Rajaditya was killed on his elephant, the Chola army broke, and the Rashtrakutas held Tondaimandalam for about two decades.
01Death on the elephant
Parantaka I had made the Cholas masters of the south, and he sent his eldest son Rajaditya to guard the northern frontier with a large army. Krishna III came down on it at Takkolam. The Atakur inscription of Butuga II, set up in the same year, records that Butuga fought Rajaditya and killed him; a hero-stone beside it honours Butuga’s hound, Kali, which died in a boar fight on the same occasion. Later Chola copper plates remember Rajaditya as the prince who died on the back of his elephant, a death Tamil warriors counted among the most honoured.
02Kanchi and Thanjai taken
After Takkolam Krishna III pushed into the Chola heartland. His Tamil inscriptions in the north of the Tamil country call him the king who took Kanchi and Thanjai, and they are dated in his regnal years for some twenty years. The old Parantaka lived on in a shrunken kingdom. Chola strength returned only under Sundara Chola, and fully under his son Rajaraja I, whose empire later reached far beyond anything Parantaka had held.
Takkolam was the high point of Rashtrakuta power in the south and the deepest Chola defeat before the imperial age of Rajaraja and Rajendra.