Before Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the Brihadeeswarar temple at Gangaikonda Cholapuram last weekend, how many Indians knew about its existence? How many clever ones thought he had visited the one in Thanjavur (with the same name) and just got his geography mixed up? How many know/knew that Emperor Rajendra Chola had conquered territories northwards right up to the Ganga and built a temple and capital to commemorate it?

Cheerleaders of the cynical ideological campaign to assert that north and south India have no common cultural and religious beliefs and were only artificially united by the Mughals and then the British would want ignorance to prevail. They would want more people to believe that there was no “India" before the British—or at least not before the Mughals. Modi’s visit there, however, has turned the spotlight on some facts that bust that long-standing divisive narrative.

Gangaikonda Cholapuram, even though it is now just a nondescript town in Tamil Nadu with one majestic temple jutting out into the sky, is a testament to the importance of Ganga—a sacred north Indian river and deity—even in Dravidian south India. The current dispensation in Tamil Nadu will also not be pleased by Modi focussing attention on a place and a king whose reverence for a northern Indian entity bespeaks a cultural confluence contrary to its political stance.

The great conqueror and administrator Rajendra Chola thought his victorious northern campaign was important enough to build an entirely new city, even though his father had embellished the earlier capital Thanjavur with a grand Shiva temple with the same name less than two decades before. But the grand capital he named Gangaikonda Cholapuram after himself in his new avatar as the Chola who had captured the Ganga was decimated once........

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