The Chola kings, who ruled from before the Common Era until the 13th century, were long gone by the 17th century, when the Portuguese, Dutch, and the East India Company were vying for trade from the eastern coast of India. Of all dynasties that had ruled the coast, it was the Cholas whose name stuck as the Coromandel Coast.
What made the Cholas great? They held power over a large geography, spanning the Lakshadweep in the west to Malaysia in the east, Sri Lanka in the south to Madhya Pradesh in the north. Much of this was nominal yet impressive for their time.
Among all the mediaeval dynasties, we have the maximum inscriptions from their times—almost 5,000 of them, scattered across temple walls and other stones, mostly in South India. Unlike the Ashokan edicts, these are not in the king’s voice.
They are all transactions of the local community: tax, water, disputes, gifts—everything that mattered to the tiny villages that made up the empire. This unique primary source enables us to study a mediaeval society and kingdom in greater depth than others in India.
If you want a deeper sense of this and pick up Anirudh Kanisetti’s book Lords of Earth & Sea, you will be in for a disappointment. On the contents page, three out of the six chapters feature blood, war, and death. The other two have contrasting words, which give an accurate indication of what is to come.
In 269 pages, the author takes you through battle after battle in all the bloody detail. If a king looked out from his mansion, which Kanisetti believes was whitewashed and gleaming, he was mounting campaigns. If another king was pacing up and down his palace, he was surrounded by loot and war booty.
If a king was travelling up the river, there too he was only plotting further campaigns. Which ruling power is not violent—even today? The Cholas certainly were, and no empire was built based solely on persuasion and diplomacy. Administrations are rarely, if ever, conflict-free.
If the blood of the battlefield nauseates you, then you cannot turn to the fields and farms, which are only places of cruel exploitation by the landowners—mostly Brahmins. Turn then to the traders, but here too traders are shown more for their support of the Chola naval battles than for their trading. The book is a maze of blood and gore with no escape.
If he had, as a historian been less enamoured of the battles, he could have dedicated more space to aspects of Chola administration that need to be known by history lovers today.
Tirunallam/Konerirajapuram is a temple he has visited; it has a fascinating Chola inscription detailing of how many different employees it had—staggering for a small temple. The Cholas used temples to bring the community together. People were, like today, fighting over gods then too. Some Chola kings tried to lessen conflict.
The image of Hari-Hara and the Vishnu shrines in key Shiva temples were efforts to bring people together. Even the price of the banana inscription in the Tanjore Big Temple was probably a way to bring traders together. The covenants of the trade guild and the inscriptions on solving right-hand-left-hand disputes underline a key principle of Chola administration—everyone was needed in the community. Caste discrimination and slavery were present, but there were checks and balances. These worked well with a conscientious king and did not with an inept king. These discussions are wholly missing.
The overall pattern seems to focus on what will show war, turmoil, and conflict exclusively over what worked and sustained a kingdom for at least 1,300 years, if not more, counting the Sangam Cholas, who he barely covers. Kalingattu Barani, a war poem, receives much attention, but the outpourings of the Tevaram receive none, presumably because they have less war and more devotion? As a historian, an analysis of how literature, music, temples, and religion coalesced to build Chola power—comparing it with his earlier research on the Chalukyas—would have been much more desirable than so many pages of battle.
The book needed a Tamil reviewer.
Pichandi is not a thief but Bikshatana. Tondai is a neck; Tondai Nadu is a region. Kavudi is not a millet. The image of Raja Raja is thankfully accurate, but the image on page 237 is certainly Shiva and not a Pandya king.
Kanisetti has several supporters. With such fame and power comes responsibility. His choice has to be clear: is he a historian keeping imagination to a bare minimum, or is he a compelling fiction writer specialising in war, inspired by history? Does he write history to sharpen divisions, or does he intend to use history to help us look within ourselves and not repeat the mistakes of the past? Books like this do nothing to inform us dispassionately about the Cholas. We have to go back to their inscriptions and their later analysts, Nilakanta Shastri’s classic, Kamini Dhandapani’s Rajaraja Chola: King of Kings, and parts of Nirmala Lakshman’s The Tamils.