Battle of Takkolam

Parantaka I (907–955) had made the Cholas masters of most of the Tamil country, and when trouble from the north-west threatened in the 930s he stationed his eldest son Rajaditya on that frontier with a large army that included elephants and cavalry. Krishna III, king since 939, had scores to settle: Parantaka’s son-in-law Govinda IV, whom the Rashtrakuta nobles had deposed, seems to have found refuge in the Chola kingdom, and the Bana and Vaidumba chiefs dispossessed by the Cholas — perhaps also his brother-in-law Butuga II — urged him on. The decisive battle was fought at Takkolam, six miles south-east of Arakkonam. A Kannada inscription at Atakur near Mandya, dated 949/950, says that ‘when Kannaradeva was fighting the Chola, Butuga made the howdah the battle-field, and aimed at, pierced and killed Rajaditya’, for which Krishna rewarded him with the districts of Banavasi 12,000, Belvola 300 and three smaller districts. The Chola version in the Larger Leiden plates is much the same: having shaken the unshakable Krishnaraja, Rajaditya was pierced in the heart by the enemy’s arrows ‘while seated on the back of a large elephant’. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri concluded that the Cholas lost the battle mainly because a well-aimed arrow of Butuga fatally wounded Rajaditya; A. S. Altekar read the Atakur inscription differently: Butuga killed Rajaditya’s elephant, climbed into the howdah and slew him there; the older story of a treacherous murder rested on misreadings.

Krishna III then occupied Tondaimandalam, the northern part of the Chola kingdom. Inscriptions dated in his regnal years, up to the 28th (965), are found in the Arcot and Chingleput districts, and the Karhad plates of 959, issued at his camp at Melpadi in North Arcot, claim that he uprooted the Cholas, distributed their land among his followers, exacted tribute from the king of Ceylon and set up a pillar of victory at Rameshvaram. His records call him ‘conqueror of Kanchi and Tanjore’; A. S. Altekar believed that he really held the Chola capital for a time, while K. A. Nilakanta Sastri could not say whether the southern claims were empty boasts or the record of a triumphant raid. By 957 the Chola kingdom had shrunk to a small principality, and most of Tondaimandalam was won back only by about 973.

The battle is dated to 949 by an inscription from Solapuram dated Shaka 871 (949/950), which describes it as the year in which Kannaradeva entered Tondaimandalam after overthrowing Rajaditya, by the Atakur stone and by the disappearance of Parantaka’s inscriptions from the Arcot districts after 948; some accounts give 948–949. An inscription from Siddhalingamadam dated in Krishna’s fifth year (944/945) already calls him conqueror of Kanchi and Tanjore, which led Altekar to place the occupation of Tondaimandalam before the battle; Nilakanta Sastri took its date for an error made when the inscription was later recopied.