Vijayanagara Empire

Founding

The empire was founded in 1336 by Harihara and Bukka, brothers who had served the Hoysalas or the Kākatīyas and had been taken to Delhi as captives. The tradition — that they converted to Islam, were sent south as governors, reverted to Hinduism under the sage Vidyāraṇya, and founded a new capital — comes from later sources and its details are disputed.

What is clear is the context. The Sultanate's campaigns had destroyed the Hoysalas, the Kākatīyas, the Pāṇḍyas and the Yādavas within twenty years, and Vijayanagara was assembled from the wreckage by the same officer class that had served them. The four ruling houses that followed one another — Sangama, Saluva, Tuluva, Aravidu — each took power from within the existing state rather than by external conquest.

The city

The capital, called simply Vijayanagara, the city of victory, stood in a boulder-strewn landscape on the Tungabhadra at what is now Hampi. Persian and European visitors — Abdur Razzaq for the Timurids, Nicolò de' Conti, Domingo Paes and Fernão Nunes for the Portuguese — describe it as among the largest cities in the world, with bazaars where diamonds were sold by the measure.

The ruins cover some twenty-six square kilometres: the Virūpākṣa temple still in worship, the Vitthala temple with its stone chariot and its columns that ring when struck, the Krishna and Hazara Rama temples, the royal enclosure with its stepped tank and elephant stables, and a hydraulic system of aqueducts and tanks. It is among the largest archaeological sites in Asia.

The empire's economy rested on irrigation, on the textile trade of its coasts, and critically on the import of Arabian and Persian horses through Goa and the Konkan ports, over which it fought the Deccan sultanates continually.

Kṛṣṇadevarāya

Kṛṣṇadevarāya, ruling from 1509 to 1529, brought the empire to its height: he defeated the Gajapatis of Odisha and took the eastern coast, held the Deccan sultanates at bay, and dealt with the newly arrived Portuguese at Goa as an equal.

He was also a poet in Telugu — the Āmuktamālyada, a poem on the Vaiṣṇava saint Āṇṭāḷ, is attributed to him and includes a long passage of political advice — and his court supported the aṣṭadiggajas, the eight elephants of the directions, the Telugu poets whose work is the classical corpus of that language. Kannada and Sanskrit letters flourished equally, and the Haridāsa devotional tradition of Purandaradāsa, the foundation of Carnatic music's pedagogy, belongs to this period and region.

Talikota and after

In 1565 a coalition of the Deccan sultanates — Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar, temporarily allied — met the Vijayanagara army at Talikota. The regent Rāma Rāya was captured and killed, the army broke, and the city was abandoned to plunder that continued for months. The destruction of Hampi was thorough and deliberate.

The empire did not end there: the Aravidu dynasty ruled from Penukonda and then Chandragiri until 1646, and the Nayaka states of Madurai, Thanjavur, Gingee and Keladi that emerged from it carried its institutions and its architecture forward for another century and a half.

Vijayanagara's memory has been heavily worked over. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century writing often cast it as a Hindu bulwark against Islam, which the record does not support: the empire employed Muslim cavalry and gunners, its rulers took the title sultan among the kings of India, its architecture borrowed freely from sultanate forms, and the Deccan sultanates fought one another as readily as they fought Vijayanagara — Rāma Rāya himself had allied with each of them in turn before Talikota.