The Tamil dynasty of southern India that, at its height between the tenth and twelfth centuries, turned a river delta into the base of a rare thing in Indian history — a great sea power, whose navy crossed the Bay of Bengal to raid Southeast Asia and whose temples still stand.
In about 1025, a fleet sailed east from southern India, crossed the Bay of Bengal, and attacked the ports of a wealthy trading empire in what is now Indonesia and Malaysia. The king who sent it was a Tamil ruler named Rajendra Chola. Few Indian dynasties ever projected sea power so far, and the raid announced that a land of temples and rice had also become a master of the ocean.