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

公元1070年，一位年轻的王子通过他的母亲与皇家可乐家族有关系，他开始统治印度南部的一小块地区。三年后，这位被重新命名为Kulottunga的王子控制了南亚最大、最强大的领土国家，并获得了三重世界皇帝的头衔。在他统治的半个世纪里，库洛滕加的可乐王国（位于现在印度的泰米尔纳德邦、卡纳塔克邦和安得拉邦）见证了其政治、社会、治国方术、文学和宗教文化的巨大变革；这些变化的最初迹象可以从他上台的事件和对这些事件的回顾性想象中看到。1070年在南印度的历史分水岭和1066年在英格兰的历史分水岭一样重要。人们对库洛通加掌权的普遍理解与他的母系血统有关——这位未来国王的母亲和祖母都是科拉皇帝的姐妹——认为这反映了著名的德拉威人的跨表亲婚姻模式。这种家谱的解释建立在上个世纪早期完成的一项令人印象深刻的历史重建之上。在对当时有限的证据进行筛选后，一种说法出现了：这个来自远征线的暴发户突然出现在现场，可能在这个过程中杀死了他的堂兄，也就是继承人。这是一个引人入胜的故事，从那以后就一直在重复；但是仅仅依靠这种家谱的解释并不能公正地对待现存的记录。本研究的第一部分重建了未来的库洛通加与来自不稳定的科拉王国北部的领主小集团之间的政治联盟网络，这些联盟实际上使其加入成为可能。这些北方领主的崛起从根本上改变了王国的精英政治（他们的后代在一个世纪后加速了王国的解体）；Kulottunga通过提供赞助来赢得他们的支持，但也通过赞美诗的诱惑和皇家密宗仪式崇拜的深奥吸引力。研究的第二部分考察了库洛通加即位的同时代人所创作的文学作品：一本竞争对手的梵文诗歌传记，一本由他的两个儿子发行的相互关联的铜版宪章（同样是梵文）的合集，以及一部在他自己统治后期创作的泰米尔宫廷娱乐作品；第一部和最后一部都是公认的中世纪印度文学杰作。这里的中心任务是仔细阅读这些文本，捕捉事件的重新想象版本融入每个文本中体现的美学和政治项目的方式。研究的第三部分，也是最后一部分，着眼于Kulottunga在一个单一的地方社会中的统治后果，以伟大的寺庙城市Cidambaram（著名的舞蹈湿婆Nataraja的尘世家园）为中心。库洛通加的出现和他的政治网络的崛起直接改变了这个微型地区。最早带有国王头衔的皇家命令是在寺庙建筑群中发布的，而寺庙自己的铭文记录则认真地开始纪念他的家庭成员和一位忠诚不清的领主所做的几项壮观的授予。皇室的加入也在当地的寺庙传说中引发了一种叙事的重新想象，在那里它被转化为寺庙和婆罗门贵族的神话宪章。通过关注这个特殊的社会，我们可以追溯当地人如何根据自己的需要和目的适应大政治事件，同时也可以追溯他们是如何与整个王国精英的设计联系在一起的。

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.