Why PM Modi's Visit To Gangaikonda Cholapuram Irks Dravidian Exclusivists

News18

4 days ago

Because the Shiva temple and lost city are a testament to the greatest southern emperor Rajendra Chola's reverence for the sacred northern river Ganga
Before Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the Brihadeeswarar temple at Gangaikonda Cholapuram last weekend, how many Indians knew about its existence? How many clever ones thought he had visited the one in Thanjavur (with the same name) and just got his geography mixed up? How many know/knew that Emperor Rajendra Chola had conquered territories northwards right up to the Ganga and built a temple and capital to commemorate it?
Cheerleaders of the cynical ideological campaign to assert that north and south India have no common cultural and religious beliefs and were only artificially united by the Mughals and then the British would want ignorance to prevail. They would want more people to believe that there was no 'India" before the British—or at least not before the Mughals. Modi's visit there, however, has turned the spotlight on some facts that bust that long-standing divisive narrative.
Gangaikonda Cholapuram, even though it is now just a nondescript town in Tamil Nadu with one majestic temple jutting out into the sky, is a testament to the importance of Ganga—a sacred north Indian river and deity—even in Dravidian south India. The current dispensation in Tamil Nadu will also not be pleased by Modi focussing attention on a place and a king whose reverence for a northern Indian entity bespeaks a cultural confluence contrary to its political stance.
But while it was there, it was magnificent. There are references in Tamil literature of multistoried palaces, grand gateways, avenues, and even highways named after Rajaraja and Rajendra Chola connecting the city with other parts of the kingdom. And every Chola ruler thereafter was crowned there, even if he decided to rule from elsewhere for some time. And the grandest assertion of the widespread power of the Chola dynasty was the creation of Cholagangam.
KA Nilakanta Sastri, in his seminal book The Cholas, cited the Tiruvalangadu Copper Plates to assert that Rajendra Chola commissioned a 'liquid pillar of victory"—Ganga-Jalamayam Jayastambham—in his new capital in the form of the tank, which came to be known as Cholagangam. Contemporary Tamil literature chronicles that representatives of all the kingdoms he conquered were ordered to bring Ganga water in golden pots and pour it into the vast tank.
The sanctified tank was created to serve the new imperial city, fill its protective moat, and irrigate nearby fields by diverting water from the Kollidam River. When full, it used to have a water spread of 130 sq km, but the grand manmade lake, the largest in the subcontinent for many centuries and a shining example of Chola engineering and water management, has now been bifurcated by a state road and lies depleted and choked due to neglect from the colonial era onwards.
So it was no coincidence that a few days before last week's visit by the PM, Tamil Nadu's chief minister MK Stalin, suddenly woke up to Rajendra Chola's 'birth anniversary", celebrated as the Aadi Thiruvathirai festival, to announce a Rs 19 crore project to revive the water body and build tourism infrastructure there! The PM then also released a commemorative coin at Gangaikonda Cholapuram and announced statues of the father-son duo, Rajaraja I and Rajendra Chola.
An imminent tug of war over the Chola legacy seems inevitable between the Centre and the aggressive Tamil Nadu state government, determined to assert Dravidian exclusivism and encourage a disconnect from all things north Indian. What the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK)'s ideologues will find tough to brush under the dhurrie, though, is the huge importance of north India's premier and revered river Ganga for Rajendra Chola and all his descendants.
For, as long as the Chola dynasty lasted—for the next 256 years—there was a powerfully symbolic Ganga in the south, albeit as a tank, in its capital city. And many copper plates and stone inscriptions of Chola rulers—and even those of the Pandya and Vijayanagara rulers who came later—record villages handed over for tax-free maintenance of the Gangaikondacholiswarar temple in the now-razed city. The lake was renamed Ponneri ('golden") later, during the Vijayanagara era.
Shiva as Gangadhara—holder of the Ganga—has been praised in Tamil literature of that time, notably in the Thiruvisaippa compositions of Karuvur Devar, who lived during the reigns of Rajaraja and Rajendra Chola. Interestingly, in the war poem Kalingattuparani by Jayan Kondar, based on the victorious Odisha campaign of Kulottunga I (Rajendra Chola's grandson) in 1110, Gangaikonda Cholapuram is mentioned simply as Gangapuri. The river and the city were inseparable.
There is no clarity on what or who caused that imperial city to be razed except for the temple, but more was lost than just fine examples of Chola architecture, obviously. Some will believe that the Pandya who vanquished the last Chola ruler and retook control of the region in 1279 destroyed the city, but why then would there be inscriptions of later Pandya donations to the temple? And why is there no epigraphic evidence of such a vengeful act by any of the Pandya rulers?
A more plausible explanation, at least for the initial decimation of the temple capital, could be the marauding Islamic armies of the rising Delhi Sultanate, first by Malik Kafur in 1311, Khizr Khan in 1314, and then Mohammed bin Tughlaq in 1327. Even if everything had not been flattened, the temples and palaces would have been impoverished by the invaders carrying off their riches, and their primacy would never have recovered despite some later donations from the Vijayanagara monarchs.
By the time the Nawab of Arcot's armies reached there during the 18th century, the magnificent multi-storied Chola palaces, commercial buildings, and public infrastructure had become mere piles of stones. No wonder the British East India Company's army used the temple premises as a garrison and also helped themselves later to the giant stones of the temple's periphery, the city's boundary fortification, and even the bund wall for their own engineering projects.
The Tamil Nadu government is conducting excavations in the area surrounding the Gangaikondacholishwarar temple—now called Brihadeeswarar, like the one in the earlier Chola capital, Thanjavur—in Ariyalur to unearth the city Rajendra Chola built after capturing the Ganga. This probably has much to do with the designation of both Brihadeeswarars along with Airavateshwara in Darasuram as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as they are 'Great Living Chola Temples".
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Hopefully, more inscriptions will also be found to add to the information already garnered from those on the walls of the Gangaikondacholishwarar temple and throw some light on how, when, and why the city around it was destroyed and/or left to crumble. And also, perhaps, reveal why the Cholagangam—a holy tank befitting its consecration by Ganga water—became merely Ponneri (golden) in a millennium, thereby obliterating a very evocative north-south cultural bond.
The author is a freelance writer. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18's views.
tags :
Chola Dravidian ganga Tamil Nadu
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Location :
New Delhi, India, India
First Published:
July 31, 2025, 03:56 IST
News opinion Opinion | Why PM Modi's Visit To Gangaikonda Cholapuram Irks Dravidian Exclusivists
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