Why the BJP suddenly loves the Cholas

The stone silhouette of the Gangaikonda Cholisvaram temple rises unobtrusively over the quiet village that carries its ancient name. There is something unhurried about the way its curved vimana slopes upward, as if chiselled by the breeze that crosses the plains of Ariyalur, heart of the river Cauvery’s delta districts.

Nothing about the setting — the clusters of modest homes, the adjacent paddy fields or the rustle of palms that define Tamil Nadu’s rural interior — suggests that this peaceful village was once the capital of a mighty Tamil empire that shaped the political destiny of the southern peninsula.

Yet the air feels expectant. The land holds its silence in a way that makes one wonder if history is watching. To come here with a sense of that history is to walk into a long-forgotten past, your senses agog with the imagined life of a court that once defined the life of these plains.

A thousand years ago, this was the grand dream of Rajendra Chola, the warrior son of Rajaraja the Great. His northern expedition, remembered for centuries as the ‘March to the Ganga’, opened a corridor from the Tamil coast all the way up to the Gangetic plain.

It was a long and determined campaign. Inscriptions describe how the Chola army advanced through the Deccan, overpowering the western Chalukyas, then surged into the regions of present-day Telangana and Odisha, pressing ceaselessly through river valleys that created a passage to the north.

The big reckoning was with a confederation led by the Pala ruler Mahipala, whose authority had frayed after years of internal conflict. The decisive moment came near the Ganga, when Rajendra’s forces overran Pala strongholds and collected the sacred river water as a sign of their triumph.

It was a feat of military courage, but also a logistical marvel for its time. Tamil poets later rejoiced that ‘the southern lion had drunk from the northern river’, celebrating Rajendra as the king whose fame had travelled across mountains and languages.

The copper plates echo this astonishment. One grant records with pride: ‘He who made the Ganga bow to the Tamil crown, he is Rajendra, king of kings.’ Another inscription says simply, ‘The waters of the northern river touched his feet.’

The water he brought home was poured into a vast man-made reservoir called Ponneri. That sheet of water, also known as the Chola Gangam, still bejewels the landscape like a trophy from a famous victory. Ottakuttar, the celebrated poet of a later Chola age, imagined the capital as ‘a place whose streets sang the language of the Tamils, where kings breathed like lions and poets like swans’.

Epigraphs speak of fortifications, ceremonial gateways and boulevards lined with shrines. There were markets bustling with maritime traders from far coasts, palace gardens scented with wormwood, and platforms where the king greeted envoys from distant lands.

The temple we see today was the luminous centrepiece of that world. Modelled on Rajaraja’s Brihadisvara at Thanjavur, yet distinctive in its gentler grace, it remains one of the most compelling architectural statements of the medieval Tamil imagination.

The fall of the Cholas and the rise of the Pandyas changed everything. Theimperial city was dismantled stone by stone. Columns that once supported palace ceilings found their way into new structures. Palace streets became fields. Markets disappeared under paddy crop. Only the temple stood its ground, watched over by villagers who understood its quiet resilience.

For centuries, it stood unassumingly, admired only by the cognoscenti—archaeologists, architects, historians and travellers with a yen for the past.

Everything changed last July when Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Gangaikonda Cholapuram. He came carrying water from the Ganga, drawn from Kashi, and the gesture echoed across time. A thousand years earlier, Rajendra had carried home the same river’s water as a symbol of triumph. Modi’s act, performed on camera, revived that memory with deliberate force.

It was not a random pilgrimage. Choosing Gangaikonda Cholapuram over famous destinations like Thanjavur, Madurai or Rameswaram signalled a civilisational claim. In Modi’s framing, the Cholas were not regional kings but architects of an early idea of Bharat. Their artistic brilliance, naval might and administrative vision were folded into the nationalist retelling of an ancient ‘Bharatiya’ continuum.

As always, the television crews followed him. Drone shots were beamed into living rooms. Travel vloggers had eager scripts. In cities, schoolchildren wrote essays on Rajendra Chola. Tourists came in steady streams, stepping across the ancient stone threshold with guidebooks and mobile cameras. The village watched this transformation with a mixture of pride, surprise and caution. Signboards were freshly painted. Tea shops were remodelled. Spare rooms became homestays. What was once the domain of scholars found itself in the national imagination.

“For years, the temple was ours alone,” says K. Ratnammal, an elderly resident. “Now the whole country has discovered it.”

But this excitement also veils a quiet anxiety. In election season, the BJP’s attempt to co-opt Tamil history, presenting the Cholas as pillars of a pan-Indian story, unsettles the DMK, which has always insisted that Tamil identity is an independent, self-fashioned civilisational assertion.

In the Dravidian imagination, the Cholas are guardians of Tamil genius. Their inscriptions are seen as the flowering of the Tamil language. Their temples are Tamil cultural laboratories. Their maritime networks extended Tamil influence across oceans. So, the BJP’s attempt to claim this as a larger national project is seen as a dilution of its Tamil character.

Ceremonies alone do not constitute respect, Chief minister M.K. Stalin has been saying. True respect for Tamil heritage, he argues, lies in linguistic rights, federal protections and cultural autonomy. The state government has been pushing archaeological work across Tamil Nadu — restoring old temples, reshaping school curriculums and investing in heritage tourism.

Keeladi, with its evidence of an early urban Tamil civilisation, has been placed firmly within the Dravidian narrative. Keeladi and Gangaikonda Cholapuram now form a cultural arc. If one reflects the antiquity of Tamil society before Sanskritic influence, the other reflects the early imperial grandeur of Tamil statecraft.

As these narratives evolve, archaeology itself has entered public debate. Pottery, stratigraphy, inscriptions and even naval expeditions have become material for speeches and arguments on social media. Historians appear on television panels. Rajendra Chola’s ‘March to the Ganga’ finds new life in political oratory. The past is once again a living battlefield.

Meanwhile, the village experiences this in quieter ways. New travellers arrive daily. Children guide visitors to the fields where the palace is believed to have stood. Local guides narrate inscriptions from memory. Archaeologists map the plains for remnants of Rajendra’s city that lie hidden beneath layers of earth.

Rajendra Chola built Gangaikonda Cholapuram to commemorate a victory over distant lands. A thousand years later, the site has become the stage for another attempted conquest, through an appropriation of history and dissembling of facts.

In September 2023, chief minister M.K. Stalin unveiled a bronze statue of Rajendra Chola I outside the Tamil Nadu assembly. It was part of an ongoing effort to place the Cholas within a Dravidian cultural narrative. The state has funded archaeological surveys and supported cinematic portrayals, most notably Mani Ratnam’s adaptation of Kalki Krishnamurthy’s fictionalised historical novel Ponniyin Selvan. The films Ponniyin Selvan I & II took the Chola story to multiplexes.

In a state shaped by language movements, anti-Hindi agitations and long struggles for cultural autonomy, the entry of Rajendra Chola into the nationalist discourse cannot be taken lightly. Stalin sees this move for what it is — another attempt to storm a fortress that has withstood the BJP’s predatory instincts.

But he must also show he cares in more than just words. And so, the famed reservoir, the Chola Gangam, which had fallen into disrepair, is being revived. Just a few days ahead of Modi’s trip to Gangaikonda Cholapuram, the state government allocated funds for the restoration of the lake, strengthening its embankments, desilting the inlet canal and spillway, renovating the sluice gates and developing the site as a tourist spot.

Inscriptions remind us that Rajendra claimed the title Gangaikonda, one who brought the Ganga. The artificial reservoir ‘Chola Gangam’ was both commemorative of a great victory and a working hydrostructure. Stalin described this ancient tank as “a liquid pillar of victory” and vowed to restore it.

Yet, the site bears visible signs of neglect. R. Komagan, founder of the Gangaikonda Cholapuram Development Council Trust, laments that among the four UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Tamil Nadu, this one is the worst maintained. He says the neglect is so visible that the temple sometimes looks like a forgotten village shrine rather than a world monument. “It’s painful to witness such indifference for a structure with such immense historical power.”

Did Tamil Nadu perhaps get too complacent about its civilisational riches? Did it take an invader to think seriously again of guarding those riches?