The Colas c17.3

c17.3

With the accession of Rājarāja we enter upon a century of grandeur and glory for the dynasty of the Cōḷas. Quite obviously, the personal ability of the first Rājarāja, in some respects the greatest of all the great Cōḷa rulers of the Vijayālaya line, laid the foundation for the splendid achievements of his son and successor Rājēndra I, under whom the empire attained its greatest extent and carried its arms beyond the seas. The thirty years of Rājarāja's rule constitute the formative period in the history of the Cōḷa monarchy. In the organisation of the civil service and the army, in art and architecture, in religion and literature, we see at work powerful forces newly liberated by the progressive imperialism of the time. A relatively small state at his accession, that had hardly recovered from the disasters of the Rāṣṭrakūṭa invasion, the Cōḷa kingdom had, by the end of Rājarāja's rule, grown to be an extensive and well-knit empire efficiently organised and administered, rich in resources, possessed of a powerful standing army, well-tried and equal to the greatest enterprises. More wonderful than the work of this great monarch must have been his personality. But of him we have no authentic description; no eyewitness has rendered to Rājarāja the service which Nuniz and Paes did to Kṛṣṇa Dēva Rāya. There is not even a well-attested statue, or painting of this king³ that has come down to us. All that we know of his reign, however, and that is not little, attests his potent personality and the firm grasp of his intellect which allowed nothing to escape its vigilance and applied itself with as much vigour to the minutest details as to the sublimest ambitions of statecraft. The affection he lavished on his sister Kuṇḍavai, after whom he named one of his daughters,⁴ and the privileged position accorded to his grand-aunt, Sembiyan-mahādēvi, the mother of Uttama Cōḷa, indicate that he was a great and good man as well as a far-sighted ruler.