Q1.
The Cholas were builders of irrigation systems that included canals, lakes, and tanks with connecting channels. Do you remember reading in your previous grades about the Grand Anicut (Kallanai) built by Karikala Chola?
Answer
Yes — the Grand Anicut, also called the Kallanai, built by Karikala Chola, and the chapter's point about it is its extraordinary working life: it remains in use even today.
What the chapter says about it:
- The Cholas built irrigation systems of canals, lakes and tanks with connecting channels — a network, not a single structure.
- Such structures helped store and distribute water, supported agriculture, and encouraged the growth of settlements.
- The Grand Anicut continued to be used and repaired by later rulers and administrations over many centuries.
Why continuous repair is the historically important part: a dam is not built once. It silts, it cracks, it is damaged by floods. That later rulers — of different dynasties, over many centuries — kept repairing this one proves two things: that the agriculture of the Kaveri delta depended on it, and that successive states accepted maintaining public works as a duty of government, whatever the dynasty. The chapter says exactly this: facilitation of agriculture continued to be a major preoccupation of the state, because it was one of the major sources of revenue.
The same story, in the north, in stone. The Junagadh inscription of Rudradaman I records that Puṣhyagupta, a governor appointed by Chandragupta Maurya, built a dam on Sudarshana Lake near Girnar in Saurāṣhṭra (the Kathiawad region of Gujarat) — and the same rock records Rudradaman's repair of it (c. 150 CE) and Skandagupta's restoration of it after severe damage (5th century CE). Maurya, Western Satrap and Gupta, over roughly 700 years, all maintaining one lake.