The Cholas: How one dynasty in India created a cultural and economic superpower

The loot of the conquest was lavished on his great imperial temple, known today as Brihadishvara.

In addition to the precious treasures, the great temple receives 5,000 tons of rice every year, from the conquered regions of southern India (you need a fleet of twelve Airbus A380 to carry that much rice these days).

This allows Brihadishvara to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, an instrument of the Chola state, intended to channel Rajaraja’s vast fortune into a new irrigation system, into expanding cultivation, into vast new herds of sheep and buffaloes. Few countries in the world can enjoy economic control of such scale and depth.

The Cholas were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to the interior of Eurasia. Rajaraja Chola’s successor, Rajendra, built alliances with Tamil merchant corporations: a partnership between merchants and government power that foreshadowed the East India Company – a powerful British trading corporation that later ruled a large part of India – which came more than 700 years later.

In 1026, Rajendra put his troops on merchant ships and sacked Kedah, a Malay city that dominated the global trade in precious woods and spices.

While some Indian nationalists have proclaimed this as the Chola “conquest” or “colonization” in Southeast Asia, archeology shows a strange picture: the Cholas do not seem to have their own navy, but under them, a wave of Tamils. diaspora traders spread across the Bay of Bengal.

By the end of the 11th Century, these traders were running independent ports in northern Sumatra. A century later, they were deep in present-day Myanmar and Thailand, and worked as tax collectors in Java.