How a dynasty in India created a cultural and economic superpower

This is 1000 CE – the heart of the Middle Ages.

Europe is on the move. The powerful nations we know today – such as Norman-ruled England and the fragmented territories that would become France – did not yet exist. Towering Gothic cathedrals are yet to rise. Apart from the distant and prosperous city of Constantinople, few major urban centers dominate the landscape.

But that same year, on the other side of the globe, a South Indian emperor was preparing to build the most colossal temple in the world.

Completed just 10 years later, it was 216 feet (66 m) tall, assembled from 130,000 tons of granite: second only to the Pyramids of Egypt in height. At its heart was a 12-foot-tall emblem of the Hindu god Shiva, encased in gold encrusted with rubies and pearls.

In the lamplit hall were 60 bronze sculptures adorned with thousands of pearls collected from the conquered island of Lanka. His treasuries contained several tons of gold and silver coins, as well as necklaces, precious stones, trumpets and drums plucked from defeated kings in the southern peninsula of India, making the emperor the richest man of the age.

He was called Raja-Raja, King of Kings, and belonged to one of the most amazing dynasties of the medieval world: the Cholas.

His family transformed the way the medieval world functioned – but they are largely unknown outside of India.

Before the 11th century, the Cholas were one of the many contending powers that dotted the Kaveri floodplain, the great body of silt that flows through the present-day Indian state of Tamil Nadu. But what sets the Cholas apart is their endless capacity for innovation. By the standards of the medieval world, the Chola queens were also remarkably prominent, serving as the public face of the dynasty.

Traveling to Tamil villages and restoring small, old mud-brick shrines in shining stone, the Chola's widow Sembian Mahadevi—Rajaraja's great-aunt—effectively “rebranded” the family as Shiva's foremost devotees, winning them a popular following.

Sembian prayed to Nataraja, a hitherto little-known form of the Hindu god Shiva as the King of Dance, and in all her temples he was prominently depicted. The trend caught on. Today Nataraja is one of the most recognizable symbols of Hinduism. But to the medieval Indian mind, Nataraja was really a Chola symbol.

Emperor Radraja Chola shared his great-aunt's taste for public relations and devotion—with one crucial difference.

Radrajaj was also a conqueror. In the 1990s, he led his armies over the Western Ghats, the range of hills that shelter India's western coast, and burned his enemies' ships while they were in port. Then, taking advantage of the internal turmoil on the island of Lanka, he established a Chola outpost there, becoming the first mainland Indian king to establish a permanent presence on the island. At last he invaded the rugged Deccan Plateau — from Germany to the Tamil coast of Italy — and claimed part of it for himself.

The spoils of conquest were scattered on his great imperial temple, known today as Brihadishvara.

In addition to its precious treasures, the great temple received 5,000 tons of rice a year from conquered territories throughout southern India (you'd need a fleet of twelve Airbus A380s to transport that much rice today).

This allowed Brihadishvara to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, a tool of the Chola state designed to channel Radraja's vast wealth into new irrigation systems, into the expansion of cultivation, into vast new herds of sheep and buffalo. Few countries in the world could imagine economic control on such a scale and depth.

The Cholas were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to inner Eurasia. Radraja Chola's successor, Rajendra, forged alliances with Tamil trading corporations: a partnership between merchants and state power that foreshadowed the East India Company—a powerful British trading corporation that later ruled large parts of India—that was to emerge more than 700 years later later on.

In 1026 Rajendra put his troops on merchant ships and sacked Kedah, a Malay city that dominated the world trade in valuable timber and spices.

While some Indian nationalists have declared this to be a Chola “conquest” or “colonization” of Southeast Asia, archeology suggests a stranger picture: the Cholas do not seem to have had their own navy, but beneath them a wave of diaspora Tamil traders spread across Bengal gulf

By the end of the 11th century, these traders were running independent ports in northern Sumatra. A century later, they were deep in present-day Myanmar and Thailand, working as tax collectors in Java.

In the 13th century, in Mongol-ruled China under the descendants of Kublai Khan, Tamil merchants ran a successful business in the port of Quanzhou and even erected a Shiva temple on the shores of the East China Sea. It is no coincidence that under the British Raj in the 19th century, Tamils ​​constituted the largest proportion of Indian administrators and workers in Southeast Asia.

Conquests and global connections turned Chola-ruled South India into a cultural and economic giant, the nexus of planetary trade networks.

Chola aristocrats invested the spoils of war in a wave of new temples that supplied fine goods from a truly global economy linking the farthest shores of Europe and Asia. The copper and tin for their bronze came from Egypt, perhaps even from Spain. Camphor and sandalwood for the gods were brought from Sumatra and Borneo.

Tamil temples became huge complexes and public spaces surrounded by markets and endowed with rice estates. In the Chola metropolitan region of the Kaveri, corresponding to the present-day city of Kumbakonam, a constellation of a dozen temple cities supported a population in the tens of thousands, probably surpassing most cities in Europe at the time.

These Chola cities were amazingly multicultural and multireligious: Chinese Buddhists mingled with Tunisian Jews, Bengali tantric masters traded with Lankan Muslims. Today, the state of Tamil Nadu is one of the most urbanized in India. Many of the towns in the state grew up around temples and markets of the Chola period.

These developments in urbanism and architecture were paralleled in art and literature.

The medieval Tamil metalwork produced for temples of the Chola period is perhaps the finest ever produced by human hands, the artists rivaling Michelangelo or Donatello for their appreciation of the human figure. To praise the Chola kings and worship the gods, Tamil poets developed ideas of sainthood, history, and even magical realism. The Chola period was what you would get if the Renaissance had happened in South India 300 years before its time.

It is no coincidence that Chola bronzes – especially Nataraja bronzes – can be found in most major Western museum collections. Scattered over the globe, they are the remnants of a period of brilliant political innovation, of maritime expeditions that connected the globe; of titanic sanctuaries and fabulous wealth; of traders, rulers and artists who shaped the planet we live in today.

Anirudh Kanisetty is an Indian writer and author, recently on Lords of Land and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire