The Colas c18.3

c18.3

Rājēndra inherited from his father an extensive empire comprising the whole of the modern Madras and Andhra and parts of Mysore and the island of Ceylon. The administration had been carefully organised and a fairly powerful bureaucracy brought into existence which, while it scrupulously respected the 'liberties,' feudal and corporate, of the various magnates and associations that studded the land, successfully maintained the king's peace, and enforced all civil rights. The army was a strong and tried body of men, well able to defend the wide land frontier and to keep down any threatened outbreaks in areas newly subjected to the empire, and ready for aggressive warfare abroad. The hold on Ceylon and some other islands like the Maldives was securely maintained by a powerful naval force which also served to protect the considerable overseas trade of the empire with the islands of the East Indies and with China. During the thirty-three years of his reign, Rājēndra turned these initial advantages to the best possible use and succeeded in raising the Cōḷa empire to the position of the most extensive and most respected Hindu state of his time, and one which possessed though perhaps only for a time a not inconsiderable dominion over the Malay peninsula and the Eastern Archipelago. The history of Rājēndra's reign is very largely the history of the extensive wars and conquests he undertook in the first half of his reign. Like his father, he has left behind in his stone inscriptions and in the Tiruvālangāḍu and Karandai (Tanjore) copper-plates a trustworthy account of the military and naval transactions of his reign which receive confirmation at all points at which we have the means of controlling it by other evidence.