I am reading sivagamiyin sabadham and ponniyin selvan.
After reading these (still iam reading ponniyin selvan), many questions arised in my mind. One of them is,
"What makes a society excel at one point of time"?
The society touches the zenith and after some time the descendents of same people became very weak and debile.What is the reason?
a.Is this fate , everything is preplanned by god? I
dont think so.
b.Is this due to any single person (king). That is
also not a fully satisfactory answer because I dont
think a single person can establish an empire
without the help of other able persons.
c. Is there any extraordinary co-incidence that all
the able handed warriors/state heads are born
contemporary and they come together and form an
empire? It seems to be a fairy tale for me.
But it is repeated again and again in history. From chandragupta to rashtrakudas to pallavas to cholas to moghals to british.
Let me know your opinion.
1 comment:
Gokul,
This discussion could give way to a lot of questions. However, i am giving you my justifications for why empires vanished all of a sudden after a period of time and what happened to the successors. Not sure if i answered your question.
1. People wanted to abolish the concept of King and queen at some point of time. They wanted to have a egalitarian society. This is one reason why empires did not exist after a period of time. For example, it is said that lot of "samasthanams" existed even during the British rule. For example "Pudukottai" is one such samasthanam. Who are these guys who ran these samasthanams? They were successors of some king and probably the last heir to throne. The family could have got into something else. For example, Saraboji maharaja's vamsam has a prince even today and he is a BE. I forgot his name(some bhonsle, senthil can help here) but he is still taken into consideration on discussions pertaining to temples that come under the jurisdiction of the aranmanai. If you get "paambu panjaagam" you can see his name.
2.Most of them traveled outside of India. For instance, lot of people traveled to Rangoon, Malaya(now called Malaysia), China and all that. If you remember, Ponniyin selvan talks about 2 chinese monks visiting srilanka and raja raja cholan was one of the "yaanaipaagan" for the elephants in which the monks traveled. I think that is how he gets introduced in the story. The reason i am saying this is because probably a lot of prince/raja parambarai people could have taken up this journey and stayed in the same place. For example, in Indonesia, there exists a temple similar to periya kovil. They say it was built in chola design. How is this possible?
3.Namma kudumbathualye namakku oru 3 illa 4 generation ku mela theriyadhu. Practically, how is it possible to track raja rajan or any empire's successor that existed 1000 years ago? This is a little difficult. And at some point of time history did not get down after some generations. For example, ravidasan was ordered to go to Pandya Naadu after leaving all his wealth in Chola desam by Raja Rajan for killing Adithya Karikalan. I don't think Ravidasan would have passed this on to his kids/grandkids for the simple fact "maanam" which was considered more valuable than "karpu" 1000 years ago.:-)
4.Finally, varumaiyin niram sigappu la oru dialogue varum..Poornam viswanathan will come to a saloon for haircut and kamal will be the barber..kamal will give his justifications for being a barber and at some point of time will call poornam "appa" and poornam will be so embarrased. Kamal will say "unga thalaimurai la vena neenga kaiyila thambura pudichu irukkalaam, aana naalam thalaimurai yai paar, naavidhanum chithappan nu oru tamizh pazhamozhi irukku appadinu. So, endha raja voda etha entha thalaimurai enga barbera irukkaano therila. :-)
Last but not least, we are already in a world where we don't want any more wars and all that. So, it is very unlikely to say if America will come down from its present situation and all that. But one thing i can say is no society can come up without good and co-operative people..Classic example is Japan which came up with so good after the hiroshima/nagasaki debacle and when you look at any developed nation you cannot miss this quality..More than anything, namma alavukku caste/creed/religion idhu moolama endha countryum divide aagala..when america was hit on sep 11 the whole country joined hands to fight terrorism..but andha madhiri oru attack nadantha namma enna seivomnu therila..RSS will say muslims should get out and muslims will say something else but problem at hand solve panna maatom..i am not saying america has no problems but defly not like us..So, any country/nation that has no co-operative people will the first to vanish..thats my point..
Thanks,
Vasu.
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