Empire: World History - 290. Medieval India’s Alexander The Great: The Cholas (Part 2)

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Who was South India’s equivalent to Alexander The Great? How did the Chola dynasty conquer Southeast Asia? And what was life like for the enslaved “service women” in the Chola court? William and Anita are joined once again by Anirudh Kanisetti, author of Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire, to discuss Rajaraja I and the development 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. Hello and welcome to this very special empire where we are in person. We're together. We're all the same kind of sofa thing. It doesn't happen often. Doesn't happen often. Yeah, I know. He's the Britain-India.

I'm the Indian in Britain. I mean, that was the premise that we started this home. I'm here, I know, I know. And now I'm actually leaning, I've just noticed, I'm leaning on my Essex roots. Whenever anyone asks me, what's your good name and where are you from? I just say Essex, just to see what happens. The confusion that follows is something to behold. Our very special guest, though, again, we're very lucky.

We've got Anirot Ken Ceti, who's with us, who has been talking us through the Chola Empire. I love Sembian, who is this woman who you kind of teased us with, the Chola Queen, who puts them on the map. And you sort of tease this out that she creates something of brand Chola that didn't exist before. Tell us just a little bit more about how that happens. What I find so fascinating about the Cholas is that there are a thousand years away from us, but the way in which they rose and the way in which they fell has a lot to do with very modern ideas. And I think Sambian exemplifies the dynasty's successful development of a media strategy.

So Nata Raja, keep in mind, was the Shiva, the king of dance, was not. a god of the Kaveri floodplain. He was a god of the swamp a little further north. So he was essentially a blank canvas waiting to be picked up by a royal family and was associated with nobody else other than the Cholas. The next big step of Sambian's strategy was that while earlier Chola Queens only built one temple over the course of their lifetimes, Sambian built 12. And she chose these temples to be in places where people are sure to see them. So something like selecting where your billboard is going to be based on who the maximum number of people are. And these were massive blingy affairs.

We're not talking about little humble things. We're talking about a huge statement. Well, no. The one is blingier or later become. How important? 25, 30 feet tall.

It's the men who follow who build the big temples. She plants the seed. The men have got something to prove. Yeah, exactly. Thank you. And here and come again. So she's laying out the seeds

of this sort of propaganda for her family and the new god that her family has brought. And the idea that her family are the foremost devotees of Shiva. and therefore whatever they're doing to build their temples which very often involves appropriating village lands moreover to oppose the cholras is to oppose the god

is to raise god himself interesting you can really see a remarkable mind here this is a woman who has grown up in the shadow of these aristocratic women with all these ideas about aesthetics and what she does instead are these very no frills attached temples with the same standard template but the benefit of the standard template is that these are without question, Sembians temples. It's a media campaign. It's a total media campaign.

But Ali Rud, let's be honest about this. She's an amazing, an amazing woman, and we have this figure. But it is her great nephew, who is the superstar who really creates the Chola Empire. Raja Raja Chola, the king of kings. Raja Raja so good, they named him twice. Okay, yes. Tell us about Raja, then. Well, the interesting thing about Raja Raja, and about the rise of the...

empire to superstardom is that it wouldn't have happened if not for the financial base that Sambian sets up. She generates this goodwill and she sets up this self-reinforcing system where the Cholas are able to display their piety to local audiences and therefore get taxes and get local talent to join them. But what Raj Rajja does is that while Samian and her son, who was the actual king, would recruit the more, let's say, peaceable among the Tamil gentry, the folks who good at finance, the guys who are good with money and accounting. Rajaja recruited guys with a different kind of talent, the guys who had a talent for organized violence.

He's a boy's boy. Oh, right. Okay. So we're talking to sort of Thug Army. So he's much more of a man's man. The only surviving depiction we have of him, which is a spectacular mural in the Temple that he later builds. I've crawled into that little crevice to have a look at it.

It's quite difficult to light. But he's depicted as this bull of a man with the dusky, gold skin. these thick, central's lips and dark eyes. And a big hairdo piled up in a sort of beehive rather like a sort of B-52. A big thick hair bun, yeah. And he was a man's man. He grows up in the shadow of this dynasty that's, while it's becoming popular, it has become far less aggressive than it once was.

And it seems that he grows up with this yearning to be an adventurer. Now, what we see in the years that follow is extraordinary conquest. The Chola's burst out of the Carvery Delta to conquer not only the whole of South India, project their power into Southeast Asia, into Northern India. Is there some great military development that they master to overcome their enemies, or is it just that they've got more resources now and have bigger armies? Well, I think it's both. And one thing I really spend a lot of time doing this book is exploring how medieval Indian states worked,

because it's nothing like what we expect. Raj Raj, like his aunt, is compelled to indulge in a good PR strategy. But what he's able to do is break the limitations of Sambian system, because Sambian was constrained by how much tax revenue she could extract and in medieval times as a limit to how much you can do with agriculture. But what Raja Raja does is he's a conqueror. So a single successful campaign will give him the loot he needs to build dozens of temples. So I've heard him described as sort of India's Alexander the Great.

Do you think that's a fair? I think that is that is Adirut's own phrase. I think it's an accurate description of him because he comes to a throne of time of political turmoil. All the great empires, especially the great Deccan empires that used to lorded over the cholas are collapsing. And while Sambian was not willing to sanction campaigns, Raja Raja absolutely is. And you repeatedly see him go to war occasionally with reverses. But he keeps going back to the battlefield. He's a man of endless determination and tenacity for conquest.

So take us through those conquests. In the 1990s, the first big campaign is over the western ghats and into the harbours of Kerala. burning the ships as they're sitting in the harbour, rather like sort of the Israelis bombing the Egyptian Air Force even before the six-day war begins. It's a kind of preemptive strike. Absolutely. And I think that Rajja Raja had an audience in mind for this. I think that you can already see during Sambian's reign that Tamil merchants are getting more and more interest in the Cholas. You see them picking up the idea of the Nata Raja on the temple wall and incorporating that into their own temple renovations. And soon after Raja Raja comes to the throne

and does a spectacular act where he burns their rivals ships. The Tamil merchants all of a sudden are now closely associated with Chola army regiments. Your interpretation is that this is done to win over the 500, this very, very rich guild which forms such an important part of the story. Because they need ships, they need transport. And if you're the people who are looking after the ships from the pirates, then you're the one who's going to get the punch nature. But moreover, you need the money of these very rich guilds and you're winning over the merchant

class. But previously you've just been talking to the peasants and getting. the taxes on the land, now you're getting the real money out of the merchants. And getting them on side. And getting the real merchants to worship the swamp god. You know, if that's the insignia that makes you feel safe, the dancing Nataraja, it is like wearing a uniform. I'm with him.

I'm with the Cholos. In most of the sources from the late 10th, early 11th century, the answer has been staring us in the face. We've always wondered how Chola expansion happened. But there's this very clear indication from the Chulavamsa, which is a Buddhist chronicle, written in Sri Lanka. And it says that Rajajaja knew what the right time to invade the island was

because a horse trader told him. Right. It says that. It says that. They knew why they were invaded. It was a Tamil-speaking horse trader who tips him off. Anuradapura was in chaos

and then went and told Rajraja and then... So just to clarify. So in Sri Lanka, there's an interregnum that king has died. A horse trader makes it all the way to Tangor. We can imagine him on his horseback, charging down the road to Tangio along the river.

and he comes into the court and he says now is the time to act Rajaj Raja and it was the perfect time for him to come with his news because Raja Raja had just tried to attack South Karnataka up in the deck in this great rival of his and was defeated and he was hungering for a fight he wanted to conquer. But Anirud, in your telling of the tale,

it's then the actual merchant guilds that provide the shipping to get him to Sera Laka. Now, this is something that's got you in some trouble with Indian nationalists who like to imagine that Raja Raja Raja Chola had a sort of great big navy like sort of, you know, the British at the time of Trafalgar.

Why do you think that's a mistaken notion? Well, medieval Tamil love documenting things. They loved writing on temples. And we have dozens and dozens of descriptions where Chola army regiments. Keep in mind, this impulse to organize things collectively extends right down to the way the armies work. You have regiments that take charge of particular temples and make temple gifts. And they give themselves names. And they give themselves names.

They have the Karnataka strong heads. Sounds like a football team. Juventus versus the Canaticus strongness. You can imagine that their team spirit would have been very similar. You know, you go back to the fields, but then you get together the boys once the planting is done, and then you go to war under the big boss's banner. And you have so many inscriptions of army regiments, army officers, military, like infantry generals, making gifts to temples, but maybe one or two that might vaguely refer to somebody associated with chips.

Because you do in the early Buddhist pyramid, which I've studied, You get these Mahanavikas who leave inscriptions. They're not there in the same way. There's no sign of them in the Chola inscriptions. Even in Nagabat, in the great Chola port, you have mentions of merchants who are making gifts, but there's nobody who seems to bear the title of a member of a standing Chola. So in your telling of the story,

not only do the merchants tip off Raja Raja Chola about this is the moment to invade, they even provide the shipping to get him there, rather like the merchants of Venice, I suppose, in the Fourth Crusade. And they profit tremendously. right after the conquest of Lanka, you have merchant inscriptions showing up on the northern shore of the island and the northern shore is also where pearl fisheries are.

For those who don't know what they are, it literally is what it sounds like. You have people diving voices, picking up pearls on some of the finest pearls in the world, which are then exported to the world. And right after that, you begin to see, for the first time, these spectacular gifts of tens of thousands of pearls

woven into necklaces, like you can imagine they're going to what a foot thick being gifted to the, idols that Roger is given to various temples. Right, right, right. In some accounts of medieval India, there's very much this image that India was this

peaceful Eden until the arrival of the Muslims who in a sense sort of inject warfare into the system. But the image you paint in this book is one of warring kingdoms who are constantly attacking each other. And the Chola conquest of Sri Lanka in your understanding, and you provide contemporary chronicle evidence for this

is an extremely violent affair involving the sacking of temples and the stealing of gems and bringing all the money and all the loot back to Tanjua. I mean are there accounts of massacres of civilians and those who aren't, I mean, or is it only death in warfare? What do we know about the

questions? Well, I would say that to the Indian nationalists that they should read the primary sources that they're basing their sentiments on because the Cholas are absolutely unapologetic about conquest and I don't mean to pass a moral judgment on this. This was the way that medieval polities worked. In fact, the Cholas

considered themselves descendants of the sun. So in their inscriptions, they are portrayed as smiting their enemies with heat. Syria, the sun god, they're descended from him, is what they think. Yes, very distantly. They claim to defeat their enemies in hot battle, to incinerate their cities effortlessly, almost as if it's a matter of play.

But only on the battlefield, I don't know. The thing that the Mughals are, by today's standards, they are often criticised by, is that you know, the barbarism towards civilian population women, children, old men who weren't doing any fighting. Do we know what the Cholos were like? We have Chalukia inscriptions and other of their neighbors who are being invaded by the Cholas, specifically accusing them of raping Brahmin women.

So that is the evidence. And to the nationalists who say that, look, this is their enemies accusing them of this. There are Chola court texts that talk about as the army's advance, gardens being incinerated, rivers dried up by heat. And village is fleeing in tells. and hiding in the forests. And it's baffling to expect that a medieval polity that doesn't have telegraphs or regular standing armies

that are well-trained to a martial court, it would be baffling to expect that these armies would somehow... That the red mist would suddenly clear for this kind of... Why would the boys be disciplined? Williams touched on this, but it is almost... climate is almost dangerous to say this about the churlus, that the churlus were anything other than these sort of golden gem and pearl bandlier wearing heroes

who pushed, you know, the Hinduism, the noble Hindu, and the glorious period of Hindu expansion, can we go as far as to say it's actually dangerous? The kind of stuff that you're showing people from the historical record can get you into some hot water. There's obviously loud mouths on Twitter always, but I don't think they represent the mainstream of Indian readers. I think that most Indian readers are open to arguments

if it's well presented and if there's evidence for what being argued. Yeah, sure, sure. I mean, do you, do you, for people who don't read your Twitter feed, are people as angry as all that at you saying? you can't even say this about the Cholos. You can't say there were anything other than noble, peaceable and conquering. We should say clearly here that Allerud is one of the best-selling young authors in India, that his work is extremely popular.

So it isn't as if you're sufficiently upsetting people that they're not buying your books and great quantities. They're buying books. And I don't doubt it for a second. That's why you're on the pod because you're so fabulously important. But I'm talking about the feebrile atmosphere in India at the moment. There are those who are definitely upset. Yeah, and I think it depends on where in India and which constituency you're talking about, because a book deal that we were talking about with a Tamil publisher wanted to do an edition of Lords of Earth and Sea fell through because they are worried about offending readers potentially.

So Sri Lanka is looted according to the Mahavamsa, is it? The Chulavamsa, which is the continuation of the Mahavamsa, which is this great Sri Lankan chronicle, which gives us everything we really know about ancient Sri Lankan history. the temples arrayed, the eyes of the idols and gems, the gold of the statues which had been melted down, are brought back to Tangor, where they finance the building of one of the very greatest temples ever built in India. After the break, we're going to ask Anirud Kanesetti about the building of the great temple of Tangor. Welcome back. Well, Anirud, tell us about this extraordinary temple at Tangor, which Raja Raja Chola builds with the loot of his. his conquest. You write, I think, that it's 216 feet whole, assembled of 130,000 tons of

granite, and it's second only to Egypt's pyramids in height at this time. Here's the thing about Raja Raja is that while most medieval Indian kings would be happy to go and levy tribute from a puppet ruler, Raja Raja seems to have this idea from the very beginning that the political conditions exist for him to create an empire. So he's interested in creating institutions. He's interested in extracting resources in a long-term manner and funneling them into this grand imperial project that will symbolically and cosmically declare him to be Rajaja, king of kings.

And the project that he settles upon is this colossal temple 40 times larger than anything that had ever been built. 40 times larger than anything that Sambian Mahadevi built. But with this completely innovative architectural style that draws on Tamil precedence, but also brings in ideas from the Telugu coast, up further north, which he had conquered about a decade prior. And it's very clearly conceived as this imperial edifice, because if you have to look at its inscriptions,

not only does Rajaraja Raja make quite a song and dance about his conquests, but he also talks about the stuff. of the temple and the staff are very deliberately handpicked from different parts of the empire. Oh, that's clever. Again, that's brand building and you all have a role here. That's messaging, very clear messaging. It's also resources from across the empire. So rice from particular regions, pearls from particular regions, but all the capital that's concentrating the temple is also very interestingly redirected and reinvested. So for example, we know that Raji Raja owned thousands of sheep. It was just something that he owned.

And what he does with these thousands of sheep is that he invests them in the hinterland, in the drier regions, with the idea being that these sheep he's looted from elsewhere, will create new herds from which he can continue to draw ghee and oil for the temple. When I visit Chola territory today, you're often confronted with lots of vegetarian restaurants, the famous, gorgeous Tali restaurants of Tangor and thereabouts. Was Raja Raja Chola a veggie? Or would he have eaten these sheep? It's difficult to say because the inscriptions all focus on the offerings to the temple,

which had to be vegetarian, of course. Well, I don't think that a martial man who's going out there conquering and raiding has a luxury of choosing what he eats. I think that he needs a protein-rich diet and if he gets that from sheep and so be. And if it's lamb, mutton fry, whatever it is. Peppery lamb-fried. Well, he's not going to need the jumpers, is he, in that kind of climate. So something would be useful.

But when you go there today, even now, even in the 21st century, the temple rises up among the flat floodplains of the Carberry, just like when you drive through Northern France, you see Chart Cathedral in the distance with that great Gothic spire rising, still dominating the whole landscape. And at the top of that great spire, there is this enormous single, is it a single stone? Or is it an enormous finial, isn't it?

Well, according to legend, it's a single stone. But if you go up and see it's actually eight massive blocks. that have been joined it together. In a sort of jigsaw puzzle. Yeah. And you destroy the lovely idea, which I've always grown up with, an enormous ramp was built. I thought that the finial got there by being sort of like the pyramids with ramps being

hauled up by oxen and so on. You say that's a total myth. It's cranes. It doesn't make sense from an engineering point of view. So it must have been elephant-powered cranes, which is an even order idea to think about. I'll go with that. So we're now going to move on from the great Rajah Raja Chola to his son, who's even more sort of military-minded and an even more ambitious

conqueror. Tell us about Regendra Chola. What I really enjoyed doing this book is because of the density of the inscriptions that these people left behind, it's possible for us to guess at their personalities. Like, we have a fairly good chance of who Sambian was, who Raja Raja was. But Rajendra is a little more of a complex character because being a martial man, he's lionized by Hindu nationalist today, but he grows up in a court that has suddenly gone from being a minor part to one of the dominant powers of subcontinent. And his father, Rajra, makes no secret of this in his inscriptions. A lot of women were captured in their raids.

And this fundamentally changed the balance of power in the Chola court, where while Rajja Raja had been practically raised by powerful women, Rajendra isn't. He grows up in a court where he's surrounded by martial men, and men. And women are enslaved and captured. So it's a different, completely different dynamic. Just to be completely clear about this, they're often referred to rather discreetly in modern Indian history books as the service women. What were their lives involving in reality? Well, a lot of service.

It takes a lot of work to run a palace. It takes constant cooking and cleaning and garland making. The king also needed to be bared ceremonially. So you're talking about slavery. Let's just call it what it is. It is slavery. That's all it is. It is slavery. And these women are forced to do what slaves all over the world have been doing since the beginning of time.

They're captured. They're forced into servitude. It's slavery. These are enslaved women who are forced to do the work that aristocrats don't want to do. Are they sex slaves as well as doing the washing and making garments? I think sex slaves, it sounds vicarious. Yes, these women did face sexual assault. There's no question about that. A lot of inscriptions talk about their children, but almost no inscriptions talk about their husbands or their husbands. fathers. So these are women who, by the patriarchal standards of the time, are considered to be uprooted. But that doesn't strip them entirely of their agency, because to your point,

Anita, about these women being slaves, these aren't slaves in the Western conception of them. These are women who still have ties to other more powerful women. These are women who still have some form of wealth. I'm not sure if they got salaries or if their employers gave them gifts, but these are women who also become temple patrons. So we know about them from their description. So their names are on temples saying so-and-so from so-and-so built or gave money for this temple. So-and-so of such-and-such service retin, attached to such-and-such-and-such-and-such-and-such-and-such-and-such-and-such-and-such-other service woman is making this gift. You say such-and-such-sservice retinue. Are they organized in sort of regiments? They're organized in retinues and regiments, and these also have names.

So we know of the Rajaraja Select Pandya Service Retinue of the Sacred Bath. Oh, my God, that's catchy. They've given up on the branding. Branding is now a thing of the past, doesn't it? Right, okay. Of the sacred. And they have to give the bath to the kick. These are not simply barbaric conquerors.

These are sophisticated people with ideas of symbolism and of cosmological significance. To be a conqueror meant to be able to seize wealth. And you're not only taking your enemy's elephants and gold, but you're also taking his women, which is a part of the wealth. You're also absorbing his martial luster. There's this very interesting line in. Rajaraja's inscriptions, which his son continues, where they talk about being so resplendent, having deprived the Pandyas, their enemies of their splendor, they have become so resplendent

that they are worthy to be worshipped everywhere. So there is this idea that as descendants of the sun, glowing with this, with wealth and jewels and women that have been secured from defeated enemies, that they are in a way semi-divine. They are the companions of the gods and the temples. And the conquests continue. And the famous conquest after which he names himself and indeed the new town and the new temple that he builds to rival his father, he does this massive campaign northwards to the river Ganges. Tell us about this. Once again, it comes from this unrivaled Chola ability to imagine, to think of new frontiers. We do have these vague legends and claims that such and such ancient king carved his name on

the Himalia and whatnot. But realistically speaking, there was no way that a medieval Tamil army could have reached all the way to the Gangesatic planes. But in Rajendra's case, it's a lot more feasible because of the alliance with the merchants. It seems that the Chola connection to the 500 merchant corporation gives their forces a speed and a range that their rivals simply could not comprehend. And in your telling of the story, they're going up the coast. So they're being supplied by the 500 merchants in ships operating out of Nagaputnam and Mambalipur. An army of tens of thousands isn't going to subsist on air. They need to be fed. And where would the food have come from? A part of it must have come from looting because you have plenty of claims from Rajendra himself of the

towns that fell to his banner. But more likely, Tamil merchants were following in fleets of ships along the coast. And after conquering the Ganges, as you said, which you think could even mean projecting his power into modern Bangladesh. There's some claims that he burnt Sompura Mahavihara, one of the last great Buddhist sites. So what Rajendra does is that he doesn't actually manage to get all that far, but his army sends us political shockwave into the region because the Bengali didn't expect them to be coming. You quickly have a collapse of the ancient Pala kingdom and all these mercenaries who went up north with the Chola set up their own little kingdoms in the ruins. And all these guys is believed to have burned the greatest of the Buddhist ones. And we mentioned in the last episode your great heroes, the rastrakutas who build the great temple of Alura,

The Cholas at this point, under a gendered chola, smash rastricotas, and rather like the Romans reducing Carthage and ploughing salt into the fields of Carthage, so that Carthage will never rise again. And to this day, archaeologists are finding that Carthage, nothing survives of Hannibal's Carthage. Your guys, the rastricotas, who are based in Maniaketa, suffer the full wrath of the Cholars. And Maniqeta is destroyed so thoroughly that we're not even quite sure where it is today. So they've got to the Ganges, they've possibly reached as far as Bengal, they've got the capital of the Rastrakutism reduced it to ashes. And now in the most ambitious of all their projects, there is a inscription on the Great Temple in Tangor, which claims that Regendra Chola invades Southeast Asia. And there's this great, I'll read a tiny fragment of it. There's this long list of port cities that he destroyed.

Pane with waters lapping against its landing gats, ancient Malayur with a strong mountain for its rampart, great Yirdrodingum surrounded by a deep sea as a moat, Lankar Sokum that is undaunted in fierce battles, great Pupolam having abundant high waters as a defence, Tuckalum, praised by men versed in the sciences, great Tamalingam, firm in great and fierce battles. So Regenda Cholu is claiming, apparently in this inscription that he's taken his ships and off he's gone to Southeast Asia and basically reduced Malaysia, the Malacca states, bits of Thailand, and that whole region to his footprint. And this is echoed today. Tamil nationalist will claim that this was part of a Chola empire that extends as far as Singapore. What's your reading of this? How do we read this inscription?

I think what we look at an inscription like this, the first thing we have to ask ourselves is who was intended to read it. Rajendra Chola was not writing it for Hindu nationalists. He was writing it for people who had some idea of what the world looked like and who may have vaguely heard the names of these towns that he's mentioned. But if you're to read the rest of the inscription will, the only thing that he actually details, the only conquest that he actually details, is of Kedda, which is a port city that used to control the entrance to the Malacca Strait, one of the great cosmopolitan emporia of the Indian Ocean. And he claims to have captured the last of the Scylindra kings who lived there. He captured the last king, and he says he captured the gate as well. Now, these were the only two hard bits of physical evidence that somebody sitting in Tamil Nad would have been able to see as proof of Rajendra's conquest. And I don't think it's a coincidence he focuses on them.

There is a few other little hints, aren't they, that this has happened. There are towns renamed Conqueror of Malaysia and so on. They're good at branding, but branding doesn't always have to be based on truth, if you ask you. The strongest suggestion we have that the Chola has maintained a political presence on the other side of the coast. is that some of their princes bear the title of Kadaram Konda, which means the Caesar of Kedar. But the Cholas also have princes who bear the title of ruler of Ayodhya. Oh, really? And they're nowhere near. The thing is that I feel like the emphasis on taking these political claims literally today

is that we miss out on a much more interesting story that archaeology tells us. And what the archaeology suggests is that while there's no evidence of a Chola commissioned inscription in anywhere in Southeast Asia, there's merchant settlements. on both shores of Sumatra, both east and west, you have autonomous Tamil merchant settlements that appear right in the aftermath of the Chola conquest. Right. And in the highlands that separate these two ports,

the Karo people who are an upland people who live in Sumatra, have 200 Tamil loanwords in their vocabulary. So look, this is amazing. It's completely feasible because this is a slipstream of the 500. It's where the traders would have gone. And on that slip stream, if there's a deal between the... the 500 and the Chola Empire, why wouldn't they go and put these little settlements in? And we've seen that even in the 16th century and the 17th century, the English state,

by this stage of Renaissance court, the Tudors, it's a fully developed state, they're not doing their colonialism themselves, they're renting it out to the Hudson Bay Company, the Virginia company, the Honourable Society of Ireland. Absolutely right. And so empire is kind of sublet to merchant. groups and your suggestion is that this is the case in the Cholabian. I think that's what the evidence points us toward. It's so, so interesting.

We are running out of time. Can we very briefly talk about the demise of the Cholta Empire? Because it does feel as if, you know, they're growing and growing and growing and nothing's going to stop them now. But it is something as prosaic and boring as tax evasion that does for them in the end. It's nom doms. Just very briefly. Tell us how, you know, not with a, not with a bang, but with a kind of a whisper. So this sort of goes out.

There's so much about the Cholas that is simply not talked about or talked about too much because of nationalist sentiment. The overseas conquers being a great example because here's a much more interesting story that we can't admit to ourselves because we have a political incentive to believe in something else entirely. And I think that similarly in India today, we have this reluctance to talk about the fall of Indian empires because we love talking about their rise because it makes us feel strong and manly and confident. but I find that the decline of empires is far more interesting. We live in a world that is shed by the decline of the British Raj. You would not be able to understand this time of incredible global connectivity and churn if you didn't talk about the end of an empire. The fall of the Cholas unleashes these powerful social forces.

Once again, these great assemblies rise to take command of the situation. And you see tremendous innovations in temple religion. All the great complexes that you see in South India today with the multiple courtyards, these are all products of the fall of the Chola Empire, not of their rice. But what do they fall because they're just not getting the money in? They've overextended. I mean, literally. Spending too much on temples.

They've overextended. Money's not coming in. People aren't paying their dues. And so it just goes, well, something like that. Essentially what happens is that to fight all these wars, they need to, at some point, the young chaps from the rice fields aren't enough. You need to have armies in the field at all time. So you start to hire hunter-gatherers from the hills who aren't connected to harvest cycles

and can be in the field at all times. But very quickly what this means is that you have essentially foreign mercenaries who command the entire Chola military structure. And in order to maintain its enormous gifts, the Cholas raise taxes on the villages, which drives villages into bankruptcy. And the only people who have money left to buy up these lands are the hunter-gadders from the hills.

So these guys essentially set themselves up as little kings. And because they know that the Cholas will not tax temples, They gift all the lands that they've bought two temples. It's a brilliant tax don't. It's a little loophole. That's hilarious. Oh, God, that's so funny. But we should say before we consign the Cholas to the scrap heap of history,

that their achievements not only in India, the landscape that you see in South India, is marked by these astonishing great big Chola temples. But it's not just in India. You write in your book about this extraordinary Chola. temple in Guangzhou in China. Tell us about this. Well, here's the thing. It's not really a Chola temple because for this one temple outside of India, we have an inscription telling us exactly who made it. And it was a merchant. It was a merchant of the 500 corporation who built it in the 13th century.

And he requested permission from a Mongol Khan to build it. So you have this very interesting situation where if you look at Raja Raja's great temple, it's called Raja-Raja-Ishvram, you know, the lord of Rajraja. This temple that they built on the shore of the East China Sea is called the temple of the Holy Khan, Khan Ishwaram. Oh, so he, oh really? So it's an alliance with the Khan. Yes, it seems that the Mongol Khan gave them permission to set up shop in Chuan Zhao

and they built this magnificent Tamil-style temple. In terms of its structural elements, it is a Tamil temple. But what's so interesting about it is that all the artisans were Chinese. And so they depict the gods with Chinese faces. You see the famous story of Vishnu rescuing the elephant from the crocodile, but the crocodile is standing in a pool that's depicted with these swirling Taoist-style clouds. Oh, that's brilliant. And it's this extraordinary relic of medieval globalization,

and the tremendous forces that Cholas unleashed. I mean, you say tremendous globalization. I would say what Semyon would have said, this is brand dilution. This is a complete confusion of messaging. And that's why, the beginning of the end, it's been an absolute delight talking to you. Can I just remind everyone the fabulous,

book. Lords of Earth and Sea by Anurit Kensetti, we're going to put a link to it to it on our newsletter. But it's been so nice and it's so nice to do it in person as well. Thank you so much for being with it. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Absolutely. And can I say the last time you threw in your goodbye at the last one? Normally people don't do that, but I insist you do it again. Because it was so cute. So this is how we normally do it. And so it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnondon. Pause and goodbye from me, William Drimple. But not enough. Pause and goodbye. And goodbye. for me, Annoog Canisetti. See you.

Yay!