The Colas c25.25
The Cōḷas c25.25
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c25.25.1
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.
c25.25.2
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.