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The Brihadishvara Temple, built in the 11th century by King Rajaraja Chola, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The year is 1000 CE – the heart of the Middle Ages.
Europe is changing. The powerful nations we know today – like Norman-ruled England and the fragmented territories that would become France – do not yet exist. The imposing Gothic cathedrals have not yet been erected. Aside from the distant and prosperous city of Constantinople, few major urban centers dominate the landscape.
However, that year, on the other side of the world, an emperor from southern India was preparing to build the most colossal temple in the world.
Completed just 10 years later, it was 66m high, assembled from 130,000 tonnes 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, sheathed in gold encrusted with rubies and pearls.
In its lamp-lit room were 60 bronze sculptures, decorated with thousands of pearls collected from the conquered island of Lanka. Among his treasures, several tons of gold and silver coins, as well as necklaces, jewelry, trumpets and drums snatched from the defeated kings of the southern peninsula of India, make the emperor the man the richest of the time.
His name was Raja-Raja, King of Kings, and he belonged to one of the most astonishing dynasties of the medieval world: the Cholas.
Her family transformed the way the medieval world functioned – but they are largely unknown outside India.
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Nataraja, today a symbol of Hinduism, was originally a symbol of the Chola dynasty in medieval India.
Before the 11th century, the Cholas were one of many feuding powers who dotted the Kaveri floodplain, the great expanse of silt that runs through the present-day Indian state of Tamil Nadu. But what distinguished the Cholas was their infinite capacity for innovation. By the standards of the medieval world, Chola queens were also remarkably important, serving as the public face of the dynasty.
By traveling to Tamil villages and rebuilding small, old mudbrick shrines into gleaming stone, Chola dowager Sembiyan Mahadevi – Rajaraja’s great-aunt – effectively “rechristened” the family as Shiva’s greatest devotees, their gaining a popular audience.
Sembiyan prayed to Nataraja, a hitherto little-known form of the Hindu god Shiva as the king of dance, and all his temples featured him prominently. The trend has caught on. 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 great-aunt’s taste for public relations and dedication, with one difference.
Rajaraja was also a conqueror. In the 990s, he led his armies onto the Western Ghats, the range of hills that shelter India’s west coast, and burned his enemies’ ships while they were in port. Then, exploiting the internal unrest on the island of Lanka, he established a Chola outpost there, becoming the first mainland Indian king to establish a lasting presence on the island. Eventually, he broke into the rugged Deccan plateau – from Germany to Italy’s Tamil coast – and captured part of it.
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The ruins of a small fort built by the Chola dynasty in Tamil Nadu
The spoils of conquest were lavished on his great imperial temple, known today as Brihadishvara.
In addition to its precious treasures, the great temple received 5,000 tons of rice each year from the conquered territories of southern India (today it would take a fleet of twelve Airbus A380s to transport that much rice).
This allowed the Brihadishvara to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, an instrument of the Chola state, intended to channel Rajaraja’s vast fortunes towards new irrigation systems, towards the expansion of crops, towards new herds of sheep and buffalo. Few states in the world could have designed economic control on such a scale and depth.
The Cholas were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to inner Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, forged alliances with Tamil merchant companies: a partnership between traders and government power that foreshadowed the East India Company – a powerful British trading company that later ruled much of the India – which was to come into existence more than 700 years later.
In 1026, Rajendra sent his troops on merchant ships and plundered Kedah, a Malay city that dominated the world trade in precious woods and spices.
While some Indian nationalists have proclaimed that it was a Chola “conquest” or “colonization” of Southeast Asia, archeology suggests a stranger picture: the Cholas did not appear to have any own navy, but beneath them, a wave of Tamil troops. diaspora merchants spread across the Bay of Bengal.
By the end of the 11th century, these merchants operated independent ports in North Sumatra. A century later, they were in the heart of present-day Myanmar and Thailand, working as tax collectors in Java.
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The Brihadishvara is one of the largest Indian temples
In 13th-century Mongol-ruled China, under the descendants of Kublai Khan, Tamil merchants ran successful businesses in the port of Quanzhou and even erected a temple to Shiva on the coast of the East China Sea. It is no coincidence that, under the British Raj in the 19th century, Tamils constituted the largest portion of Indian administrators and workers in Southeast Asia.
Conquests and global connections made southern India, ruled by the Cholas, a cultural and economic monster, the nexus of global trade networks.
Chola aristocrats invested the spoils of war in a wave of new temples, which sourced quality products from a truly global economy linking the farthest shores of Europe and Asia. The copper and tin for their bronzes came from Egypt, perhaps even Spain. Camphor and sandalwood for the gods came from Sumatra and Borneo.
Tamil temples evolved into vast complexes and public spaces, surrounded by markets and featuring rice fields. In the Chola capital region on the Kaveri, corresponding to the present city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of a dozen temple towns supported tens of thousands of inhabitants, perhaps outclassing most cities in Europe in the era.
These Chola towns were surprisingly multicultural and multi-religious: Chinese Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Tunisian Jews, Bengali tantric masters traded with Lankan Muslims. Today, the state of Tamil Nadu is one of the most urbanized in India. Many towns in the state grew up around the shrines and markets of the Chola period.
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A Hindu temple dedicated to Shiva and built by the Chola dynasty in Tamil Nadu
These developments in town planning and architecture found their parallel in art and literature.
Medieval Tamil ironwork, produced for temples of the Chola period, is perhaps the finest ever produced by human hand, with artists rivaling Michelangelo or Donatello in their appreciation of the human figure. To praise the Chola kings and worship the gods, Tamil poets developed notions of sanctity, history and even magical realism. The Chola period was what would have been known if the Renaissance had occurred in South India 300 years before its time.
It is no coincidence that Chola bronzes – particularly Nataraja bronzes – are found in most major Western museum collections. Scattered across the world, they are the vestiges of a period of brilliant political innovations, of maritime expeditions that connected the globe; of titanic sanctuaries and fabulous riches; merchants, leaders and artists who shaped the planet we live in today.
Anirudh Kanisetti is an Indian writer and author, most recently of Lords of Earth And Sea: A History of The Chola Empire.
