Watch all episodes here: 1. A Brief History of a Civilisation and Why We Need to Know it | 2. The Aryans and the Vedic Age | 3. The Mauryans and Megasthenes | 4. The Ikshvakus of Andhra Pradesh. | 5. Nalanda and the Decline of Buddhism | 6. Khajuraho and the World of Tantra | 7. Alberuni and Marco Polo in India | 8. The Vijayanagar Empire | 9. The Mughals and Bernier | 10. The Faiths of Varanasi.
The Vijayanagar Empire (1336–1565) once ruled much of south India. Foreigners have left vivid accounts of its capital city, aka Vijayanagar—its grand temples, palaces, royal baths, audience halls, Islamic quarter, bazaars, military might, and cosmopolitanism. Considered the birthplace of Carnatic music, Vijayanagar also evolved syncretic forms of architecture, governance, and courtly attire.
Folk tales abound of its famous king, Krishnadevaraya, and his minister, Tenali Raman, who had a clever solution to every problem. The city’s remains now lie near Hampi village, in a beautiful rocky landscape by the Tungabhadra River.
How did Vijayanagar acquire all the wealth that impressed foreign travellers? Their eyewitness accounts – and contemporary scholars – reveal much about its economy, social customs, big festivals, and the cloistered lives of its elite women.
In this episode, Namit Arora describes what’s known about its trade, taxation, governance, policing, crime and punishment. He also looks at Vijayanagar’s religious landscape and courtly norms, its eager embrace of Persianate culture, and its war machine and shifting military alliances in which religion mattered little.
And finally, the causes of the empire’s massive defeat at the battle of Talikota. Hindu nationalists today fondly imagine Vijayanagar as a self-conscious bastion of Hinduism bravely resisting the ‘onslaught of Islam’. Is that true? As we’ll see, history is messy, and it often confounds sectarian readings of the past.
Below is the full transcript of the episode.
Hello and welcome to Indians. I’m Namit Arora.
In the previous episode, we looked at medieval India through the accounts of two famous travellers, Alberuni and Marco Polo. After Marco Polo’s departure, a series of wars reorganised the fragmented political map of south India into two entities: The Bahmani Sultanate and the Vijayanagar Empire. In this episode, I’ll look at the rise and fall of the Vijayanagar Empire.
My own fascination for Vijayanagar began as a kid, when I first read the stories of its famous king Krishnadevaraya, and his minister, Tenali Raman, who had a clever solution to every problem. He seemed to always outsmart the crooks and save the day, while imparting a sort of chaloo [चालू] wisdom. In stories, they were the south Indian counterparts to Akbar and Birbal.
At its peak, the Vijayanagar Empire covered much of south India. Many foreign travellers have left behind vivid accounts of its wealth, military power, and its cosmopolitan society and culture. It innovated new and syncretic forms of architecture, governance, and courtly norms, and was the birthplace of Carnatic music. Many Hindu nationalists today fondly imagine Vijayanagar as a proud Hindu kingdom that bravely resisted the ‘onslaught of Islam’. Is that true? As we’ll see, history is messy, and it often confounds sectarian readings of the past.
Hampi’s physical geography
It is possible that because of the stories I had heard as a child, I was primed to fall in love with the magnificent, sprawling ruins of the city of Vijayanagar, which was the capital of the Vijayanagar Empire. Once the political, religious, and commercial hub of a large empire, the city’s remains now lie near the town of Hampi, in a beautiful rocky landscape just south of the meandering Tunghabhadra River.
Even in its ruined state, the city of Vijayanagar is overwhelming. Spread over 30 sq. km, we can make out two major zones: a northern ‘Sacred Centre’, and a southern ‘Urban Core’. The Sacred Centre abounds in temples and shrines, which include the Virupaksha Temple, Vitthala Temple, Krishna Temple, and Achyutaraya Temple. Many of them are adjacent to former bazaars lining long streets, hosting single and double-storied shops and pavilions.
The Urban Core is where the elites lived; it had palaces, royal baths, audience halls, and homes made of stone. This elite area had many thick walls, gateways, and watchtowers—a defensive response to the perennial threat of war and internal rebellion. The common folk lived outside these two zones, in homes made of perishable materials. Between and beyond the two zones were agricultural fields, which were fed by canals like this one.
Hampi’s sacred geography
In the area around Hampi, prehistoric settlements and burial sites go back at least 3000 years. Hampi is an important site in the Ramayana. Known in the tales as Kishkindha, it is home to the vanara (or ‘monkey’) kingdom of Vali, Sugriva, and Hanuman. It was above Kishkindha that Sita dropped her jewels as Ravana flew her away to Lanka. Local lore has cooked up an elaborate schema of Ramayana sites at Hampi: the pond by which Sita’s jewels fell; the cave where Sugriva hid them; the rocky ledge from where Rama fired the arrow to murder Vali. Hanuman was a big favourite with Vijayanagar’s sculptors, who depicted him with a raised hand and an overlarge tail. A shrine nearby, atop Anjeyanadri Hill, claims to be his birthplace.
By the 7th century CE, local tribal groups worshipped a powerful river goddess, called Pampa. From her name in Kannada, Hampe, we get Hampi. Pampa’s husband, Virupaskha, was a minor god. But through the process of Sanskritization, they were admitted into the Brahminical pantheon as forms of Parvati and Shiva—and their power got reversed. Pampa became a mere ‘consort’, a sidekick, to the more powerful Virupaksha. This power reversal is of course a common story among folk gods across the subcontinent. By the 12th century, a temple to them had appeared at Hampi, which would become a foundational site and institution of Vijayanagar.
South India’s political transformation
In the 13th century, south India was a patchwork of warring kingdoms with shifting borders. These kingdoms were of two kinds: the first were the wealthier kingdoms, such as the Cholas and Pandyas, situated in fertile coastal river basins—which Marco Polo had written about. The second kind were located in the arid peninsular uplands, such as the Kakatiyas, Hoysalas, and, later, Vijayanagar. They had a weaker economic base and tended to be more warlike. This natural asymmetry doomed the coastal states to political subordination and plunder from raids by the upland states.
But this political map was shaken up by a new expansionary force in the early 14th century: the Delhi Sultanate, led by Ala-ud-Din Khalji and Muhammad bin Tughlak. They commanded greater military discipline, meritocracy, and battlefield innovations. They were simply better at the game of conquest and domination that Indian rulers also played. Their cavalry-led armies were more formidable than anything the southern rulers had faced before. Great battles led to the rise and fall of many kingdoms. South Indians were forced to raise their military game, especially the founders of Vijayanagar.
When the dust settled in the mid-14th century, a sovereign Muslim kingdom had arisen in the mid-peninsula. It was founded by Bahman Shah, formerly a rebellious general in Tughlak’s army. The Bahmani Sultanate patronised Islam, as well as Persian language and culture in its urban centres. Within a few generations, the Deccani dialect of Urdu would become the lingua franca of the ruling class, which included many Hindus. Sufi orders gained popularity and many lower-caste Hindus voluntarily converted to Islam. As with most new political dynasties, the Bahmani Sultanate caused disruptions for some social groups, while creating new opportunities for others.
To its south emerged the powerful Vijayanagar Empire. It was founded by two soldier-brothers, Hakka and Bukka, who were Shudras and likely Telugus. In c. 1336, the brothers established their capital at Hampi. They fought against the Bahmani Sultanate as well as other Hindu kingdoms of the south. They were able to grow their domains because they were no less militaristic and violent than the Bahmani sultans. In a few decades, the Vijayanagar kings controlled much of the region south of the Krishna River, ruling 25 million people, at a time when the whole subcontinent had around 125 million.
What foreign travellers saw
A fair bit of our knowledge about Vijayanagar comes from the accounts of foreign travellers of the 15th and 16th centuries, such as Niccolò de’ Conti, a Venetian merchant (1420); Abdur Razzaq, a Persian scholar-envoy (1443); Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese officer (c. 1515); and two Portuguese merchant-adventurers, Domingo Paes (c. 1520) and Fernão Nuniz (1535–37). Their accounts offer a vivid sense of Vijayanagar’s ruling class and courtly culture, its economy and trade, religion and politics, public customs and festivals, and much else.
Some common themes emerge from their accounts. Many of them speak of Vijayanagar as a dazzling city—of orchards, gardens, grand temples, palaces, baths, water tanks and lakes. They speak of merchants and wealthy men in the city, including visitors who might be ‘Christian, Jew, Moor or Heathen’. There was even an Islamic quarter with mosques and tombs. They speak of shops and bazaars on wide streets near major temples, overflowing with precious goods like pearls and diamonds, leather shoes embroidered in silk, vermilion, opium, grooming products for fashionable men and women, scented materials, pepper, fine textiles and cheaper brocades from China and Alexandria in Egypt. The city’s population topped 250,000, making it one of the largest in the world. It was a cosmopolitan city, whose public art and temple walls even had whimsical carvings of foreign travellers in their native attires—hard to imagine on modern temples today.
The travellers also describe the great fanfare with which people celebrated festivals. Dussehra was the biggest, involving 9 days of feasting, dancing, circus acts, wrestling, games, fireworks, even a public slaughter of buffaloes. At the end of it came military parades, which were a great testosterone-driven display of the king’s military might, meant to impress both his subjects and his enemies. Much like our display of missiles and fighter jets in Delhi on Republic Day.
Domingo Paes found Vijayanagar’s markets well stocked with grains, pulses, butter, oil, milk; fruits like mangoes, oranges, lime, pomegranates, jackfruit and grapes; vegetables like brinjals and radishes. Nuniz wrote that people ‘eat mutton, pork, venison, partridges, hares, doves, quail and all kinds of birds; even sparrows and rats, and cats and lizards, all of which are sold in the [city’s] market’. Since then, religious ideas and tastes have changed so much that today, meat is banned in Hampi village.
Paes met king Krishnadevaraya in the 1520s. Paes calls him ‘the most feared and perfect king’, who begins his day with a drink of seed oil, rubs it on his body and does weightlifting, wrestling, fencing and horse riding. Then he is bathed by a Brahmin, after which the king does puja and begins his courtly duties. Near his palace is a temple where they sacrifice ‘every day many sheep’. The travellers document all sorts of royal intrigues, assassinations and intra-family violence in Vijayanagar. Men of the royal family often killed each other, and paranoia was commonplace. All these have long been occupational hazards in dynasties around the world.
The culture of vijayanagar’s elites
The language of the Vijayanagar court was Telugu. Kannada and Sanskrit were common too. The same Krishnadevaraya who led violent military campaigns, was also a patron of the arts and literature. He supported eight great poets in his court, including Allasani Peddana, often called the ‘grandfather of Telugu poetry’, and Tenali Raman, who was a poet, scholar, court jester, and the hero of many a folk story I read as a child in north India.
The ruling class of Vijayanagar was almost entirely Hindu, but which strands of Hinduism did it patronise? Both Vaishnava and Shaiva. It supported both Vedantic non-dualism and dualism, that is, both Adi Shankara’s Brahminism, as well as Bhakti devotionalism. Among the latter was a Bhakti saint called Purandara Dasa (1484–1564). He composed and sang devotional melodies to Lord Vitthala and lived in this airy mandapa by the river. Today, this scholar-saint from Vijayanagar is widely regarded as the father of Carnatic music.
Many untouchable groups existed in Vijayanagar, along with bonded slaves. As always, their unwritten experiences are harder to recover. One exception is the Bhakti saint Kanaka Dasa, a shepherd, who was denied entry into Hindu temples. His songs poetically lamented the caste order that marked and constrained his life.
A perceptive observer might notice how little erotica there is on temple walls in Vijayanagar. In the episode on Khajuraho, we looked at how Hinduism had started becoming more orthodox, puritanical, and patriarchal centuries before the rise of Turko-Persian rule. Vijayanagar was part of this journey towards the conservative strains of Hinduism and temple art that we have today. So the little erotica it does have is more like an afterthought.
Interestingly, while Vijayanagar’s elites were Hindu, their material and political culture had been significantly Persianized, including their courtly attire: the kabayi, a long-sleeved pullover tunic, and kullayi, a high, brimless conical cap. This differed sharply from the loincloth-wearing Hindu kings more typical of south India. Persianate attire probably raised their status in the eyes of the envoys and traders of all Muslim kingdoms, because Persianate norms then signified high culture both in West Asia and South Asia. This embrace was voluntary, and is also evident in other realms in Vijayanagar, such as its Persianate architecture, administration, military technology, and more. Vijayanagar’s kings also patronised Islam in their domains and hired Muslim nobles in their courts. In short, their elites valued Persianate culture and happily embraced it in multiple arenas.
The lives of upper-class women
Most kings of Vijayanagar kept large harems, for which ‘the fairest and healthiest women are sought throughout the kingdom’, wrote the Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa. Once chosen, the women were materially secure for life but they ‘are never seen by any [unapproved] man . . . When they wish to go out, they are carried in litters shut up and closed’, accompanied by eunuchs. ‘They bathe daily in the many tanks’, and the ‘king goes to see them bathing, and she who pleases him most is asked to come to his chamber’. Barbosa claimed that ‘there is such envy and rivalry among these women with regard to the king’s favour, that “some kill others” and some poison themselves’.
The picture that emerges from multiple testimonies is that most queens and concubines of Vijayanagar led miserable lives, as if combining the worst of Hindu and Islamic patriarchy. They were segregated and confined indoors, guarded by eunuchs. They learned many arts in their walled gardens but were given no public role. When the king died, they were expected to commit sati, though this was not always realised. Widows of Kshatriya men who refused sati were held ‘in great dishonour … and a shame to their families’, wrote Barbosa. If young, they were sent to a temple ‘to earn money for it with their bodies’. Women of other classes suffered none of these indignities and led freer lives, though still subject to the common norms of patriarchy of the time.
And how did most kings of Vijayanagar die? Not on the military battlefield, it turns out, but on the sexual battlefield. According to Nuniz, Krishnadevaraya died ‘of the same illness of which all of his ancestors had died, with pains in the groin, of which die all the kings of Vijayanagar’. This sounds like venereal disease—hardly surprising, given their extreme promiscuity. Of course, this would have meant that the same death stalked many women of the harem too.
Female prostitution was legal. Taxes from sex workers paid for the city’s police services, claimed the Persian traveller Abdur Razzaq. The prostitutes, he wrote, wear ‘costly pearls and jewels and fine clothing, are quite young and extremely beautiful, and with each stand one or two serving girls’. They ply their trade on attractive streets, waiting for customers on chairs outside rows of chambers, ‘as clean as can be’. Some temples kept devadasis, who, like the courtesans of the elite, traded sexual favours for money. The state also hired thousands of prostitutes to accompany the army on its long military campaigns. Far from merely tolerating and legalising it, the state of Vijayanagar actively recruited young women into prostitution.
Crime and punishment
Policing in the city of Vijayanagar was efficient, and punishments were, well, very medieval. Small-time thieves had a foot and a hand cut off, wrote Nuniz. Major thieves, and also rapists, were hung by a hook piercing their chin. Traitors were ‘impaled alive on a wooden stake thrust through the belly … people of the lower orders, for whatever crime they commit’ had their heads cut off in the market-place. Occasionally, the king had a man thrown to the elephants, who tore him to pieces. Nuniz reported all this in a matter-of-fact way, perhaps because Vijayanagar was hardly exceptional—medieval European states also doled out appallingly cruel punishments.
Curiously, one crime that was tolerated in Vijayanagar was bribery. Public officials at all levels expected bribes from traders. Nuniz, a horse trader himself, wrote that ‘You must perforce pay bribes to all the several officers with whom you have to deal. They will do nothing without some profit to themselves.’ Here’s another example of a cultural habit with deep roots.
But the law of the land was not only harsher against the ‘lower orders,’ it was markedly gentler on the upper-castes. According to Barbosa, men of the priestly class ‘hold the greatest liberties and privileges and are not liable to death’ for any crime. They receive ‘much alms’. Some priests ‘have estates while others live in [monasteries with] good revenues. Some are great eaters and never work except to feed well’, wrote Barbosa. Most travellers saw Brahmins as a prosperous group, who were often administrators, merchants, and landowners.
The political economy of Vijayanagar
So how did the city of Vijayanagar acquire all the wealth that impressed foreign travellers? The first thing to recognize is that Vijayanagar Empire was an imperial state run by warrior-chiefs. They had conquered the economically productive regions of south India through brute force, including coastal Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh. They kept a large standing army whose ranks included thousands of Turkish and Indian Muslims.
Much of what was sold in the city of Vijayanagar came from outside, arriving on about 2,000 bullock carts daily. The goods were taxed at the city’s gates like this one. But land use tax was the largest source of revenue for the state. Other key taxpayers included traders, merchants, and producers of manufactured goods. Taxes also came from their many ports on the Malabar and Coromandel coasts. Foreign imports included 13,000 Arabian horses for the army each year. Military guards ensured the smooth flow of supplies on roads linking the ports to the capital. The Vijayanagar regime exerted its power and control through a cadre of regional governors, or nayaks. These were trusted royal kin, noblemen and warlords. They were often placed as outsiders to the districts they administered—say, Telugus or Kannadigas were sent to serve in Tamil country. There they asserted the king’s authority and collected rents. These governors resided in fortified garrisons, from where they maintained standing armies to quell local rebellions and joined the Vijayanagar army when summoned. It was very much a feudal arrangement.
In other words, the city of Vijayanagar was the capital of an imperial war state, sustained by military force and ‘courtly patronage, to which much of the wealth of the empire was diverted’. And this wealth is what foreign travellers saw and reported in its capital—wealth that was extracted from the subjugated people of the empire. In this aspect, the Vijayanagar Empire was not fundamentally different from any other empire of its time.
The fall of Vijayanagar
It’s fascinating how and why the Vijayanagar Empire ended. In 1520, the Bahmani Sultanate broke up into five sultanates. In subsequent decades, all five were in shifting alliances and conflicts with each other and with Vijayanagar. They fought many battles for the control of the fertile Raichur doab. Muslims fought each other; Hindus fought each other; Hindus allied with Muslims to fight Hindus; Muslims allied with Hindus to fight Muslims. For example, Vijayanagar often allied with some sultanates against others, but its most hated rival was the Hindu Gajapati rulers of Odisha. We really see all permutations and combinations! In the realpolitik of both rajas and sultans, religion was much less a source of conflict than the demands of imperial power and economic self-interest.
The armies of the sultanates had Hindu soldiers and generals, just as Vijayanagar’s armies had Muslim and Christian soldiers and generals. Elite warriors enjoyed professional options far beyond religious considerations. In reality, a warrior’s ‘loyalty to family, faction, or paymaster counted for more than loyalty to land, religion, or ethnic group’ (Richard Eaton). Consider the remarkable case of Rama Raya, a top military general of Vijayanagar and son-in-law of Krishnadevaraya. Earlier in his life, he had enlisted for three years in the service of the sultan of Golconda (Quli Qutb-ul-Mulk), a great rival of Vijayanagar.
The sequence of events is complex, but after a series of misadventures later in his life, when Rama Raya was the de facto ruler of Vijayanagar, four of the five sultanates united against him in a decisive battle. A great war took place in 1565 at Talikota. But Vijayanagar’s army, led by the overconfident Rama Raya, now 80 years old, had fallen behind in military technology, like field artillery. With such vulnerabilities, they were quickly routed. Scholars would later blame the arrogant follies of Rama Raya for the ‘disaster’ of Talikota.
As news of their defeat reached their capital, the royal family promptly fled with hundreds of elephants loaded with gold, diamonds, and precious stones. Many others left the city with the little they could carry. But before the enemy forces arrived to take what remained, the neighbouring tribespeople looted the city. One wonders what sort of relations Vijayanagar had fostered with the surrounding tribes to invite such opportunism. The city was then plundered by the victorious troops, which included Hindus like the Marathas of Bijapur and Telugus of Golconda. Such plunder by the winning side was a common practice in those times—it was considered part of a soldier’s ‘package of incentives’. Just six years earlier, Vijayanagar and Bijapur had aligned to defeat and similarly plunder Golconda and Ahmadnagar, where Rama Raya’s troops had even destroyed mosques. However, through the plunder of Vijayanagar, its temples and their delicate statuary would survive remarkably intact, which visitors to Hampi and to local museums can see today.
Was Vijayanagar a Hindu kingdom that bravely resisted the ‘onslaught of Islam’, as many Hindu nationalists allege today? That’s not what history tells us. There is little evidence that the rulers of Vijayanagar were defending Hinduism against Islam. Happily syncretic, they had embraced many Persianate cultural norms; they employed Muslim fighters and commanders. In its courtly rituals, taxation, and governance, Vijayanagar resembled the sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda more than the Hindu domains of Pallavas and Cholas. Vijayanagar’s rajas, or rayas, allied with the sultans as often as they opposed them. They were mainly defending their kingdom against other kingdoms, whether Muslim or Hindu, using both Muslim and Hindu allies. To see the Deccan as a binary between an ‘evil’ Muslim north and a ‘good’ Hindu south is a projection of modern passions and prejudices upon the past. It really distorts the actual historical experience of medieval South Indians.
Within a year of the battle of Talikota, the alliance of the four sultanates collapsed, and they again became rivals. In the following century, the Mughal Empire would swallow them all. But many of the nayaks, or the regional governors of Vijayanagar Empire, set up independent kingdoms of their own, such as at Mysore, Tanjore, Gingee, and Madurai. The great city of Vijayanagar was abandoned, and was eventually covered by a forest where tigers roamed the ruins.
In the next episode, I’ll go north and take a closer look at Indian society during the Mughal Empire, especially during the reign of Aurangzeb. Among other things, I’ll lean on the account of the perceptive French traveller, François Bernier, a medical doctor who worked for a nobleman in Aurangzeb’s court for many years. See you next time!
