The Colas c20.17

c20.17

At the time of his father's death and the forcible seizure of the Vēṅgī throne by Vijayāditya mentioned in the Ryālī plates, Kulōttunga, or Rājēndra as he was then known, must have been a youth in his teens. For considering that he lived on to have a long rule of fifty years from a.d. 1070, it is hardly likely that about a.d. 1062 he was more than twenty years of age. His earliest Tamil inscriptions record certain facts which seem to indicate how Rājēndra engaged himself when he was thus kept out of his inheritance. The records of his second year²⁵ state that, with the aid only of the strength of his arms and his sword, he overcame the treachery of his enemies, captured many herds of elephants, levied tribute from the Nāgavamśī king, Dhārāvarṣa of Cakrakūṭa, and gently raised the Earth resembling the lotus expecting the rise of the sun for blooming, as Viṣṇu raised the Earth from the ocean in his boar incarnation, and seated her, to her great pleasure, under the shade of his parasol.²⁶ His records soon came to describe these achievements as belonging to the period of his *iḷangōp-paruvam*, when he was still heir-apparent.²⁷ If this view is correct, we must conclude that Rājēndra spent the best part of the period a.d. 1063-70 in the region of the modern Bastar state, and possibly even carved out for himself a small dominion beyond it in the Pūrvadēśa, even if he did not gain complete control over the Cakrakūṭa state and annex parts of the Pūrvadēśa to it, as his inscriptions imply. Possibly this northern extension of the influence of Vēngī, so closely allied to the Cōḷas, was the cause of Vikramāditya's expedition against Vēngī and Cakrākūṭa, counteracted by the campaign of Vīrarājēndra culminating in the battle of Bezwāda. It will be remembered that in the course of this campaign, Vīrarājēndra is said also to have marched up to Śakkarakkōṭṭam. After the death of Vīrarājēndra, Kulōttunga marched into the Cōḷa country in good time to get himself accepted as king; but more of this later. And as he did some fighting during these years and subsequently came to look upon the whole period as a sort of probation for the Cōḷa throne, he might have felt justified in saying that he left Vēngī to his uncle Vijayāditya at the death of his father for a double reason.²⁸