Moonset on Sunrise Mountain: Poetry, Politics, and the Making of a South Indian King

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In 1070 CE, a young prince related through his mother to the royal Cola family began to rule over a small area of south India. Three years later, the prince, renamed Kulottunga ('Lofty in his Family') controlled the largest and most powerful territorial state in southern Asia, and had assumed the dignity of the title Emperor of the Triple World. Over the course of the half-century of his rule, Kulottunga's Cola kingdom (in what are now the Indian states of Tamilnadu, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh) was to witness enormous transformations in its politics, society, statecraft, and literary and religious culture; the first intimation of many of these changes can be seen in the events of his coming to power and in the retrospective imagination of these events. 1070 marked, in a very real sense, as significant an historical watershed in south India as 1066 proved to be in England.The received understanding of Kulottunga's rise to power explains it with reference to his maternal ancestry--the future king's mother and grandmother were both sisters of Cola emperors--seeing in this a reflex of the well-known Dravidian pattern of cross-cousin marriage. This genealogical explanation rests on a very impressive piece of historical reconstruction accomplished early in the last century. Sifting through the limited evidence then available, a narrative emerged: the upstart from the distaff line suddenly appeared on the scene, possibly killing his cousin, the heir apparent, in the process. It made for a compelling story, and has been repeated ever since; but solely relying on this genealogical explanation fails to do justice to the surviving record. The first part of this study reconstructs the network of political alliances struck between the future Kulottunga and a coterie of lords from the restive north of the Cola kingdom which actually made the accession possible. The rise of these northern lords fundamentally altered the elite politics of the kingdom (their descendants hastened its dissolution a century later); Kulottunga won them to his cause through offers of patronage, but also through the beguilements of eulogistic poetry and the esoteric appeal of royal Tantric ritual worship. The second part of the study looks at the literary representations of Kulottunga's accession produced by his contemporaries: a Sanskrit verse biography of a rival king, a collection of interrelated copperplate charters (again, in Sanskrit) issued by two of his sons, and a Tamil courtly entertainment composed late in his own reign; the first and the last of these are acknowledged masterpieces of medieval Indian literature. The central task here is a close reading of each of these texts, capturing the way that the reimagined versions of the event were integrated into the aesthetic and political project embodied in each text.The third and final part of the study looks at the consequences of Kulottunga's rule within a single local society, centered on the great temple-city of Cidambaram (the earthly home of Nataraja, the celebrated Dancing Siva). This micro-region was transformed as a direct result of Kulottunga's emergence and the rise of his political network. The earliest royal orders bearing the king's imperial title were issued from the temple complex, while the temple's own inscriptional record begins in earnest with commemorations of several spectacular grants made by his family members and a lord with ambiguous loyalties. The royal accession also prompted a narrative reimagining in a local collection of temple legends, where it was transformed into a mythic charter for the foundation of the temple and its Brahman aristocracy. By focusing in on this one particular society, we can trace the ways that local people adapted the events of grand politics to their own needs and purposes, while also tracing the way they were bound up in the designs of the kingdom-wide elite.