A History of India, Third Edition

THE REGIONAL KINGDOMS OF EARLY MEDIEVAL INDIA

The disposition of these men is naturally fierce: they are attached

to heretical teachings. The sangharamas [monasteries] are ruined

and dirty as well as the priests. There are some tens of [Hindu]

Deva temples.

The resurgence of the Chola dynasty

The comeback of the Cholas in the ninth century was achieved in a way
with which we are by now familiar: they served as tributary princes under
the Pallavas and reasserted their independence when Pallava power
declined due to the constant confrontation with the mighty Rashtrakutas.
While the Pallavas were busy in the north, the Cholas defended the Pallava
realm against the southern Pandyas until Aditya took his chance around
897 and challenged his Pallava overlord on the battlefield. The encounter
took the usual heroic form of a duel in front of the two armies. Aditya (the
Sun) won and he and his son Paratanka (907 to 955) consolidated their
hold on the south. While doing this they also had to confront the
Rashtrakutas, who defeated them. Thus the Cholas had to restrict their
activities to their original nuclear area in the Kaveri valley for several
decades.
Towards the end of the tenth century Uttama Chola and finally his son
Rajaraja I restored Chola power with a vengeance by extending their
territorial boundaries beyond their original ‘homeland’. Rajaraja
vanquished the Pandyas and Cheras, conquered Sri Lanka and sacked the
venerable old capital, Anuradhapura, and at the end of his reign he even
captured the distant Maldive islands. His son Rajendra I, whom he had
asked to share the responsibilities of ruling the expanding empire in 1012
continued this aggressive policy with equal vigour. He conquered Vengi,
captured the capital of the Chalukyas of Kalyani, sent his fleet again to the
Maldives in 1017 and then in 1022 to 1023 he launched his great
campaign which was to make him the ‘Chola who conquered the Ganges’,
a feat which he commemorated by naming his new capital
‘Gangaikondacholapuram’. In an inscription he reported that he had
defeated the Pala king, Mahipala, and that he had ordered the defeated
princes of Bengal to carry the holy water of the Ganges to his new capital,
where he built a huge tank containing this water as a ‘liquid pillar of
victory’. Three years later he sent his fleet on the famous expedition to
Sumatra and Malaya where his army then defeated the mighty Shrivijaya
empire and all its tributary princes.
There are many theories about the causes of the sudden expansion of
the Chola empire under these two great rulers. Did they just follow the old
injunction of conquering the world (digvijaya) so as to prove their valour
as universal rulers (chakravartin)? Were they mainly interested in plunder,
as one American historian has suggested? Were their maritime expeditions