Rajaraja Chola: Interplay Between an Imperial Regime and Productive Forces of Society

Rajaraja assembled a marauding army, no less audacious, to build the first imperial empire of the South after reducing several cities to ashes and charred bones.

least before 3rd century BCE 235 BCE – Invasion of Lanka by the Chola king Ellalan (Sembiyan) mentioned in Mahavamsa 848 CE – Capture of

Exemplary moral behaviour may have also contributed to this. ‘Chola kings… were exemplars of medieval South Indian kingship and models of appropriate rulership for chiefs of the macro region; it was less the might of the Chola rulers than it was their moral appropriateness that provided the basis of Chola rule over the Coramandel plain’.

The early Cholas had lost their pre-eminence during the Kalabhra32 period between the 3rd and 6th centuries and had literally been reduced to feudatories of the more powerful Pandya and Pallava kingdoms. It is from this desperate position that we come across their first attempts to establish an empire which expanded into the largest empire that the

No less important to the stability of his empire was the compelling iconography of Saivism2 and the bhakti movement3

While his grants and gifts to temples have astounded many, it is a fact that during the reign of the Cholas, lands of the oppressed were systemically appropriated and the booty from war spoils were used to fund temple construction.

And undeniably, the Mauryan Empire was the largest that India had known while the Chola Empire was the longest.

But, purportedly, there is a kinder way to look at this since ‘it appears, however, that the true meaning of the phrase is that the vanquished king had to acknowledge his defeat by humbling himself before the conqueror in a particular manner as it were, by placing his head at the disposal of the conqueror’.

During this period of roughly two and half centuries, the Cholas were constantly at war with their neighbours.