1 - The Naval Expeditions of the Cholas in the Context of Asian History

Summary

In one of his inscriptions at the monumental temple at Tanjavur, King Rajendra Chola is praised for having dispatched in 1025 “many ships in the midst of the rolling sea and having caught Sangrama-vijayottunga-varman, the king of Kadaram, together with the elephants in his glorious army, (took) the large heap of treasures, which (that king) had rightfully accumulated; (captured) with noise the (arch called) Vidhyadhara-torana at the ‘war gate’ of his extensive city, Srivijaya with the ‘jeweled wicket-gate’ adorned with great splendour and the ‘gate of large jewels’ ”. The inscription enumerates likewise twelve other port cities on the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and the Nicobar Islands, which had been raided by the South Indian navy.

Rajendra's mighty overseas expedition against Srivijaya was a unique event in India's history and its otherwise peaceful relations with the states of Southeast Asia which had come under India's strong cultural influence for about a millennium. The reasons of this naval expedition are still a moot point as the sources are silent about its exact causes. Nilakanta Sastri concluded in his monumental work on the Cholas that “we have to assume either some attempt on the part of Srivijaya to throw obstacles in the way of the Cola trade with the East, or more probably, a simple desire on the part of Rajendra to extend his digvijaya to the countries across the sea so well known to his subjects at home, and thereby add luster to his crown”. The American historian G.W. Spencer interprets the naval expedition of the Cholas as the culmination of their “politics of plunder” and expansionism which the Cholas had been employing for decades already in wars in South India and Sri Lanka. In 1995 Tansen Sen pointed out that “the possibility of a ‘trade war’ cannot be completely ruled out because the Zhufan zhi [Description of the Barbarous People by Chau Ju-kua, AD 1225] records of Srivijayans forcing foreign ships to stop at their sea ports, and if the ships failed to do so, then, they would be attacked by the powerful Srivijayan navy and destroyed. Therefore, the Cola raid on Srivijaya can be concluded as an ambitious maneuver with a pretext to remove hindrance from the trade route.”