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

公元1070年，一位通过母亲与可口可乐王室有血缘关系的年轻王子开始统治印度南部的一小块地区。三年后，这位更名为库洛通加的王子控制了南亚最大、最强大的领土国家，并承担了三重世界皇帝的尊严。在他统治的半个世纪里，库洛通加的可乐王国(在现在的印度泰米尔纳德邦、卡纳塔克邦和安得拉邦)见证了其政治、社会、治国和文学和宗教文化的巨大变化；许多这些变化的第一次暗示可以在他上台的事件中看到，在对这些事件的回顾想象中可以看到。在非常真实的意义上，1070年标志着印度南部的一个重大历史分水岭，就像1066年在英国被证明一样。人们对库洛通加崛起的理解解释了这一点，他的母系--未来国王的母亲和祖母都是可口可乐皇帝的姐妹--在这一点上反映了众所周知的德拉威式的表亲婚姻模式。这种谱系解释建立在上个世纪初完成的一段非常令人印象深刻的历史重建之上。在对当时可用的有限证据进行筛选后，出现了一种说法：迪斯塔夫家族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，即法定继承人。这是一个令人信服的故事，从那以后一直在重复；但仅仅依靠这种谱系解释不能公正地解释幸存的记录。这项研究的第一部分重建了未来的库洛通加和来自动荡不安的可口可乐王国北部的一小撮领主之间达成的政治联盟网络，这实际上使加入成为可能。这些北方领主的崛起从根本上改变了王国的精英政治(他们的后代加速了一个世纪后的解体)；库洛通加通过提供庇护，但也通过颂扬诗歌的欺骗和皇家密宗仪式崇拜的深奥呼吁，赢得了他们对他的事业。这项研究的第二部分着眼于库洛通加登基的文学表现，由他的同时代人创作：一本关于敌对国王的梵文诗篇传记，他的两个儿子发行的相互关联的铜版宪章集(同样是梵文)，以及他统治后期创作的泰米尔宫廷娱乐作品；其中第一部和最后一部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，捕捉到重新想象的事件版本被整合到每个文本所体现的美学和政治项目中的方式。研究的第三部分也是最后一部分着眼于库洛通加统治在一个单一的地方社会中的后果，以伟大的寺庙城市奇丹巴拉姆(著名的舞蹈湿婆Nataraja的尘世家园)为中心。由于库洛通加的出现和他的政治网络的崛起，这个微型区域发生了直接的变化。最早的带有国王皇室头衔的皇家命令是从寺庙建筑群发布的，而寺庙自己的铭文记录开始于对他的家人和一位忠于他的勋爵进行的几次壮观的捐赠的纪念活动。王室的入主还促使当地一系列寺庙传说中的叙事重新想象，在那里它被改造成寺庙及其婆罗门教贵族建立的神话宪章。通过关注这个特定的社会，我们可以追溯到当地人如何根据自己的需求和目的来调整宏大的政治事件，同时也可以追溯到他们是如何被整个王国的精英阶层的设计捆绑在一起的。

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.