In 1024, Rajendra Chola dreamt up the grandest, riskiest, campaign ever planned by a medieval Indian ruler: an attack across the seas on Kedah (in today’s Malaysia). Both Rajendra Chola and the merchants of the Five Hundred guild knew now how wealthy Kedah had become – primarily by supplying goods the Tamil coast wanted.
And Rajendra had a plan. It was simply not profitable for the Cholas, or any land-based state, to set up a navy when most revenues came from crops and land-based wars. But both Rajendra’s generals and the Five Hundred had realized the possibilities of rapid, highly mobile operations supported by merchant shipping. No Indian Ocean king, except Rajendra Chola, had the imagination to plan something like this. None except Rajendra had the generals, the crack troops and the mercantile alliances to even dream they could pull it off. This constellation of factors never came together in India again.
Rajendra’s court had worked out most of the details. Conveyed by the great annual merchant fleet, Chola troops would attack and loot Kedah. The Five Hundred would expand into the political vacuum and soak up the profits. And so the centuries-old histories of three great powers in Monsoon Asia – the Chola state, the ports of Southeast Asia and the Tamil merchant corporations – moved towards a tremendous collision.
The clouds of the northeast monsoon crashed into South Asia in early 1025, soon after the December cyclone season. The red star Betelgeuse, known to the Tamils as Cemmeen, had been sighted. Rituals had been conducted in Nagapattinam’s Shiva temples and Buddhist monasteries. To the beating of drums, prows garlanded with flowers, the trading fleet headed south to Lanka. From there, as generations of ships had done before and after, it swung east from the coast for a two-week voyage to the Malay peninsula.
Hair whipped by wind, hands roughened by rope and sail, the fleet’s navigators came from communities from across the Tamil coasts. They had dozens of names for currents and winds, and they knew what they could tap into at which point of year. The altitudes of stars, used for orientation at sea, were measured using fingers and thumbs, as well as a rudimentary wooden sextant which encoded information using knots. The North Star wasn’t visible from the Tamil coast in the 11th century; they used Vadameen (Alcor) and Cemmeen (Betelgeuse) to navigate. Lanka and the Malay peninsula were at roughly the same star altitude: once the fleet swung eastward, it had to keep all the ships headed in the same direction, ideally within sight of each other, to signal with flags, torches and drums.
The navigators had a straightforward job. The elite Chola troops packed into the ships absolutely did not. The size of this expeditionary force was minuscule compared to deployments on the mainland: 3,000 is a generous estimate, perhaps spread across a large trading fleet of a hundred vessels. They may have brought a small number of elephants, each requiring over 2 tonnes of hay, grass, ghee and rice to feed them during the sea-crossing.
The Five Hundred would have hastily refurbished the interiors of rickety ships to accommodate squads of warriors. These ships looked nothing like what we’re used to: most medieval Indian Ocean vessels didn’t have fully covered decks, which allowed the crew to easily access food and tools stored within, but restricted their movement to narrow gangways on the edge of the hull. The hulls themselves were expanded and partitioned into makeshift rooms, thatched over to afford some shelter from the ocean drizzle.
Medieval Indian Ocean travel was precarious, and steering and sails were far more rudimentary than what we’re used to. No crewmen could be spared to look after the passengers. Chola troops would have to take care of their own cooking, belongings and waste. They ate salted ginger, lime and mango; rice gruel and coconuts; perhaps even brought a few goats to slaughter. Dragnets caught fish, to be roasted and fried. Matting and cloth provided a measure of privacy, while servants collected and disposed of vomit and excrement.
The fleet moved like a collection of noisy little houses on the silent expanses. Indian Ocean crews could be quite diverse: the Kedah expedition was probably manned by Tamil sailors as well as Sinhalas, Malays, Sumatrans, possibly even a few Arabs, Persians and Chinese. They gambled and swapped stories with their warrior passengers: lives, mistresses, adventures, faiths. Shiva, Tara, Jesus, Dipankara, Allah, Avalokiteshvara: it did not matter where the gods came from, as long as they could protect them from the monstrous heave of the water. The navigators inspected stars and swells, captains ordered sails rigged in the salt spray, steering oars adjusted. Sailing by the stars was simple but effective: map-and-compass navigation would not need to exist for centuries after. Medieval Arabs wrote with admiration of the accurate star altitudes used by their Tamil contemporaries.
If the trading fleet was extremely large, perhaps up to a hundred ships, it’s possible that some vessels missed Kedah and ended up elsewhere on the coast. This wasn’t a problem – normally. Navigators knew the bird life, sea life and physical features of various locales, so they could easily find their way to nearby ports. But in 1025, surprise was essential: Kedah could not be allowed to prepare for a siege. How the Chola expeditionary force pulled it off, we have no idea. Perhaps they had local allies who resented Kedah’s growing prominence, provided them with intelligence, and helped the troops prepare for an all-out assault.
Finally, in the distance, Mount Jerai, the great hill looming behind Kedah, whose gates glimmered with jewels. Drums and horns, catamarans lowered onto the water. Seasick, bad-tempered warriors unleashed to do what they were good at: kill, rampage, loot. The trade fleet waited in ominous silence to see what would happen.
The king of Kedah, who seems to have been taken entirely by surprise, sallied out with an elephant corps, but this was hardly a problem for Rajendra Chola’s crack troops. Lassoes, javelins and arrows were loosed; the man was downed and captured. Kedah was then stormed, its bejewelled gates torn down to be publicly exhibited by Rajendra Chola, as the loot of Manyakheta – the former capital of his rivals, the Chalukyas – had been. One of these gates was called the Vidyadhara, literally “Knowledge-Wielder”, a race of celestial wizards in the Sanskritic imagination. Another, likely the southern, was called the Srivijaya Gate. The sacking permanently changed Kedah’s settlement pattern: its centre of activity shifted from the Muda river to the Merbok.
Basing themselves at Kedah, contingents may have advanced down the swampy Malay coast, requesting tribute for Rajendra Chola, Great King-of-Kings of the Earth. Rajendra’s poets claimed that various towns in the Malay Peninsula and parts of Sumatra, freed of Kedah’s influence, did so. But everyone knew the Chola force couldn’t overstay its welcome: the Tamil trading fleet had to leave soon, and there would be no military reinforcements until the next year – if they ever came. Chola presence on this distant shore was shocking, a complete trampling of the norms by which Indian Ocean polities did business.
But they were lucky: the sudden crushing of Kedah sent shockwaves through Srivijaya, the loose confederation of ports that extended through Malaya and Sumatra. Once, it had been dominated by the Kedah’s dynastic ally, the Sumatran city of Palembang, so rich that gold was offered daily to the serpent lords believed to live in its river. With the sack of Kedah, Palembang was discredited, and it collapsed. As smaller cities squabbled for predominance within Srivijaya, they were unable to unite. For the next century, no single polity would be able to dominate the islands of Southeast Asia – at least not without keeping a wary eye on the Tamil coast. What if a Chola emperor decided to send a larger army next time? What if Chola generals emerged as kingmakers in Southeast Asia? Unlikely, yes, but nobody could ever again say it was impossible.
Excerpted with permission from Lords of Earth And Sea: A History of the Chola Empire, Anirudh Kanisetti, Juggernaut.
