The Colas c25.21

c25.21

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.