The Colas c25.6

c25.6

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.