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Chola state

art history (Dr B. R. Ambedkar University Delhi)

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The Cholas were a major political dynasty in South India in the early medieval period. Their rise to power can be traced
to the ninth century CE. The fall of the Pallavas created a power vacuum in the Tamil country, resulting in the rise of
the Cholas. The Chola state stood on a firm footing deriving sustenance from the resource-pocket located in the fertile
and rich area of the Kaveri valley. The characteristics of the early medieval period of the south Indian state is defined
differently by various scholars of distinct schools based on conceptual models. The debate’s major issues include the
degree of control (central authority versus local autonomy) and the various roles of religious institutions in the polity.

The important contributing models are that of the Imperial State model by K.N. Sastri, Marxist’s Indian Feudalism
Model of R. S. Sharma and the Segmentary State Model of Burton Stein. The Integrative State Model of B. D.
Chattopadhyaya is also one of the dominant models that have tried to determine the nature of the state in the early
medieval India.

The writings of pioneering scholars like Nilkantha Sastri marked a significant effort in bringing the dispersed
information from various sources together into a bigger historical narrative. He portrayed the chola monarchy as a
highly bureaucratized, centralised empire with a clear hierarchy that facilitated control even across the large and
diverse geographic area that was under the Cholas' reign.

The chola state was able to strike a balance between centralised bureaucracy and engaged local government, fostering
a strong feeling of civic duty and unprecedented levels of efficiency. Sastri was likewise ready to recognise Vijayanagar
as a chola state where the ruler was also the military commander in addition to being the king. Sastri does discuss the
divisions of the Nadu and the Nadus that make up Vallanadu, but he essentially returns to the point that all of these
territorial subdivisions were ultimately governed by the sort due to the strong centralization of power. Later, T.V.
Mahalingam and A. Appadorai continued along the same lines.

The second state model, Feudalism model , was developed by R.S. Sharma and his adherents, including D.N. Jha, B.N.S.
Yadav, and R.N. Nandi. It focuses on the production relationships within the fief and the decline of trade during the
mediaeval era. Sharma contends that the land concessions made to Brahmans, religious organisations, and
government officials, who were then given the legal and tax-free ownership rights, were a crucial factor in the
development of feudalism in India. Village community lands were invaded, and these inhabitants were gradually
subjugated to serfdom. A decline in urbanisation and trade contributed to and made this situation worse.

Politically, this growth was characterised by a persistent decentralisation and fragmentation process brought on by
the common practise of allocating areas to vassals and officials who later established themselves as autonomous
potentates. Socially, this time period was characterised by the emergence of new castes and the progressive decline
in the social and economic standing of Vaishyas and Shudras. The Kshatriyas and Brahmins gradually resembled the
feudal lords of Europe, while these two Varnas became indistinguishable from one another.

According to the Indian Feudalism Model, which D. C. Sirkar criticises, Brahmins in India carried out similar duties to
military officials in Europe but did so in a different way. Brahmins thus gave their monarchs legitimacy in
a number of ways.

The Segmentary State is an anthropological model developed by Southall. Burton Stein utilized this model to describe
the state formation under the Cholas and the Pallavas. Southall describes the Segmentary State as a state where the
spheres of ritual suzerainty and political sovereignty do not coincide. The former extends widely towards a flexible
changing periphery. The latter is confined to the central core domain. Stein divided into 3 zone- centre, intermediate
and peripheral.

In this theory, the king as having enjoyed only limited territorial sovereignty. The element of centrality existed only in
the core area even where the presence of semi-autonomous foci of administration was tolerated by the Cholas. He
had no political authority over the surrounding segments. The real foci of power are suggested to have been the
locality level centres or Nadus. He also denied the existence of a Chola standing army, arguing that military power was
distributed among various groups including peasants, merchants and artisans

Southall criticized the points of Stein’s denial of the king’s political authority over segments other than his own.
According to him, a king has political authority was combined with his ritual authority in the case of Hindu Kingdoms.
For e.g.the temple of Rajarajeshwara shows his own greatness and the unchallenged prestige of the state by building
this temple.

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It depicts the ritual sovereignty of the king over the whole country. Rajaraja granted to the temple state revenue
accruing from as many as 40 villages in Chola mandalam, the core area of the state and 16 villages in the conquered
area (Karnataka, Sri Lanka). It shows also well-developed bureaucracy for revenue collection. The various departments
called puravwari comprised various offices, functions and feature. They invoked the Siva cult by constructing temples
across the region

He view that the peasant society of the Cholas, which was presented as united structured one, on the primary bonds
being those of kingship and marriage, was in effect an extremely stratified society, vertically divided into numerous
segments. These segments created a highly pyramidal which encourage the series of relationships between the centre
and the peripheries. Each of these segments had a specialised administrative staff. It also had a large amount of
centres, and all the features of a dual sovereignty consisting of political as well as ritual sovereignty.

Stein distinguishes sharply between actual political control on one side and ritual sovereignty on the other. All the
centres of the segmentary state do exercise actual political control over their own parts or segmentary but only one
centre of extending ritual sovereignty beyond its own borders. Stein’s description of the early medieval south Indian
state as a peasant state is even more questionable and seems to represent an extreme reaction to the idea of highly
centralized monarch. The existence of corporate village organizations does not indicate that peasants exercised
political power at a high level.

Hermann Kulke has questioned Stein’s concept of ritual sovereignty. According to him, in a traditional society,
particularly in India, ritual sovereignty seems to be an integral part and sometimes even a pace maker of political
power. These inscriptions were documents of a systematic ritual policy which was as much a part of the general “power
policy” as for instance, economic or military policies.

Another model proposed by B.D. Chattopadhyaya was called the integrated polity model. In this model, he interprets
the early medieval period as a ‘period of state formation’ not disintegration. It means the transformation of pre-state
polities into state polities, thus the integration of local polities.

This integrative development was based on and accompanied by a series of processes like peasantization the
emergence and spatial extending of ruling lineages by processes called Kshatriyaisation; interspersing the dynastic
domain and its hinterlands with network of royally patronized religious institutions and land assignments to officials,
etc.. Moreover, state formation implies that there was an existence of resources capable of generating surplus.

Chattopadhyaya further argues that while land grants were important in country, they did not represent a complete
breakdown of imperial authority. He further argued that land-grants gave too much importance under the Indian
Feudalism model while other factors such as the frequent invasions and continuing authority of the kings had been
ignored.

According to Hermann Kulke, The multiplicity of local and regional power is the result of the extension of monarchical
state society into areas and communities tribal, non-monarchical polity.

Noboru Karashima and Kesavan Veluthat have attempted an alternative model for understanding the nature of the
Chola state. They have attempted a systematic application of the idea of feudalism to the socio-economic formation
in the early medieval period in south India and have called it a “Feudal State”. The research of Karashima indicates
that several titles in Chola inscriptions refer to administrative offices and that the Chola kings made certain attempts
to centralized their administration.

James Heitzman and Y. Subbarayalu preferred to call the Chola state an ‘Early State’. According to this model, the
Chola state was a centralised socio-political organisation, in a complex stratified and extremely unequal society, which
consisted of the rulers and the ruled. Heitzman says that royal political unification took place under the Cholas. The
Chola kings remained ritual leaders but aspired to be managers in the Arthashastra style.

Heitzman says that the success of royal integrative policies depended on local variables of geography. The most striking
feature of the Chola rule was the rapid decline of royal influence with increasing trend towards decentralized. James
Heitzman elaborates that the underlying dynamics of state formation rested on the ability of these agencies to give
direction to the aspirations of the village elite. Political and economic leadership, within a predominantly agrarian
economy, rested on the possession of land or came from control exercised over profits accruing from land. Heitzman

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the Chola polity was an ‘Early State’ since its agrarian base and the political power of its landed elite were at a rather
nascent stage of development. For Subbarayalu the chola state was was an evolutionary state that at a time being
was a centralized. For him, before 985 it was a formative state that was kind of suppressed by other political power of
the region ; from 985-1070 was the period of expansion when chiefdoms started disappearing and new officers came
in and the land holding class emerged ; then came the period of revival from 1070-1178. After reaching a point of
prosperity ,the state gradually started from 1178-1278. So according to him there’s no single way to characterise the
kind of polity that existed in chola state .The argument of Subbarayalu appears more accurate, and the Chola state
was integrated in the middle phase and it perhaps showed somewhat “segmentary nature” in the early
and later phases.

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