How medieval India's wealth, power and influence grew under the Chola kings - and queens

The Cholas are credited with popularizing Nataraja bronzes and singing Bhakti songs in temples, among other practices that have survived the test of time. (Photo credit: Richard Mortel via Wikimedia Commons 2.0)

From words like cash (from the Tamil kasu) and Coromandel Coast (from Chola Mandalam or Chola circle) to Tamil temple architecture and economic systems that made Indian textiles world-famous, the Chola dynasty gave the world many things and customs. Founded in the early 10th century, the empire imploded in the 13th century under kings with low ambition and high instance of tax evasion by the same people who had benefitted most from the empire's most prosperous years.

In an interview with Moneycontrol, Anirudh Kanisetti - the author of 'Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire', which released on January 17, 2025 - spoke about temple architecture of the period, including the 1,000-year-old Brihadeeswara in Thanjavur; Rajaraja 1's grandmother Sembiyan Mahadevi and the ways in which women influenced politics in this period; "how medieval wars and conquest changed the nature of Indian society"; and the "unsung heroes of medieval Indian economic history". Edited excerpts:

In the introduction to 'Lords of Earth and Sea', you write that the reason why Indians became interested in reclaiming this history in the 20th century had to do partly with the freedom struggle and partly with the rise of Dravidian nationalism. Why should we be interested to revisit this history in 2025?

We are interested because I think we yearn to see India reclaim its status as an important superpower in the Indian Ocean region. And, therefore, a polity like the Chola empire - that was so extraordinary ahead of its time in terms of its curiosity and drive to expand and go beyond the normal definitions of what a kingdom should look like - I think that is one of the reasons why the Cholas command such importance in our political discourse today.

But as for why we should read about them, I think the Cholas show us a lot about how our world works. The humanity and complexity of the Cholas, and the humanity and the complexity of the powerful more broadly, doesn't play enough of a role in our understanding of the past. I think that when we look to the past, we want to search for heroes and villains. We want them to be invincible or we want them to be irredeemable. And the Cholas, in a lot of ways, don't fit into this binary. They are truly extraordinarily imaginative people. But at the end of the day, they are people.

And once you look at their inscriptions, once you look at the way that they negotiated power, the way that they convinced people to follow them, and the ways in which the dynasty eventually was no longer able to command the kind of respect that it once did, it tells us a profoundly moving story of a dynasty that in a lot of ways was both deeply different from us, but also in many, many more ways quite similar to the kind of people that we are and also the kind of people that our rulers are.

So I think it's very important for us as citizens of the world's largest democracy, seeking for India to return to its rightful stage in world politics, to have a better and more nuanced understanding of how medieval power worked. And if you want to understand how medieval power worked, there is no dynasty that has documented it better and has done more extraordinary things with it than the Cholas.

(Read Anirudh Kanisetti's pieces on medieval economics in Moneycontrol at 'Medieval economics: Warmongering merchants and the real-life geoeconomics of 'Ponniyin Selvan' and 'Why and how did the Cholas conquer the seas?'.)

Is it fair to say that the Chola kingdom was built on a growth model that's not unlike many corporates today - that so long as they were expanding, it was fine, but once the growth stopped, the empire imploded?

I would say yes, with qualifications. I don't know if the Cholas had our same understanding of economics; if they necessarily understood that the structure they were building would eventually implode under its own contradictions.

A big part of the Chola success as well as their eventual slowdown was manpower and the availability of skilled human capital. At the peak or the high tide of Chola expansion in the early 11th century, they very clearly had some of the greatest military and logistical minds that could be found anywhere in South India. And their armies were staffed from military labour markets that extended into northern Sri Lanka, into the Malabar coast. We know even mercenaries from Karnataka, in some cases, were actually drawn into Chola armies. But beyond a point, it was simply not possible to make enough money without these conquests to pay all of these men. And so as the tide of Chola expansion began to recede, you essentially had these highly skilled military guys who had nowhere to go, who were suddenly super rich and essentially they set up their own competing political firms. And you really do see that in the inscriptions: It's just a political free-for-all that is unleashed in the late 12th century that continues into the early 13th century. Because you have these tides of armed men who are being pulled from one court to another. And the chaos really takes a very, very long time to resolve. I would argue that it is only in Vijayanagara, which is in the 1400s-1500s, that we begin to see a more stable equilibrium being reached as the waves of this expansion finally begin to stabilize. It's really a historical process of incredible vastness and grandeur that is unleashed by Chola expansion that in a lot of ways outlives the dynasty itself.

In what ways did the Cholas influence the world? Early on in your book, you explain how some English words like cash come to us from medieval India. But can you give us a more expanded view how the Cholas affected the world?

The most important way in which the Cholas impacted the world was simply in terms of economics. If not for the Cholas, the history of the Indian Ocean would have looked profoundly different. Perhaps as much, if not more than the Cholas, it's the Tamil merchant diaspora. It's important for us to remember that historically, India's diaspora has been just as influential as Indian royals in shaping the world that we live in. That is one way.

Of course, the more obvious way is simply in terms of urbanism, in terms of religion, which continue to play very, very important parts in our politics today. And then there are the more subtle ways that are not directly because of the Cholas, but resulted indirectly from their expansion. The reason why India becomes this commercial juggernaut in the 16th century - the world's greatest producer of textiles that brings in these merchants from across the planet, is because the Cholas set up these commercial systems, these economic systems that enabled merchants to flourish.

One of the most remarkable things that I learned while researching this book, is that Kaikkolar - they are an important weaver caste in northern Tamil Nadu; Kaikkolar literally means strong arms - was also the term that was used for the royal bodyguards of the Cholas. So the Tamil caste system, which was actually structured horizontally until the last century, had two divisions of the Valangai and the Idangai; the right hand and left hand. And in the inscriptions, it seems highly likely that these actually were Chola army divisions that once incorporated men from many different professions who, after the decline of the Cholas, went on to become the seeds of new systems of social organization. So there are all these remarkably profound ways.

When European traders show up on the coast of India in the 16th century, they are interacting literally with the descendants of the Cholas in terms of economic systems, in terms of social systems. The cloth that they are buying, the money that they are using, derives from designs and ideas that were developed in this great renaissance, essentially, that the Cholas unleashed in South India. And that's why we have words like kasu: cash and Coromandel which comes from Chola mandalam.

They influenced not just the history of South India, but really influenced the European understanding and memory of how South India was. And in all of these ways, I really think that this qualifies the Cholas as one of the most remarkable dynasties of the entire medieval period - not just in India, but really anywhere on the planet.

You mentioned inscriptions - there are some 13,000 of them that have survived?

Yes, we have a tremendous (number). The Chola (period) is one of the best documented periods in all of medieval India. If you look at medieval Deccan temples... usually when a Deccan temple is set up, there is a foundation inscription and that's it. All the other records of the temple - about various donations, expansions made to it - would have been kept on palm leaf and have not survived the test of time. But medieval Tamils documented every single thing to do with the temple - and a lot of things that didn't have anything to do with the temple - on the temple walls, and stone of course is a much more enduring material than palm leaf, which means that we are able to construct a very, very fine-grained social history, at least in comparison to other parts of medieval India. We can trace out the activities of particular individuals: We can say that this year they were here, that year they were saying this about their career and this year they were patronizing this God... And that allows you to build a well-rounded picture of who these people were. In a lot of ways they come across as being remarkably intelligent and deep and complicated in ways that I think really will resonate with modern readers.

Tell us about the temple architecture and the role temples played in everyday life - you write in the book that these temple complexes weren't just places of worship, but places where a lot of administrative work was also happening. Also, just to get the time frame right, this is happening from 900 CE till about the 13th century?

Yes, the book really begins in the early 10th century and ends in the late 13th century. It is really one of the most remarkable periods for temple construction anywhere in India in our many, many thousands of years of civilization. Historians have actually called this the third urbanization of India. The first being, of course, the Harappan civilization; the second being the early kingdoms of the Gangetic plains, and the third being the medieval period, especially along the coast in the Tamil area.

If you were to pull up a satellite image on Google Earth and just look at the Kaveri river, you will see that the river is studded with these medieval temple complexes that are still urban nucleii (towns that came up around these temples are urban centres today). And that gives you a sense of just how important temples were, not just to the religion of the period, but also really to the fabric of public life.

Medieval Tamil temples really were public spaces in every sense of the word, where you are not just seeing religious affairs and rituals and so on being recorded, but also political pacts. For example, various deals about the buying and selling of land.

And, of course, the temples were such important centres of consumption. We know that in order to have a large and well-endowed temple complex, you had to constantly be importing, for example, ghee and oil and camphor and sandalwood. These are things that don't grow in the Kaveri floodplain; these are things that very often had to be sourced either from the dryer regions of Tamil Nadu or in some cases from across the seas from Sumatra, and in the case of precious metals, we know that they were coming in the medieval period from as far away as Egypt and possibly even Spain.

So medieval Tamil temples really are some of the most extraordinary relics of a period of profound urbanism, profound globalization, if I can use that term.

The way that this develops is that if you have to look at the beginning of the period, you essentially have a whole class of middle powers, if I can use that term - essentially landed gentry, some military magnets, as well as royal families, village assemblies - who are patronizing very small shrines. And in the late 10th century, you begin to see this change in a very concerted fashion because of this remarkable Chola queen called Sembian Mahadevi, who is a devotee of Nataraja and builds a dozen temples which feature Natarajan in a prominent position. This really establishes the Chola style of temple building as the aspirational model for a huge chunk of southern India.

Over the course of the 11th and 12th centuries, you see something very interesting happening in Tamil Nadu, which is a bit of a divergence from what is happening in North Indian Hinduism, for example. In that, in North India, if you think of let's say Khajuraho, the entire site (in Khajuraho) was considered politically and religiously significant. But every time a new king came to the throne, they would build pretty much their own standalone temple. But in Tamil Nadu, you have a very different situation where once a site is considered sacred, instead of having new standalone temples added to a place, you will have additional structures added to an existing complex. So you have a very, very wide class of well-to-do folks, aristocrats who benefited from Chola commercial, political and military expansion, who are wealthy, and who want to exhibit their devotion through temples. So they (the temples) become from these small shrines (to) these vast courtyards capable of handling large crowds of people. We have the institution of new rituals that very often are pioneered by wealthy women. (Rituals) such as the daily singing of Tamil hymns to the gods... the offering of smoke, flame and various ingredients for Tamil temple prasadams that still survive all the way to the present.

So what we are looking at here is really one of the most remarkable periods in not just in the development of Hinduism, but really in the broader economic integration of southern India into the global economy.

(Image courtesy publisher Juggernaut)

Some of these structures, of course, continue to be the most spectacular temples in India today. The 1,000-year-old Brihadeshwara temple is an example. Your book gives the sense that the Chola kings were perhaps not so powerful as they might have projected - they were constantly having to strive for alliances, to work out deals with the vassals who were controlling large tracts of land for them and to negotiate with the public that they ruled over. Were the Kaveri plains different in this respect from other kingdoms and civilizations around India?

It is difficult to say this wasn't happening in other parts of India. I would suspect that it was. You have to remember that medieval states didn't have the same capacity as modern states do. They didn't have a broadcast media, for example. They didn't have instantaneous communication. And so I think it was really for most of human history, and this is not really unique to the Cholas, but for most of human history, the kings had to negotiate with the people they ruled over a lot more than we generally think. This negotiation, of course, could take many, many forms. But to me, what is remarkable about the Cholas is that this happens primarily through temples. And you can very often see this push and pull between local power centers and royalty happening through temples.

To me, really one of the most fascinating sub-periods of the Chola period is the 12th century (when) you have this situation where you have a large class of wealthy military men who have benefited from Chola expansion. And this is a time when the Chola kings themselves are no longer as expansionist as they used to be. In order to continue running the state that they have, they are forced to raise taxes gradually on villages, which drives many villagers into bankruptcy. And as a result, villagers are forced to sell their lands and the only people who have this liquid capital are military man.

You see this over the course of the 12th century that a lot of the magnets who got rich from working for the Cholas, get even more powerful in relation to the Chola throne. They become extremely powerful landholders. And as is the nature of well-to-do people, both in history and in the present, they didn't love paying taxes. You see them developing very, very sophisticated financial instruments. You have them making gifts of land to various institutions with very, very specific rates of return. You have them dividing up land into smaller holdings and giving them to tenants and so on. And essentially the Chola state is not able to keep up with these continual financial innovations that are happening because it is limited in its capacity to extract taxes. So the single biggest factor in the weakening of Chola power, more than foreign invasion, is tax evasion, which is something that I was not expecting to find as I was researching this priod.

But at the same time, it's because of this tax evasion that you have all these well-to-do magnets patronizing temples and making them into great complexes. So, in a very paradoxical way, the decline of Chola power also unleashed the forces that gave rise to the Hinduism and the Hindu society that we still see in present day in Tamil Nadu.

In what way did the Cholas influence how Hindu religion is practised today in India, but also as far as Sumatra where Tamil merchants of the time had established trade relations?

It's a tremendously fertile period for religious developments. Especially in the 12th century, quite paradoxically, as the Chola period recedes - because you have all these wealthy, educated people who are trying to do new things - some of the most enduring features of Hinduism begin to emerge. For example, the worship of poet saints as those were especially favoured by the gods continues across South India and parts of north India today. While the Bhakti Saints actually predate the Cholas, it's in the Chola period that you have these organized hagiographies that are put together. Bronze sculptures of the saints are made and integrated into temple practice and the singing of the verses of these saints is institutionalized as an offering to the gods. And the singing is done partially by professionals but also, very often, simply by members of the community who receive this duty as an honour from the temple administrative committee. These are all things that we associate with Hinduism today: the idea that the temple is a public space that can or should organize a community, that it is a place where political claims as well as claims to status (and) to devotion are being made - you see them in their earliest and most well-defined forms in Chola period in Tamil Nadu.

But if we talk about the widest impact that the Cholas had, the most profound effect was the spreading of the Tamil merchant diaspora. In a couple of decades after Rajendra Chola's raid on Kedah, this great Malay trading emporium, we have archaeological evidence of Tamil merchant settlements in Sumatra. They were present on both the east and the west Coast. And it seems that they were moving into the highlands and sourcing camphor, precious woods, even gold in some cases and taking it from coast to coast without having to navigate these very choppy and dangerous waters around the tip of Sumatra. All these fine goods are being are being sold all over the Indian Ocean.

If you're to think of medieval trade as a series of networks that stretch from the Mediterranean into the Western Indian Ocean, into the East Indian Ocean and then through Southeast Asia into the East China Sea, the eastern part of the Indian Ocean - that integration into the global economy really happens with the spread of the Tamil merchant diaspora. And to me what was a really remarkable discovery is that very often these merchants overseas were essentially autonomous. They would receive particular permissions from local kings in order to transact their business. And they of course maintained a strong connection to the Tamil homeland, so they would build temples in the Tamil style. We have these remarkable situations where in the 13th century, Tamil merchants are building a Shaivite temple in Quanzhou in China under the rule of the Mongol/Yuan dynasty. I think we really do need to talk about these merchant diasporas more. In a lot of ways, they are the unsung heroes of medieval Indian economic history.

You also write about the role of women in this period, and how there isn't an equivalence in how women influenced political and public life in medieval South India versus the 21st century. Could you unpack that for us - what was the role of women in these households and what kind of influence could they exert outside of the home?

There isn't a single answer to this question. It really depends on where in medieval India and when you are talking about. But in the early 10th century - and, of course, Queen Sembian Mahadevi is a fantastic example of this - for the Cholas, as they are rising, the women of the dynasty are the public face of the dynasty. They are commissioning these remarkable temples. They are making gifts to these temples. They are using the temples as a means of projecting not only their devotions and their religious beliefs, but also as a way to connect to local communities by getting locals to administer gifts that have been made to temples, for example.

All of this has a profound impact on the men of the family as well. I don't think it is a coincidence that Sembian Mahadevi's successor in many ways is her grandnephew Rajaraja Chola. He is very obviously thinking of her temple practice in building his colossal Brihadeshwara temple. But rather paradoxically, even though in the 10th century, Chola women are so prominent, from around the mid-11th century or so, you see the queens kind of receding away from the public space. You don't see them making as many temple gifts. But the situation is very quickly upended in the 12th century, as the wives of various magnets and generals and courtiers emerge onto the scene in a really, really big way.

I mentioned a little earlier about how wealthy women did shape temple practice. Even, for example, the institution that we know as the devadasi system - it actually begins in a very, very different context called the Devaradiyaar, which literally means God servant or God slave. But it was really a title that was given to high-ranking women who received this honour in return for making significant contributions to the local temple. And these were women who would not just sing and dance in front of the God, but, for example, wave fans for the God during public procession. These are women who would be seen and who are considered to be formidable and important members of their community.

And this is happening in a time when the Chola royal women themselves are receding from the public space, and also at a time when, owing to the escalating agrarian crisis that I alluded to earlier, wages are falling for working class women. And as a result, you see a lot of them gradually disappearing from the public record. And you have these very strange situations where a husband is called to answer for his wife's crimes, but the wife is not even mentioned in the inscription that talks about the crime. So it is this paradoxical situation where, depending on the social and economic position of women, they are either seizing a larger space for themselves in the public discourse or they are disappearing from it entirely. And that contradictory nature, that complexity of the past - this refusal to fit into our contemporary ideas of what gender relations may have looked like - makes it really challenging and interesting to think about.

Some of the descriptors sound quite grand. You refer to Parantaka as the foe-destroyer. Is that what the people called him?

That's what Parantaka means. Madhurantaka, which was the birth name of the famous conqueror Rajendra Chola (son of Arulmoli), means Madurai-destroyer. And that was the name that he was given as a child, which is a little ironic. You can't really imagine a little baby going and burning a city. A lot of Chola titles are not meant to be taken literally. But the point is that for medieval man, it was very important to be martial. It was very important to be a conqueror. It was very important to be able to command and deploy armies. One thing that I have been very excited and happy to be able to do in this book is actually trace how this impacted dynasty psychologically. What does it really mean to be the son of the most famous man in South India? What kind of legacy does that leave you with to grapple with? And I think that personal drive really characterizes a lot of Rajendra Chola's extraordinary ambitions: Like his raid into the Ganges, his raid of Kedah. And even after him, you see that he leaves behind sons who struggle equally to live up to his image. So you have this remarkable picture of how medieval wars impacted not just their instigators, but also that generations after them really carried this with them. It influenced not just individuals, but it impacted military labour markets. It impacted land markets, cash markets. It impacted Tamil public spaces. This incredibly rich world that we see in the inscriptions, very rarely comes across in the history books about this period, this region. And I really wanted this book to cover this extraordinary world, this extraordinary society, this extraordinary polity in all of its depth and detail, and to express how soaring and crushing it must have been to its inhabitants. I wanted modern readers to be able to experience some of that as well.

What was the strangest, most interesting thing you found while researching this book? 

I don't think that I can possibly give you a single answer to that because this period repeatedly confounds all the possible expectations that we can have from it. But I would say that to me, the most remarkable learning was seeing that merchants essentially had their own armed forces. In a lot of cases, the armed forces of medieval merchants were drawn from the same communities that worked for the Chola armies. And these guys could sometimes do some pretty crazy things. We have an inscription from Banavasi, which is in present-day Karnataka near the Western Ghats, that talks about how some locals essentially killed a merchant and so the merchants got together and hired a mercenary to go after them. This mercenary killed seven men, four children and two babies and then drank their blood. The merchants then rewarded him with food and betel leaves and said: OK, now you can be a merchant as well and you can pay less taxes than the average person and we are going to waive your membership fees to join our guild.

This is not what you expect of medieval merchants at all. The stereotype of the medieval merchant today is this well-fed individual who is sitting and counting money in a comfortable shop. But merchants were armed very often. Medieval merchants took great pride in their own physical prowess, just as much as kings in a lot of ways. And I think it's important to remember that these neat categories and boundaries that we draw between politics and economics and religion didn't really exist for the people of the medieval world.

There was no contradiction between being a successful trader, as well as being a government official, as well as having your own little private armed forces, as well as being a speculator in the prices of land or the prices of rice. These are people who, in every possible way, are capable of being as complicated and as contradictory as you and I are.

Finally, why write about the history of the Chola world now?

As I was writing a history of the Deccan (in 'Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas', published in 2022), I found the Cholas constantly appearing as this periphery that the Deccan found tremendously difficult, confrontational, but also inspiring in so many ways. Tamil temple architecture, really, had inspired the great architecture of Vijayanagara, one of the largest cities, many centuries later. And it really began to dawn me as I was researching my first book was that what defines the Deccan, in a lot of ways, is its relationship with the coast (which) I really wanted to explore as I continued to write about medieval South India. I wanted to write a history of the coast, and I think the Cholas were the perfect people to do that.