Restoring the Southern Sun

PM Modi’s invocation of the Cholas revives a legacy long buried by wilful ideological obfuscation in post-Independence India.

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before the grand granite walls of the 1000-year-old Gangaikonda Cholapuram, it symbolized a bold and conscious attempt to reposition India’s southern dynasties at the heart of a national civilisational narrative that has hitherto been ‘marginalised’ by the post-Independence politics of Tamil exceptionalism.

Modi’s speech extolled Rajaraja Chola’s administrative brilliance and Rajendra Chola I’s naval triumphs over Southeast Asia. “Long before Europe’s Magna Carta,” the Prime Minister observed, “elections were held in the Chola Empire.”

It was an implicit rebuke to the ideological currents that had, since the early 20th century, diminished the grandeur of South India’s classical past.

The Dravidian movement, forged in the heat of colonial identity politics and fermented by the vicious anti-Brahmin polemicists like E.V. Ramasamy ‘Periyar,’ did not merely contest caste hierarchies but more preciously, flattened Tamil history into a binary of oppression and victimhood. It cast Tamil antiquity not as a proud civilisational chapter but as a cautionary tale of Brahminical oppression. The movement, forged in the cauldron of anti-colonial and anti-upper-caste agitation, found political traction by dismantling symbols of Hindu antiquity, especially those linked to Sanskritic or Brahminical heritage. In that process, the astonishing achievements of the Pallavas, Pandyas, Cholas and Hoysalas were either wilfully ignored or distorted beyond recognition.

In this schema, temples were not architectural wonders but instruments of Brahmin tyranny and Sanskrit was foreign. The past, instead of a shared inheritance, became a source of grievance.

The Prime Minister’s speech challenged this ‘orthodoxy’ head-on. It was a rhetorical rearmament of the South’s civilisational legacy, wrapped in the BJP’s larger ambition to breach the electoral fortress of Tamil Nadu.

“The heights reached by these [Chola] emperors are a source of inspiration,” Modi declared, adding that “they provide a roadmap for a developed India.” The subtext of speech - reclaiming Tamil antiquity not as a regional outlier, but as a core pillar of the Indian civilisational state – was equally potent.

Few scholars have documented the illustrious legacy of the Cholas more meticulously than historian K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, whose magisterial The Cholas (1935) remains the definitive account of a dynasty not just in depth and clarity, but whose achievements were long buried beneath layers of sectarian polemic and ideological amnesia.

Sastri, steeped in epigraphy and classical Tamil literature, worked like a restorer of palimpsests, scraping away centuries of indifference and colonial distortion. He treated stone inscriptions not merely as historical detritus but as instruments of precision, with each copper plate and temple endowment acting as a datum point in his reconstruction of a golden age.

His command over sources such as the Leiden Grants and the Thiruvalangadu Plates allowed him to map with astonishing fidelity, the reach of Chola power which stretched from the Coromandel coast to the banks of the Irrawaddy, and as far afield as Srivijaya in modern-day Indonesia.

Unlike the reductionist frameworks later imposed by Marxist and Dravidian historiographers, Sastri presented a complex civilisation that defied binaries. The Chola kings were not merely temple-builders but also naval expansionists, fiscal innovators and patrons of international trade. In his view, Rajaraja and Rajendra were not static icons but statesmen who pioneered ideas of imperial sovereignty centuries before their European analogues.

Sastri challenged the British colonial historians’ dismissal of Indian polity as inherently despotic, pointing instead to the ur-models of participatory administration in Chola village assemblies - ur, sabai and Mahasabha - which managed irrigation, land tenure and local justice with astonishing sophistication, a point reflected in the Prime Minister’s speech.

Crucially, Sastri’s writing bore no trace of the ‘guilt’ or self-doubt that later crept into post-Independence historiography. He was unembarrassed by Indian greatness. In his sweeping A History of South India, first published in 1955, he placed the Pallavas, Pandyas and Hoysalas on a civilisational pedestal equal to that of their northern peers.

The Pallavas of Kanchipuram, he argued, initiated one of the most distinctive artistic revolutions in Indian architecture as seen in the monolithic marvels of Mahabalipuram and the structural elegance of the Kailasanatha temple. The Pandyas, with their deep links to Roman trade and flourishing Tamil literary courts, offered further proof of southern cosmopolitanism. The Hoysalas, often dismissed as local warlords, were shown by Sastri to be pioneers in temple aesthetics and jurisprudence, with their capitals at Belur and Halebidu producing a style unmatched in delicacy.

That such a corpus of scholarship was later marginalised in Tamil Nadu is no accident. Sastri’s empirical, pan-Indian framework clashed directly with the iconoclastic claims of the Dravidian movement, which painted South Indian history as one of unrelenting Brahminical oppression and northern hegemony. In that ideological schema, dynasties such as the Cholas became inconveniently ‘Sanskritised’ while scholars like Sastri were dismissed as ‘Brahmin apologists.’

E.V. Ramasamy, whose portrait still adorns government buildings in Tamil Nadu, spoke of Hinduism as a “Brahminical conspiracy” and called Lord Rama a “cheat.” His successors institutionalised this legacy with Tamil Nadu banning the display of Hindu deities in government offices and Sanskrit being jettisoned from education. This resulted in the steady decay of archaeological treasures of the South, often temple-based.

It is ironical that the towering vimanas of Gangaikondacholapuram and Darasuram have found more admirers in French and Japanese archaeologists than in Chennai’s policy circles.

The irony is even more saddening given these Hindu dynasties were anything but anti-intellectual or regressive. The Pallavas of Kanchipuram, under Mahendravarman and Narasimhavarman, were patrons of Sanskrit, Tamil and Prakrit. The Hoysalas of Karnataka, especially under Vishnuvardhana, produced enduring marvels at Belur and Halebidu that were nothing less than geometric poetry in stone blending Shaiva, Vaishnava and Jain motifs. The Pandyas presided over a vibrant trade network stretching from Arabia to Suvarnabhumi (modern Thailand).

Rajendra Chola I’s naval campaign, which subdued Srivijaya (in today’s Indonesia), secured the Malacca Strait, and established a temple and merchant base in Kedah would be the envy of any modern admiral. These maritime feats were not isolated acts of conquest but part of a broader strategy to protect Tamil merchant guilds, known as the Ainnurruvar, and ensure safe passage for Indian textiles and spices.

P.T. Srinivasa Iyengar, another giant of early 20th-century Tamil historiography, drew attention to the continuity of political ideas, temple patronage, and urban planning between successive dynasties in his classic History of the Tamils, observing that it was not just Northern India that nurtured Hindu civilisation but it was the South gave it vigour, flexibility, and resilience.

The BJP, long confined to the Hindi belt, sees in this legacy a narrative counterweight to both the colonial and Dravidian paradigms. In recent years, the Modi government has funded the restoration of South Indian temples, promoted classical Tamil abroad and encouraged NCERT textbook revisions to include Chola naval conquests and Pallava architecture.

The move obviously is not without electoral ambition. With the AIADMK in disarray and the DMK vulnerable to anti-incumbency, Tamil Nadu presents a tantalising, if still distant, prize.

But the stakes go beyond votes. 75 years since India became an independent republic, the question of civilisational continuity in form of what was lost, what is remembered and who gets to curate that memory, looms large.

Rehabilitating this past demands a conscious disavowal of the binaries imposed by British colonial and post-colonial Nehruvian Marxist ideologies of Aryan versus Dravidian, Brahmin versus non-Brahmin, temple versus science.

The Cholas and the Pallavas did not suffer from such hang-ups. They built observatories within temple complexes, mapped star charts, patronised both Shaiva monks and Buddhist missionaries, and composed verses in multiple tongues. They knew that greatness is not a regional artefact but a civilisational inheritance.

The battle to reclaim that inheritance is far from over. But with one speech at the foot of a Chola sanctum, PM Modi has pushed the needle. And the granite remembers.