The Cholas Dominated South India, Here's How They Did It

In South Indian history, there's one name that everyone has heard of. Even if you're not a history nerd like me, I can guarantee that you know at least something about the most powerful Tamil empire in the world, the Cholas. Maybe you know about their emperors, men like Raja Raja and Rajendra Chola who conquered as far north as the Ganga and as far east as Malaysia and Indonesia. Maybe you've seen their colossal temples like the Brihadeeshwara with their richly decorated Gopuras that, with the exception of the Pyramids of Giza, were the tallest structures in the world at the time. But for the next 30 minutes, I want you to forget everything you think you know about the Cholas and join me on an intimate journey through the very heart of medieval Tamil society. How did politics function in the imperial Chola court? What was it like to live as an ordinary peasant in a Tamil village? How did the generals of the Chola army organise massive military campaigns against their biggest rivals, the Chalukyas of Karnataka? As we explore the diverse and violent world of medieval South India, we'll visit the Buddhist cities of Lanka, the ultra-rich trading ports of Malaysia and, most importantly, we'll spend time with the main characters of this historical drama, the Chola kings and queens themselves. Along the way, we'll also debunk some of the biggest myths about the Chola empire using real historical evidence and scientific analysis. Like, did you know that the Cholas, who were famous for being a seafaring empire, never actually had their own navy? Wait, so then how did they get from here all the way to here? To find out, join me as I take you through the complete history of the Chola empire. A history over 400 years long, beginning at a time when the Cholas were a family of wealthy rice farmers near the Kaveri, to the peak of their power when they were influencing politics as far away as China and to their ultimate downfall, not at the hands of any enemy, but something you'd never expect, tax evasion. This is part one of a two-part series, made possible by the fascinating new research in Lords of Earth and Sea, the latest book by award-winning historian Anirudh Kanisetty. Let's get on a bullock cart and go on a tour of the Kaveri floodplain in the 8th century CE. You pass by vast paddy fields, the stocks heavy with golden rice baking in the sun. A network of lazy canals crisscross the landscape, and you pass through small villages and towns where people are busy buying and selling in the noisy markets. Crucially, you notice that this land isn't actually ruled by any king or emperor. In fact, unlike most other places in medieval India, it wasn't the rich lords or nobles who held the most power in the Kaveri delta. It was actually the peasants. You would see that the Cholas are actually sharing space with a whole bunch of different powers. We are also talking about Nadu assemblies. Now, we know the name Nadu because of Tamil Nadu, but it comes from a much smaller territorial unit where a whole bunch of villages would coordinate the irrigation systems, the tax systems, the arrangement of their local markets and so on. You also had assemblies of Brahmins. You had assemblies of merchants. So, the defining feature of medieval Tamil society is that most things were done collectively. Decisions were taken collectively. Even property was owned mostly collectively with some exceptions. So, if you want to understand the rise of the Cholas, you have to understand what was the society they were a part of. How did they gradually convince the society to accept them as kings? Because the story of how they came to be accepted as rulers is the story of how they eventually became a great superpower. That collectivism, that self-sufficiency is at the heart of Chola politics because these Nadu people were so used to self-governance that if some outsider came and said, I'm your new ruler, so you gotta pay taxes to me. They'd obviously ask, Who the hell are you? We've not had a king here for a thousand years. Why do we need one now? At this point, the Cholas were just a rich landowning family from the ancient town of Uraiyur. They'd have lived as a large joint family in a brick and timber mansion with a retinue of servants. The patriarch of the family, Paranthaka Chola, was an ambitious man and had married a dozen women from other wealthy and powerful families, further increasing his own status. The Cholas were rich enough to actually have their own standing army of a few hundred soldiers and made money through raids against enemies in the north and south, collecting protection money from the locals, herding animals and other activities. Of course, in the highly decentralized world of the Kaveri floodplain, even the Cholas couldn't just give orders to the local villagers and expect them to listen. They had to win the loyalties of the Nadus through acts of generosity and goodwill. And they did that by giving expensive gifts to local temples. Things like gold jewelry to decorate the deity, bronze lamps and idols, ghee for the lamps to stay burning through the day and night, and even herds of sheep to give the locals a source of employment and the temple a steady stream of revenue. Think of it like a medieval PR campaign. Just like how politicians today pay to have their banners and posters hung up like advertisements, Tamil kings would leave inscriptions on the walls of temples recording how many gifts they gave. In medieval Tamil society, if you look at the inscriptions on the walls of the temples, you realize that these were not simply elite spaces. The early donors to Tamil temples included washer people, included shepherds. So these are places where the community is congregating. It is not just an elite space. And so for the Cholas, the temples essentially act as nodes of the public relations strategy. When the king has gone and made a conquest, he brings back some loot and then an officer of his will take some of that and make a gift in the temple. And at the beginning of the gift, there will be a long introduction, a eulogy called the Maykirti. And the Maykirti will say, Oh, it is the year such and such of this glorious king, line among kings. He is the consort of the goddesses of fortune and earth. And in his long life, he has conquered these, these, these, these, these countries. And it's very important to be a successful conqueror because it makes, it not only enables you to be pious to maintain the gods, but more importantly, it ensures that you're able to remain in the public eye. So it is a way to build loyalty. It is a way to project a particular image and to ensure recruitment, to ensure that locals continue paying taxes. So the temple is not simply a religious space. It is a node of the state. It is a community center. But in order to be able to afford such expensive gifts for the temples, Paranthaka Chola needed loot that could only be acquired by invading his enemies. His gaze began drifting southwards towards the ancient metropolis of Madurai, the capital of the Pandya dynasty. The Pandyas were a much older house than the current Chola family and had deep roots in the southernmost parts of Tamil Nadu and even Northern Lanka. But now that Paranthaka had formed so many alliances through marriage, he decided to flex his military muscles through some hard-hitting raids on Pandya lands. So in the 910s, Paranthaka Chola would go around gathering all the able-bodied men from nearby villages and towns and set out on yearly expeditions, attacking towns and farms all the way up to the outskirts of Madurai. In return for their bravery, the Chola warriors got a share in the loot they collected. Gold and silver, weapons, livestock, pretty much anything of value. This became a yearly cycle of raiding and pillaging and suddenly the Pandyas were being driven further and further back. They got so desperate, they had to ask the king of Lanka for help. But by now, the Cholas were on a roll. Growing richer and more powerful with each successful battle, the Cholas were sending armies of armored warriors and elephants to fight the combined forces of the Pandyas and the Lankans and they were winning. They conquered further and further south, eventually reaching Rameshwaram on the island between Tamil Nadu and Lanka. By now, Paranthaka Chola had amassed so much wealth in loot that he was giving out his weight in gold to local Brahmin priests and performing expensive rituals to show the world that he was the one true king of kings. He'd also managed his family life very smartly. His sons were all young adults now and instead of keeping them in close proximity, where jealousies and vicious rivalries could flare up, he'd cleverly station each of them in different regions of the kingdom, assigning them various activities to keep them busy. While the Chola men were off fighting wars, it's not like the women were sitting idle in their mansions. Chola queens and princesses had a crucial role to play in the politics and image building of the royal family. Remember how Tamil kings gave gifts to temples as a sort of PR campaign? Well, the Chola royal women were doing the same thing, perhaps on an even larger scale. These queens would travel to various temples in the kingdom and offer expensive gifts and you can imagine the sort of political campaigning they'd be doing in the Nadu assemblies. Queens from wealthier families were able to afford more luxurious and exotic gifts like gold, gemstones and pearls while the less wealthy ones would give sheep to produce milk for the ghee lamps. Some of the wealthiest queens even built new temples which, as we'll see very soon, led to the golden age of the medieval Cholas. All this information has been carefully recorded in temple inscriptions which has helped historians understand the socio-economic and political circumstances at every period in Chola history. At this point, Paranthaka Chola was riding high on a wave of success. He had driven the Pandyas into hiding and he'd even conducted the Cholas' first international military campaign by invading Anuradhapura, the great ancient citadel of Lankan power and sacked the city. He was currently the most powerful Tamil king alive, his enemies were in a shambles and his coffers were full of looted gold and precious stones. But what Paranthaka didn't realize was that he was far from the great king of kings that he imagined himself to be because he was about to make a fatal mistake that would tear the Chola royal family apart and bring the kingdom crashing down around him. It was a quiet, uneventful day in the Chola court when a young man suddenly burst through the doors desperate to seek the king's audience. Upon being questioned, he revealed that he was the recently deposed king of the Rashtrakuta empire in Karnataka claiming his own lords and ministers had schemed behind his back to overthrow him and install his uncle as the new emperor. The truth was that the young man was completely unfit to rule. In his few short years as emperor, he'd managed to squander lakhs and lakhs of gold and silver coins giving away over a thousand villages to local communities. And if that wasn't enough, he'd managed to get accused of incest with his dead brother's wives. After a political struggle, his uncle Krishna III Rashtrakuta had kicked him out and taken the imperial throne for himself and was on a mission to reclaim the lost glory of the great Rashtrakuta clan. That could only mean war and conquest. Paranthaka Chola, seeing this new development right at his doorstep, wasn't about to let this new emperor just stroll into his territory. For the last 30 years, he'd enjoyed an almost unbroken string of victories. Surely it would be no different this time. Paranthaka felt the full weight of the Rashtrakuta hammer when he tried to attack the new king in the Ganga kingdom. It came down with the force of a hundred elephants and a thousand troops shattering both the Chola forces and Paranthaka's overinflated ego. Now Krishna Rashtrakuta's attention was drawn to the Cholas, who scrambled to prepare their armies for the inevitable assault. Prince Kodanda Rama Chola, eldest son of Paranthaka, would lead his war elephant against the enemy. In the great battle that ensued, the day ended in the greatest possible tragedy for the Cholas. Prince Rama, the man who was to be the next Chola king, was slain in battle, taking a knife to the back even as he sat atop his elephant. The Chola resistance collapsed in that moment, allowing the Rashtrakuta emperor to ransack Tanjavur and Madurai with no one to stop him. The sun had set on the shining Chola empire, leaving them shrouded in darkness. You can imagine that there would have been considerably less fanfare when the next Chola king rose to the throne, one of Paranthaka's younger sons, Gandharaditta. A pall of gloom overshadowed the occasion, where just a few years earlier, the Chola court had been lively with politics and ceremony, and the royal family had been one of the richest and most powerful in the region. But seated next to him on the throne was Gandharaditta's senior queen, a woman with a spark in her eye, who possessed a mind that never sat still, constantly searching for opportunity where it arose, and brilliant enough to create it when there was none. That woman was Queen Sembian Mahadevi, architect of what would eventually become a Tamil superpower, the imperial Chola dynasty. The Cholas under the rule of Gandharaditta had slipped into obscurity, fearing the wrath of the Rashtrakutas. But once Krishna III had died, the shadow slowly lifted from the Kaveri floodplain. After Gandharaditta's death, his son Uttama was too young to take the throne, so it was given to his cousin, Paranthaka II, also known as Sundara Chola. Sundara was on a mission to reclaim the lost glory of his family. By now, the Chola name had lost much of its once fierce reputation, and the local Nadus had ceased to recognize them as their overlords. Even the Pandyas had reclaimed Madurai and were trying to reassert their power. But with the Rashtrakutas out of the picture, Sundara Chola captured the old Pallava capital of Kanchi, while his son scored victories against the Pandyas and Lankans. But then, a sudden, mysterious tragedy struck the Chola royal family. For reasons we don't quite know, three Brahmin officials assassinated the heir to the throne, the eldest son of Sundara Chola. Immediately, rumors of fratricide began to float around the Chola court. Could this have been an elaborate plot by the wily Sembian Mahadevi, wife of the dead king Gandharadita, to clear the line for their son, Uttama? Tragically, Sundara Chola died of grief in his palace in Kanchi, and his queen committed sati. The Chola royal household was no doubt swirling with drama and whispered gossip as Uttama Chola, who currently held the strongest claim to the throne, was crowned the Chola king in the year 971. It didn't help that Sundara Chola left behind two highly intelligent, ambitious children after his death. A cunning daughter, Kundavai, and a hot-blooded son, Arulmozhi Varman. Both were highly suspicious of Uttama's convenient rise to the throne, and as we shall see very soon, these two would come to play a central role in the creation of the Chola empire. But the queen mother, Sembian Mahadevi, ignored the rumors and was focused on the long road ahead. So Sembian emerges onto the historical scene, I think roughly around 912-913 CE, when she was a very young girl. And while a lot of her sisters-in-law came from very grand families, quite wealthy, they were able to build stone temples using their own personal funds, Sembian Mahadevi was only able to make gifts of sheep to produce ghee for lamps in temples. But you already see, from the beginning of her career, how Sembian has an understanding not just of religion, but also of politics. So she makes her temple gift quite strategically, this first gift of hers, just of sheep, she makes in the northern frontier of the Cholas, in a region which the Cholas have just conquered. And by making a temple gift in such a region, she's ensuring, not just the visibility of her devotion, but also the visibility of her in-laws in a place that has just been conquered and therefore is not entirely loyal. So what you have here is this remarkable woman who is not simply a devotee, but also a politician. This is a woman who understands how broadcasting, how public relations works, even though she's doing it through the means of a temple. Early in her career as Davaja Queen, Sembian Mahadevi came to the realization that in order to win the loyalty of the Nadu assemblies and secure her uncertain position in the Chola court, she had to appeal to the one common denominator that cut across every strata of society, from the wealthiest lords to the poorest peasants, religious devotion. Long ago, while traveling through a humid marshy swamp in present-day Chidambaram, she'd come across a beautiful Shiva deity in an obscure temple. Unlike any other depiction of the god she'd seen before, here Shiva was resplendent, dancing wildly, his long locks of hair streaming like the rays of the sun behind him. This was Nataraja, the divine dancer, lost in his cosmic Tandava dance. And ever since she first saw that idol, Sembian Mahadevi could not stop thinking about it. When her husband died, she'd found great solace and comfort in the hymns of Tevaram poets singing praises to Shiva. Now as the Queen Mother, she realized that her devotion was the path forward. She would have to reinvent the image of the Chola dynasty itself, usher in a new age for their clan. And she would do it in the very image of her beloved god, Nataraja. Sembian Mahadevi found solace in some way, in devotion. She found community among the singers of various hymns. And so when her son, once again through a bit of familial churn, becomes the king in 972 CE, when she suddenly gains access to the treasury of the Cholas, this humble princess who only gave gifts of sheep all those decades ago, she instantly starts to build temples. And while earlier Chola queens all built only one temple over the course of their lifetime, Sembian Mahadevi built 12. And if you look at the geographical layout of Sembian Mahadevi's temples, she also places temples strategically in the Chola's frontiers. She puts them in places that were sacred, that had pilgrims coming to them, or she puts them in market centers and she makes gifts to temples and asks local assemblies to administer them. So she'll ask local brahmins, she'll ask local velala cultivators, she'll ask local merchants to administer her gifts. Now, all of this definitely must have had a devotional component to it, because in all of her temples, she has Nataraja depicted on the exterior. But there's also an inkling of her understanding of media strategy. There is a very consistent messaging in all of Sembian's temples that she is a devout queen, that her son is a devout king. And you see this ability to also indulge in some local deal-making, because she's purchasing lands, she's creating employment locally, and she's also showing that she as a devout figure is worthy of people's loyalties. If you look at the way that politicians work today, where do politicians put up billboards? They put it up in places where people are likely to see them. Similarly, Sembian makes her claims of devotion and exhibits her devotion in places that people are likely to see, the public space at the time were temples. So in many ways, what Sembian Mahadeva is able to do through building all these temples is she ignites this craze almost for Chola-style temples. Suddenly, you have locals who are almost like arguing to be the recipients of her patronage. You have locals who are being recruited by her son who are acting as a backbone of a new kind of Chola administration. And the two of them really in a lot of ways set up the financial basis for the kingdom that Rajaraja Chola, who was Sembian Mahadevi's grandnephew, uses as a springboard for the conquests that took Chola armies to the farthest corners of the subcontinent. But even as Sembian Mahadevi was busy reinvigorating the name of her royal clan, great political games were afoot within the Chola court. It was well known that Uttama Chola was a peace-loving king, perhaps too peaceful, which left many of the men of his court frustrated with the lack of action or conquest that their ancestors were known for. Chief among these restless souls was the king's nephew himself, Arulmoli Varman, who was watching with disbelief as the Rashtrakuta empire collapsed completely in the Deccan and Uttama Chola did nothing? Where was the fire? Where was the ambition? Not only had his uncle not punished those brahmins who'd murdered his brother, but now he wasn't even taking advantage of the biggest opportunity they'd seen in 18 years? This temple-building craze had gone on for far too long. Enough political campaigning, the Cholas needed to conquer. So the young royal decided to take matters into his own hands. Uttama's health had begun to fail, giving Arulmoli the perfect opportunity to declare himself co-ruler. He had no shortage of supporters in the court and without bothering to ask for the king's permission, he cheekily decided to give himself a new name, Rajaraja Chola, the king of kings. Rajaraja could not have picked a better time to begin his new military campaign. After the Rashtrakuta's collapse, the Deccan was in a state of disarray as various factions sought to fill the gaping power vacuum left behind by the mighty empire. Meanwhile, the Chola kingdom had a healthy treasury, a series of bountiful harvests meant there was plenty of food and the land was filled with able-bodied fighting men ripe for the picking. Rajaraja's first campaign took him west, to Kerala, where he attacked the Chera kingdom. Having gotten used to the sleepy foreign relations with Uttama Chola's court, the Cheras were completely blindsided by the assault and Rajaraja easily managed to reach the western coast of India, where he proceeded to set fire to the merchant ships docked at the harbour. In doing so, Rajaraja may have been sending a message to the Ainutruvar, or the 500, a coalition of merchants who operated on the Tamil coast. The Ainutruvar, over the course of the centuries, I think were perhaps the single most influential organisation in determining the course of South Indian history. They originate in the 8th century CE in Ayyavali, in the northern part of Karnataka, and then they gradually begin to move south. It's a very flexible organisation. Many people call themselves the 500, but they don't have a single head office. They don't have a single chief merchant who's taking all the decisions. Merchants are very closely connected to the Chola court and very often, the boundary between a merchant and a courtier is not very clear. If you read the inscriptions of the Ainutruvar, they talk about who are the component groups. Of course, they include the merchants of the cities, the merchants of the countryside, etc, etc. But they also mention that their members include Brahmins, their members include warriors, their members include artists, weavers. So these are not, when we talk about merchants today, we think of them simply as these amply fed individuals who are sitting and counting their coins. But the reality of medieval merchants is that these guys were moneyed and mobile elements of South Indian society who were looking to make a profit in various ways. If it means helping a king with intel, then fine. If it means serving as a king's ambassadors, then fine. If it means an expanding into a region that a king has conquered and setting up shop because your competition has appeared, then it's fine. But also it means sourcing materials for new temples that are being built. These are all educated, literate, mobile people. And merchant, the word really doesn't do justice to just how remarkable and just how influential they were. As we'll see in the second part of this series, the Ainutravar would end up playing the most crucial role in Rajendra Chola's invasion of Southeast Asia. Get subscribed to my channel so you don't miss it. But for now, Raja Raja had tasted blood and wanted to hunt his real prey, the Deccan, A new successor to the Rashtrakutas, the Western Chalukya dynasty, was consolidating power in Karnataka. When they saw that the Cholas were moving into Gangavadi, the region ruled by the old Ganga dynasty around present-day Bengaluru, they retaliated with a swiftness that Raja Raja did not expect. They drove his armies back into Tamil Nadu, giving the young king a serious reality check. But in a complete stroke of luck, the Chalukyas had other enemies they were fighting in the north, so they stopped paying attention to the Cholas. Despite his earlier loss, Raja Raja was able to move back into Gangavadi, effectively conquering the region and appointing a vassal lord there. But Raja Raja was on the cusp of a military campaign that would catapult him from a mere king of a minor Tamil kingdom to the most powerful emperor in South India. It all began when a merchant arrived in the Chola court, bearing news from the Lankan capital of Anuradhapura. That ancient city, once one of the richest and most advanced urban centres in the entire subcontinent, was falling into ruin. Over the years, Lankan kings had generously gifted land and labour to the Buddhist Sanghas in the city. Except they had been far too generous and now the Sanghas had so much land and labour at their disposal that they had stopped paying their dues to the king, sending the kingdom deep into debt. The royal treasury had no money to maintain the massive network of canals in the city, hindering agriculture, which led to a decline in population, which further slashed the city's tax revenues. The Lankan king, who had maintained an army of mercenaries all these years, now found himself unable to pay them and the disgruntled warriors were rioting through the city, threatening to break into the king's palace. Seeing a golden opportunity, Raja Raja swooped down into the city, leading his army on a legendary sacking of Anuradhapura. Here too, the Chola king established a military outpost before returning to his homeland. Rejuvenated by this victory, Raja Raja prepared for even more war and conquest, this time against the Cheras and Pandyas. Even as he defeated these old kingdoms, a new one rose out of the hills of Karnataka, the fearsome Hoysalas. There was a period when Raja Raja was fighting battles on all fronts against the Chalukyas in the Deccan, the Hoysalas in Karnataka, the Cheras in Kerala and the Pandyas in Madurai. Leading his elephant corps at the head of an army tens of thousands strong, Raja Raja Chola must have struck a terrifying figure in the eyes of his enemies. His armies spilled onto the various kingdoms of South India, sweeping over his enemies, scattering their troops in all directions and seizing ungodly amounts of loot. More wealth meant more temple building and gifting, which meant more support for the king, which only meant more conquest. The Chola queens and army generals did their fair share of temple gifting. For example, the inscriptions show that after Raja Raja's conquest of Lanka, the temples began receiving vast quantities of pearls for the first time, a luxury that Lanka was famous for at the time. There could hardly have been a town or village anywhere in South India where the name of Raja Raja Chola wasn't spoken, while others still got to witness the massive procession of his army passing through their lands, thousands of elephants, horses and foot soldiers flattening everything in their path. But Raja Raja wasn't just some bloodthirsty military strategist, he was an equally brilliant statesman. He essentially revamps the entire administrative edifice of the Chola state by creating an organized revenue secretariat and by redistricting all the fractious Nadus with their assemblies into regular Vala Nadus, which means you can interpret as a fertile Nadu but also as a prosperity district. And the resources that are brought from these Vala Nadus are poured into his great imperial temple, the Dhrithishwara temple. And from the temple, they are driven towards ritual, but also reinvested in expanding agriculture, in expanding cultivation. The sheep that are being captured in various raids are being gifted to shepherds So what you're seeing here is essentially India's answer to Alexander the Great, but an Alexander the Great who lived to see all of his ambitions fulfilled. A man who overthrew his dynasty's greatest enemies, who expanded Cholapar into South Karnataka and Northern Sri Lanka, established outposts that had never really been there before, builds the early ties with merchant corporations that his son Rajendra later built upon. And now it was time for him to build something that would leave behind a legacy something that would carry on the name of Raja Raja and the Cholas for centuries to come. He wanted to construct the greatest temple built by any Tamil king in history. It would tower over the city of Tanjavur, its gopuram rising like a mountain, sunlight bathing its brightly painted facade each morning. It would be called the Raja Rajeshwaram, known to us today as the Brihadeshwara temple. Raja Raja wanted the temple ready on the 275th day of the 25th year of his reign, which meant that the builders barely had 7 years to complete it. 7 years to construct a temple 40 times the size of the average Tamil shrine that was common in those days. So, they got to work. Every single day for 7 years straight, 17 tons of stone was extracted from a quarry 45 kilometers away and floated down the Kaveri to Tanjavur on giant coracles. 1,30,000 tons of granite was required to construct the temple and a literal army of stonemasons, craftsmen and laborers toiled in the unforgiving Tamil sun day after day while blacksmiths stood by to sharpen and repair tools, cooks prepared hearty meals in massive vats and waterboys fetched a constant supply of water from the nearby river. Anytime there was a shortage of funds for the temple, the cholas would just send out a raiding party Meanwhile, the chola court was mobilizing thousands of tons of rice and exotic offerings from across the kingdom in preparation for the grand opening of the temple. To complete the structure, a colossal 80-ton capstone was hoisted to the top of the 200-foot tall gopuram, a single stone holding the entire superstructure in place. If you were to visit Tanjavur in the 11th century, it would be impossible for you to not notice the enormous skyscraper that dwarfed all other structures in the city, a gleaming monument to the chola's utter and complete supremacy over the land. More importantly, it was a symbol of Raja Raja's staggering achievements in taking his clan to unimaginable new heights. Of course, there's an inescapable irony to all this. If you look closely at the Brihadeeshwara temple, you'll notice several places where the sculptures are simply incomplete. Given their tight deadline, the builders of this temple had to cut several corners in order to finish the structure and try to hide the fact with some last-minute sculpting. For those educated in the aesthetics and symbolism of medieval temples, it was obvious to see that as impressive as this temple was in sheer size and scale, it was deeply flawed in its final form, rough-hewn and unfinished, not unlike the man it was named after. Because for all of Raja Raja's incredible work in rejuvenating the Chola empire, he was leaving behind a complex, war-torn state for his son to inherit. He was giving the impossible burden of running a kingdom in the hyper-competitive landscape of medieval India to his son, who had yet to prove himself. For Rajendra Chola, fixing his father's mistakes and steering his temple in the right direction was not going to be an easy task. In part 2 of this series, I'll be showing you the incredible life of Rajendra Chola, arguably the greatest South Indian king to have ever lived, and his conquests that took him all the way to the steamy jungles of Indonesia. We'll also learn how the Cholas were plunged into a state of turmoil from their rivalry with the Chalukyas and ultimately, their downfall, caused by tax evasion, by the greedy nobles of the empire. Thank you so much for watching. This video would not have been possible without the help of Anirudh Kanisetti and the pioneering historical research in his new book, Lords of Earth and Sea. If you're an Indian history buff and want to learn about Chola life in even greater detail, you should absolutely check out his book. You can find a link below in the description. Please subscribe to my channel and share this video with your friends and family. It really helps me create even more high-quality history documentaries like this. I'm Manish Bhargav and I'll see you in part 2 of the complete history of the Cholas.