The Anaimangalam Copper Plates, Restituted to India on 16 May 2026, Record a Chola Village Given in About 1005 to a Buddhist Monastery Built by a Southeast Asian King

On 16 May 2026, with the prime ministers of India and the Netherlands present, Leiden University Library restituted two sets of Chola copper plates to the Government of India. The Press Information Bureau’s release of the same day counts 21 large plates and 3 small ones and calls them “royal charters issued by Chola Kings”. The larger set records how a Chola king gave the paddy revenue of one village, Anaimangalam, to a Buddhist monastery at Nagapattinam on the Tamil coast, a monastery built by a king from Southeast Asia.

The text has been in print since 1886, and the edition used here is the one K. V. Subrahmanya Aiyer published in 1933 to 1934. Two questions get different answers in different places: which Chola king stands behind the plates, and where the donor’s kingdom lay. Both are set out below by who says what. The Chola fleet’s raid on that same kingdom, around 1025, is covered in Rajendra Chola’s Ganges expedition and the fleet to Kadaram.

What Leiden handed over

Leiden lists the two sets as Or.1687 and Or.1688. Or.1687 is 21 copper plates strung on a ring with the seal of Rajendra Chola I, five plates in Sanskrit and sixteen in Tamil. Or.1688 is three Tamil plates on a ring with the seal of Kulottunga I, who reigned from 1070 to 1120. The university gives the combined weight as about 30 kilograms and says the plates record agreements on village revenue for a Buddhist shrine and monasteries at Nagapattinam.

James Burgess and S. M. Natesa Sastri first edited the larger set in 1886. Aiyer quotes their verdict that it was “the first Chola inscription yet translated containing much definite information respecting the dynasty”. His own edition corrects printing mistakes in theirs and puts back in order some plates they had misplaced. He worked from ink impressions that Lt.-Col. Th. van Erp of the Rijks Ethnographisch Museum in Leiden sent to the Government Epigraphist for India.

The order, the scribe and the elephant

The Tamil part of the larger set is the working deed, and it shows how a Chola village assembly worked in practice. Another Chola assembly’s rules are in the Uttaramerur inscriptions. Aiyer’s translation has the king, seated in a pavilion south of his palace outside Tanjavur, declare on the 92nd day of his 21st regnal year, which Aiyer puts in AD 1005 and Heritage Tamil in about 1006, that the income from the village of Anaimangalam would be entered in the registers as a tax-free pallichchandam, the term for land given to a Buddhist or Jain shrine. The yearly figure is 8,943 kalam of paddy (a Tamil grain measure) and a few smaller measures, from 97 veli (a Tamil land measure) and its fractions. A royal scribe, Amudan Tirttakaran, wrote the order down, and superintendents of royal writs signed it. The register entry was made on the 96th day of the same year.

Then the state sent six officials, one arbitrator, one revenue officer and four Brahmins called Bhattas, to walk the boundary with the district assembly. A female elephant led the walk, and stones and milk-bush, a spurge used for hedges, marked the line. A Vellala villager of Anaimangalam named Kon Puttan rode the elephant and pointed out the limits, and he signed the deed. Aiyer counts the assemblies of 26 villages among the signatories. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, writing in 1935, counts the accountants of 27 villages, Anaimangalam included.

The boundary description runs for pages and names the neighbours’ fields, a carpenter’s land and a potter’s land among them, and the streams between. The two editors also differ on the last date. Aiyer’s translation has the deed handed over on the 163rd day of the 23rd year, which he reckons as two years and 72 days after the order. Sastri gives the 113th day.

Rajaraja or Rajendra: who says what

The Tamil order is in the name of Rajaraja I, who built the Thanjavur temple, one of the Great Living Chola Temples, and whose reign Britannica dates from 985 to 1014. The Sanskrit verses that open the set were composed later. Aiyer reads them as a learned preface written under Rajendra, and they say that after Rajaraja’s death his son, named there as Madhurantaka, a name Aiyer identifies with Rajendra, had an enduring edict made for the village. Five craftsmen of Kanchipuram sign as the engravers, and one of them gives his name as Krishnan Vasudevan, also called Rajarajapperacharyan.

The later accounts divide on emphasis. Sastri writes that Rajaraja approved the gift and that Rajendra confirmed it after his father’s death and had it put on copper. Leiden says the larger set carries Rajendra’s seal, and Aiyer reads the legend on it as naming Rajendra Chola. The Press Information Bureau names no king, saying only “Chola Kings”. In his Mann Ki Baat address of 31 May 2026, the Prime Minister said the plates “primarily relate to King Rajendra Chola the first, fulfilling a vow made by his father, King Rajaraja Chola”.

Heritage Tamil, a heritage website, adds that Rajaraja gave the order orally, that it was first written on palm leaf, and that Rajendra later ordered the copper plates. Aiyer’s summary says only that the oral order was committed to writing by the royal scribe and does not name the material. The Sanskrit verses add a third commissioner: they say the plates were also made at the direction of the lord of Kataha, through an agent named Anokka. A note sent from Leiden and printed in the Epigraphia Indica says the writing was made first on wax tablets and the plates cast from them, while the Kanchipuram craftsmen’s colophon says they incised it. Aiyer reports the note and does not comment on it.

A monastery begun by the father and finished by the son

The Tamil part says the monastery, the Chulamanivarma-vihara, was being built by Chulamanivarman, the king of Kadaram, at Nagapattinam. The Sanskrit part says it was built by his son, Maravijayottungavarman, of the Sailendra family, in his father’s name. Aiyer notes that the Tamil text always says “being built” and never “built”, and suggests that the work began around the 21st year and was finished under Rajendra. R. C. Majumdar, in a note printed in the same volume, adds dates from the history of the Sung dynasty of China, which records envoys from the kingdom it calls San-fo-ts’i in 1003 and 1008. Georges Coedès had read the two royal names in the Chinese transcriptions as Chulamanivarman and the start of Maravijayottungavarman. Majumdar concludes that the father died between 1005 and 1008. Coedès, writing in 1968, adds that the son was on the throne by 1008 because he sent tribute to China that year.

On why a Chola king endowed a foreign monastery, Aiyer points out that Rajaraja’s lists of conquests never mention Kataha, so he reasons that Rajaraja had not conquered it. Because the charter is issued in the Chola king’s name and not the donor’s, Aiyer asks whether the Kataha ruler built with Chola permission and on friendly terms, and he leaves it as a question. Sastri says the builder had the Chola king’s permission.

Where was the donor’s kingdom?

The Sanskrit text calls Maravijayottungavarman lord of Sri-Vishaya and says he conducted the rule of Kataha, in Aiyer’s translation. The Tamil text calls his father king of Kadaram. Aiyer, Majumdar, Coedès and Sastri all read Sri-Vishaya as Srivijaya and treat Kataha and Kadaram as one place. They differ on how the pieces fit.

Majumdar identifies Kataha with Kedah on the Malay Peninsula and Srivijaya with a kingdom in Sumatra. He translates the Sanskrit verb in the verse as “extended”, so that the Sailendras were first rulers of Kataha and then widened their rule over Srivijaya. The other five mentions in the plates call the king simply the king of Kataha. He also quotes Coedès as writing that sound method does not allow anyone to say that before the 11th century the kings of Srivijaya were Sailendras or reigned at Srivijaya, and he records that Coedès had accepted his view. In a footnote he mentions H. G. Quaritch Wales, who suggested that Srivijaya might itself have lain on the Malay Peninsula, at Chaiya, with a Srivijaya Hill not far to the south.

Coedès in 1968 places Srivijaya at Palembang and Kataha at Kedah. He finds the plates’ pairing of the two names consistent with the Arab geographers, for whom, he writes, “the maharaja holds the two shores of the straits”. Sastri also takes Srivijaya as the kingdom of Palembang and Kadaram as a port on the Malay coast, the first place Tamil sailors reached, which would explain why the Cholas named the ruler after it. He adds that Ferrand leaned in 1922 towards south or east Sumatra for Kadaram but left the question open, and that S. K. Aiyangar’s identification with Kerti on the north-east Sumatran coast rests on a discussion by Gerini that Sastri says has been superseded.

The 2026 coverage is looser. ETV Bharat places the donor’s kingdom in present-day Indonesia, Heritage Tamil in Sumatra, and Hinduism Today in Southeast Asia. As far as the pages opened show, none of the three takes up where Kataha lay.

Nagapattinam to Leiden and back

Leiden says the Colonial Collections Committee found it likely that the Dutch East India Company dug up the plates between 1687 and 1700, while building Fort Vijf Sinnen and redeveloping the “Chinese” pagoda site at Nagapattinam. It says a pastor in Batavia, Florentius Camper, and his wife probably brought them to the Netherlands in 1712 and that their descendants gave them to the university in 1862. India asked for their return in the summer of 2023, and at the end of 2025 the committee advised unconditional return, calling the removal “an involuntary loss of possession”.

Leiden describes the 16 May 2026 event as a formal ceremony in The Hague before the official transfer. The joint statement of 17 May welcomed the return of the plates to the Indian authorities. The Archaeological Survey of India in New Delhi is the recipient and decides whether and where they are shown, according to Leiden, which keeps the digital versions for research and teaching. As of 29 October 2026, the university’s page carries a note dated 7 September 2026: “The university has since handed the objects over to India.” The pages consulted for this article do not say where the plates are now held.