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

On the whole, the Tamil people had a penchant for different types of aggression and war which kept them happily engaged with each other,

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’.

Krishna Deva Raya.

The black deed once done, both the emperors sheathed their respective swords and turned into sober men to propagate peace and religion.

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

Many kings of this period in the South seem to have excelled at cutting off the heads of their foes and have promptly added the phrase ‘talaikonda’ (having cut off the head) to their already long titles.

The emperor contributed to the growth of Tamil by popularising the Devaram61, the sacred Tamil hymns of the Saivite bhakti saints.

Ashoka called himself devanampiya, the beloved of the Gods, while Rajaraja lent his name to the main deity, Rajarajeswara, of the Thanjavur temple, apt names for the union of the sacred with the secular.

But, indisputably, the Cholas had a much earlier origin considering that right from the 6th century BCE there was a thriving commerce between coastal Thamizhagam and Western countries as well as countries in the east such as China, Malaya and Cambodia.