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Leiden Plates returned by Netherlands aren’t for ASI storerooms. They belong at Nagapattinam

The past decade under the Modi government has seen a dangerous erosion of evidence-based histories in India, owing to an ongoing neglect of both public universities and museums.

The Dutch government on 16 May formally returned to India a set of 24 copper plates that had spent the past three centuries in Leiden, a city in the western Netherlands. The handover ceremony took place in The Hague. 

I was among the historians consulted by the Netherlands’ Colonial Collections Committee as it assembled its provenance report (one name among many, and far from the most important). The coverage of these objects has described them as “Chola Plates”,  symbols of a vanished imperial glory and of cultural restitution. 

But the Leiden Plates are much more: over their 1,000-year history, they were conduits for the many entanglements of the Indian Ocean World. Their story is of Buddhism and Shaivism, imperialism and colonialism; warfare, famine and cosmopolitanism.

Tides of medieval diplomacy

Throughout India’s early medieval period (c. 400–1100 CE), copper-plate inscriptions were issued by courts across the subcontinent, recording the granting of land to a religious institution or a Brahmin agraharam. Chola plates were issued for similar purposes but were exceptional in scale: typically several hundred acres at a time, gifted across the lush Kaveri delta, with eulogistic Sanskrit prefaces, and detailed Tamil sections outlining the terms of the gift. Typical recipients were agamic Shaivite temples and Vedic Brahmins.

Within this tradition, the Leiden Plates are exceptional for many reasons. For one, they sketch out the relationship of three separate institutions: the Chola court, a Buddhist complex at Nagapattinam port, and the court of the kings of Kedah. The Larger Leiden Plates are dated to the twenty-first regnal year (1006 CE) of Rajaraja I, whose imperial campaigns had carried his armies from the Krishna-Godavari delta to Polonnaruwa in present-day Sri Lanka. 

The Sanskrit preface, added in 1019 during the reign of Rajendra Chola I, confirmed and recorded this gift made by his then-late father: the revenues of Anaimangalam village were granted to a Buddhist monastery called the Chudamani-Vihara, “of [such] high loftiness [as had] belittled the Golden Mountain [Meru]”.

The Chudamani-Vihara was named for Chudamani-Varman, the late king of the Malay port of Kedah. It had been paid for by his son, Mara-Vijayottunga-Varman, the then-king. The Tamil section then relates an order, not to any Chola official, but to the nadu assembly — the chief landholders of the region, organised as a collective — ordering them to enforce the grant as tax-free. Annually, 8,943 measures of paddy were transferred to the Chudamani-Vihara, a gift of several tonnes.

Rajendra’s renewal of the gift in 1019 may be significant, especially when read with other Nagapattinam inscriptions. According to professors Noboru Karashima and Y Subbarayulu, who provided a reassessment of the gift with other scholars in Nagapattinam to Suvarnadwipa (2009), Mara-Vijayottunga-Varman of Kedah had made a series of reciprocal gifts at the temple to Shiva Kayarohanasvami in Nagapattinam. Acting through Tamil agents from various ports, he donated a temple gateway, ornaments affixed with Mara-Vijayottunga’s makara emblem, and Chinese gold for the feeding of Ardhanarishvara, the Lord Who is Half Woman, and Brahmins.

Which is to say: the donors were agents of the same ruler who was funding the Buddhist monastery across town; simultaneously, the divinity who received the Chinese gold was Shiva. And significantly, the last gift to the Shiva temple happened in 1019, the very same year Rajendra I confirmed his father’s grants to the Chudamani-Vihara. This, then, was ‘temple diplomacy’ as several historians have dubbed it: gifts made to religious institutions as part of larger diplomatic exchanges and positionings in the Indian Ocean. Nagapattinam was a rich and diverse port through which merchants of many lands passed: gifts of this sort presented both the Chola and the Kedah king as devout and benevolent rulers.

Thereafter, there is a gap of several decades in the Chudamani-Vihara inscriptions, until the Smaller Leiden Plates were issued in 1090. Quite a lot happened in those decades. Despite the amicable picture of the Larger Leiden Plates, Chola-Kedah........

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