Rajendra's Gangaikonda Cholapuram
Gangaikonda Cholapuram, Tamil Nadu
After his army reaches the Ganga, Rajendra I builds a capital named for the feat; in 1025 his fleet raids Srivijaya across the Bay of Bengal.
Between about 1019 and 1022 a Chola army marched north through Kalinga to the Ganga, defeated the Pala king Mahipala, and brought back Ganga water. Rajendra took the title Gangaikonda, he who took the Ganga, and built a new capital with a great temple, completed in 1035, and an embanked tank, the Cholagangam. The city stayed the Chola capital for some two hundred and fifty years; little of it survives but the temple.
In 1025 a fleet sailed against Srivijaya, whose ports controlled the straits between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Rajendra's inscriptions list the places taken, among them Srivijaya itself, usually placed at Palembang, Kadaram (Kedah) and Tambralinga. It was a raid, not a conquest: no Chola administration followed, and Chola grants to the Buddhist monastery that Srivijaya's kings had founded at the Chola port of Nagapattinam continued.
The motive is argued. Some historians see a war for the sea routes in which Tamil merchant guilds had a stake; others see a plundering expedition meant to fill the treasury and display the king's reach.
- war
- trade
- state-formation