YS 138 | Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire

The first module is an introduction to the political, religious and cultural worlds of medieval South India, dominated in the 9th century by the Rāṣṭrakūṭa imperial formation of the Deccan. This week, we will study the Kaveri river valley, with its assertive village and nadu assemblies, which managed irrigation, taxation and commerce, as well as relationships with regional rulers and devotional currents. We will then examine how royal power was developed and projected in medieval India through temple patronage, through a case study of select sites in present-day Maharashtra, northern Tamil Nadu, and the Kaveri river valley. 

Finally, we will zoom in on 8th and 9th-century political campaigns by Pāṇḍya and Pallava kings to absorb the Kaveri zone, a dynamic which the then-minor Cōḷa clan would harness with great success.

In the second module, we examine the growth of Cōḷa power through alliances with local military families such as the Irukkuvēls and Paḷuveṭṭarāyars, and how princesses and queens from these families expanded the court's reach throughout the Kaveri's agrarian heartland. We will focus particularly on the careers of Kōkkilān Aḍigaḷ, a lady from the Malabar coast, and Cempiyan (Sembiyan) Mahādēvi, the influential 10th-century queen-regent who nurtured the dynasty's relationship with the god Āṭavallān (better known today as Natarāja). In parallel, we will examine the men of the family, and the political successes and setbacks of the 10th century — which included raids into Sri Lanka as well as a serious defeat at the hands of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas. All these would directly feed into the career of the famous Rājarāja I (r. 985–1014 CE), who would develop a radical model of Cōḷa kingship presenting the king as a conqueror-devotee, intervening directly in local agrarian relationships and reorienting corporate mercantile and military identities around the Cōḷa court. We will study these innovations through the king's great Rājarājeśvaram temple (better known today as the Brihadiswara at Thanjavur).

The third module examines how Cōḷa power broke out of its traditional setting in the Kaveri valley to penetrate southern Karnataka and northern Sri Lanka, while also mounting campaigns into Bengal and the Malay peninsula. While these campaigns would ultimately prove ephemeral to the Cōḷa court itself, other actors in Tamil state society, particularly the merchant corporation known as the Ainurruvar or the Five Hundred Lords, would successfully expand in their aftermath, establishing lasting settlements on the coasts of Sumatra and the forested inland of Sri Lanka. In this module, we will examine how such corporate entities functioned in medieval South India, their relationships with state actors and society at large, and how they often grew in the absence of royal oversight. In particular, we will study the agrarian corporation known as the Cittiramēli Periyanādu, the Shining Plow of the Great Nadu, which represented an unprecedented alliance of wealthy peasantry across multiple nadu regions at a time when the Cōḷa found itself embroiled in multiple unsuccessful military adventures in the Deccan and the Krishna-Godavari delta. All this would lead to a major factional shift in Cōḷa court politics, allowing families from the erstwhile Pallava kingdom to capture important offices in the late 11th-early 12th centuries.

In the final module, we examine the decline of Cōḷa power as local magnates gradually took control of the mechanism of temple production and charisma. In parallel, the middle aristocracy — Brahmins, prosperous Vellala peasantry, and tribal warlords-turned-dynasts — propelled major innovations in temple practice in the Coromandel Coast. Temples became sprawling complexes with landholdings scattered across multiple villages, while both the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava textual corpora attest to social churn in temple patronage. As agrarian supply chains grew contested, epigraphic materials suggest that landless groups were forced into indentured servitude, while artisan and warrior groups were able to leverage their connections to climb the caste hierarchy. Amidst all of this, transformations in Indian Ocean networks unleashed new, centralised, cavalry-wielding states in the subcontinent, which the Cōḷa court proved unable to compete with. While the dynasty itself would disappear by the late 13th century, the religious, economic and social networks of the Coromandel Coast, which they had helped form, would long outlive them.