Since last week, much ink has been spilled on the Sengol, which quite a few online sources describe as a “Chola-era” sceptre. I will not address why a royal sceptre—explicitly linked to rule by divine appointment and aristocratic descent—was selected as the symbol of Parliament, a temple of democracy. What is interesting is the claim that it is “Chola”—a medieval dynasty that I find utterly fascinating and is undergoing a rediscovery-cum-rewriting by India’s political right.
The general consensus seems to be that the sceptre was commissioned by the pontiffs of Thiruvaduthurai in 1947, nearly 700 years after the collapse of the Cholas. Why call it Chola, and not Nayaka or Thanjavur Maratha? During the reign of these early modern rulers in the 17th and 18th centuries, we have much more extensive mentions of Sengols. But then, if the Sengol was made in 1947, why not simply call it what it is—a modern artefact?
The answer comes down to the way we imagine history, and what we think we have inherited from it. In an interview, Bharatnatyam dancer Padma Subrahmanyam—who had a role to play in the recent rediscovery of the Sengol—mentioned that “the South has been more fortunate to preserve its heritage and traditions.” The idea that the Cholas represent some primordial past that has been preserved in South India is widely held. But what does it really mean?
Reinventing Bharatnatyam
Let’s take dance as an example, simply because it is one of the few South Indian phenomena that has actually been studied deeply over time. Devadasis or devaratiyals, the temple women in the Chola period, were generally local landladies. And there is little evidence that they were specifically dancers (Leslie Orr’s Donors, Devotees, Daughters of God, 2000). A new phenomenon emerged in the Nayaka/Thanjavur Maratha period of the 18th century when devadasis were influential and cultured courtesans who developed a dance form (Velcheru Narayana Rao’s Symbols of Substance.) This was reinvented and claimed by Anglophone Tamil middle classes in the 20th century and has come down to us as “traditional” Bharatanatyam (Davesh Soneji’s Unfinished Gestures, 2019).
Which one of these is Bharatanatyam’s “true” history? In claiming that today’s Bharatanatyam is the true inheritor of an “ancient” tradition, we are ignoring how various forms of dance, and the sociocultural activities around them, developed over time. Is all that not our history as well? From an objective standpoint, it is really strange that one state of affairs is imagined as “true” history and others are not. The Chola period was itself an innovative time, quite distinct from those that came before. We might as well return to the Iron Age and go back to building megaliths. But even that came with its own innovations, and so on, and so on. There is no “original” history anywhere.
Also read: Chola period wasn’t golden age of Tamils. Modern obsession with their glory is misplaced
Chola appropriations, past to present
The resurgence of the Cholas in political memory is especially strange, given that most of the successors of the dynasty rarely mention them. When the armies of the Vijayanagara empire arrived in Tamil Nadu in the 14th century, they looked to the Pandyas—rivals of the Cholas—for legitimacy. Even after the fall of Vijayanagara, the Cholas were only vaguely referred to by local rulers, who had generally claimed authority as successors of Vijayanagara rather than the Cholas. Only one exceptionally erudite ruler—the Thanjavur Maratha Serfoji II—claimed the title of “Chola king” in the 18th and 19th centuries (Lennart Bes, The Heirs of Vijayanagara, 2022).
In the 20th century, the Cholas were rediscovered and reimagined as unparalleled conquerors and devotees, and as exemplary Tamil nationalist heroes. This is not the way that they had been seen before. But given the psychological world that accompanied colonialism, Partition, Independence, and debates about Hindi imposition, it is understandable. Yet, public conversations about the Cholas have not substantially changed in the decades since, even though they have received excellent academic attention. Instead, the Cholas are now Hindu nationalist heroes, not just Tamil nationalist heroes.
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) supremo Mohan Bhagwat had this to say on the Cholas, specifically the conqueror Rajendra I, in 2015: “He established a model of good governance in Bharat and had promulgated in Southeast Asia the benevolent influence of the eternal Bharatiya culture.” The BJP is keen to link itself with this image. But to what extent is this image based on historical facts?
On the question of “good governance”, decades of historical research has shown that the Chola state was in no way comparable to a modern one. The scale and penetration of the modern Indian state were unimaginable to a medieval state, which generally resembled an agglomeration of small and allied political bubbles. Professors Y Subbarayalu (South India Under the Cholas, 2012), Noboru Karashima (South Indian Society in Transition, 2009), Whitney Cox (Politics, Kingship and Poetry, 2016) and George Spencer (The Politics of Expansion, 1983) have pointed out that the Chola state under Rajendra I was militarised to an unprecedented extent. It needed conquests to maintain itself, to impose its authority into allied political bubbles, and to undertake its spectacular feats of engineering and logistics. When it ran out of manpower, as most conquest states do, it became a smaller regional entity—once again a collection of political bubbles. It was only for about 90 years—less than a third of its total history—that the Chola state was on the offensive. The history of how the Cholas attempted to centralise a multi-centric land, and how they achieved what they did despite such multi-centricity, is much more interesting than the vague claim of “good governance”.
Next, the historical evidence for Bhagwat’s Southeast Asia claim is just one inscription left by Rajendra I (South Indian Inscriptions XXII, No. 20). As an archaeologist told me rather drily at a conference in February: “We take inscriptions far too seriously.” There is little to no evidence of lasting Chola control in Southeast Asia, aside from a few lines in one inscription. It is much more likely that the Chola attack was a limited raid. But facts and evidence do not matter in our modern memory of the Cholas. We see the past through a politics of emotion, a politics of “returning to our roots” while dismissing inconvenient histories and misremembering the ones we claim to respect.
It is strange that, since 2014, there has been such persistent complaining that the Cholas are not talked about. They absolutely are, but mostly through complaints that they aren’t talked about, or the same inane lines about their “heroic conquests”. Specifics never seem to enter the picture, for they are not as politically useful as vague emotions. If we really want history to be remembered as it was, it’s time for something more than grand and symbolic gestures. Until then, it is clear what the whole Sengol furore is really about: calculated politics, rather than an homage to the past.
Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. Views are personal.
This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)