The Colas c20.8

c20.8

To return to the evidence from the Eastern Cāḷukya copper-plates. Three grants of the sons of Kulōttunga, known as the Ṭēki, Cellūr and Pithāpuram grants, dated respectively in the seventeenth, twenty-first and twenty-third years of his reign, narrate in almost identical terms the course of events in Vēṅgī as it was described by Kulōttunga himself to his son Rājarājamummaḍicōḍa, while sending him to Vēṅgī as viceroy of the northern province of the Cōḷa empire.¹⁶ From these plates we learn that, at the death of Rājarāja after a rule of forty-one years Rājēndra was first crowned as lord of Vēṅgī and attained great celebrity. He was then crowned in the Cōḍa-rājya, not less exalted in status than the position of Dēvēndra. He married Madhurāntakī, the very Lakṣmī risen from the ocean, namely Rājēndra-dēva, the *tilaka* of the Solar race. He had many children by her, and to one of them, Rājarāja, he said: 'Child, the great kingdom of Vēṅgī was, in days gone by, entrusted by me to my paternal uncle, king Vijayāditya, as I was desirous of undertaking a conquering tour (or according to the Cellūr plates, "as I was desirous of securing the Cōḷa kingdom"). He too, who was like a god and resembled a lion in his strength, went to heaven after ruling the kingdom for fifteen years.' And the Ṭēki plates make it clear that Vijayāditya's death occurred some time in A.D. 1077;¹⁷ this would mean that Kulōttunga appointed him as his deputy in A.D. 1062 or thereabout.