Empire: World History - 289. Medieval India’s Game of Thrones: The Cholas (Part 1)

Episode Date: September 10, 2025

Who were the Cholas who ruled in South India from the 9th century? How was a Hindu symbol of a Chola queen the inspiration behind the Christian hymn “Lord of The Dance”? What was the Medieval Indian equivalent of the “Iron Bank” in Game of Thrones? William and Anita are joined by Anirudh Kanisetti, author of Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire, to discuss the beginnings of the Chola dynasty. Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnham. And me, William Duremple. And we hope you enjoyed this series on Sewers with Alex von Tundselman, which I think is our most popular ever series. The first episode.

The blockbuster. The blockbuster. Absolutely. I just loved it. We had so many comments on Twitter, particularly, Anita's hot crush for Gamal Abdul Nasser, the pin-up. What I found, actually, rather than NASA being very good-looking, undisputably, very good-looking,

and we know it's undisputable because it got right up Anthony Eden's nose. And, you know, what I loved was the psychodrama of the whole situation. So, I mean, those of you haven't gone to listen, go back and listen. Eden is completely convulsed with the idea that his younger, much younger, much prettier wife, maybe falling under the thrall of a dashing NASA. And I just, I love that with Alex. You know, you get this sort of the big characters of history. But yeah, they're humans, aren't they, at the end of the day, flesh and blood,

with all of the insecurities that we all carry. That's an extraordinary story. Anyway, as you may be aware, because we've been putting it up online, We will soon be starting another Middle Eastern series, and this is on the history of Gaza, which I don't think anyone has done. I'd be looking online for any broadcaster in the world has actually done this, which is bizarre considering it's been in the headlines of every single newspaper every day for the last two years. Starting all the way back with the Egyptian Pharaoh, Tukmosis III,

through the Crusades, through the British mandate and the Nakhba, up to the rise of how. mass. Of course. I mean, one of the reasons perhaps that nobody has done this is that it is emotional, tricky, a difficult thing to discuss, but we think everyone should perhaps have an insight into the history behind the headlines. It's a huge and obviously very controversial and emotional and exciting thing to do. But before we do that, we're going to give you a little palate cleanser, a little sobé in between your two Middle Eastern courses. And we are going to go and take you back just for one week into medieval Indian history. And a piece of Indian history that has always fascinated me.

In many ways, it's India's own Game of Thrones. And I think people in South India know this history very well, and are very proud of it. But even people in the north don't cover those. And I think it's one of the great stories from India. And it's the story of the Chola Kingdom, which from the 10th century expanded outwards, not just in India, but into Southeast Asia, and raided as far as Singapore and the Malacca Straits.

And the reason I'm fully invested is because there is a woman at the heart of this story, one of these sort of kick-ass queens of history who is responsible for the rise of one of India's most iconic images. Now, you'll know it. If I could say Nataraja, you might not recognize what that means, unless you are from India, but the dancing Shiva. Now, you'll know that figure. It's sort of normally surrounded in a circle, sort of sometimes embellished with flames, with the dancing god a drum in one hand, his third eye opened, doing the dance of destruction. It is exactly that image that inspired a Christian hymn writer to come up with Lord of the Dance. I am the Lord of the Dance, said he. So look, we hope we really like this because we love making it. Our king, sweet ambrosia to me, abides in the dancing hall of Southern Tillai, humming with duneful bees, shrine radiating light like a blaze of lightning circled by towers with fluttering white flags. the golden mountain rising before us. When shall I attain him? King you dance on stage before the 3,000 Brahmin priests. When shall I get to see your dance? Father in the shrine of Shadden

Tilae where bees humming tunes sing the four Vedas chanted by your 3,000 priests, who serve you in utter devotion, when will I get to see you dance in the Ampalam Hall? The immortal crowned with the moon, the king of the golden Ampalum hall in Tili, sprout of wisdom, when shall I join him? When the whole world beseeched him, he graced Patanjali with a vision of his dance, dances in the golden Amplum Hall in Tully, and the gods worship him there. When shall I see him there? When shall I see him? It's going to say, well, look, we see him. He's here. William Daryl. Paul, Anita Arnith for a very special Empire podcast.

Anyway, I should explain what all that was about. So that poem is about the God who became the greatest icon in all Indian art, the dancing Shiva. It's that round statue of the god with one leg raised, with fire in his hand, that's become, in a sense, a shorthand for Indian art. Well, the one that we call the Nataraja, Lord of the Dance, I suppose. Then inspired weirdly the Christian hymn, Lord of the Dance. You never, we were brought up?

Well, I did. I mean, I know the Lord of the Dance, him, but I didn't think it was a direct dance. Then, wherever you may be, I am the Lord of the Dance. It was a Quaker who had, for some reason, an image of the dancing Shiva on the front of his desk. Good Lord. And he thought that he was going to be accused of heresy for writing the same. It actually took off and become one of the most popular Catholic Christian hymns, bizarrely. Although 99% of the people that listen to that him or sing it had no idea that it's referring to the dancing.

I will lead you all wherever you may be. I will lead you all in the dance, said he. I know it very well. I'm very impressed, Nita. Thank you very much. Good, common educated girl. Well, very much so. Sister Francesca would burst with pride, indeed.

Anyway, we are here because we are meeting with one of the great meteors of Indian history, Anirut Canisetti, who although still in his early or mid-twenties, I'm 30. You're 30, but you still look. You wear it very lightly. You wear it very likely. In a kind of sickening kind of way. He looks very young. Anyway, this is not his first, but his second book.

Both books have been met with astonishing acclaim. And the new book is called Lords of the Earth and Sea, a history of the Chola Empire. Now, Andrew, first of all, you should explain, for most of our readers and listeners, will absolutely not know who the Cholars are. So give us a very basic explanation of who these people were going to talk about

for the next two episodes. Well, if you were to imagine Europe at the turn of the first millennium CE, You'd see a world very much in flux. The great kingdoms that we are most familiar with in Europe. Norman England, for example, does not exist. The unified kingdom of France does not exist. But at the same time, on the other side of the globe, Raja Raja Chola, a title which means king of kings,

was preparing to build the most stupendous monument that had been seen in centuries, really, since the construction of the pyramids. The tallest temple, and what will remain the tallest temple? The tallest temple on earth. tallest temple on earth for quite a long time. Until probably the building of what, Angkor what, a couple of centuries later? It's much taller than Angkor, in fact. I think it's only Westminster Abbey in the 13th century that manages to...

Really? To top the Chola. And just give us a geographical location. So the Cholas are based in the deep south of India, presently state of Tamil Nadu. On the Coromandel coast, which, as it happens, actually derives from Chola Mandalam. Or the Chola Circle, which is, of course, what they call their home territories. I didn't know Coramandel came from that. That's delicious. That's where it comes from. And the English word cash, according to one of three possible etymologies, might be derived from

Kasu, which is a Tamil word, which refers to a coin. Portuguese traders use the term, I think it's pronounced kasha because of the Kassu, and we also see the same term used in records from the British Raj as well. It's one of three possible etymologies that should be perfectly clear, but the Cholas have a much, much bigger impact on the world economy and the way the world functions than we otherwise give them credit for. And you know, anyone that's read medieval Indian history, particularly anyone who's not familiar with India, often comes across this blur of different dynasties with long, complicated names, the Ikfashkuas, the Rastrakutas, the Chalukyas.

Why have you chosen particularly the Cholos to concentrate on? What distinguishes them? What makes them stand out from the run of the middle of all these different mandolars, as historians call them these circles of different competing kings? Well, think of the Cholas as essentially the Mongols of the medieval Indian Ocean world. It's directly as a result of Chola conquests that you see new forms of economies, more interlinked regional circuits in the Indian Ocean world, and you'll see the development of Hinduism in its most recognizable form.

As you said a bit earlier, well, Nataraja, the most famous symbol of Hinduism. And it's not even a comparison, like by far, I think he is the most, iconic symbol of this religion. Oh, sure. Apart from Ganesh, there is only one other image people who think of, which is the Lord of the Darlahs. Can I ask you one other thing? I mean, the politics though of the Cholas, the Cholas we hear a lot because in politics right

now, they will talk about the Marathas and the Cholars. These are the two they've kind of, or am I imagining this, the two that are often The Vigra, the King's Fumpy. Yeah, sort of highlighted and spoken about as the zenith of, you know, India's greatness. Well, the Cholas, I think, also speak to a contemporary. Indian anxiety about our influence in the world at large. The Cholas were this martial, aggressive, but also tremendously innovative dynasty that took Indian polities, Indian diasporas to shows where they hadn't been present at the same scale

before. I think they speak to a very contemporary anxiety, a contemporary yearning for India to be a world superpower again to be able to boss around our neighbors again. And in the Cholas, it seems that we found a Hindu dynasty that does exactly that, even though to the Cholas it was more of a commercial enterprise than anything else, as hopefully we'll get into in this conversation. The reason I think that Hindu nationalists love the idea of the Cholas is not only did they march from the south of India right up famously to the Ganges and conquer uniquely a South Indian dynasty conquering the north rather than the reverse, which is what happens in most of Indian history. There's also this thing which we'll be discussing particularly in the next episode about this extraordinary moment almost unique in Indian. history when an Indian naval force leaves the shores of India and raids and possibly even

conquers the Malacca Straits, where areas of Thailand and Malaysia, Laos and there are, I mean, the claims are made for, you know, the whole of Southeast Dayshare is. Even as far as the Maldives, and this is a huge expanse. And Lakhadweeb. Yeah. So there's this vast area which is, and Anirut, we should say, we should explain, has stepped into this debate with some very clear views, which you hinted at just then, that a lot of it you think is the power of the equivalent.

Remember in Game of Thrones the Iron Bank? Oh yes, yes. Those sort of mysterious trade-ins. Esos, if you really want to know. Yes. Esos with the Iron Bank. In some ways, Tronos is a bit like that because they have the 500, this mysterious trading guild, which has its own armies, its assassins.

Donno, tell us about the 500. So who were they? And where did they get their money from? Well, the really important thing to understand about medieval India is that I think we tend to think of it as a land of kings and peasants. These, well, the Hindu nationalist imagination, these ultra-masculine kings and the orientalist imagination, these are foppish kings sitting around in the harem. But the idea is that it's a world of kings and peasants.

But the reality of medieval South India, specifically the place where the Cholas came from, is it's a land of assemblies. It's a land of collective rule where villages are handling their own affairs. Well, like panchayats that we think of today, sort of like a local democracy. Something like that, yes. It's essentially, the thing is that. private property as a concept doesn't really exist at this point of Indian history. These are all collectively owned lands which a bunch of families are cultivating. And of course these families

take the decisions about what needs to happen to the land. The king has very little to do with that. And this idea, this idea of collective decision making extends to everything in this part of India, especially to commerce. So very often decisions about finance and what goods need to be imported where and what tariffs need to be paid on these goods are not being taken by royal courts, but by merchant assemblies. I should say that in my book, The Golden Road, I came across your 500, this extraordinary guild,

very frequently because they leave inscriptions right across Southeast Asia, which you can read today in places like Singapore and Sumatra, long way away from India, recording what sounds a bit like a sort of proto-East India company, just like the East India Company founds trading settlements at Bombay, Calcutta and Madras. So you get the equivalent with the 500,

this Tamil merchant guild, establishing outposts where you're getting tamil inscriptions, Chora style temples, little sort of goldsmith's touchstones with little Tamil inscriptions associated with the guild. So you've got a whole trading world that's suddenly illuminated. So what we're going to be discussing in the next two episodes are these extraordinary kings associated also with merchant guilds

who extend their influence right across India and project it deep into Southeast Asia, whether controversially, as you say, through the trading guilds or directly through their own navies. And this is something we'll be discussing in the next episode. But let's just open now with your account of the rise of the Cholas. How out of this landscape of villages that you've beautifully painted in this rich soil around the rivers,

particularly the Carvery River in South India, how does this one dynasty rise up and really establish itself over this vast area? It's this rhythmic, almost seasonal process. The main source that we have to reconstruct the rise of the Cholas is inscriptions made in temples. But the really interesting thing is that I want you to imagine this landscape of the Kaferi, this lush green of villages with muddy canals between them. And all these villages have at their center a little temple of mud brick and wood. All the houses are mostly mud havels.

You might see the occasional large whitewashed mansion. of an esquire, a member of the gentry, or you might see a more well-maintained little settlement of Brahmins who own the lands surrounding them. And very occasionally, in between this very variegated landscape, will you see market towns, and even more rarely than the market towns, are royal courts. It's important to remember the Cholas,

it was by no means evident in the early 10th century, the Cholas were going to emerge as the great superstars of medieval South India. They were loomed over by the great Deccan plateau, or this vast landmass the size of Germany, this tri-arid upland region, home to great and terrible empires that would raid the coastal areas of the Kaweri where the Tamil speakers lived,

and the Tamil speakers lived in these assemblies, in these villages that we've just seen. In your last book, you particularly talked about the Rastrakutas, who again were one of these kingdoms that are in the textbooks, and it's a name that has almost no resonance, because you don't particularly associate any sort of particular art.

Well, in the West, they will never have heard of that word. Most people never heard of them. But you showed that the Rastrakutas who were in the Deccan were in fact considered one of the four great world powers of the 8th century. We have Arab travelers accounts that describe the Rastrakutas as being on par with the Abbasid Khalif, with the emperor of China, with the Byzantine emperor. You have to keep in mind that when you're talking about the rise of the Cholas, we're talking about them in the shadows of what was considered to be one of the greatest empires of the age. So, I mean, let's do it through archaeological record. I just want to paint a picture of what the Cholas were and how they lived.

So are we talking about noble class that wears gold and jewels and bling and shows off their wealth and power that way? And a merchant class, I mean, what do they look like? What do they spend? What is kind of the wealth that we are looking at in the archaeological index? What we're looking at is it's a very diverse society where it isn't actually possible to draw this very clear line sometimes. because in medieval sardin it is possible for a merchant to be a landowner to be a courtier and vice versa. The lines weren't as clear as they later became. Merchants could be warriors.

Sure. I suppose what I'm doing is asking is that most people, particularly who don't live in India, even in India, they think of the Mahabara, they think of the big golden crowns, the big jeweled bandaliers. That's the image they have of wealth and power. And I just want to know in comparison with what we've been taught is wealth and power. where did the Cholas kind of rank? Well, to a great extent, I would say our image of what medieval India looked like comes from Chola images.

It's because Chola bronzes are everywhere in Western Museum collections is because you see these great jeweled bracelets on their arms. You see these towering, tiered crowns, and these body necklaces made of thousands of pearls stretched across the body. But we should also say, I mean, and this is what strikes a Western observer when they see those bronzes of the first. So wearing very little else. Except jewels and gold and bling.

Yeah, absolutely. And they are incredibly sexy and largely unclothed figures with only the slight sign of sort of ripples of cloth around their ankles. I would dare anyone who is startled by the Chola's lack of clothing to wear more clothing than that in the heat of the Kaliri summer and see how they go. Right, right, right, right, right. So to answer a question. As Mahmagandhi famously said to George the Third, who was it, who suffered him to Buckingham Palace. when he was asked why he was only just wearing a lungi. He said his majesty is wearing enough for both of us.

So the aristocratic class of this 10th century village-dominated world weren't as wealthy as they later became. All these bronzes are produced when the cholas are the height of the superstardom when they've conquered the treasuries of rival kingdoms. So you can imagine that yes, they did have some amount of jewelry, but they wouldn't have looked that different from most people who lived at the time. Right. Okay. And take us through the beginning.

of their rise. Because in previous episodes of this podcast, we've talked about the palavas in Kachipurum, again, South Indian kings, who are trading with Southeast Asia and taking their ideas of Hindu kingship to Cambodia and Laos and Vietnam. The Cholas, in a sense, rise to power over the palavas, don't they? So the Cholas are in this very interesting geopolitical situation where the Kaveri being a land of these independent villages was, wasn't a place where kings really enjoyed projecting too much power. So the Palavas are off to their north. Far to the south are a rival dynasty called the Pandyas and neither Palavas nor the Pandyas can figure out what the hell to do with the Kaveri area because it is just too independent. So by playing these kings off against each other,

the early Cholas managed to rise up into this political vacuum. In the late 9th century, the last Palava king dies in battle near the Kaveri area in fact. And this is what really allows the Cholas to rise because all of a sudden there's this vast urban commercially rich territory up to their not. The gate is open and they can walk straight through, right. In your book, you have this lovely description of this battle where the Pandyas of Madurai, who are the rival power, summon the kings of Sri Lanka from over the waters

and the two of them fight the Cholas, but the Cholas defeat them and eventually drive them back. And then in a startling new development, the Cholas are the first Indian power to project their armies over the sea to Sri Lanka. So we see what is initially a South Indian army fighting an invasion, reversing that radically and suddenly leading warships over the Palk Strait into Sri Lanka. Tell us about all that.

It must have been an absolutely bizarre development for the early Chola Kings to suddenly be on the dominant side of a war. As you said, Will, the Pandyas and the Sri Lankans were the most powerful of the South Indian. kings. There was no reason for them to expect that they would not be able to conquer the Cholas. But not only do the Cholas hold their own in battle, there's an attack of this terrible disease in the Lankan camp. We're not sure exactly what it was. Smallpox? It may have been smallpox. It may have been malaria in the marches of the Caveri Delta. But the Sri Lankan crown prince dies on India's shore and the Lankans have to retreat with their tail between their legs. But the Cholars don't leave it at that. The way that medieval Indian polities work is that kings would

go to war when once in between the harvest season and the planting season, you would have a whole bunch of time when the village tuffees were waiting for employment. The king would come along, take them off to war. And the loot that they would get, they would give it to their wives once they came back from the campaign. And the wives

would invest it in temples. So I talked a little earlier about how all these villages have their own little brick temple. And what Chola Queens would do is that they used the wealth their husbands got from war to rebuild these temples and stone with of course a little description of their husband's martial exploits. Well, you have entirely beautifully led us to a break here, because when we come back from the break, we're going to talk about arguably the greatest Chula Queen of all time.

Think Zena, think Warrior Princess, think also Medici, roll it all into one. Join us after the break and we'll explain. Welcome back. So just before the break, I was sort of teasing you about this great character who, predictably I have fallen head over heels in love with, like I do with a powerful woman. Sambiant Mahadevi, who is largely responsible for giving the world this Nataraja image that you will find in most Hindu households, in most temples, and indeed in most Western collections of Hindu art. And above all, and most famously now, in CERN, in the High, what's it got? The Collider. The Collider. The Hadron Collider.

The Hydron Collider. The Hydron Collider. When you walk into CERN, there is a giant Chola Nataraj sitting in the main entrance hall of Cern. apparently. Just remind me one day to tell you I've been there when it was turned off and we walked through the tunnel. That's when the beer bottle got put in there. Famously, there was a beer bottle found in the collider.

We didn't do that. I bet that was that was Ravi or one of your boys. For my nine-year-old son. It was years before they were born and we didn't leave any detritas at all. But tell us about Semy and Mahadiabee, because I'm fascinated by her. She enters the Chola family as one of the lower-ranking daughters-in-law. These are families where the men had many wives. These wives tended to come from well-educated moneyed backgrounds.

So they weren't just sitting around in the palaces waiting for the kings to come to the harem as a stereotype goes. These are intelligent, educated women who are talking to each other, exchanging ideas about architecture, and wealthy enough, as I said, to import tons of stone to rebuild temples. they pick their temples carefully strategically. So would they sit with an architect and say, look, I'm getting, I've paid for the stone, this is where I want it, and this is what I want it to look like. Sounds like it needs to redo your kitchen. Yeah, well, I mean, well, indeed.

Is that how it would happen? This is my vision, make it happen. Something very similar to that. We know that the more important families had their own guilds of sculptors, and they would have a template of what they would do for a particular family, but they knew how to throw in bells and whistles to embellish it, depending on the patron's personality. Which is why they have, the Chola architecture,

this really beautiful kind of intricacy about it. They're festooned with carvings from scripture. And rather charmingly, Andrew, in your book, you say that the first known inscription about our heroine, Zambian Mahadevi, is when she donates a modest 90 sheep to the local temple. Is that the first? Yeah, well, and you've got to think about it in terms of what was happening with the other daughters-in-law. These are ladies who are coming in with attendants, carrying chests of treasure, the architect snapping to the every command. And this princess who comes in from the hills surrounding Chola Territory, she's the daughter of a hill chief, she tells us, all she's got to give our sheep. Her retin, you can imagine, was loud and noisy and had a

ton of animals compared to the aristocratic. They're not quiet. She doesn't approach by stealth. What I'm really interested in is we don't know very much about her, apart from this story about the 90 sheep, and that she's very well off and she's very strong-minded. And yet hers is the figure that we perhaps know best of all, partly because of a controversy over this three and a half foot statue, because there was a lot of, let's put it this way. I spent hours in front of it. It's one of the most beautiful statues. So there was a lot of controversy about how it ended up in the Freer Collection and in New York and who had it and had it been stolen and did it go missing in 1929. There's a whole sort of legal sort of tangle going on about it. If you want to have a

look, Google it. Malernard friends, don't bother me. I just Googled. So, but this statue, is the one that you fell in love with three and a half feet tall describe what it looks like. So what's immediately apparent if you've looked at a few Chola Bronzes is that there's very clear ideal of what a Chola Bronze maker wanted a Davey, a goddess to look like. And they have this very particular perfect figure and frankly enormous breasts. Well, is it currently? She's got beautiful rounded hips. I would say she's utterly a woman. What I'm saying is that this figure is not that ideal. It's a very particular portrait sculpture of someone that actually looks like a real person

rather than an idealised man's idea of what a woman should look like. And she's dignified, regally poised, she's elegant, she's very clearly resting her weight on her left foot, and she's got her right leg slightly bent. She's holding her head high, she's a queen. She's very clearly this sort of regal princess figure. oval face, quite long oval face. Straight nose, serene, calm, relaxed with these very unusual sloping shoulders. It's just a lot like any other chola bronze. Her left hand rests downwards. Her right is bent to hold what I think is now a missing lotus or a water lily or something like that. And she's got kind of low slung, long skirts, hugging her thighs and legs with a very simple belt. Her head. Hips are exceptionally narrow.

And some artist-torians, particularly the wonderful Vidyid Hegera, who Anirud and I have closely followed and are great admirers of. Vidid Hegea wondered whether this was a way, these hips, the way they'd do it, is a way of suggesting that she was a woman who would bear no more children. Oh, interesting. She only had that one child. And so it's not the kind of the super voluptuous, normal chola supermodel. It's not a sex model.

Yeah. It's not a sex bowl. It's a very particular portrait. sculpture. It's a strong, but I would say very, sorry, you've male gaze for a second, female gaze, but she's entirely strong, Amazonian and feminine. There's a femininity about her long neck, her long limbs, the power in her sort of thighs and hips, which is, she's sporty. She's a, she's a sporty woman, it looks up. She's also a woman that clearly has her own ideas, this sculpture. She's poised as if in the middle of a conversation. She looks like she's just sort of

given the, you know, the servants are dressing down or was about to order somebody to, to take 90 sheep's to a temple or that sort of thing. But they've also got, and this is quite important, these very elongated earlobes. And that in Indian temple imagery is a sign of spirituality. Because every god and goddess in the Indian pantheon has these same earlobes.

And she's also just finally just got this charisma. She is her own individual, strong self. And she's also, I mean, it's just one of the great masterpieces of Indian art. And when you go to the room in the Freer in Washington, where it is now, there may be not much longer if, as you tell us, that it's now thought to be, to be stolen. It's one of the great masterpieces and arguably the greatest of all female portraits.

So what I wanted to say about it, it's, to me, feels like a statue of a woman commissioned by a woman, because it isn't that sort of the hypersexualized, you know, big boobs, big hip, hips, you know, sort of voluptuous. It isn't, but it's strength and its power. And to me, it looks like an athlete's body. Intelligence. What I want to know, though, is how do we know is her? How do we know?

Professor Dehiji has some ideas. Her arguments are mostly based on her perception of Sambian's personality as it comes across from inscription. But also the date and where these were found. The date and styles about, right, but we don't have hard evidence that this is definitely her. We know that she did commission a bronze of herself. We know that it may have been a bronze of herself as the goddess Parvati.

And here we have this bronze that is of Parvati. Vidya makes such a forceful case for it. Who is Fythia? Vidya de Heger, our historian friend. Who worked in the Freya for many years and who built up the collection, who kind of passed the statue every day. So it's certainly in her mind, and she is the great expert. Well, okay, I'm not going to argue with Vith.

She's what Bernard Berenson was to Florentine painting, sold to Heraldist Jolta Sculpt. I'm convinced. But the power that's sort of expressed in that statue and in her physique, it does come along with the story of this is a woman whose husband has died young as well, who is standing on her own two feet. Tell us a little bit about what we do know for sure about the real women's circumstances. So we know that she wasn't the wealthiest princess to enter the Chola family through marriage in the early 10th century.

We know that the Chola family was. was thrown to upheaval in the mid-10th century, 949, when Sambian's brother-in-law was killed on the battlefield and he was the heir apparent. By your friends, the restricotas. Yes, by my friends, the Rastrakutas, the builders of Alora, the great emperors of southern India at the time. And what happens is that in the turmoil that follows,

medieval families were extremely political. Very often you see that princes were positioned in different parts of the territory and were allowed to build up their own retinues before the king took a decision on who was going to be told. And so the throne fell to Sembion's husband, a man called Gander Aditya, the poem that we opened this podcast with. The Where is He? The refrain. Yes. That was written by Samian's husband. And it seems that at some point, while the husband was still alive, the bosom visited Chidambaram, which today is one of the great sites of Shaivism, of the worship of Shiva.

But wasn't the... I'm one of the largest and most dazzling temples in London India. It's massive. It's sprawling. But it was a little shrine. in a mangrove swamp when Sambian would have first seen it. Her husband died sometime in the 950s, leaving her to raise a young son, her brothers-in-law take the throne, and for a couple of decades, Samian disappears from the historical record. We have no idea what she was doing, because if somebody wasn't gifting to temples,

if somebody wasn't writing their name on stone, it doesn't survive from this period in Southernian history. But she reappears in great style in the 1970s, when after yet another round-year-old. of family shakeups, her husband becomes king. And what she does immediately after is quite extraordinary. She builds this grand new temple right in the backyard of the Chola kingdom. She purchases lands, names a flower garden after her husband, and asks the local Brahmins to look after it. And she also commissions this lovely little portrait of her husband worshipping Shiva, and behind him their son is sitting holding a royal umbrella. And she's got this long inscription

saying this is the gracious king Gandhadadya and his gracious son the gracious king, Utama and this temple was commissioned by Utama's gracious mother. It's propaganda. It's like a proper propaganda thing of we are here and we are important. Exactly. How interesting. Can I also ask

the link to Lord Shiva and just to remind people who he is, because if you're not familiar with the Hindu pantheon, he is part of the triumvirate. He is the destroyer if you like. He does the dance when he does that Nataraja dance it is the dance of destruction. He raises everything to the ground, that it may be created again by Brahma, sustained by Vishnu.

So this is like a little potted Hinduism for you. But he's also the most innocent, the most playful of the triumvir. He likes music. He has a short temper. He regrets things very quickly. He's called Polenath, you know, the innocent one, because he's frequently conned by everybody into giving them ridiculous wishes that everybody else in the pantheon has to undo. Is it her decision to pick out Shiva?

Or is it her family's decision to pick up Shiva? as the one who is going to be their god, if you like, because every dynasty had had an opportunity to pick a god, and many of them picked Vishnu, because he had sort of the biggest flex out of the trifecta. He was the one who had the most power, the most avatars, you know, the most stuff in his quiver. Why Shiva? Why this family?

Well, he was popular with peasants, and the Chola seemed to have done, generally speaking, what the peasants would have liked. And I think that you very clearly see, see this idea I was alluding to earlier, which is that it's not always the king starting the peasant were to do very often because Tamil peasants were so independent, so well-organised, royals are picking up trends from them. But what Sambian does differently is that while most Chola temples were dedicated to other

forms of Shiva, you know, the ones that were popular in the Kaveri, Sambion picks up a form of Shiva who's not from the Kaveri. She picks up the wild dancing god of the swamp at Chidambaram. And she puts him prominently on her temple. And over the course of her life, of her life as Dowager Queen, I think about a 10, 15 year period, she donates, she builds 12 temples all with the spectacular Nata Raja visible at the most. The wild one, the dancing one. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We should say that she is one of the greatest patrons of medieval Indian art.

And Vidya Dehya says that she would leave a mark rivaling the greatest patrons of global art, the Mughals of North India and the Medici's of Tuscany. That's the kind of scale of her artistic achievement. That's my line, Will, but I completely agree with it. I thought this was a video head year. Well, All right. Well done. It's a lovely line. I put it in my notes here very, very prominently. But it's true. She's a major patron, and we have a host of inscriptions on her temples and on these bronzes. And the bronzes are the thing that she really is associated with.

It isn't just that one sculpture that we have of her. it's during her period that the art form of the South Indian bronze, which has been around for a bit since Palova Times, reaches its great peak of achievement. To her credit, they're called the Chola bronzes. That's what you just, and that's thanks to her. And some of them, I think we ought to really explain why they are such a leap up in just the aesthetic,

because you've got the wild dancing god king, but you've also got sensuality in the gods who are making love to each other, who are very human. And so Shiva, shiva again, for those who don't know about Hinduism, is worshipped very much in the form of the Ling, which is, you know, it's a penis. It's the penis. You have the yonni in the penis. And it is fertility. And often he's depicted with the love of his life, Barathe. And there's a beautiful story. I think it might be your story of how actually sometimes in the evenings they take out, is it the hairpin from her hair? So if they make love that evening, is it. That's one of my books. It's your books. Okay. So we're all attributing everything to everyone, but it's such a beautiful story. So tell us it. that story because I think it's delightful. So a few years ago I wrote a book called Nine Lives and one of the people I profiled was the descendant of the very people who made the bronzes for Sembian Mahadevi. And this family still make bronzes in the same village on the banks of the carver. And the reason they're

on this particular place on the cavalry is that there's a bend in the river. And this means that the river, according to the hydraulics of the river, lays down a particularly fine silt at the bend. which is used in casting these bronzes so they can't move. They have to stay in this place and the same family have been sitting here for a thousand years making these beautiful...

Can I just read a little bit from my nine lines? Well yes, because you wrote it. You're allowed. I'm allowed to be it. I'm allowed to be it. Exquisitely poised and supple. These chola bronze deities

are some of the greatest works of art ever created in India. They sit quite silent on their plinths. Yet with their hands, they speak gently to their devotees through the noiseless, lingua franca of the mudras or gestures of South Indian dance. For their devotees, their hands are raised in blessing and reassurance,

promising boons and protection, and above all, marriage, fertility and fecundity, in return for the veneration which is so clearly theirs by divine right. In Western art, few sculptors, other than perhaps Donatello or Rodan, have achieved the pure essence of sensualities so spectacularly evoked by the Cholubes. or achieved such a sense of celebration of the divine beauty of the human body, there is a startling clarity and purity about the way the near naked bodies of the gods and saints are displayed. Yet by the simplest of devices, the sculptors highlight their spirit and powers, joys and pleasures and their enjoyment of each other's beauty.

Yeah, it's beautiful. But yours is also the story. It is you, of course it is, because I remember now where I read it. where at nights they take out the nose jewel from Barthi's nose so that when they do make love, it won't scratch the little shiver. Because these are envisaged as living gods. As living, breathing flesh and blood. And originally the point of the bronzes was that there were stone sculptures permanently

in the temples, which sat there, which didn't move. But if you needed to take the god out for a walk, if you had a festival, you had to have a portable version of the god. This was the bronze. It was then put in a temple cart. of these great carriages that you see outside the South Indian temples. And this is the background to this great image, the Nataraja, the king of the dance. There's one other wonderful poem, but I know I'm being indulgent.

I read one of these. These are translations by a wonderful woman called Indira Peterson. This is her translation of a poem about the Nataraj from the time of Sembian Mahadevi. The arch of his brow, the budding smile, on lips, red there's kvai fruit. cool matted hair, the milk-white ash on coral skin, on the sweet golden foot, raised in dance. If you could see these, then even human birth on this wide earth would become a thing worth having. It's a beautiful thing. I think we're going to have to leave it there, but can you come back, Anur, because what we need to do,

now we've established Sambian and her establishment of Shiva as this sort of the preeminent god in the south, and the image that she arguably creates is the preeminent. image of that God. Let's find out what the chole's do next with the power that is growing and the loyalty of the people that is growing around them. Till the next time we meet is goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye and see you soon from Anirud. Oh, that's exciting. That's what happened before. Goodbye for me, will you? It's very good.