In this long-awaited study of the south Indian monarch Kulottuṅga Coḻa, Whitney Cox's Politics, Kingship, and Poetry in Medieval South India: Moonset on Sunrise Mountain promises to upstage twentieth-century classics (e.g. Nilakantha Sastri, Subbarayalu) as the gold standard of historiography on the Coḻa Empire. Through a relentlessly interdisciplinary fusion of “history, politics, and philology”, Cox moves well beyond the reconstruction of regnal years and military campaigns endemic to positivist historiography in favour of a recovery of the human agency at the heart of Coḻa imperial politics – defined by Cox as the “array of customary and constitutional institutions and practices that meaningfully maintained and reproduced the asymmetrical distribution of power and access to resources”. Significantly, for Cox, the political fundamentally includes the textual, entailing a recover of the monarch's discursive footprints in multiple languages and genres. Thus, Coḻa-period epigraphy and literature are rendered themselves as strategic acts, whose motivations come into sharp relief through Cox's painstaking philological acumen.

While the four chapters of Politics, Kingship, and Poetry are structured sequentially as chronological episodes in the life (and afterlife) of Kulottuṅga Coḻa, the book's narrative is equally punctuated by episodes of intervention in the close reading of key texts and genres. The early years of the Cola Imperium figure prominently in Cox's reconsideration of the mĕykirtti genre of royal encomium, a eulogistic signature of Coḻa regents that precedes the documentary activity of imperial edicts. Although highly regimented in its form and function, the mĕykirtti, Cox demonstrates, were intended as deliberate political acts, the genre serving less as a static emblem of Coḻa imperial legitimacy than as an arena for strategic choices in rhetoric that sought to intervene in extra-textual social relations. Most notably among these choices, in both Tamil mĕykirtti and Sanskrit praśasti, figures the deliberate invocation of dual imperial imagery, where references to the Cālukya emblem, the boar avatāra of Viṣṇu, and the mythological heritage of the Coḻas and Cālukyas in the Solar and Lunar Dynasties respectively, provide a venue for the negotiation of Kulottuṅga's ambiguous identity as that “Moonset on Sunrise Mountain” for which the book is named.

It is well known, as Cox acknowledges, that the dearth of documentary evidence from early medieval south India limits what can realistically be known about individual political acts. Nevertheless, Cox breaks methodological ground by demonstrating that observable patterns in the political aesthetic are far from accidental. For instance, Cox employs a weighted analysis of incidences of the mĕykirtti in the Toṇḍaimaṇḍalam, the northern Tamil region, to identify it as a heightened arena of political activity. This evidence suggesting that the restructuring of social and political relations between the Coḻa state, local magnates, and Brahmin and Veḷḷāḷa elites would later prove pivotal to the unlikely succession and later political stratagem of Kulottuṅga Coḻa. And indeed, it is remarkably implausible in hindsight that Kulottuṅga, the erstwhile Veṅgī Cālukya prince Rājiga, so named derisively for his Andhra origins, ought to have succeeded to overlordship of the Coḻa imperium at all, barring the complex exigencies of interdynastic politics. Whereas previous studies have applied a structuralist analysis of kinship to explain how a matrilineal descendant of the Coḻa line such as Rājiga would serve as an appropriate candidate, Cox instead locates in the instability of the 1070s a nexus of events – including the untimely death of his cousin, Adhirājendra, in 1072, and escalating tensions with the Cālukyas of Kalyāṇa – that left the Coḻa political arena ripe for strategic intervention.

But perhaps the rhetorical apex of Politics, Kingship, and Poetry lies in its philological excavation of the political resonances in contemporary works of Sanskrit and Tamil literature, principally Bilhaṇa's Vikramāṅkadevacarita and Cayaṅkŏṇṭār's Kaliṅkattupparaṇi. Blurring the disciplinary boundaries of aesthetic and historical referential textual study, Cox approaches the “worldliness” of a literary work, in the words of Edward Said – its inevitable imbrication with the extratextual world – with an underdetermined methodology that leaves the precise motive and referentiality of any individual work in the hands of philological judgement. Moving beyond, for instance, Bilhaṇa's purported mendacity concerning Coḻa affairs as royal spokesman for Vikramāditya of the Kalyāṇa Cālukyas, Cox calls attention instead to subtleties in Bilhaṇa's language, such as how the analogical figuration of Rājiga and Vikramāditya's brother Someśvara reveals Bilhaṇa's fascination with the pathological excesses of royal power. Cayaṅkŏṇṭār, likewise, beyond the situatedness of his Tamil paraṇi as manifested in his concrete references to the places and personages of the Coḻa court, embeds a historical re-emplotment of Kulottuṅga's ascension to the throne within the work's rhetorical fissures, in which political chaos cohabits with the ferocity of Kāḷi's court with its horrific pālai wilderness landscape.

In its thoroughgoing interdisciplinarity, Politics, Kingship, and Poetry presents a compelling contribution to the history of religion in south India, particularly through its sensitive reading of Kulottuṅga's lasting contribution to the shape of Tamil Śaivism. While questioning evidence for large-scale Brahmin resettlement as a means of royal legitimation, Cox turns instead to the narrative subtleties of the Sūtasaṃhitā and the Cidambaramāhātmya, the latter of which he labels the single most consequential rendition of the monarch's life owing to its formative articulation of the “ritual and socio-moral order” of Cidambaram as the iconic centre of Tamil Śaivism. Of similar significance is Cox's recovery of the Coḻa intervention, during the earlier reign of Rājendracoḷa, in the endowment and worship of the goddess Cāmuṇḍeśvarī, who is figured, as accords with emic conceptions of power and agency, as a political actor in her own right.

As an iconoclastic and nuanced study of the political through its unnoticed traces, Politics, Kingship, and Poetry endows the field not only with a thorough reconsideration of the Coḻa Empire and its historiography, but also with a methodological challenge. In its subtle yet persistent challenge of the structuralist norms of historiography, Cox reveals the breadth of material at our disposal as interdisciplinary scholars of the South Asian past to recover the diachronic and the agentive within events often emplotted as static, pre-given structures.