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Next, chafing at the Chola ruler’s tyranny and insults, they assassinate him in his palace and burn it down. First, in a show of machismo, they slaughter almost all the artisans in their lands. Though they were initially allies and vassals of the Chola kings, a pair of twins born to the family decide that this is not enough. The landlord family gradually grows in power.
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He then commands that they will be henceforth paid not in gold, but in grain, as decided by their landlords. In the Kathai, the god Vishnu helps subjugate the artisans himself. As soon as they arrive, the Vellalar family begin to fight with both groups. They are sent by an unnamed Chola king to claim a nearby territory, though it is already inhabited by artisans and Adivasis. The Ananmar Kathai, an epic of Tamil Nadu’s Kongu Vellalar community composed between 1000–1500 CE, sings of a family of upper-caste landlords. Folk ballads are one such source of evidence. To understand the realities of Chola rule, we thus need to look at the testimony of commoners who were affected by it. Yet this is exactly how we see medieval India-most of the sources that writers like Kalki rely upon are inscriptions of royals praising themselves, or poetry, drama and ritual texts written by their propagandists. We all have families and friends who have lived through disastrous governmental incompetence, and generations of journalists have exposed the foibles of state power. We would conclude that every single party has been efficient, incorruptible, and transformed India and all its people for the better. Imagine a history of modern India based only on advertisements of ruling political parties.
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Muslims were integral to South Indian gods Since then, decades of scholarship have shown that the Chola polity was not only as brutal as any other, but that even its own subjects had a much less rosy picture of it than we do.Īlso Read: ‘Historic hurt’ is a modern phrase. What is less understandable is modern media’s increasing yearning for Chola ‘glory.’ Their unceasing appetite for expansion and frequent violence against women were written about even during Kalki’s time. Kalki’s utopian optimism about the dynasty is understandable, given the century’s need for national icons around which to build political consciousness. The books upon which the film is based, written by freedom fighter Kalki R Krishnamurthy between 1950–54, are certainly among the most important works of modern Tamil literature. In this sense, the film is part of a decades-long attempt to reclaim the medieval Chola dynasty as icons of muscular nationalism. With the release of teasers and trailers for Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan, social media has erupted in jubilation over this cinematic celebration marketed as a “Golden Age for Tamils”.