The Colas c23.17
The Cōḷas c23.17
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c23.17.1
From the reign of Kulōttunga I, the growth in the number of feudatories and the extent of their influence on the administration and policy of the central government is one of the most striking features of Cōḷa history. The multiplication of these over-mighty subjects of the king naturally weakened the control exercised by his government over the general welfare of the country and removed considerable areas from its direct purview and constituted them into more or less independent jurisdictions. So long as village-communities and other popular organisations, rural and urban, were the only machinery of local administration by the side of the central government, the latter had a firm hold not only on the general administration as a whole but on the manner in which the various corporations carried on their affairs. It was not to be expected that powerful chieftains, who, though in the beginning they might have risen with the support and favour of the king, subsequently found themselves at the head of armed forces, would stand the same amount of interference as the humbler popular organisations, the assemblies and the guilds. Such chieftains often found themselves in possession of considerable areas of territory allotted to them by the king partly in recognition of their past services and partly with a view to enabling them to add a contingent of soldiers to the forces of the king in times of need. The growth in the number of such chieftains had two consequences.
c23.17.2
The first was to weaken the prestige of the king’s government by increasingly restricting the sphere of its effective operation, and thereby to loosen its hold even on the rest of the administration. The inscriptions of the later Cōḷa rulers do not give rise to the same impression, as do those of the earlier monarchs, of a powerful central government ever active in restraining, correcting, advising and guiding the more or less autonomous local organisations in the various parts of the empire. The popular organisations seem to be for the most part left to themselves, and when they have anything to do with outside authorities, it is generally with the local chieftains who have come up in their neighbourhood that they have to deal. It is more often to them rather than to the king that they begin to look for large gifts or the permanent assignment of local taxes and dues for charitable purposes. Another consequence of the new situation was that the local chieftains began to enter into political compacts calculated to regulate their conduct towards the emperor. These compacts seem to have had an important rôle in effecting the transition by which the class of official nobility, which had at first grown with the growth of the Cōḷa empire, converted itself into a number of petty local chieftaincies of a hereditary character.
c23.17.3
It is remarkable that the binding power of these compacts is often sought to be secured by the most fearful imprecations some of which are too shocking to be reproduced here. The earliest of these compacts are those found in the Ramnad district towards the close of the reign of Kulōttunga I and in the beginning of Vikramaśōḷa's reign. In the forty-second year of the reign of Kulōttunga I, as we learn from an inscription from Śivapuri (Ramnad Dt.),³³ Kaṇḍan-Mangalattēvan *alias* Tuvarāpati-vēḷān swore a vow of alliance and fealty to Sundarattōḷan Kaṇḍan *alias* Rājēndraśōḷa Tuvarāpati-vēḷān saying: 'I, Kaṇḍan Mangalattēvan *alias* Tuvarāpati-vēḷān do hereby swear that I shall remain true to (your) life, wealth and honour, and that, if I fail, I shall incur the sin of him who becomes the husband of his mother and of consuming liquor (*surā*) and beef (*gō-māmsam*).' About ten years later, in the same place is registered another compact³⁴ between Rājēndraśōḷan *alias* Niṣadarājan and Kaṇḍan Sundarattōḷan *alias* Tuvarāpati-vēḷān by which the former swore fealty to the latter in similar terms. Another instance comes from North Arcot and belongs to the reign of Rājādhirāja II; an inscription from Māḍam dated in the eleventh regnal year of the king³⁵ registers a similar compact among three chieftains of the Śengēṇi family.
c23.17.4
It will become clear presently that under Kulōttunga III this tendency became much more general, and there can be no doubt that we have here unmistakable evidence of the approach of the end. The empire is dissolving into a number of warring principalities before the eyes of the king, now no longer powerful to enforce his will on his vassals who, though they still own allegiance to him, generally act very much by themselves and as best suits their divergent interests.