Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tribute to the civilisational legacy of the Cholas was a significant and a profoundly symbolic moment for India as a whole. It concretised India’s civilisational aspirations to emerge as a great and decisive power in the comity of nations. That aspiration is legitimate for any nation or people which have existed, on a civilisational scale and proportion in the past.

The mighty Chola Temple of Gangaikonda Cholapuram has stood for a thousand years signifying that aspiration. It was an aspiration that led India, in the Chola era, to become master of the oceans and to disseminate her philosophy, thought, culture and coveted products across the Far East.

Diplomat-historian KM Pannikar, in his analysis of the ‘Determining Periods of Indian History’, argues that there “are some periods which shape the course of the future more than others, when events of far-reaching importance are crowded together so that the centuries that follow seem to be working out the ideas generated at that period…Also, it may happen that discoveries, achievements or decisions taken at such a crucial period mark so definite a change as to give a new character to the ages that follow. These are the determining ages of the history of a country, a region or a civilisation".

The Chola era was certainly a “determining period" in the flow and evolution of Indian civilisation. The apogee then achieved had a far-reaching and multifaceted impact. It was an impact that was not confined to India but was spread across a vast region covering large parts of Southeast Asia and the Far East.

The Chola Empire’s spread and influence contributed to a unique synthesis and blending which enabled the evolution of a rich cultural and religious diffusion across Southeast Asia in which Hindu deities such as Shiva and Vishnu were central and defining. One is reminded of the words of that profound scholar of India’s civilisational past, D Devahuti, who argued that the spread of Indian culture happened through a “continuous flow of forceful ideas, and institutions". The Chola era ensured a continuous flow of ideas and of institutions that had a lasting impact, visible even today.

As one heard PM Modi speak, one was reminded of the words of Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, spoken a hundred years ago, “Do you know your own mind? Your own culture? What is best and most permanent in your own history? You must know at least that, if you are to save yourselves from the greatest of insults, the........

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