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.

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

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

Aside from ruthless conquests and a regular stream of income from fealties, this was made possible by many other factors: expansion of agriculture, the rise of nagarams – the trading and craft centres with their new productive forces, the maturing of self-governing corporate bodies such as the sabhas and urs, increase in inland and overseas trade

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’.

Long inscriptions on stone or copper follow a certain pattern. The opening verses invoke either one or more deities of the ruler’s choice. This is followed by a preamble called the prashasti in Sanskrit or meykeerthi in Tamil, which is a short eulogy of the ruler. Then comes a detailed description of the gift and to which institution it was made

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’.

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.

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