The Colas c23.17.2

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.