A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6.10

c6.10

The rise of the imperial Cholas of the line of Vijayālaya may be dated from the middle of the ninth century A.D. As they emerged from their obscurity, they soon displaced the remnants of Pallava power to the north of their capital Tanjore, and subdued the Pāndya and Chera countries in the south and invaded Ceylon. The hostility of the Rāshtrakūtas, particularly of Krishna III, threatened to wreck the Chola empire at its birth (c. 950), but the Karnātaka power was operating too far from its base to achieve permanent results; and Krishna's wars, while putting a temporary check on the rising imperialism of the Cholas, spelled disaster to his own empire which was easily overthrown under his successors by the Chālukya Taila II. The Chola power recovered soon after the withdrawal of Krishna's arms, and swept on to its meridian in the first part of the eleventh century under Rājarāja I and his even greater son Rājendra I. At a time when Northern India was divided into a number of weak and warring states, some of which began to stagger under repeated Islamic inroads, these two great monarchs gave political unity to the whole of Southern India for the first time and established it as a respected sea-power controlling the highways of the Indian Ocean and effectively regulating the affairs of the empire of Śri Vijaya by invasion and diplomacy. They perfected a highly organized administrative system of central control and fostered the autonomy of village assemblies as none had done before; the father constructed the Great Temple of Tanjore, the purest and most magnificent gem of South Indian architecture; and the son created its replica in the wilds of the Trichinopoly district and called up a new city to surround it. The name of the city, Gangaikondaśōḷapuram—'the town of the Chola who took the Ganges'—was an advertisement of the new power of South India to the rest of the country. This was the silver age of the religious revival which had begun under the Pallavas; a fresh commentary on the Rig-Veda was composed by Venkaṭa Mādhava who lived in a village on the banks of the Kaveri in the reign of Parāntaka I; the Tamil hymns, Śaiva and Vaishṇava, of the last epoch, were gathered together and grouped into canonical books, a form which they have retained to this day; the glorious conception of the form of the Dancing Lord Naṭarāja found embodiment in many monumental bronze images which, alike for the technical skill they imply and the artistic perfection they exhibit, have few rivals in the history of the world's art.