chola

By the standards of the medieval world, Chola queens were also remarkably prominent, serving as the dynasty's public face.

Travelling to Tamil villages and rebuilding small, old mud-brick shrines in gleaming stone, the Chola dowager Sembiyan Mahadevi – Rajaraja's great-aunt – effectively "rebranded" the family as the foremost devotees of Shiva, winning them a popular following.

Next, exploiting the internal turmoil of the island of Lanka, he established a Chola outpost there, becoming the first mainland Indian king to set up a lasting presence on the island.

This allowed the Brihadishvara to function as a mega-ministry of public works and welfare, an instrument of the Chola state, intended to channel Rajaraja's vast fortunes into new irrigation systems, into expanding cultivation, into vast new herds of sheep and buffalo.

Rajaraja Chola's successor, Rajendra, built alliances with Tamil merchant corporations: a partnership between traders and government power that foreshadowed the East India Company - a powerful British trading corporation that later ruled large parts of India - that was to come more than 700 years later.