Person · Chola emperor · India
Rājarāja I
The ruler who made the Cholas an empire between 985 and 1014: he took the Pandya and Chera country, invaded Sri Lanka and moved its capital to Polonnaruwa, claimed the Maldives, and built the Brihadishvara at Thanjavur — whose walls carry the endowment accounts of the whole operation.
- Date
- 947–1014
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 10.783, 79.132
Worth knowing
The Thanjavur inscriptions are the fullest record of any pre-modern Indian state's finances: they name the dancers, musicians, accountants, watchmen and washermen attached to the temple and the exact share of land or grain each was to receive. An empire's administration is legible because it was cut into a wall.
About the place
Placed at Thanjavur, the capital he ruled from and where the temple he built carries the records of his reign.
Connections (2)
- CampaignThe Maldives
The Tanjore inscription lists the old islands of the sea numbering twelve thousand among Rajaraja's conquests, which is taken to mean the Maldive atolls — and the Cholas seem to have exercised real authority there for a period. The islands' principal export was cowrie shell, which served as small change in Bengal into the nineteenth century and in the West African slave trade, so the Cholas briefly controlled a currency supply rather than a territory.
- PatronageSwāmimalai bronze icon casting
The Chola bronze reached its finished form under Rajaraja and his successors: the processional image cast by lost wax in panchaloha to the proportions of the Shilpa Shastras, with the Nataraja as its characteristic type, made for temples that had the endowment to pay for both the metal and the ceremony. Swamimalai in the delta still casts by the same method, and the bronzes found at Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka are indistinguishable from the ones made here.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Rajaraja I”. The Thanjavur (Brihadishvara) inscriptions in South Indian Inscriptions II; Hermann Kulke, K. Kesavapany and Vijay Sakhuja (eds), Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa (2009).
Open Rājarāja I in the repository →