Journey

Chola expeditions overseas — Lanka, the Maldives and Srivijaya

Stops (21)

1. Rājarāja I · Rājarāja I — the empire assembled

   He took the Pandya and Chera country, invaded Sri Lanka and moved its capital, claimed the Maldives, and built the temple whose walls carry the accounts of all of it. The Thanjavur inscriptions are the fullest record of any pre-modern Indian state's finances, down to the shares allotted to individual dancers and watchmen.

2. Thanjavur Brihadishvara · Thanjāvūr — the inscription that is the evidence

   Rajaraja's temple of 1010, sixty-six metres high and built without mortar, whose walls carry the endowment accounts of an empire and, added under his son, the list of places taken overseas. Almost everything known about these campaigns is on this building.

3. Kaveripattinam (Puhar) · Kaveripattinam — the older port

   Puhar, the Sangam-age Chola harbour of the Silappadikaram, largely taken by the sea and now a site for underwater survey. The delta's ports move as the river silts, which is why the medieval Cholas sailed from Nagapattinam and the Sangam-age ones from here.

4. Nagapattinam · Nāgapattinam — the port that mattered

   The medieval Chola harbour at the Kaveri mouth, from which the fleets for Sri Lanka and Srivijaya sailed — and the site of the Chudamani vihara, a Buddhist monastery built with Srivijayan money under Chola licence, which is the diplomatic half of the same relationship.

5. The Chola fleet and the merchant guilds · The fleet and the guilds

   Not a state navy in the modern sense: royal ships together with the armed merchant corporations — the Ayyavole Five Hundred, the Manigramam — whose capital, agents and ports made the campaigns possible. The guilds outlasted the dynasty by two centuries and left inscriptions from Sumatra to south China.

6. Takkolam · Takkolam, 949 — the check

   A Rashtrakuta victory that killed the Chola crown prince and halted the dynasty's expansion for a generation — the setback immediately before Rajaraja. Chola imperial power was not continuous: the line was nearly extinguished in the mid-tenth century, and everything that follows belongs to a recovery.

7. Anurādhapura · Anurādhapura — the conquest

   Rajaraja's forces took the Sinhala capital about 993 and sacked it, ending a settlement that had been continuously occupied for over a millennium. The Sri Maha Bodhi survived; the city did not recover, and the island's centre of gravity moved south to Polonnaruwa because an invader put it there.

8. Polonnaruwa · Polonnaruwa — the province

   The Cholas ran the island for some seventy years from here as Mummudi-chola-mandalam, and five Shiva temples of the occupation still stand — the oldest stone buildings in the city, with Tamil inscriptions and bronzes indistinguishable from delta work. Vijayabahu drove them out in 1070 and kept their capital.

9. The Maldives · The Maldives — the twelve thousand islands

   The Tanjore inscription counts the old islands of the sea numbering twelve thousand among the conquests, and the Cholas seem to have had some real authority over the atolls — the source of the cowrie currency Bengal and West Africa ran on, and of the coir that rigged Indian Ocean ships.

10. Rājendra I · Rājendra I — the Ganges and the Bay

    He marched to the Ganges in the 1020s, brought water back for a new capital and took the title Gangaikonda; then in 1025 he sent a fleet across the Bay of Bengal against Srivijaya. It is the only Indian overseas naval campaign of the medieval period, and one inscription is almost all the evidence for it.

11. Gangaikondacholapuram · Gangaikondacholapuram — the capital that commemorates it

    Rajendra's new city, named for the northern march, with a temple deliberately lower than his father's and more curved in profile. The city was abandoned when the dynasty fell and the temple now stands alone in fields, which is the difference between it and Thanjavur.

12. Kedah / Kadaram · Kaḍāram — first on the list

    Kedah on the Malay peninsula, named first and most prominently in the Tanjore account of 1025, and the transhipment point where goods crossed the isthmus rather than running the Malacca strait. Hindu and Buddhist remains in the Bujang valley go back to the fourth century.

13. Palembang / Srivijaya · Śrīvijaya at Palembang — the target

    The Sumatran power that had controlled the straits for three centuries and was a major centre of Buddhist learning — Yijing stopped there for years to learn Sanskrit. It recovered from the raid and went on sending embassies to China, which is why the campaign reads as a violent renegotiation rather than a conquest.

14. Pannai, Sumatra · Pannai — the Sumatran coast

    One of the ports the Srivijayan system controlled and one of the places the inscription names, generally located in northern Sumatra though the identification is not secure. Indian merchant guild inscriptions are found on this coast, which is a commercial presence rather than a political one.

15. Tambralinga / Nakhon Si Thammarat · Tāmbraliṅga — and the traffic the other way

    A Sanskrit-named polity on the peninsula, also on Rajendra's list, whose king Chandrabhanu invaded Sri Lanka twice in the thirteenth century and held part of the north for a time. The Bay of Bengal was not a one-way street from India.

16. Malaiyur (Jambi / Malayu, Sumatra) · Malaiyūr

    Generally connected with Jambi or the Malayu polity of Sumatra, and one of the names whose modern identification is not settled. The repository keeps these as inscriptional place-names rather than asserting locations, because the inscription gives a sequence of names and no coordinates.

17. Mapappalam (Papphāla, Ligor coast) · Mapappāḷam

    Often placed on the Ligor coast of the peninsula, and unidentified with any confidence. Several of the campaign's names are like this: they were legible to whoever cut them into the wall at Thanjavur and are not legible to us.

18. Talaittakkolam (Takuapa) · Talaittakkōlam

    Usually associated with Takuapa on the Malay peninsula's western shore, a transhipment point on the isthmus crossing where Tamil inscriptions and a Vishnu image have in fact been found — which makes this one of the better-supported identifications in the list.

19. Ilangasokam (Langkasuka) · Ilangāśokam

    Langkasuka on the northern Malay coast, a polity that appears in Chinese, Malay and Javanese sources across several centuries as a real place with a real court, which makes the connection plausible without making it certain. Like several names on the list it was legible to whoever cut it into the wall at Thanjavur and is only approximately legible now.

20. Ilamuridesam (Lamuri / Lambri, Aceh) · Ilāmuridēśam

    Lamuri or Lambri, at the northern tip of Sumatra near modern Aceh — the first landfall for a fleet crossing from the Coromandel, and a name that turns up later in Marco Polo and in the Arab pilots' accounts as well.

21. Nakkavaram / Nicobar Islands · Nakkavāram — the Nicobars

    Commonly identified with the Nicobar Islands, directly on the sailing route from the Coromandel to the straits and the first land after crossing the Bay. Marco Polo describes the same islands under a similar name two and a half centuries later, which is one of the few identifications in the list generally accepted.

Sources

• Wikipedia