Rajendra I

Rajendra I carried Chola power further from its Tamil heartland than any south Indian ruler before him, mounting expeditions that reached the Ganges and crossed the sea to Southeast Asia. The son of Rajaraja I, he served as co-regent from 1012 and succeeded on his father's death in 1014, inheriting an empire that already included much of peninsular India and northern Sri Lanka. He ruled until his death in 1044.

His early campaigns consolidated and extended his father's conquests. Chola control was pushed over the whole of Sri Lanka, the Pandya and Chera countries were held under viceroys drawn from the royal family, and long wars were waged against the Western Chalukyas on the northwestern frontier. Around 1019-1021 he dispatched an expedition northward through Kalinga to the Ganges valley, where his army defeated several rulers, among them the Pala king Mahipala, according to Chola inscriptions. The expedition was framed as a sacred errand: water from the Ganges was carried back to be poured into a vast tank at his new capital, and the king assumed the title Gangaikonda, "the one who took the Ganges."

That capital, Gangaikonda Cholapuram, founded to commemorate the northern campaign, replaced Thanjavur as the seat of the dynasty and was furnished with its own great granite temple to Shiva, closely modeled on his father's Brihadisvara temple, together with the enormous reservoir called the Cholagangam. The city remained the Chola capital for some two centuries, though little besides the temple survives above ground today.

The most remarkable enterprise of the reign was the naval expedition of about 1025 against Srivijaya, the maritime kingdom that controlled the straits between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea from bases in Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula. Chola inscriptions list the capture of Kadaram, identified with Kedah, and other ports, and the king added Kadaram Kondan, "taker of Kadaram," to his titles. The motives, perhaps connected with control of the China trade, are not recorded, and the Cholas did not attempt permanent occupation, but the raid demonstrated a naval capacity unique among Indian states of the period. Rajendra was succeeded in turn by three of his sons, Rajadhiraja I, Rajendra II, and Virarajendra, who maintained the empire he had brought to its height.