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[ 4 minute read ]
Humbled AGAIN!
I am so lucky to have a shop keeper that comes from Sri Lanka. I live in the centre of the known world. As Al Murray, 'the pub landlord' says, 'We invented time because everybody sets their clocks by our invention of the Greenwich Meridian, or zero degrees East and West. If I want to, I can go and look at where it is, if I care to walk for fifteen minutes. I am definitely in the best country in the world, where only European history is important, we invented that too! You know, The Industrial Revolution and science and stuff. However, we 'Brits' have the Vikings who settled in Normandy to thank for our 'amazingness' because they came and taught us French and chivalry and things in 1066, and by so invading England killed a tyrannical family. Merci!
Or so I thought. As far as I was concerned, up until recently, everywhere outside of Europe, in the same time period, was a swamp peopled by the same type of people who we think inhabited The Fens in East England who breathed the miasma of putrefaction; a place (Ely) that supposedly harboured 'Hereward the Wake', who rebelled against the kind and polite Normans in 1070, and later reincarnated as Robin Hood in the 12th century.
Meanwhile, in Southern India one of the 'swamp people' built this:
The Brihadishvara temple, built in the 11th Century by King Rajaraja Chola, is a Unesco World Heritage site (Anirudh Kanisett, BBC, 2025) Chola dynasty and Brihadishvara temple (opens in new window)
I have heard of and seen pictures of the Taj Mahal in India built in the seventeenth century, and separately, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, built in the first half of the 12th century by King Suryavarman II. (tourismcambodia.com)
I used to imagine how countries are in the present day from only considering marketing material that travel agents used to tempt people to distant countries for Summer holidays. It was once about getting British people onto white beaches and they used pictures of muscled men in boats with sponsons surfing onto a beach with women wearing grass skirts serving drinks to Europeans wearing white shirts or a one piece bathing suit. (A little bit of extension there, into the 1950's and '60's.
My local shopkeeper is proud of his ancestral past and was keen to tell me about the Chola dynasty of the early Medieval period in India. He told me how they transported elephants on ships to conquer Indonesia and how they were mighty conquerors. The Chola dynasty ended in 1279 (Britannica, 2025) Chola Dynasty (opens in a new window
'The Cholas were as important to the Indian Ocean as the Mongols were to inner Eurasia [...] Medieval Tamil metalwork, produced for Chola-period temples, is perhaps the finest ever made by human hand, the artists rivalling Michelangelo or Donatello for their appreciation of the human figure [...] The Chola period was what you'd get if the Renaissance had happened in south India 300 years before its time.' (Anirudh Kanisett, BBC, 2025)
Well, I got told. Something else I learnt was that my local shopkeeper, rather than being only interested in retail is a remarkably interesting man who wanted to lend me his book on the Chola dynasty.
In my head, there are men in chain-mail poking each other in their eyes with arrows, and in my local shop keeper's eyes for the same period there is an empire building temples.
Of course, in England we have a history of Norman expansion back into France and further into the Muslim world. And there, along with the achievements of many other countries, including Portugal, lies a connection between East and West trade. 'Merci', 'Tak', 'Tack' or 'takk'
References
Anirudh Kanisett, BBC, 2025, BBC website https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm27zn0vl33o on 14th November 2025
Britannica, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chola-dynasty on 14th November 2025