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The Colas c25: Chapter XVII. The Government of the Cōḷa Empire

The Cōḷas c25

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Chapter XVII. The Government of the Cōḷa Empire

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In this and the succeeding chapters, an attempt is made to describe the state of government and society in the Cōḷa country from the accession of Vijayālaya to the downfall of the Cōḷa empire. Such a description must necessarily be very imperfect, as it has to be pieced together from scanty material, scattered over a wide area and as yet not fully understood. Numerous as are the inscriptions, the task of interpreting them can hardly be said to have begun, and but for the access I had, by the courtesy of the Archaeological Survey of India, to the unpublished inscriptions in the epigraphist’s office at Madras, this survey must have remained even more meagre than it is. The deplorable lack of a settled chronology for the indigenous literature imposes a serious handicap on the student who seeks to use it in historical reconstruction. Welcome as it is, the light shed on South Indian affairs by foreign travellers and chroniclers of this age is faint and flickering. Numismatics again offers us more problems than solutions; and taking the area and duration of Cōḷa rule into account, we may well say that the number and variety of Cōḷa coins known to-day are almost inconsiderable. Fortunately, we seem to be in a better situation with regard to the monuments of the period, and there is no lack of authentic and valuable material for an appreciation of its architecture and sculpture. For the study of government and social life, however, as for that of political history, our primary source must remain epigraphy, aided by a cautious use of literary material.

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The historian of India must perhaps remain a stranger to the bracing effects of a consciousness that his is a study of continuous and progressive tendencies steadily working for the amelioration of his fellow-men. He cannot claim that in any sphere of human activity, whether it be in the production and conservation of wealth, in the creation and development of political organisation, or in devotion to the fine arts, or even in the pursuit of religious life and the practice of moral virtues, often held up as the differentia of Indian culture, there has been a steady advance through centuries towards a higher level of achievement. No country in the world, not even the most fortunate, has altogether escaped disorders and revolutions that have often rudely undone, for a time, the noble results of generations of civilised life and work. But the student of India's past finds it hard to resist the impression that at some stage in her history there set in a rot which, spreading soon over all spheres of life, sapped its vitality and made for the continuous loss of her efficiency. Foreign domination, the ascendency of caste, the pessimistic outlook on life started by Buddhism and perfected by the Vedānta, and other causes of an equally sweeping character have been brought forward as the possible source of decay. Even the earlier phase of the history of India, in which she was most herself, little dominated by the foreigner though by no means unwilling to absorb the good that he brought into her ken, and giving freely of the best in her to the rest of Asia without the least attempt at an enforced cultural, much less physical, domination of the lands enriched by her gifts,—even this phase has often been viewed in the shadow of ideas generated by the decadent phase of her subsequent history. Caste was there, and with it also Buddhism and the philosophy of the Vedānta; none of them, nor all of them taken together, did anything, at one time, to sap the foundations of national life and achievement; and much evidence lies to hand to show that, on the contrary, these and other features of Indian life were the results of earnest and, by all human standards, not unsuccessful efforts to solve pressing problems of social and intellectual life in a manner which, however inconsistent with our modern views on these subjects, appears then to have worked tolerably well towards the promotion of mutual understanding and good-will and contentment in a large section of the human race. The history of the Cōḷa empire belongs, on the whole, to this earlier and happier phase of India's history, and we shall see that, in spite of much that appears primitive and even offensive to us, much greater things were accomplished by corporate and voluntary effort, a greater sense of social harmony prevailed, and a consciousness of active citizenship was more widespread when the Cōḷa kings held their sway in Southern India than in more recent times.

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The period covered by the following survey extends over more than four centuries, *circa* A.D. 850-1270. Though, strictly speaking, it should embrace the whole of Southern India including the Telugu country which was, for the bulk of the period, an appendage of the Cōḷa empire, still the paucity of Cōḷa records outside the Tamil country proper, and the existence of the records of many local dynasties in these areas which have not yet been as fully studied as they deserve, render it necessary to confine this survey primarily to the Tamil land. The history of the Eastern Cāḷukyas for instance is a great chapter in the annals of the Telugus and their literature; it is hardly possible to do justice to it in what is essentially a study in Tamil history. And what applies to the Telugu area applies also, though not perhaps in the same measure, to the Kēraḷa and Karnāṭa countries. Though these districts may find mention off and on, especially in the study of the administrative system of the Cōḷa empire which embraced them all alike, the following account of social life makes no claim to any approach to fullness with regard to these areas.

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The form of government was now, as in the Śangam age, monarchy. But there was little in common between the primitive and somewhat tribal chieftaincy of the earlier time, and the almost Byzantine royalty of Rājarāja and his successors with its numerous palaces, officials and ceremonials and its majestic display of the concentrated resources of an extensive empire.

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It is inconceivable that little groups of roving bards with their tambourines and their danseuses could have strolled in a casual manner into the stately mansions of these mighty potentates and gaily accosted them to an hour or two of feast and song, as they did in an earlier age when the 'Crowned King' of the Cōḷa land shared with two other crowned heads some sort of primacy in a land studded with petty principalities held by a somewhat turbulent, but not uncultured, aristocracy. After its recovery from the effects of the Rāṣṭrakūṭa inroad, the Cōḷa monarchy embraced the whole of Southern India and extended east to west from sea to sea, while its sway was bounded on the north by an irregular line from somewhere near Mangalore along the Tungabhadrā and the Vēṅgī frontier; for Vēṅgī was so closely connected with the Cōḷa kingdom in the period 1000 to 1150 or so, that, though its separate political existence continued throughout in all its vigour, for all practical purposes of inter-state diplomacy, it counted more or less as part of the Cōḷa empire. The principal conquests of the Cōḷas took place in the interval between the accession of Sundara Cōḷa and that of Rājēndra I, and mainly in the reign of the great Rājarāja. And as in his reign the Cōḷa kingdom ceases to be a small state and grows to imperial dimensions, the monarchy undergoes a corresponding transformation, and the king may be said now to become 'Emperor', 'Chakravartigaḷ'¹ as he is occasionally called by his subjects, though in his official records he is still described only as 'Uḍaiyār', and not till much later is the title 'Emperor of the Three Worlds' adopted or the queen mentioned along with the king in public documents as possessing the whole world.² Under Rājarāja also begins the system of prefacing the stone records of the reign with an account in set form of the chief occurrences of the reign.³ This innovation may be said to have marked the consciousness of the change in the position of the monarch. Another symbol of the same consciousness might be found in the magnificent lithic temple of Rājarājēśvara in Tañjāvūr which rose in the proportion and technique of its architecture as much above any other temple then known, as the Cōḷa empire itself did above the earlier kingdoms of the south.

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Tañjāvūr, the Tanjore of the modern maps, was the Tañjāpurī chosen by Vijayālaya for the seat of his new power and the abode of the goddess, Niṣumbhasūdanī, that had vouchsafed him success in his enterprises. Though after the conquest of the Pallava country, Kāñcī became a sort of subsidiary capital in which the kings spent part of their time, Tañjāvūr maintained her position as the chief city of the kingdom till it was eclipsed by the new city of Gaṅgāpurī, which with the vast tank in its neighbourhood, the Cōḷa-gangam, served for many centuries to commemorate the ambition and the vanity of Rājarāja’s warlike son, Rājēndra. We have apparently no contemporary account of either of these cities. From the hymns of Karuvūrttēvar celebrating the Rājarājēśvara and the Gaṅgaikoṇḍacōḷēśvara temples in the two places, we learn only that Tanjore had a fort-wall and a deep moat surrounding it, and nothing whatsoever concerning the other city. The big bazaar of Gaṅgaikoṇḍacōḷapuram, and the palace Śōḻakēraḷan in it are, however, mentioned in the inscriptions of the period,⁴ besides the servants of the bathing establishment of the king (*tirumañjanattārvēḷam*) attached to the palace.⁵ Paḷaiyāṟu, near Kumbakōṇam, which contained a temple called Arumoḷidēva-Īśvara after Rājarāja’s name,⁶ seems to have contained a palace which was the favourite residence of Rājarāja’s sister Kundavai, and for some time of Rājarāja himself. A small hamlet near Paḷaiyāṟu even now preserves the name Śōḻa-māḷigai within about four miles of the Kumbakōṇam railway station, and a small ruined temple there is said still to mark the site of the ancient palace of which it served as the guardian angel.⁷ It has been pointed out before that Rājēndra I built a palace of huge dimensions at Madura, and other places like Uttaramērūr also have traditions of Cōḷa palaces having existed in them.

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About Tañjāvūr, the original capital of Vijayālaya and his successors, we learn more from the inscriptions of the period than about any other city. The Big Temple, the most remarkable monument of Rājarāja’s reign, was nearing completion about A.D. 1010; it is not possible to decide how long before that date its construction was begun. Though the king’s order for engraving on the walls of the temple his gifts to it and those from others was issued early in his twenty-sixth year, A.D. 1011, it seems hardly likely that the work of actual engraving started till nearly three years later.⁸ Besides a number of royal palaces inside the city and in its vicinity, and the residence of palace-servants divided into a number of *vēḷams*,⁹ we find the names of a large number of streets and quarters of the city mentioned in the records. The big street of Vīraśōḷa, the big bazaar of Tribhuvana-mahādēviyār, are mentioned in inscriptions of an earlier date than the reign of Rājarāja.¹⁰ In that reign a distinction comes up between the inner (*uḷḷālai*) and the outer (*puṟambaḍi*) city, and it seems possible that the *Puṟambaḍi* was of the nature of an extension, a new city, planned and for the most part built in the reign of Rājarāja himself, though the big bazaar named above had been in existence for some time already.¹¹ It is perhaps noteworthy that among the new streets constituted in Rājarāja's reign were two running east to west, perhaps in front of the big temple, and known as the Northern and Southern Taḷiccēris, both of them given over entirely to the occupation of four hundred hetaerae who were impressed into the service of the big temple from the various other temples of the kingdom, and whose names are preserved to us with the door numbers of the houses occupied by them.¹² We also learn incidentally of other temples in the city called the Jayabhīma temple and the temple of Tañjai-māmaṇi. And there was a hospital attached to a Viṣṇu temple called after Rājarāja's father Sun-dara-cōḻaviṇṇagarātula-śālai and endowed by his sister Kun-davai.¹³ Altogether the impression we get is that of a rich, well-provided and progressive city whose life was doubtless dominated by the temple and the court.

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The royal household comprised numerous servants of various descriptions including body-guards of sorts. Several groups of Parivāras are mentioned and distinguished from one another by their individual names formed from the surnames of the kings;¹⁴ that these groups served also as body-guards is clear from their being described occasionally as *Tirumeykāppār*. The bath-room and kitchen establishments would seem to have been composed more or less exclusively of women. The palace servants were organised into *vēḷams* and settled in separate quarters in the cities of Tanjore and Gaṅgaikoṇḍacōḻapuram;¹⁵ these *vēḷams* were often recruited from the men and women captured in war. We have to look upon this crowd of personal servants as in the enjoyment of a fair competence in return for generally very light work; the status of the members of the *vēḷams* was perhaps that of a not unpleasant servitude to which the less sensitive among them might have reconciled themselves in a short time.

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'At state banquets', we read in Chau Ju-kua on the Cōḷa Dominion,¹⁶ 'both the Prince and four Court Ministers salaam at the foot of the throne, then the whole (company present) break into music, song and dancing. He

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<!-- End of transcription --> (the Prince) does not drink wine, but he eats meat, and, as is the native custom, dresses in cotton clothing, and eats flour-cakes. For his table and escort he employs "fully a myriad dancing-girls, three thousand of whom are in attendance daily in rotation."'

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Apparently each important member of the royal family had his own entourage of such personal attendants; this is seen from such expressions in the inscriptions as: 'In the particular service (*tanic-cēvagam*) of Uḍaiyār Kōdaṇḍarāma,' 'the Śatrubhayankarat-terinda-*vēḷam* of Pañcavan Mahādēviyār'¹⁷ and so on. The king, his queens and their numerous relatives set the example, so generally followed by the official nobility, the merchants and other well-to-do classes of society, of erecting temples and endowing them on a liberal scale, and spending considerable sums of money on the reclamation of land, promotion of irrigation works, maintenance of schools and hospitals and other useful works. In order to be able properly to comprehend the loving regard and affection which generally actuated the feelings of the people towards their rulers of various grades, we must take account, among other things, of the generous measure in which much that was collected from the people by way of numerous taxes, aids and dues was returned to them in the form of charitable endowments. Such endowments formed indeed an essential feature of national economy, and it is important to grasp the significance, political and social, of the lead given by the court in this respect.

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One circumstance worthy of some attention is the paucity of references to Vedic sacrifices performed by the monarchs of the period. The *aśvamēdha* occurs only once and that in the inscriptions of Rājādhirāja. The poems of the Śangam age doubtless imply that such costly Vedic rituals were more common in that age. More emphasis seems to be laid in this period on *dāna*, gift, in preference to *yāga*, sacrifice. Occasions for such gifts are multiplied not only by the elaborate organisation of temples and worship in them, and the studied effort to group all social amenities round the temple as a nucleus, but by the newer means of obtaining religious merit enjoined on the rich in general, and on royalty in particular, such as the *tulā-* *bhāra*, the *hiraṇyagarbha* and so forth. It is one of the most remarkable achievements of mediaeval Hinduism to have harnessed the religious emotions of man in the effective service of society. The temple and the *maṭha* flourishing on *dāna* (gifts) together with the *agrahāra*, the *caturvēdimangalam* of the Cōḷa inscriptions, are the most typical expressions of this phase of South Indian religion. The Jain *paḷḷis* and the Bauddha *vihāras* also derived benefit from this general movement.

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That the Cōḷa monarchs were staunch Śaivas in their religious persuasion is a well established fact. Śaivism, like many other sectarian manifestations of latter-day Hinduism, required its followers to obtain initiation from a *guru*; the Cōḷa kings no doubt followed this rule and there must have been in existence a succesion of *rāja-gurus* during the whole period of Cōḷa rule. The names of Īśāna Śiva and Śarva Śiva stand out from the inscriptions of the reigns of Rājarāja I and Rājēndra, and bear testimony to the North Indian connections of the Śaivism of the Cōḷa Court. A *guru-dēvar* revered by the king as his spiritual preceptor is mentioned in an inscription of Rājādhirāja I.¹⁸ Another *rāja-guru* is mentioned by a Mysore inscription of the reign of Kulōttunga I which records that the king followed the advice of the *guru* in granting a Brahmadēya to 108 *caturvēdibhaṭṭas*.¹⁹ And the position held by Uḍaiyār Svāmidēvar in the reign of Kulōttunga III shows that the *guru* generally acted as the king's adviser in the administration of religious institutions; Svāmidēvar, for instance, disapproved of certain dispositions made by the king regarding the conduct of worship in the temples at Tirukkaḍaiyūr on the death of one of the priests; when the king came to know of it, he revised his orders and appointed the men recommended by Svāmidēvar as having a just claim to the place.

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Several temples, of the period, and often also the chief icons in them, were called after the ruling kings who established them. The worship accorded to idols called sometimes after living monarchs seems to have been connected with the apotheosis of royal personages after their demise. This practice in the form of the cult of Dēvarāja, 'God-king', was even more widespread in the Indian Archipelago and the contemporary kingdoms of the Indo-Chinese peninsula than in Southern India.²⁰ More closely allied to Śaivism than to any other form of Hinduism, the prevalence in the Cōḷa country of the notions that gave rise to the cult of Dēva-rāja is attested by inscriptions which mention the construction of sepulchral temples over the remains of kings and princes. The Ādityēśvara at Toṇḍamānāḍ erected as a *paḷḷipaḍai* to his father by Parāntaka I,²¹ the Ariñjigai-Īśvara at Mēlpāḍi built by Rājarāja I likewsie to commemorate Ariñjaya who died at Āṟṟūr,²² and the Pañcavanmādēvīśvara in Rāmānāthan Kōyil apparently erected by Rājēndra I²³ are among the most conspicuous examples of this practice. The existence of human bones underneath the sanctum sanctorum in several temples has been revealed in recent times when their renovation was started;²⁴ and the growing disapproval of this practice in later times is shown by the attempt to erase the word '*paḷḷipaḍai*' in the inscription at Rāmanāthankōyil just referred to.²⁵

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An image of Sundara Cōḷa Parāntaka II is said to have been set up in the temple at Tanjore and arrangements made for its worship by his daughter Kundavai who also endowed another image either of herself or her mother in the same place.²⁶ There were also images of Rājarāja and his queen Lōkamahādēvī.²⁷ The temple in the village of Śembiyanmahādēvi, so called after the pious queen of Gaṇḍarāditya, contained an image of the queen, likewise regularly worshipped.²⁸ Inscribed images of a more or less authentic character supposed to represent Rājēndra and Cōḷamahādēvi are found to-day in the temples of Tanjore and Kāḷahasti.²⁹ These examples are enough to establish the divine honours accorded to royal personages after death, and sometimes in their lifetime.

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The king was the head of the army and the navy. Numerous regiments of the army are mentioned by their specific names in the inscriptions. One remarkable feature of the army brought out by these records is that each of these regiments had a corporate life of its own and was free to endow benefactions or build temples in its own name.

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Sometimes individuals still in service adopted the same course. And we come to know the names of these regiments and individuals from the records of such transactions. In fact we learn more of the part taken by the forces of the king in the civil life of the country than of the details of their military life and organisation. The names of over thirty regiments mentioned in Rājarāja's inscriptions have been collected by Venkayya and the list can easily be extended to about seventy by adding to it names that can be drawn from the records of other reigns before and after Rājarāja. Each of these names clearly commemorated the time when the regiment was constituted, and it possibly recalled, to the minds of contemporaries, the exact occasion for it; many surnames otherwise unknown of the kings of the period are preserved in this manner—Pārthivaśēkhara, Samarakēsari, Vikramaśinga, Tāyatonga, Dānatonga, Caṇḍaparākrama, Rājakuñjara and so on. These names of regiments constitute evidence of the gradual growth of the army in the early days of Cōḷa expansion and to some extent also of the nature of the different sections of it. We hear for instance of the elephant corps (*ānaiyāṭkaḷ*, *kuñjiramallar* etc.), the cavalry (*kudiraiccēvagar*), and several divisions among the infantry. The *Kaikkōḷapperumbaḍai*,³⁰ 'the great troops of kaikkōḷas', included all the regiments known as Kaikkōḷar. This name has sometimes been interpreted in its modern meaning of 'weavers';³¹ but the term has a more literal meaning in the contexts in which it occurs in the Cōḷa inscriptions; it indicates '(a class of) men distinguished by the strength of their arms', or 'the strong men of the wings (of the army),' that is, soldiers of the infantry division in the army. Then there were regiments of bowmen (*villigaḷ*) and swordsmen (*vāḷperṟa kaikkōḷar*). The *vēḷaikkārar* of the *valangai* (Right-hand),—we hear of Iḍangai (Left-hand) also in the Polonnaruva inscription of Vijayabāhu,—were another large section comprising several regiments. The conjecture has been made that these were volunteers enlisted on particular occasions (*vēḷai*).³² This seems to be, however, wide of the mark. In fact, the *vēḷaikkārar* were the most permanent and dependable troops in the royal service, and their designation implies that they were ever ready to defend the king and his cause with their lives when occasion (*vēḷai*) arose. This view is supported by some literary references of a somewhat later date.³³ Perhaps closely analogous to the *vēḷaikkārar* in organisation and purpose were the *tennavan-āpattudavigaḷ* found in the service of the later Pāṇḍya kings of whom Marco Polo says that they kept always near the king and had great authority in the kingdom.³⁴ The distinction between Śiṟudanam and Perundanam seems to have cut across the other divisions so far mentioned. Sometimes, regiments were distinguished by territorial names like Pāṇḍip-paḍai.³⁵

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A unique inscription from Tiruvālīśvaram near Ambāsamudram in the Tinnevelly district furnishes the military history of a regiment which calls itself Mūṉṟukai-Mahāsēnai (the Great Army of the Three Arms or sections).³⁶ Undated though it is, there can be no doubt that the record belongs to the period of Rājarāja I and Rājēndra I. In this inscription the Mahāsēnai is said to have constantly worshipped Viṣṇu and Śiva, to have defeated the Kannara and pursued him, to have killed the Gāṅgēya, to have captured Kalmāḍam and destroyed Viḷiñam on the sea, to have crossed the sea on the other (eastern) side and razed Mātōṭṭam to the ground, to have taken the Hill country (Malai-nāḍu) and routed the fleet (*kalamaruttu*) at Śālai, to have put to flight the Vallān (Cāḷukya) and captured Vanavāsi and to have been praised in song for these achievements by the Tamil poets of Kāḷahasti, to have also destroyed the fortress on the hill of Kucci and captured Uccandi (Uccangidroog), to have inflicted a defeat on the Vaḍugas (Northerners) who opposed them, and dismantled the fortifications of Vātāpi and done other things which, on account of a gap in the record, are not easy to follow. The army is also called—the residents of Pāṇḍi-nāḍu, the dauntless soldiers of the Great Army of the Three Arms. They took under their eternal protection the Temple of Tiruvālīśvaram and all its belongings, including its priests and servants. It is evident that the campaigns in which this regiment claims to have fought with such glory were those of the reigns of Rājarāja and his successor. The same regiment again proclaims its ideals of heroism in an inscription from Śērmādēvi in a.d. 1096³⁷ and solemnly takes under its protection another temple and its properties; here the regiment is called: 'the several armed thousands of the great army of the three divisions (*kai*).'

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The army seems to have been spread over the country in the form of local garrisons and in cantonments called *kaḍagams*. Expressions like the *villigaḷ* (bowmen) of Eṉanallūr-kaḍagam,³⁸ the troops quartered in Tiruviḍaimarudil,³⁹ Ivvūrp-paḍait-talaivan (the Captain of the troops in this town)⁴⁰ are clear indications of the practice mentioned. After his southern campaigns, Kulōttunga I stationed an army in Kōṭṭāṟu, and established military colonies along the road from the Cōḷa country to that place.⁴¹ A section of the army was posted in Maḍavilāgam in South Arcot in the forty-sixth year of the same king.⁴²

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We can form no idea of the methods of recruitment or of the numbers of the troops permanently employed in the army. It is remarkable that many of the leaders (*sēnāpatis*) in the army were of Brahmin extraction and when sufficiently distinguished bore the title Brahmādhirāja. The children born and bred in the *vēḷams*⁴³ seem to have formed a normal recruiting ground for the army, though they could not have furnished more than a small proportion in it. There is little evidence that the soldiers formed anything like a highly trained professional army having little or nothing in common with the civil population. On the other hand, the evidence is clear that they were not a mere rabble beaten up for particular occasions with no training in the military arts and no taste for the field. An army which included regiments like the Mūṉṟukai Mahāsēnai with cherished traditions of their own could hardly have been recruited or maintained in that manner. The mention of *kaḍagams* (cantonments) also goes to show that periodical training in military practice and the enforcement of discipline were not altogether unknown to the military department of the Cōḷa government. But there is much to show that the army was deeply interested in the civil transactions of life, and that its sections acted in many ways like the innumerable local corporations of a professional or territorial character of which we shall have to speak in detail later. The numerous charitable endowments made by them as groups and by their individual members, and the protection of the Tiruvālīśvaram temple undertaken by the Mūṉṟukai-Mahāsēnai have already been mentioned. We find three regiments of the Kaikkōḷappaḍai of Rājarāja I⁴⁴ co-operating with a revenue official (*nāḍu vagai*) at Sōmūr in imposing and realising a fine levied on the authorities of the local temple for their default in not organising a procession of the image of the goddess on the occasion of a solar eclipse. Later Cōḻa inscriptions from Kuḍumiyāmalai in the Pudukkottah state mention two divisions of the army interesting themselves in civic affairs. In the thirty-sixth year of Kulōttunga I (a.d. 1106) the *mūṉṟu-paḍaip-porkōyil kaikkōlar* and the *nāṭṭuppaḍai paḻiyili aiññūṟṟuvar* undertake to co-operate with the assembly of the *nāḍu* in maintaining a charitable endowment made in favour of the local temple.⁴⁵ Again, in the year 1213, the Kaikkōḷar mentioned above are described as stationed in Kōnāḍu and undertake to provide for the celebration of a number of festivals every year in the same temple.⁴⁶ It must be noted, incidentally, that the two divisions of the army here mentioned appear to have constituted two out of the four kinds of troops prescribed in the books on Indian polity—hereditary (*maula*), mercenary (*bhṛtaka*), militia (*śrēṇi*), and tribal (*aṭavi*). The *kaikkōḷar* were perhaps royal troops receiving regular pay from the treasury; the *nāṭṭuppaḍai* was the popular militia, called *śrēṇī* or *jānapada* by Kauṭilya, and employed perhaps only for local defence.⁴⁷ Who the faultless 500 (*paḻiyili aiññūṟṟuvar*) were and what relation they bore to the rest of the *nāṭṭuppaḍai*, it is not possible to say.

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Almost to the end of the period of Cōḻa power the composition of the army and its role in the civil life of the community apparently continued to remain the same as at the beginning. In the reign of Rājarāja III, a member of the regiment called Naraśinga Vikkirama Vīrar built a temple at Pulivāy (Chingleput) and made some gifts to it.⁴⁸

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A Chinese author, writing in 1178, gives the following account of the Cōḻa country and its army:⁴⁹ 'This country is at war with the kingdoms of the West (of India?). The government owns sixty thousand war-elephants, every one seven or eight feet (cubits?) high. When fighting, these elephants carry on their backs houses, and these houses are full of soldiers who shoot arrows at long range, and fight with spears at close quarters. When victorious, the elephants are granted honorary names to signalize their merit, and there are some who bestow upon them embroidered housings and golden mangers. Every day the elephants are taken into the presence of the king.’

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The idyllic view of war which makes it a joust among professionals interfering little with the normal life of the neighbourhood gains no support from our sources. From them war is seen to be a grim business of fire and sword; and, to judge from the inscriptions of the Cōḷas themselves, no less than of their enemies, the Cāḷukyas, life was made an intolerable burden for many generations to the people on either side of the Tungabhadrā by the bitterness of warfare. Even the common rules of fair fighting and chivalry seem often to have been ignored and much wanton injury inflicted on non-combatant populations, and women subjected to cruel disgrace and mutilation. The evidence from Ceylon and the Karnatak is too glaring to be set aside or glossed over. The destruction of temples of which Rājēndra I is accused in a Cāḷukya inscription was no doubt due in part to religious differences and in part to cupidity; Rājēndra was a Śaiva and the temples were richly endowed Jaina *bastis* in the enemy country and were fair game. The amount of booty that fell into the hands of the Cōḷas as a result of foreign war must have been enormous, and the Cōḷa inscriptions make no secret of the benefactions of the monarchs being often only the bestowal of plundered wealth on public institutions.⁵⁰ The booty captured in war belonged to the king who disposed of it at his will. In his sixth year, Rājarāja I ordered that nine hundred sheep captured from Śippuli and Pāki *nāḍus* were to be employed in endowing ten lamps in his own name in the temple of Durgā at Kāñcīpuram.⁵¹ Again, we find an officer petitioning the king for the gift of one of the icons brought after the conquest of Malanāḍ, and obtaining, as a result, an image of Marakatadēvar which he installed at Tiruppalanam soon after.⁵²

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The ‘numberless ships’ which carried Rājēndra’s troops across the ‘rolling sea’ to the conquest of Śrī-Vijaya and its dependencies could not have come up suddenly and must be accepted as proof of a steady naval policy pursued by the Cōḷa monarchs of the period. The early Cōḷas of the Śangam period had a good share in the maritime trade and activity of the Indian seas. The history of the Hindu colonies in the Malay Archipelago and Indo-China gives clear evidence of a steady increase, under the Pallavas, in the trade and culture contacts between these lands and the countries of South India. The Tamil inscription⁵³ of Takuapa shows that an important mercantile corporation of South India, the *maṇigrāmam*, had established itself on the opposite coast of the Bay of Bengal in the ninth century a.d.. The Cōḻas only continued an ancient tradition in the attention they gave to developing their power on the sea. The conquest of Ceylon and the Maldives, and the evidence of the Chinese annals on the embassies that reached China in this period from the Cōḻa country give us some measure of the success they attained in this direction. And the overthrow of the Cēra fleet at Kāndaḷūr Śālai may well be taken to mark the definite establishment of Cōḻa naval power in this period in the territorial waters of Southern India. We have little direct evidence on the build of the ships employed.

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Considering that the author of the *Periplus* distinguished three types of vessels several centuries earlier on the Coromandel coast and that the naval expedition of Rājēndra was a great achievement in itself, the existence of a well-ordered fleet comprising ships and boats of different grades must be admitted. The Arab merchant Sulaiman made several voyages between China and the Persian Gulf in the ninth century a.d., at a time when this long distance trade was being carried on very briskly. In his curious account of the Maldives, he says that the people of these islands 'built ships and houses and executed all other works with a consumate art.'⁵⁴ Sulaiman had no occasion to visit the Coromandel coast; and his voyages were made before the rise of the Cōḻas of the Vijayālaya line into prominence. Taking into account Sulaiman's testimony to the quality of the ships built in the Maldives, and the conquest of these islands effected by Rājarāja's fleet, we may form some idea of the efficiency of the Cōḻa navy in this period. Abu Zaid Hasan, in the notes which he added to Sulaiman's work about the beginning of the tenth century a.d., observes that the vessels of the Indian ocean, specially those made at Siraf, differed in construction from those of the Mediterranean. 'It is a fact that the type of ship built by pieces of wood sewn together is a speciality of the builders of Siraf;

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the ship-builders of Syria and of Rum (Byzantium) nail, on the contrary, these pieces of wood and never sew them one to the other.'⁵⁵ To-day we can see boats on the Madras coast with planks 'sewn' together by threads of cocoanut fibre. But these are usually of a small size; and the observations of Abu Zaid based on what he saw and heard at Siraf about a.d. 916 on navigation in the Indian ocean⁵⁶ should be no obstacle to a just estimate of the size and importance of the navy of the Cōḷa empire more than a century later. If the Arab writers are too early, Marco Polo comes unfortunately too late, and we are without a good contemporary account of ship-building on the Coromandel coast under the Cōḷas. Ahmad-ibn Majid, an Arab writer of the fifteenth century and author of several nautical works, makes frequent allusion to the opinions of the Cōḷas which he approves or modifies. He must have had before him a specialised nautical literature of Tamil (Cōḷa) origin which he compared with Arab documents of a like nature. This literature must have included geographical tables with indications of the latitude of ports for the use of the mariners of the Coromandel coast.⁵⁷ Of this technical literature mentioned by this and other Arab writers, unfortunately no part seems to have survived.

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The king's share in the public administration consisted in the issue of oral orders (*tiruvāyk-kēḷvi*) on representations made to him by responsible officials on particular matters requiring the personal attention of the sovereign; secretaries were always in attendance on such occasions and it was their duty to make a note of the terms of the petition made to the king and his orders thereon, and to transmit copies of such records to the authorities of the central or local administration concerned for necessary action. The time and place of the original petition, the name of the officer who presented it, and even the particular hall or throne where the monarch received the petition were often noted in reciting the order for being recorded in public places, usually the walls of temples. Rāja-rāja, for instance, is said in the larger Leyden grant to have ordered the gift of Ānaimaṅgalam to the *paḷḷi* (temple) of the Śūḷāmaṇi-panma-vihāra while he was sitting in the hall to the south of his palace called Rājāśraya in the outer city (*purambaḍi*) of Tañjāvūr; and the order was written out by a clerk,—*nām śolla nam ōlai eḻudum . . . . Amudan-tīrttakaran eḻuttināl*.⁵⁸ Other instances may be easily gathered and sometimes the same form is adopted in the records of the Cōḷa-Pāṇḍya viceroys, who were invariably members of the royal family.⁵⁹ Most of these examples relate, however, to gifts in one form or another; though it does not seem likely that the method of dealing with other matters differed very much, the very one-sided character of the inscriptions makes it difficult to prove this conclusively.

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There is no definite evidence of the existence of a council of ministers or of other officers connected with the central government. A numerous and powerful bureaucracy assisted the king in the tasks of administration, which were those of controlling, supervising and regulating an existing order, changing it, if at all, only by imperceptible steps. No government of an Indian state ever enjoyed in those days legislative power in the modern sense of the term; there was no legislature proper, nor any attempt at legislative control of the executive. What legislation there was took the form of declarations (*vyavasthas*) by local associations of sorts, meant to meet the requirements of new situations as they arose. Such declarations in so far as they conformed to a general conception of what was fair and proper (Dharma), that is in so far as they commanded support from the public opinion of the class or group concerned, formed part of the social code, and were liable in the ultimate resort to be enforced by the king’s government. Indian Society did not commit to the care of government anything more than the tasks of police and justice. Even the adjudication of disputes among individuals and groups often took place without reference to the officers of the crown, and went up to them only in the last resort, when other means had failed. The essentials of social regulation were undertaken by numberless local groups of a hereditary or voluntary character, and the duty of the central government was only to maintain the general conditions of peace and security needed for these numerous social organisations to thrive and fulfil their several purposes. The law-codes (*Smṛtis*) and the learned (*śiṣṭas*), as well as the elders in each group, commanded the allegiance of these social groups more readily than royal mandates that contravened Law (Dharma) and custom (*ācāra*). The king was in no sense a law-maker; he was only the guardian of social life and laws.

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In this respect the Cōḷa government did not differ perceptibly from its contemporaries. What distinguished it from them was the superior executive strength it was able to develop by bringing into existence a highly organised and thoroughly efficient bureaucracy. It saw to it, moreover, that the growing host of officials by no means interfered with the free life and the initiative of local authorities and associations, while at the same time they controlled them efficiently and kept them on the straight path by a periodical scrutiny of their affairs. The more one reads the contemporary records, the more one begins to admire the nice balance struck between centralised control and local initiative, the clear distinction, ever present, between the functions of the state and those of the social group. The individual, as such, did not count. The problem of ‘the man versus the state’ never arose in a society that is best described as a federation of groups.

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The hierarchy of officials in the service of the king were in the enjoyment of titles and distinctions which marked them off from one another and from the rest of society. Some of these were titles of ancient renown like *ēnādi*, and *mārāyan*, found mentioned as early as the age of the Śaṅgam. From the context in which the author of the *Tolkāppiyam*⁶⁰ mentions *mārāyam*, it would seem originally to have been a military title indicating distinction won on the field of battle. In the inscriptions of this period, however, we find the title in more common use for designating persons in civil occupations like Kaḍigai-mārāyan, Vācciya-mārāyan and so on. We have also the title *mārāśi*, the feminine of *mārāyan*, applied to the wives of the *mārāyans*.⁶¹ *Araiyan* and *pēraraiyan* are other titles also of quite common occurrence and conferred on persons distinguished in civil occupations like—*nittappēraraiyan*, (grand master of the dance). We have also the general title *adigārigal* used to describe the higher officers in the army and in general administration which were not differentiated from each other in those days as they are now. These *adigārigal* often described themselves by the name of the ruling sovereign followed by the phrase *mūvēndavēḷār* and it is often impossible, as a result, to detect their personal names, and unless particular care is taken, one is apt easily to mistake one officer for another with similar or even identical titles. The annotator of the *Takkayāgapparaṇi*, writing no doubt some centuries after our period, gives a quaint account of the class of *adigārigaḷ*, which may be rendered thus: 'The *adigārigaḷ* are said to have come of the families descended from Bhōjarāja. Members of these families only accepted appointments as *mantris*, and did no other work. It is an improper thing that they are found holding the position of accountants in these days; except that they could not wear a crown, they are entitled to all the other insignia of royalty, and it is improper for them to accept any positions other than those of *mantris*.'⁶² This curious legend shows how quickly the new class of official nobility that was coming up as a result of the elaboration of the Cōḷa administrative system developed group-traditions of its own and how readily such inventions gained currency. The wives of the *adigāris* may have been called *adigāriccis*; but we have obvious instances of the women in the female establishments of the queens bearing the title in their own right.⁶³ A more general distinction often found in the records of the period is that between the higher grade and lower grade of official nobility, so to say. The terms '*perundaram*' and '*śirutaram*' (often with '*tanam*' written for '*taram*') seem to imply this distinction more than anything else;⁶⁴ the officers and servants, *karumigaḷ* and *paṇimakkaḷ*, even, at times, divisions of the army, are mentioned as belonging to the *perundanam* or the *śirudanam*.⁶⁵ Sometimes an intermediate status is also implied by the term *śirudanattup-perundaram* to which even commanders of troops, *sēnāpatis*, are assigned.⁶⁶ It is also to be noted that not only the king, but some of his more important feudatories like Paḷuvēṭṭaraiyar Kaṇḍanmaṟavan,⁶⁷ and perhaps also other members of the royal family, employed officials and servants grouped in such higher and lower grades. The earliest mention of the *perundaram* in a datable record is in the fifth year of Maduraikoṇḍa Rājakēsari,⁶⁸ c. a.d. 961. Eight officers of Rājarāja, of the *perundaram* rank, along with some others, were caught by the king in some act of cowardice or misdemeanour, and endowed lamps in the Tanjore temple apparently in fulfilment of vows they had taken to secure divine intercession against their being disgraced by the king.⁶⁹ *Nyāyattār* (judges) of both *perundanam* and *śirudanam* are mentioned in the reign of Rājādhirāja II.⁷⁰

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Little is known of the manner in which the officials of different grades were chosen for appointment in the first instance and for promotion to higher ranks thereafter. Birth and high connection must have conferred some advantage at the start, though the subsequent career might have depended largely upon the individual ability of a person, and the occasions for distinguished service which he got and utilised successfully. As even the succession to the throne appears to have been determined by a proper regard for the individual merits of those who might be deemed eligible for it, and as successive kings are seen to have used their discretion freely and fearlessly, not hesitating to keep out the unfit and always seeking to instal as heir-apparent the ablest person of their own generation or the next, it is not a violent assumption to make that the same stress on ability marked the choice and encouragement of public servants in the king’s service. The most common method of remunerating officials was that of assigning to each according to his status a certain extent of land⁷¹ which he held as his *jīvita*, and regular cash payments from the public treasury were practically unknown. But the income from such assignments usually consisted of two parts, one realised in kind and the other in cash payments. What was assigned in all these cases was by no means the absolute proprietorship of the soil which always belonged to the individual occupier or the village community, unless indeed their rights were bought out, but the rights of the central government to certain dues from the area so assigned.⁷² Such assignments often included a whole village, or even district,⁷³ and this is the reason why many officials are found described as possessors or leaders (*uḍaiyān*, *kiḻān*)⁷⁴ of particular villages or even *nāḍus*. It was open to the assignees to sell or otherwise alienate or give away in part or as a whole the rights assigned to them. The system was open to uncertainties and abuses, though perhaps effectively checked by the accurate record of landrights maintained by the government and by the public opinion of the villages themselves, ready to assert itself in various ways in those times.

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The self-governing village was the unit of government. A number of them constituted a *kūrram* or *nāḍu* or *kōṭṭam* as it was called in different parts of the country. What is often described as a *taniyūr* (a town apart) seems to have been a big sized village large enough to form a *kūrram* by itself, as is implied by the phrase occasionally employed in connection with such places—viz. *tan-kūṟu*.⁷⁵ Several examples of such *taniyūrs*, in some ways analogous to the boroughs of mediaeval England, can be gathered from the inscriptions.⁷⁶ A number of *kūṟṟams* made up a *vaḷanāḍu*, often also called *nāḍu* in the region where the smaller division was called *kōṭṭam* viz. Toṇḍai-nāḍu alias Jayangōṇḍasōḻa-maṇḍalam. Above the *vaḷanāḍu*⁷⁷ was the *maṇḍalam* or province proper, the largest division of administration. There were about eight or nine of these provinces including Ceylon, at the end of Rājarāja's reign, and it does not seem likely that this number was ever exceeded.⁷⁸ The subordinate divisions evidently underwent numerous reshufflings, and their names were changed so often as to justify the complaint that 'Cōḷa geography came to suffer as much from the plague of homonyms as the kings themselves.'⁷⁹

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The designations and functions of some of the officers of government as they are found in the more important inscriptions of the period give us a very good idea of the numbers and organisation of the executive government of the day. The general terms by which such officers of all ranks are described are *Karumigaḷ* and *Paṇi-makkaḷ*, more or less corresponding to 'officials' and 'servants.' The Anbil plates of Sundara Cōḷa mention a Brahmin *Saciva* by name Aniruddha whose father was a teacher who gloried in a life of learning and instruction, and whose grandfather was an *Āhitāgni* and a devotee of Rangēśa. Aniruddha's was a celebrated family of Vaiṣṇavas from the village of Anbil. What the exact position of this 'noble minister' (*mānya saciva*) of the Jaimini sūtra and the Āvēṇika gōtra was in the administration, we are not told. But he got from the king the title of Brahmādhirāja and a perpetual grant of 10 *vēlis* of land in token of his regard and affection. The machinery employed for the execution of this order of the king is comparatively simple.

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The order is communicated in the form of a *śrī-mukham* by the *Āṇatti*, the executive officer nominated by the king for the purpose, and the rest is done by the local corporations to whom the letter is addressed; and when the transaction is complete and a record of it is drawn up, it is attested by a number of persons who appear to be local magnates and describe themselves in various ways as Nāṭṭukkōn, Nāḍū-kiḻavan, Ūruḍaiyān and so on. It is difficult to decide if these witnesses were only prominent men of the neighbourhood or held definite posts under government. However that may be, the procedure followed some years later under similar circumstances is far more elaborate and furnishes a measure of the complexity of the administrative organisation that had grown in the interval. The larger Leyden grant and the Tiru-vālangāḍu, Karandai, and Chārāla plates exhibit a close resemblance with regard to their official forms. The grant of Ānaimangalam to the Bauddha shrine in the Cūḍāmaṇivarma-vihāra was ordered by the king on the 92nd day of the twenty-first year of his reign, recorded on the ninety-sixth day of the same year, and the execution was completed on the 113th day of the twenty-third year.⁸⁰ The corresponding dates for the grant of Paḻaiyanūr as a *dēvadāna* recorded in the Tiruvālangāḍu plates of Rājēndra I are: the 88th and 90th days in the sixth regnal year, and 155th in the seventh of that monarch.⁸¹

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