02 POLITICAL CULTURE IN THE SANSKRIT WORLD

The culture that had informed Rajendra Chola’s political actions, including his raid on Bengal, was derived from Sanskrit treatises on power, wealth and rulership. It presumed a political universe crowded with little kings, bigger kings and emperors – that is, kings of kings. It also presumed a world of shifting political sands, where rulers had neither permanent enemies nor permanent allies. In conducting the business of warfare, therefore, classical Indian thought recommended that enemies not be annihilated, but rather co-opted and transformed into loyal subordinates¹ who could be put to use as allies against future enemies. Thus the same inscription that describes the Chola raid on Bengal records that when Rajendra returned from his victorious northern expedition:

He [then] entered his own [capital] town, which by its prosperity despised all the merits of the abode of the gods – his lotus feet [all along] being worshipped by the kings of high birth who had been subdued [by him].²

In reality, of the eight kings that Rajendra or his generals are said to have fought on this expedition, one was killed in battle, two others fled the battlefield and the rest were ‘conquered’. These defeated kings – or at least, the five who survived the Chola invasion – were not executed or publicly humiliated. Instead, they became loyal vassals.

Such an outcome conformed to well-defined norms of inter-state politics long canonized in classical Indian thought.³ According to these norms, territory was imagined as something like a large chessboard on which kings manoeuvred with allies and against rivals with a view to creating an idealized political space called the Circle of States, or mandala.+++(5)+++ The term referred to a series of concentric circles, where one’s own capital and heartland was at the centre, surrounded by a second circle of one’s allies, and a third circle of one’s enemies. Beyond that lay a fourth circle occupied by one’s enemies’ enemies, understood as potential allies with whom a king endeavoured to ally himself. With all of India’s major dynastic houses playing by the same geostrategic rules, the result was not only intense political jockeying and perpetual conflict, but overall stalemate and equilibrium.⁴ No single dynastic house could achieve lasting dominance over large tracts of territory within India, much less over South Asia as a whole. Indeed, it is hardly surprising that chess itself originated in India around the sixth century, just when these geopolitical ideas were taking hold.⁵

Rajendra’s father Rajaraja (r. 985–1014) is widely acclaimed as the greatest of Chola emperors, as judged by his conquests and the literature and art he patronized, including his building of one of the grandest temples in south India, the Rajarajeśvaram (or Brihadeśwara) Temple in his capital of Tanjavur. The temple was designed to replicate cosmic space and to situate itself at the centre of that space; one of its names is ‘Daksinameru’, or the southern Mt Meru – that is, the axis of the universe.⁶ Much of the wealth necessary for patronizing the king’s cultural projects derived from his successful deployment of the mandala strategy on India’s geopolitical chessboard. From the Cholas’ heartland in the fertile Kaveri delta, Rajaraja had waged a series of victorious military campaigns, defeating in turn the Pandya kings of Madurai to his south and the Cera kings of Kerala to his west. Since these two dynasties had been allied with the Buddhist kings of Sri Lanka, Rajaraja launched a naval expedition to the island kingdom and sacked its ancient capital of Anuradhapura, making him the first Indian king to embark on overseas conquests. Just as importantly, these conquests validated Rajaraja’s claims to being a universal emperor (chakravartin) since, according to classical Indian political thought, such an emperor had to perform a digvijaya, or ‘conquest of the quarters’ – that is, kingdoms to the south, west, north and east.

In 1014, when Rajaraja died, Rajendra, who had been co-emperor at the end of his father’s reign, became Chola emperor in his own right. One of Rajendra’s inscriptions records that he soon thereafter ‘turned his attention to the conquest of the quarters [digvijaya] backed by a powerful army’. In 1017 he launched a fresh invasion of Sri Lanka, conquering the entire island, of which his father had occupied only the northern portion. The next year he reconquered the Pandya king to his south and the raja of Kerala to his west. In 1021 he attacked the Chalukyas of Kalyana, an ascendant dynasty based in the heart of the Deccan plateau. Having defeated that house, Rajendra returned to his capital before moving his army towards Bengal, thereby continuing his clockwise digvijaya. But the inscription discloses another rationale for the expedition to Bengal. ‘This light of the Solar race [Rajendra],’ it says,

laughing at Bhagiratha who had brought down the Ganga [to the earth from heaven] by the power of [his] austerities, wished to sanctify his own country with the waters of the Ganga [i.e. the Ganges] carried thither through the strength of [his] arm. Accordingly [he] ordered the commander of the army who had powerful battalions [under his control], who was the resort of heroism [and] the foremost of diplomats – to subdue the enemy kings occupying [the country on] the banks of that [river].⁷

This passage refers to a Hindu myth, visually narrated in a stunning seventh-century seaside bas-relief at Mahabalipuram (or Mamallapuram, near modern Chennai), according to which the ascetic+++(4 Any Hindu would say emperor!)+++ Bhagiratha, by performing rigorous austerities, induced the great god Śiva to water the parched earth by bringing the Ganges down from heaven. The parallel between Bhagiratha and Rajendra is clear: if an ascetic had mythically brought the river down from heaven to earth, King Rajendra would ritually bring it down from north India to Tanjavur.

Rajendra attached great importance to his raid on Bengal and the pots of Ganges water that he brought south to his capital. Not only did he assume the title Gangaikonda-Chola (‘the Chola who took the Ganges River’), but he built a new capital in the Kaveri delta named Gangaikonda Cholapuram, or ‘the city of the Chola who took the Ganges’. This he embellished with a colossal temple to Śiva whose central, nine-storey shrine soars to a height of fifty-six metres. Inside, he had a well dug for the sacred Ganges water into which was placed a statue of a lion, a Chola dynastic symbol.+++(4)+++ Completed in 1035, the temple served to publicize Rajendra’s military successes in conquering not just neighbouring kingdoms, but – symbolically – all India. Standing on either side of the main temple are two shrines, called Northern and Southern Kailash, which refer to the sacred Himalayan mountain in which dwells Śiva himself, the Lord of the Universe. By, as it were, bringing this mountain into the heart of the temple precincts, the Chola monarch architecturally asserted both his affinity with the great god and his claim to universal sovereignty. Ritually, the Ganges, too, was relocated to the heart of Rajendra’s empire – a striking instance of how India’s sacred landscape could be metaphorically manipulated to serve a political purpose.+++(4)+++

The invasions of Sri Lanka by Rajendra Chola and his father also led to the extension of Indian influence across the Bay of Bengal and on to the mainland and islands of South-east Asia. In fact, with their maritime contacts stretching as far as the South China Sea, the Cholas were the most outward-looking Indian state in their day, joining Arabs, Persians, Malays and Chinese in a transregional commercial system. Around 1025 Rajendra Chola embarked on a grand naval campaign against the kingdom of Śrivijaya, which ruled over much of the Malay peninsula and Sumatra. Since the Cholas had maintained diplomatic contact with China since 1015, their subsequent control of the Straits of Malacca, together with the tributary suzerainty they exercised over Śrivijaya, enabled direct Indo-Chinese maritime trade, unmediated by Śrivijaya authorities. In effect, the territories under Śrivijaya’s rule became incorporated within the Chola kingdom’s mandala, or circle of tributary states, the legacy of which survives today in the ordinary term for the Tamil coast: Coromandel, a corruption of ‘Chola mandala’.+++(4)+++

The mandala theory not only informed inter-state relations, however. Its logic also sowed the seeds of decline for its participant states. Since bestowing land on vassals was understood as a mark of royal dignity, the greater a king’s pretensions to imperial grandeur or universal dominion, the more land and authority he was obliged to bestow on courtiers or vassals. But this was ultimately a self-defeating enterprise, as is seen in the case of the Chalukya kings of Kalyana (974–1190), the Cholas’ principal rivals for control of the Deccan plateau. From the mid twelfth century on, that dynasty’s subordinate rulers increasingly appear in inscriptions bearing exalted titles and enjoying powers to grant land, dispose of local revenues, wage war and administer civil and criminal justice. Mere generals were given the most prestigious insignia of royalty, such as the white umbrella, the great drum and the fly-whisk. Although in theory the Chalukya emperor remained the supreme bestower of such honours, over time even this prerogative was delegated to feudal lords in his confidence.⁸ Ultimately, ceding so much authority only encouraged larger feudatory lineages to assert their autonomy from their imperial overlords,+++(4 - Did any system avoid this??)+++ a process that effectively hollowed out the Chalukya crown to an empty shell.+++(4)+++ By the end of the twelfth century the dynasty’s most prominent vassal states – the Hoysalas in southern Karnataka, the Kakatiyas in Andhra, the Yadavas in upland Maharashtra – had all emerged as independent kingdoms. The pattern was repeated across the subcontinent.⁹ By the eleventh century not only was India as a whole divided into many dynastic houses, but those houses were further internally divided, as vassals and smaller chieftains built up their own courts, replicating in miniaturized form the rituals and retinues of their overlords.

These political ideas were closely intertwined with religion, inasmuch as sovereign rule over royal territory was formally invested in a patron deity – usually a form of Śiva or Vishnu – in relation to whom a king was conceived as a mere servant. The king honoured his Cosmic Overlord by patronizing Brahmin priests to interact with the deity and by sponsoring the construction of monumental temples in which that deity’s image was housed. Such ideas radically transformed India’s built landscape, which by the tenth century had become dotted with royal temples. Situated in a king’s capital city, these structures were typically richly endowed, elaborately carved and often covered with gold. But such magnificent monuments carried risks for their royal patrons. Since they visually expressed a king’s claims to legitimate authority, royal temples were also highly charged political institutions, and as such were subject to attack by enemy kings who, wanting to expand their own circle of tributary rulers, sought to desecrate the most visible sign of a king’s sovereignty – his temple. Someśvara III (r. 1127–39), an emperor of the Deccan plateau’s Chalukya dynasty, bluntly made the case for such action:

‘The enemy’s capital city should be burned – the palace of the king, beautiful buildings, palaces of princes, ministers and high-ranking officers, temples, streets with shops, horse and elephant stables.’¹⁰+++(5)+++

विश्वास-प्रस्तुतिः

This is a mistranslation (Eaton was emailed on Apr 24 2022). The original has no reference to a temple. The author seems to have confused by “मनुष्याणां मन्दिराणि” or “मन्दुरा”.:

यस्मिन् परे वसेच्छत्रुः सपुत्रबलवाहना।
तत् परं राजनिलयं साट्टप्राकारतोरणम् ॥ १०७५ ॥

अन्तःपुरे पुरन्ध्रीणां रमयाणि भवनानि च।
निकेतनानि पुत्राणाम् अमात्यानां गृहाणि च ॥ १०७६ ।।

सचिवानां निवासाश्च मन्त्रिणां सदनानि च।
अन्येषां च मनुष्याणां मन्दिराणि बहूनि च ॥ १०७७ ॥

मन्दुरा गजशालाश् च विविधानापणानपि ।
भस्मसात् कुरुते यत् तु स दण्डः स्थानदाहकः ॥१०७८ ।।

Gujarat’s temple of Somnath, as noted above, had been fortified in 1216 to protect it from attacks by Hindu rulers in neighbouring Malwa. Recorded instances of Indian kings attacking the temples of their political rivals date from at least the eighth century, when Bengali troops destroyed what they thought was the image of Vishnu Vaikuntha, Kashmir’s state deity under King Lalitaditya (r. 724–60).+++(4)+++ In the early ninth century Govinda III, a king of the Deccan’s Rashtrakuta dynasty (753–982), invaded and occupied Kanchipuram in the Tamil country. Intimidated by this action, the king of nearby Sri Lanka sent Govinda several (probably Buddhist) images that the Rashtrakuta king then installed in a Śiva temple in his capital.+++(4)+++ At about the same time the Pandya King Śrimara Śrivallabha (r. 815–62) also invaded Sri Lanka and took back to his capital at Madurai, in India’s extreme south, a golden Buddha image – a symbol of the integrity of the Sinhalese state – that had been installed in the island kingdom’s Jewel Palace. In the early tenth century, King Herambapala of north India’s Pratihara dynasty (c.750–1036) seized a solid-gold image of Vishnu Vaikuntha when he defeated the king of Kangra, in the Himalayan foothills. By mid-century the same image had been seized from the Pratiharas by the Chandela King Yasovarman (r. 925–45), who installed it in the Lakshmana Temple of Khajuraho, the Chandelas’ capital in north-central India. In the mid eleventh century the Chola King Rajadhiraja (r. 1044–52), Rajendra’s son, defeated the Chalukyas and raided their capital, Kalyana, in the central Deccan plateau, taking a large black stone door guardian to his capital in Tanjavur, where it was displayed as a trophy of war.¹¹ In the late eleventh century, the Kashmiri King Harsha (r. 1089–1111) raised the plundering of enemy temples to an institutionalized activity.+++(5)+++ In the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, kings of the Paramara dynasty (800–1327) attacked and plundered Jain temples in Gujarat.¹² Although the dominant pattern here was one of looting and carrying off the images of state deities, we also hear of Hindu kings destroying their enemies’ temples. In the early tenth century, the Rashtrakuta monarch Indra III (r. 914–29) not only demolished the temple of Kalapriya (at Kalpi near the Jamuna River), patronized by the Rashtrakutas’ deadly enemies the Pratiharas, but took special delight in recording the fact.¹³+++(4)+++

Rajendra Chola’s seizure of the Śiva image from the Palas of Bengal in 1022, then, was hardly unique. In order to sever the links between a defeated king and the visible manifestation of his divine patron, it was necessary to carry off images or in other ways desecrate his royal temples. Consequently, a high level of inter-state violence between the ninth and thirteenth centuries inevitably accompanied efforts to create idealized mandalas and to transform neighbouring enemies into subordinate vassals. Conquest of the quarters was built into the politics of the day.