This polity was founded in the mid-ninth century CE, when members of the Chola dynasty, centred in the fertile Kaveri delta of Tamil Nadu, began a series of territorial conquests. At their peak in the eleventh century, they ruled over large parts of southern India and north-central Sri Lanka. [1]
[1]: (Mahalakshmi 2016: 1), Mahalakshmi, Rakesh. 2016. ‘Chola (Cola) Empire’. In The Encyclopedia of Empire, edited by John M. MacKenzie, 1st ed., 1–7. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118455074.wbeoe366. Zotero ID: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/ET6Z69AC.
| Year Range | Chola Empire (in_chola_emp) was in: |
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"Emerging from their heartland in the vicinity of Uraiyur along the banks of the river Kaveri in the mid-9th century, they soon controlled the entire Tamil-speaking area." [1]
[1]: (Mahalakshmi 2016: 1), Mahalakshmi, Rakesh. 2016. ‘Chola (Cola) Empire’. In The Encyclopedia of Empire, edited by John M. MacKenzie, 1st ed., 1–7. Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118455074.wbeoe366. Zotero ID: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/ET6Z69AC.
In the below quote, Rocher argues that professional lawyers did not exist in India for much of its history. Unhelpfully, Rocher does not provide dates or much in the way of temporal boundaries. However, the use of the word “ever” in the sentence “no written source allows us to draw the conclusion that the experts on legal matters ever developed into a professional group whose regular activities consisted in representing parties in the court” may perhaps be taken to mean that professional lawyers did not exist in India before the colonial era.
“Thus, we believe that at an early date—let us roughly say at the time of the dharmasutras—professional lawyers or, to be more precise, specialized dharmasastrins could not exist. The Indian sage in those days was a specialist in all of the texts related to a particular Vedic school. His specialized knowledge concentrated on a specific version of the Vedic samhita and all its related texts: brahmana, aranyaka, upanisad, srautasutra, grhyasutra, dharmasutra, etc. There were no specialists on dharmasastra, and, a fortiori, no specialists on law that were part of it.
“But the situation changed. The texts on dharma grew away from the Vedic schools. Gradually there may have come into being a specialized group of learned men whose main interest was dharma, and the various dharmasastras as such.
“Finally, as the amount of textual material increased, we may assume that certain experts, without detaching themselves completely from aspects of dharmasastra and from Hindu learning generally, accumulated a very specialized knowledge of one aspect of dharma: vivada and vyavahara, or, in modern terminology, law. It is very possible that at this stage the nature of legal representation (niyoga) also underwent a certain change. We do not want to exclude the possibility that, at that moment, in a number of cases legal competence played a role in the choice of a representative. We are even willing to accept that Vyasa refers to the very special circumstance in which the representative was paid for his services. However, no written source allows us to draw the conclusion that the experts on legal matters ever developed into a professional group whose regular activities consisted in representing parties in the court. The impression which we gather from the texts is that, even in cases where the representative was chosen because of his special competence on legal matters, and, a fortiori, in all other cases, the necessary condition for a person to represent a party was the existence, between the former and the latter, of a certain form of close personal relationship.”
[1]
[1]: (Rocher 1969: 399-400) Rocher, L. 1969. "Lawyers" in Classical Hindu Law. Law & Society Review 3 (2/3): 383-402. Seshat URL: https://www.zotero.org/groups/1051264/seshat_databank/items/QKMEMIHW/library