Title: Lords of Earth and Sea – A History of the Chola Empire
Author: Anirudh Kanisetti
Publisher: Juggernaut, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9789353455606
Pages: 343
The Chola dynasty is historically and emotionally very important to South Indians and Tamils respectively. It was the only Indian lineage that carried our culture towards the distant shores of southeast Asia and even China. Indian mainstream historians generally assume an unmindful attitude towards this South Indian dynasty and focus entirely on the Delhi sultanates and Mughals. Partly to rectify this bias and set the record straight, our new parliament building houses the spectre (chenkol) of the Cholas as a symbol and continuity of the authority and fountainhead of Indian culture. The book’s front cover shows a chenkol. This book lacks historical rigour, but is an attempt to fill the void. The story is generated from inputs of 30,000 inscriptions in the Chola land. Names of minor dignitaries who had dedicated grants and gifts to the temples are also woven into the story. The unfortunate part of the whole episode is that the author has made a lot of warps and wefts coloured by his ideology while weaving the parts into the general skeleton of Chola history. Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian specializing in ancient and early medieval India. It is not clear whether he has any academic background in history but has received grants for his work from prestigious institutions.
The book opens with a clarification that the Cholas who originated in the Kaveri floodplain is not genetically linked to Cholas of the Sangam era. The new kings were only slightly more powerful than the landed magnates who were their allies. They developed political power by matrimonial alliances with powerful families and other royal houses. The book tells about Kokkilan Adigal, a Chera princess married to Parantaka I. While describing her imaginary journeys across the vastness of the Tamil plains, the book resembles a movie script. These queens were very social, not quite unlike their modern counterparts and greatly contributed to temple worship as part of an effort to justify their rule to a peasant subject class. Sembiyan Mahadevi was a Chola queen who commissioned and popularized Shiva’s worship as Nataraja. This iconic figure of Shiva was first crafted around 970 CE. Sembiyan Mahadevi built as many as eight temples. She handpicked a team of sculptors from the Kaveri delta, binding all their families and villages to her. All her temples had a signature style, with Nataraja facing the south. Slowly, under the velvet glove of Shaivism, the Chola court extended its iron fist and controlled the floodplain. One of their initial defeats in 949 at Takkolam was soon gotten over with and the empire was crowned in all its glory by the end of the first millennium CE.
Kanisetti provides some interesting details which put the Cholas in a class of its own among medieval and pre-medieval kings. Succession to the throne appears to be smooth and orderly, without fratricide or patricide. The ascent of Prince Arulmoli (regnal title Rajendra Chola) shows a marked contrast to the bloodstained machinations of many dynasties, especially the Mughals. Again, Rajaraja was ordained as a co-ruler to his uncle Uttama Chola and he assumed sovereignty when the elder died of natural causes. Construction of the Brihadiswara Temple at Thanjavur gives an absorbing aside to the story. The architects needed to design a temple at least 40 times larger than the average Tamil shrine. It had to be done in a single stroke, without experimenting with buildings of intermediate sizes. Excepting the pyramids of Giza, it was the tallest structure on earth in the eleventh century. The interior of the superstructure can still be glimpsed today. It is an astounding and somewhat eerie sight, an empty, silent pyramid of granite ascending away into the darkness. Cholas heavily depended on the merchant guilds such as the ‘Five Hundred’ to project their power overseas. The Cholas had no navy, contrary to popular perceptions, but the merchant ships carried men and materiel to the places as needed. They also acted as spies and gathered information on numerous occasions. They tipped Rajaraja of the power vacuum in Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka which led to a Chola invasion and annexation. In return, the Cholas helped the guild by destroying their trade rivals. When Rajaraja stormed Kanthaloor in Kerala, he burnt the merchant ships moored there in an uncharacteristic departure from the rule of leaving commerce unmolested during war. This is thought to be a strategy to cause crushing losses to the Chola guild’s competitors. Further, the book notes that the Cholas established new centres through conquest, but they did not wipe out the older cultures and thrived from diversity. Rajendra made a plundering raid to Kedah in Malaysia in 1025, but he did not establish suzerainty over it. A network of Tamil merchants was established from mainland India deep into southeast Asia. Remains of brick temples were found there, containing Tamil-style stone idols of Buddha, Shiva linga and sculpture of Vishnu were cohabiting harmoniously (p.145). Read William Dalrymple’s excellent work ‘The Golden Road’ which presents a sweeping coverage of southeast Asia’s cultural links to the Tamil country (read my review here). Some fundamental changes were happening in the palace around this time. After Rajendra followed his father Rajaraja to the crown, purse-strings were tightened and the royal ladies ceased patronizing temples for half a century since the 1020s.
The most unfortunate thing about the book is that Kanisetti tries to sneak in his liberal ideology onto medieval treatises in claims such as the Chola empire was great only for the upper classes of the Kaveri floodplain; for the people on the frontier it meant that their homes were looted, fields burnt and women captured. Not only the Cholas, in any period in history including our own, the upper classes always have a great time. It provides no new information such as redundant statements like ‘it was the sun which rose in the day and the moon shone in the night during the Chola period’. The author plays up the atrocities during Cholas’ military campaigns as if to blame them. During Rajendra’s Ganga campaign, he attacked temples. The author then admits that a number of spectacular idols were carried back to Chola territory (p.19) and placed in minor shrines. He says that this was very much par for the course in medieval south Asia. Now, compare this to what Ghaznawi did to the Somnatha idol at around the same time. Readers also get a taste of the author’s socialist turn of mind while describing events occurred in the eleventh century. He complains that most of what the Paraiyar cultivators grew went to landowners. The unmentioned labour of the Paraiyars was the foundation of the medieval period’s urbanism and complex exchanges, but the people were shorter, wirier and more wrinkly with prolonged exposure (p.164). These are lofty, elegant ideas but applied here a bit anachronistically. This book also takes references in contemporary texts at face value ignoring the exaggeration of many orders of magnitude. He considers Sekkilar’s Shaivite work on the history of sixty-three gurus. They entered into a religious discourse with the Jains and when the latter lost, 8000 of them is said to have impaled themselves. Kanisetti then cheekily suggests that this was based on a historical event even though he has no references to support this claim. Another story in the same book is that of a devotee of Shiva named Kannappa plucking both his eyeballs and offering it to a linga. Was that too based on a real incident?
The book gives a prominent place to the changes that occurred in Tamil society along with Chola decline and how the caste system solidified thereafter. As the centralized monarchy weakened, power was gradually seized by those who controlled military labour and agrarian production at the source. Tax evasion from within by gifting land to temples and foreign invasions weakened the Cholas. Caste is often thought of as an ancient, immutable system imposed from the top by kings and Brahmins, but in south India, it was a medieval system shaped by medieval classes in response to an absence of royal authority, rather than a preponderance of it (p.255). The book explicitly narrates the Cholas’ war-time atrocities, but a marked difference of their modus operandi to Islamic invasions is clearly discernible. The Hoysalas ransacked Kaveri temples but did not destroy them. The Palli people under the Cholas ransomed the idols and re-consecrated them (p.200). This is how true economic interest on the part of invaders works. On the other hand, whenever we read of destruction of temples, a clear religious motive lies behind the act. The author presents the ways in which palace women were sexually exploited in needless detail. These are unquestioningly taken from the eulogies of fawning poets living on the largesse of their patrons.
The entire book employs a clever stratagem to paint the greatest Chola kings as villains or at least as those who do not deserve appreciation or respect. To bolster his point, he alleges them to have carried out the most outrageous crime imaginable in today’s Tamil Nadu – patronization of Brahmins! The book is written in dramatic prose with characters displaying emotions and capable of thinking like ordinary people. It is probable that the author might have desired to provide the seed for a movie script on Cholas out of this book in the future. Even though this book is historical fiction for the most part, he paints a picture designed to accentuate the fault lines in present-day society and deliberately plays up discrimination and violence which might have happened in the distant past. Instead of naming the princes directly, the uses their battle honorifics like ‘Madurai-destroyer’ or ‘Kerala-destroyer’ in a wily attempt to scratch long-healed scabs in order to reopen the wound. This would also make the people from these regions remain slightly peeved that would prevent them from identifying with the kings and queens in this book. Mass rape is accused in a Chola-Chalukya war. It might’ve occurred, but what is hypocritical is the total tactical silence of such liberal authors when the winning side is Mughal or Central Asian, as we have seen many times in the past. In such cases, they shut up like a clam on battlefield violence and tyranny on captured women. Examples of the author’s colourful language describing Cholas’ atrocities are: ‘hands reddened with blood and mud-stained sweat of thousands’; ‘loot and pillage of undefended villages’; ‘sawed off the nose of the daughter of an enemy general’; ‘The Chola imperial temples only served to distribute war loot to Kaveri gentry and warriors’; ‘Chola court was imagined as a cut-throat world in later centuries’.
Winston Churchill once pejoratively remarked that India was no more a single country than the equator – that is, India was only a geographic term. But Kanisetti goes one step further in the detestation of his homeland by removing all references to the Indian subcontinent and replacing it with South Asia. However, South India remains as such without any modification. Taking into account the disdain and apathy Kanisetti shows to all things Indian and his uncanny knack in always digging up the unpleasant, this man may rightly be called the ‘Wendy Doniger of India’.
The book lacks serious research and feels like fiction. Serious readers of history would do better by avoiding this book.
Rating: 2 Star
