What the PM didn’t say about Cholas

DURING his July 27 trip to Tamil Nadu, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, duly dressed in veshti-shirt-angavastram, carried with all the reverence of a passion play actor, a traditional kodam or jug of water from the Ganga to pour into a tank that an ambitious Chola king built a thousand years ago to commemorate his victorious Gangetic quest.

Rajendra Chola is known as Gangaikonda Cholan — literally the Chola who conquered the Ganga. The king built a new capital, naming it Gangaikonda Cholapuram to celebrate his feat. In the middle, he built a temple — slightly smaller than the one built by his father Rajaraja in Thanjavur but as beautiful, if not more — to Siva, the god that the Cholas had adopted.

Modi extolled the greatness of Rajendra, and spoke of his legacy of bringing the Ganga to the land of the Kaveri. According to a PIB press release, the Prime Minister said the Chola rulers “had woven India into a thread of cultural unity”, and stated that his government was carrying forward “the same ideals from the Chola era”.

He highlighted that programmes like the Kashi Tamil Sangamam and the Saurashtra Tamil Sangamam were reinforcing centuries-old bonds of unity. He described the endeavours of the Chola kings as symbolic of his own government’s “Ek Bharat, Shreshtha Bharat”.

In its quest to establish a glorious Hindu past for India, the BJP has shown that it can pick and choose what it wants from history. Add to this the anxiety about making a mark in next year’s Tamil Nadu Assembly elections, and you have a party that adopted first the Tamil god Murugan, and now a Tamil king. The muscular, military-minded Rajendra Cholan, a Siva bhakt with a maritime prowess unmatched in his time, mirroring India’s own aspirations in the Indian Ocean, is clearly the BJP’s idea of Hindutva with a Tamil script ahead of the elections. But... it’s complicated.

For one, Rajendra’s Gangetic expedition was not the medieval forerunner to the BJP’s Kashi Tamil Sangamam, nor was it a king’s personal meditative pilgrimage. Rajendra I was out to prove that he was a super-king, a king of kings, and that nothing could stand in his way. He had already conquered the Deccan, the Cheras and the Pandyas. He had completed his father’s conquest of Lanka. Now he was looking for ritual confirmation of his status as emperor.

In latching on to the Chola king for its Ganga-Kaveri trope, Modi and the BJP have dismantled, perhaps unintentionally, their own assiduously propagated myth of a past in which Hindus lived peacefully with each other in a golden idyll before the Muslims came and spoilt it all.

Between 1022 and 1023, as Aniruddh Kanisetti shows in his work on the Cholas, Lords of Earth and Sea, Rajendra’s massive army killed, raped and plundered its way north for what was to be a “raid on the Ganga” to bring its water so that he could consecrate himself as “king of kings”. Along the way, they destroyed the Chalukya confederation and left the Pala dynasty of Eastern India teetering. Muslim invaders were still far away in the north-west, parts of which are now Pakistan. Along the way, Rajendra’s soldiers sacked temples and stole their idols, while he waited for them to return with the water collected from the Ganga on the southern bank of the Godavari.

Kanisetti writes that it is “difficult to believe that these idols were obtained without extreme violence against the lords that derived power from them, to say nothing of the population displaced and brutalised by roving armed men”.

Back in Chola territory, the idols were placed in much less respectable places than the royal temples from where they had been stolen. As for the Ganga, its waters were brought in urns by soldiers and poured into a huge reservoir, three times the size of Gangaikonda Cholapuram, created by diverting water from the Kaveri.

It was interesting to see the Prime Minister fitting himself into this frame. “He expressed his delight that, in memory of this historic episode, Ganga water has once again been brought from Kashi to Tamil Nadu, noting that a formal ritual was conducted at the site,” the PIB release aid.

India’s neighbours will have their own take on Modi’s remark at “the coincidence of having returned from the Maldives just yesterday and today being part of this programme [commemorating Rajendra Chola] in Tamil Nadu”. Rajaraja claimed to have conquered “the thousand islands of the ancient sea”, which some historian believe is a reference to the Maldives.

In Sri Lanka, the present-day wariness about India is at least partly due to the historical memory of Tamil invasions by the Chola father and son. In 1017, Rajendra sacked Polonnaruwa and carted off Mahinda V over the sea to his kingdom, where the Lankan king was jailed, and died a dozen years later, inaugurating a 50-year era of Chola rule in Lanka. In 1025, Rajendra would storm Kedah in Sumatra, leading to chaos in the Srivijaya empire for the next 100 years.

How many political points the BJP might gain from its Chola discovery is not immediately apparent. But it’s safe to say that Modi’s announcement that statues will be built to Rajajraja and Rajendra has not taken Tamil Nadu by storm. After all, what statue can equal the majesty of the two Brihadeeswara temples — now UNESCO world heritage sites — that Rajaraja and Rajendra built, as much to celebrate themselves as their god.

Moreover, the Cholas are already spoken for. It was the DMK, for all its Dravidianism, that began in 2022 the practice of holding the Aadi Thiruvadarai festival to commemorate Rajendra’s birth anniversary, which Modi attended this year.

Nirupama Subramanian is an independent journalist based in Chennai, India.