the ruins. And one of these guys is believed to have burned the greatest of the Buddhist monasteries.

[William Dalrymple]

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 general Chola smash Rastrakutas. 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. Your guys, the Rastrakutas, who are based in many Ketta, suffer the full wrath of the Cholas. And many Ketta 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 Rashtrakutas and reduced it to ashes. And now, in the most ambitious of all, there is an 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 it. There's this long list of port cities that he destroy. Panay, with waters lapping against its landing. Ghats, Ancient Malayur, with a strong mountain for its rampart. Great Yerudingham, surrounded by a deep sea is Emote Lanka Socum, that is undaunted in fierce battles. Great Papalum, having abundant high waters as a defense. Takalam praised by men versed in the sciences. Great Tamilingam, firm in great and fierce battles. So Rajendra Cholu is claiming, apparently in this inscription, that he's taken his ships and off he's gone to Southeast Asia and basically reduced Malaysia, the Malacca States, bits of Thailand and that whole region to his footprint. And this is echoed today. Tamil nationalists will claim that this was part of a Chola empire that extends as far as Singapore. What's your reading of this? How do we read this inscription?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

I think when we look at an inscription like this, the first thing we have to ask ourselves is who was intended to read it. Rajendra Chola was not writing it for Hindu nationalists. He was writing it for people who had some idea of what the world looked like and who may have vaguely heard the names of these towns that he's mentioned. But if you were to read the rest of the inscription, will. The only thing that he actually details, the only conquest that he actually details is of Kedah, which is a port city that used to control the entrance to the Malacca Strait, one of the great cosmopolitan emporia of the Indian Ocean.

[William Dalrymple]

And he claims to have captured the last of the Silendra kings who lived there.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

He captured the last of the kings and he says he captured the gate as well. Now, these were the only two hard bits of physical evidence that somebody sitting in Tamil Nadu would have been able to see as proof of Rajendra's conquests. And I don't think it's a coincidence he focuses on them There is a.

[William Dalrymple]

Few other little hints, aren't they, that this has happened. There are towns renamed Conqueror of Malaysia and so on.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Well, they're great at branding, but branding doesn't always have to be based on truth, if you ask me. The strongest suggestion we have that the cholas maintained a political presence on the other side of the coast is that some of their princes bear the title of Kadaram Konda, which means the Caesar of Kedah. But the cholas also have princes who bear the title of ruler of Ayodhya.

[Anita Anand]

Ruler of Kannon, and they've been nowhere near.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

The thing is that I feel like the emphasis on taking these political claims literally today is that we miss out on a much more interesting story that archaeology tells us. And what the archaeology suggests is that while there's no evidence of a Chola commissioned inscription in anywhere in Southeast Asia, there's merchant settlements on both shores of Sumatra, both east and west. You have autonomous Tamil merchant settlements that appear right in the aftermath of the Chola conquest.

[Anita Anand]

Right.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

And in the highlands that separate these two ports, the Karo people, who are an upland people who live in Sumatra, have 200 Tamil loan words in their vocabulary.

[Anita Anand]

So, look, this is amazing. So this. I mean, this is. It's completely feasible because this is a slipstream of the 500. It's where the traders would have gone. And on that slipstream, if there's a deal between the 500 and the Chola Empire, why wouldn't they go and put these little settlements?

[William Dalrymple]

We've seen that Even in the 16th century and the 17th century, the English state, by this stage, a Renaissance court, the Tudors, it's a fully developed state that they're not doing their colonialism themselves. They're renting it out to the Hudson Bay Company, the Virginia Company, to traders. The honorable society of two traders.

[Anita Anand]

Absolutely right.

[William Dalrymple]

And so it's empire is kind of sublet to merchant groups. And your suggestion is that this is the case in the Chola people.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

I think that's what the evidence points us toward.

[Anita Anand]

It's so, so interesting. We are running out of time. Can we very briefly talk about the demise of the Chola Empire? Because it does feel as if, you know, they're growing and growing and growing and nothing's going to stop them now. But it is something as prosaic and boring as tax evasion that does for them in the end. Nom dum, Just very brief. Tell us how you know, not with a bang, but with a kind of a whisper almost, that this sort of goes Out.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

There's so much about the cholas that is simply not talked about or talked about too much because of nationalist sentiment. The overseas conquest being a great example. Because here's a much more interesting story that we can't admit to ourselves because we have a political incentive to believe in something else entirely. And I think that similarly in India today, we have this reluctance to talk about the fall of Indian empires because we love talking about their rise because it makes us feel strong and manly and confident. But I find that the decline of empires is far more interesting. We live in a world that is shaped by the decline of the British Raj. You would not be able to understand this time of incredible global connectivity and churn if you didn't talk about the end of an empire. The fall of the cholas unleashes these powerful social forces once again. These great assemblies rise to take command of the situation. And you see tremendous innovations in temple religion. All the great complex that you see in south India today with the multiple courtyards, these are all products of the fall of the Chola empire, not of the rice.

[Anita Anand]

But do they fall because they're just not getting the money in? They've overextended. I mean, literally spending too much on deadpool. They've overextended, money's not coming in, people aren't paying their dues, and so it.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Just goes, well, something like that. Essentially what happens is that to fight all these wars, they need to. At some point, the young chaps from the rice fields aren't enough. You need to have armies in the field at all times. So you start to hire hunter gatherers from the hills who aren't connected to harvest cycles and can be in the field at all times. But very quickly, what this means is that you have essentially foreign mercenaries who command the entire Chola military structure. And in order to maintain its enormous gifts, the cholas raise taxes on the villages, which drives villages into bankruptcy. And the only people who have money left to buy up these lands are the hunter gatherers from the hills. So these guys essentially set themselves up as little. And because they know that the cholas will not tax temples, they gift all the lands that they've bought to temples.

[William Dalrymple]

It's a brilliant tax. Don't you?

[Anita Anand]

That's hilarious. Oh, God, that's so funny.

[William Dalrymple]

But we should say before we consign the cholas to the scrap heap of history, that their achievements not only in India, the landscape that you see in south India is marked by these astonishing great big chola temples. But it's not just in India. You write in your book about this extraordinary Chola temple in Guangzhou in China. Tell us about this.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Well, here's the thing. It's not really a Chola temple because for this one temple outside of India, we have an inscription telling us exactly who made it. And it was a merchant. It was a merchant of the 500 corporation who built it in the 13th century. And he requested permission from a Mongol Khan to build it. So you have this very interesting situation where if you were to look at Rajaraja's great temple, it's called Rajaraja Ishwaram, you know, the lord of Rajaraja. This temple that they built on the shore of the East China Sea is called the temple of the holy Khan Kanishwaram.

[Anita Anand]

Oh, so he. Oh, really? So it's an alliance with the khan?

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Yes. It seems that the Mongol Khan gave them permission to set up shop in Chuanzhou and they built this magnificent Tamil style temple. In terms of its structural elements, it is a Tamil temple. But what's so interesting about it is that all the artisans were Chinese and so they depict the gods with Chinese faces. You see the famous story of Vishnu rescuing the elephant from the crocodile, but the crocodile is standing in a pool that's depicted with these swirling daoist style clouds.

[Anita Anand]

Oh, that's brilliant. That's brilliant.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

And it's this extraordinary relic of medieval globalization and the tremendous forces that Chola's unleashed.

[Anita Anand]

I mean, you say tremendous globalization. I would say what Semian would have said. This is brand dilution. This is complete confusion of messaging. And that's why the beginning of the end. It's been an absolute delight talking to you. Can I just remind everyone the fabulous book Lords of Earth and Sea by Anuudh Kensetti. We're going to put a link history of the Cholera empire to it on our newsletter. But it's been so nice and it's so nice to do it in person as well. Thank you so much for being with us.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

[Anita Anand]

Absolutely. And can I say, the last time you threw in your goodbye at the last one. Normally people don't do that, but I insist you do it again because it was so cute. So this is how we normally do it. And so it's goodbye from me, Anita Ana.

[William Dalrymple]

Pause and goodbye from me, William Dalrymple.

[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

But not enough pause and goodbye from me, Angel Ganacetti. See you.

[William Dalrymple]

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[William Dalrymple]

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[Aniruddh Kanesetti]

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