Chola

I understand my life through movement, before place. I was born in Bangalore, raised in Indonesia, and now measure time by the distance between Sydney semesters and late night family calls from Vietnam. For most of my life those movements felt ordinary, the soft drift of a middle class family following work and weather across Southeast Asia. Airports were fluorescent and interchangeable. School corridors smelled of ink and humidity. Home rearranged itself every few years. It was only much later, sitting in a university library in Sydney, that I realised my life had been quietly tracing older routes. The sea lanes that carried me from India to Indonesia and later to Vietnam once carried Tamil merchants, temple envoys, traders, and sailors who travelled under the insignia of the Cholas, a South Indian dynasty that looked out across the Bay of Bengal and did not see a border.

Between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, the Cholas consolidated power in Tamilakam and extended their influence across the Indian Ocean. Under rulers such as Rajaraja I and Rajendra I, The Cholas built a maritime network, reaching Sri Lanka and parts of Southeast Asia, including the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian Archipelago. Tamil inscriptions found in these regions record the activities of merchant guilds such as the Ainnurruvar, also known as the Five Hundred, who negotiated trading rights and established commercial networks across the Bay of Bengal. Other inscriptions detail donations to Shiva temples funded by overseas merchants and royal officers, linking commerce with religious patronage. Some even proclaim the authority of Chola rulers in newly reached territories. Together, they point to an ambition both geopolitical and devotional, concerned with securing trade and extending cultural presence.

The same impulse to secure presence across the sea also sought permanence on land, in stone. The Brihadisvara Temple in Thanjavur, completed in the early eleventh century, stands with an assurance that feels almost unreasonable. Its granite tower rises in measured proportion, each stone placed with attention to weight and angle. It is devotional architecture in which mathematics is made visible.

The Cholas did not invent the intellectual traditions that made such feats possible. In the fifth century, Aryabhata calculated the Earth’s circumference by observing the changing angles of shadows and applying geometric reasoning to the arc between distant locations, arriving at a figure that approximates modern measurements with striking closeness. He proposed that the Earth rotates, and used observation to explain the stars’ apparent motion. Astronomical treatises such as the Surya Siddhanta, composed in late antiquity and revised over generations, modelled planetary motion and predicted eclipses through cyclical time-keeping and sustained sky-watching. By the time the Cholas ruled, these systems of knowledge were already embedded in the scholarly life of a subcontinent where astronomy and astrology coexisted.

It would be easy to turn this into a story of uncomplicated pride. I resist that turn. Nor do I want to replace one hierarchy with another by framing these histories as proof of civilisational superiority; knowledge, like power, moved across oceans through assertion as much as exchange. Chola expansion involved warfare and extraction. Economies were entangled with caste hierarchies. The sanctum did not open equally to all. To inherit this history as a Tamil woman is to inherit a contradiction. There is beauty in the bronze Nataraja, and there is unfortunate structure in the society that sustained it. 

What compels me is not the grandeur, but the way different epistemologies seemed to share the same air. The Vedic corpus, composed long before the Cholas, contains hymns that contemplate the origin of the universe with an austerity that feels startlingly modern. The Nasadiya Sukta in the Rig Veda asks whether existence emerged from non existence, and whether even the creator knows how it began. The hymn admits the possibility of not knowing. Reading it now, after courses in history and biology and the sciences that shape contemporary thought, I am struck less by any claim of foresight than by its intellectual humility.

I grew up without feeling that these currents required separation. In Indonesian classrooms I learned about evolution, about common ancestry, about fossil records and genetic inheritance. At home I heard stories of Vishnu’s avatars that begin in water and move through amphibian and mammalian forms before arriving at human figures. Scholars are clear that the Dashavatara is a symbolic narrative rather than a scientific model. The progression from fish to tortoise to boar to human does not constitute evolutionary theory. Still, as a child, I felt a quiet recognition when I saw evolutionary diagrams unfold in textbooks. The movement from sea to land to upright life felt familiar. It did not threaten the stories I had been told.

I am not studying cosmology. My days are not spent solving equations about distant galaxies. Yet when I read about the age of the universe or the shared genetic code of living beings, I do not experience rupture. I experience enlargement. The idea that the elements in my body were forged in ancient stars does not unsettle whatever remains of devotion in me. The suggestion in the Upanishads that the self is made of the same substance as the cosmos finds an unexpected echo in contemporary science, not because one predicted the other, but because both attempt to grapple with scale.

There was a moment in Bali when I stood on a beach at dusk and watched the sky darken into a dense violet, the sea insistently moving. I tried to imagine Chola vessels crossing that same horizon a thousand years earlier, guided by monsoon winds and stars read with practised attention. The Indian Ocean then was fuller, a corridor of trade and encounter, linking South India with Southeast Asia and beyond. A region shaped by exchange, negotiation, at times violence, always by movement. 

My own migrations are smaller, gentler. They were shaped by job contracts and school calendars rather than imperial ambition. Yet I sometimes feel that history resides in the body as much as in archives. The ease with which my family moved between Bangalore, Jakarta, and Da Nang does not feel entirely new. The airports and container ships of our era follow patterns established long ago. In Vietnam we cook Tamil food in kitchens where another language presses at the windows. In Sydney I attend lectures and write essays, then call relatives who recount epics with unselfconscious authority. Each world feels complete. Each world feels partial.

I am wary of the way discussions of Hindu scientific insight can slide into competitive comparison. Civilisations across the globe developed astronomy, mathematics, and medicine in parallel and through exchange. Greek, Arab, Chinese, and Indian scholars read the sky with seriousness. To situate Indian contributions within that wider human conversation feels honest. It avoids the need to prove primacy. It allows for interdependence.

What returns to me, quietly, is the sense that curiosity itself is inheritance. The Chola ships required it. The temple architects required it. The poets who composed hymns about the origin of the universe required it. My biology teacher required it. So do I. When I read about black holes or the slow unfolding of evolutionary time, I do not feel that I am stepping outside my cultural inheritance. I feel that I am extending it.

I think of evenings in Bangalore when temple bells rang at dusk and the sky shifted from gold to indigo. I think of Indonesian science fairs where I built imperfect models of the solar system from painted foam balls that never quite balanced on their axes. I think of nights when the power flickered and the sky sharpened into a scatter of stars, the same constellations once read by sailors and now diagrammed into textbooks. None of these moments demanded that I choose between story and evidence. They asked only that I pay attention.

I continue to locate myself somewhere between the Chola seas and the modern classroom. History complicates pride. Doubt sharpens belief. Evidence does not silence memory. It changes the light in which memory is held. I stand in that altered light, aware that the ocean once carried ships from Tamil ports to Southeast Asia, and that the stars those sailors watched are still burning, distant and indifferent, above the places I now call home.