Ponniyin Selvan Varalaatru Peravai

http://tamil.berkeley.edu/Old Files from previous/Tamil Conference 2010/Tamil Conference 2010.html

Narrative, Politics, and the Accession of Kulottuga I Cola

The rule of the emperor Kulottunga I (usually dated to 1070-1020 CE) has
been taken as a watershed in the history of the Colas across a spectrum of
schoarly disciplines, ranging from studies of literary culture, to art and
architecture and the history of economy and society. In my paper, I will
outline a reinterpretation of Kulottunga's transformation from distaff
cousin from the strife-ridden family of the Vengi Chlukyas in coastal Andhra
to ruler of the most influential kingdom in all of southern Asia. As I will
show, the standard explanation for Kulottunga's sudden political
success –that he was related to the imperial Cola line through two
generations of
cross-cousin marriages – provides only a necessary, not a sufficient cause,
while it fails to adequately address his complex genealogical situation and
deliberate self-fashioning. My argument proceeds along two closely related
tracks: an empirical reconstruction of the early years in which he issued
inscriptions under the name Rajendra (ca. 1070-1075), and a
cultural-historical interpretation of the multiple narrative sources that
framed his public actions, and that in turn gave rise to new textual
renditions of the events of his accession in both Sanskrit and Tamil. As I
will show, these two different approaches to Kulottunga's career are best
understood in concert: the political maneuvering that marked his early
epigraphic pronouncements are best understood as intelligible cultural
actions, while the abundant narrative and literary sources can themselves be
situated within definite social and political contexts of production, as
realizations of particular worldly projects. This line of thinking comes
together in a new reading of Cayankondar's Kalinkattupparani, the major
literary monument of Kulottunga's court and a turning point in the history
of medieval Tamil poetry.

Indira V. Peterson, Mount Holyoke College

http://www.poetryinstone.in
Here the language of stone surpasses the language of man