Raja Raja Chola I.

It is the rare medieval ruler whose name still does work in the present tense. A thousand years after his death, Raja Raja Chola is the name on a Reserve Bank of India commemorative coin, on a Tamil Nadu high-speed train, on a thousand school textbook chapters, and on the most-photographed temple in South India.

He was born Arulmozhi Varman in (probably) 947 CE, into the Chola royal family at Thanjavur. He took the throne in 985, took the regnal name Rajakesari Arulmozhivarman, and only retrospectively acquired the title — Raja Raja, "king of kings" — by which the world has known him ever since. The reign that followed was twenty-nine years long, ended in 1014, and produced, among other things, the building we are still standing inside.

A name, in pieces.

The Tamil and Sanskrit traditions name him at least four different ways, and English-language sources use all of them more or less interchangeably. The components are worth knowing.

• Arulmozhi Varman — his birth name. Arulmozhi = "gracious speech"; Varman = "shield", a Kshatriya royal suffix.
• Rajakesari — his regnal name on accession. Raja-kesari = "lion of kings", an alternating regnal title in Chola succession.
• Raja Raja — the imperial title, given after his major conquests. Raja-raja = "king of kings", the formula reserved for paramount sovereigns.
• Rajaraja Chola I — the standard modern English form. The numeral distinguishes him from Rajaraja Chola II (r. 1146–73) and Rajaraja Chola III (r. 1216–56).

The accession of 985.

The Chola throne in the tenth century did not pass smoothly from father to son. Raja Raja's elder brother, Aditya II, had been assassinated; their uncle Uttama Chola held the throne until his death in 985. The younger prince had been heir presumptive for at least a decade by then. He took the throne, by all surviving accounts, peacefully.

The state he inherited was, by Indian standards of the era, large but not exceptional — the lower Kaveri delta, parts of the Coromandel Coast, a contested border with the Western Chalukyas at the Tungabhadra. In the twenty-nine years that followed, he made it the largest political entity that had ever existed in southern India.

“The Chola empire under Raja Raja was not a federation of tribute-paying client states in the older Indian pattern. It was an administered empire — surveyed, taxed by direct assessment, garrisoned, and inscribed on stone.”— Burton Stein, A History of India, Blackwell, 1998

The empire built.

The military campaigns of the reign are catalogued in the Tamil meykkīrti — the formal court eulogy that opens every Chola royal inscription. The standard list runs: the Cheras at Vizhinjam; the Pandyas at Madurai; the conquest of Ilam, modern Sri Lanka, completed by 993; the Gangapadi region of southern Karnataka; and the Maldive islands, the first overseas conquest of a South Indian power on record.

By the end of his reign the empire extended from Kalinga (modern Odisha) in the north-east to the southern tip of the subcontinent, west across the Western Ghats to the Arabian Sea, and offshore to Ilam and the Maldives. At its maximum extent the territory under direct Chola administration was approximately 800,000 square kilometres — roughly the size of modern Türkiye.

The Chola navy.

The Chola navy under Raja Raja and, more famously, his son Rajendra is the medieval Indian institution that most surprises modern readers. The Maldives expedition was launched from the Coromandel ports almost certainly between 1014 and 1018. Twenty years later, Rajendra's navy would cross the Bay of Bengal and raid the Sumatra-based Srivijaya empire — the only documented Indian transoceanic conquest of the medieval period.

Raja Raja did not personally lead the trans-oceanic campaigns; his son did. But the institutional capacity — shipyards at Nagapattinam, the system of overseas tribute, the merchant guilds (the Ainnurruvar) that operated as a kind of state-licensed multinational — was built during his reign. The Cholas were, briefly and improbably, a thalassocracy.

The temple as instrument.

Construction of the Brihadeeswara temple began in 1003, in the eighteenth year of the reign. It was completed in 1010, in the twenty-fifth. The dedication inscription names it Rajarajeswaram — "the temple of Rajaraja's lord", a possessive formulation that fuses the king and the deity in a way that is not coincidental.

The temple was not, in any ordinary sense, a religious commission. It was a state project — financed from the treasury, staffed from the imperial rolls, inscribed with the names of donors, dancers, accountants, musicians and goldsmiths. The base inscriptions list 400 devaradiyars (temple dancers) by name and home village, 212 musicians, hundreds of pieces of gold and silver liturgical equipment, and the precise endowments by which the temple was to be supported in perpetuity. It is the most thoroughly documented Indian building of the medieval period — and the document is the building.

Administration and inscription.

The administrative innovations of the reign are less photogenic than the temple but, in their way, more consequential. Raja Raja reorganised the state into mandalams (provinces), each divided into valanadus (districts) and finally into nadus (assemblies of villages). A revenue survey was undertaken; land was classified by yield; tax was assessed in cash and kind. The Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions of the period are the densest surviving administrative record from anywhere in medieval India.

The inscription habit — chiselling state acts onto the walls of temples — is the reason we know what we know about the reign. Brihadeeswara's plinth alone carries 107 distinct inscriptions, covering 64,000 square centimetres of granite. Most of them are not religious. They are receipts.

Death and the long aftermath.

Raja Raja died in 1014, a few years after the temple's consecration. He was succeeded by his son, Rajendra Chola I, who had been co-regent since 1012 and would in his own reign push the empire to its territorial maximum — across the Ganges, across the Bay of Bengal, briefly the master of Sumatra.

The dynasty he founded lasted three more centuries. By 1279, when the last Chola king Rajendra III was defeated by the Pandyas, the empire had long since contracted to the lower Kaveri. The temple, however, has outlasted all of it: the dynasty, the rivals, the colonial administrations, the British Empire and the independent Indian republic that succeeded them. The institution he built to outlive him has, so far, done so by exactly a thousand and fifteen years.

Further reading

• Burton Stein, A History of India, Blackwell, 1998 — the standard English overview.
• Nilakanta Sastri, The Cōḷas, University of Madras, 1955 — the foundational scholarly history, still in print.
• Y. Subbarayalu, South India under the Cholas, Oxford, 2012 — the modern administrative reading.
• Hermann Kulke, The Routledge Handbook of the State in Premodern India, 2017 — for the comparative framework.