290. Medieval India’s Alexander The Great: The Cholas (Part 2)

Welcome to this very special empire where we are in person, we're together, we're on the same kind of sofa thing. It doesn't happen often. It doesn't happen often. Yeah, I know, he's the he's the Briton India. I'm the Indian in Britain. I mean that was the 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 where what's your good name or 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 I know Ken Setti 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 they're 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 Sembyan exemplifies the dynasty's successful development of a media strategy. So Nataraja, keep in mind, was the the Shiva, the king of dance. was not a god of the Caveri floodplain. He was a god of the swamp a little further north. So he was essential 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 Sembian's strategy was that while earli queens only built one temple over the course of their lifetimes, Sembian built twelve. And she chose these temples to be in places where people were 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 sort of little humble things. We're talking about huge statements.

twenty five, thirty feet tall. It's the men who follow who build the big books. She plants this. And the new God that her family has brought. Right. Whatever they're doing to build their temples, it very often involves appropriating village lands. The cholas is to oppose the goal. 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.

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