Karikāla Chōḻa#Karikala
A figure from the books
#Karikala
Karikāla Chōḻa · fl. c. 2nd century CE
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
Kingship — war, trade and irrigation; the political centrepiece of the Sangam age and, in legend, the tamer of the Kāverī.
“Nobody can prove Karikāla built the great dam that bears his tradition — and it does not matter, because his real monument is not the stone but the rice: a river disciplined so well that the fields it waters have never stopped feeding people since.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“A battle wins you a delta; only water-engineering keeps it. Karikāla beat two crowned kings as a boy, and then — say the poems and, more loudly, the legends — turned the Kāverī's floods into the rice bowl that fed south India for two thousand years.”
From the book
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