Long before Sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah began planning the city of Hyderabad, royal patrons in the sprawling kingdom of Vijayanagara had already built the monumental temple complexes that, in popular imagination, remain iconic images of that state. In their metropolitan capital, kings regularly sponsored huge public processions and ceremonies taking place over several days that were enacted in elaborately built structures near their palaces or in the city’s temple complexes. Long chariot streets, tanks, multi-pillar halls and colonnades lining inner enclosure walls – all were prominent features of these complexes.
The capital’s oldest temple complexes appeared in its Sacred Centre, the well-defined quarter near the southern banks of the Tungabhadra, originating with the one dedicated to the goddess Pampa and a form of Śiva locally called Virupaksha [see Fig. 4]. Here, progressively greater Tamil influence can be seen in a cluster of temples associated with the first four Sangama rulers, spanning the period from the mid fourteenth to the early fifteenth centuries. This is readily understandable, since very early in the kingdom’s history, between 1352 and 1371, royal armies from the upland plateau conquered most of the fertile and prosperous Tamil country to the south and east of the dry interior that formed the core of the Vijayanagara state. Prolonged contact between Vijayanagara’s political centre and its wealthy coastal provinces led, among other things, to the imperial city’s gradual assimilation of the rich heritage of classical Tamil architecture, including such elements as heavily carved pyramidal entrance towers with their distinctive barrel-vaulted roofs.
Vijayanagara’s conquests in India’s deep south also had religious and ideological consequences. From the mid fourteenth century through to the mid sixteenth, as an increasingly diverse range of peoples and cultures were brought under its rule, the state evolved an ever more synthesized, cosmopolitan courtly style.25 We have noted the extent to which the kingdom’s elite classes had been assimilated into an expanding Persianate world. Eschewing the status of a regional kingdom, Vijayanagara also patronized a range of religious traditions that included Śaiva, Vaishnava and Jain, together with Islamic institutions. The Sangama brothers, who had founded the state in 1347, declared their official deity to be Virupaksha. Down to the mid sixteenth century, the kingdom’s official documents continued to be authenticated in the presence of the icon representing that god in the city’s Virupaksha temple. From the early fifteenth century onwards, however, ruling authorities gave increasing patronage to the god Vishnu in his various manifestations, or avatars. The trend began with Deva Raya I, who built the Ramachandra Temple, a magnificent structure dedicated to the Vaishnava deity Rama, in the heart of the Royal Centre. In building this temple, the king made efficient use of the city’s mythic landscape, inasmuch as the Tungabhadra next to which it stands, together with the hills to the north and east of the Royal Centre, are all associated with an important episode in the Ramayana epic. This is the Kishkindha section, in which Rama meets and secures the help of monkey heroes in his quest to rescue his abducted wife, Sita. However, even though the mythic associations of Rama with Vijayanagara’s landscape had probably preceded the founding of the capital, the Sangama founders of the dynasty never mentioned Rama in their inscriptions, patronizing Virupaksha instead.
As a solution to this growing tension over which deity would be recognized as the dynasty’s Cosmic Overlord – the Śaiva god Virupaksha or the Vaishnava god Rama – recent research has proposed that, throughout the fifteenth century, Vijayanagara’s rulers practised a hybrid royal theology. Kings presented themselves as ideal devotees of Śiva in the form of Virupaksha, but as ideal kings in the manner of Rama, an avatar of Vishnu.26 But in the late fifteenth century when the Sangama house was overthrown by Saluva Narasimha (r. 1485–91), a warlord based at the stronghold of Chandragiri on the northern Tamil plain, the new king openly favoured the Vaishnava deity Venkateśvara, the lord of the popular shrine at Tirupati in southern Andhra. From Narasimha’s reign on, south India’s pilgrimage centre at Tirupati grew dramatically in importance, both for the general population and for the state’s rulers. Whereas before the Vijayanagara period only 150 inscriptions at Tirupati referred to the shrine’s benefactors, that figure rose to 480 in the short period between 1509 and 1542, when the state had attained its height of cultural and political influence. Vijayanagara’s most famous monarch, Krishna Raya, made Venkateśvara his patron deity and visited Tirupati seven times. His successor, Achyuta Raya (r. 1529–42), performed several coronation ceremonies, the first of which occurred at Tirupati in the presence of Venkateśvara.27 In 1544 the state altogether ceased authenticating official documents before the Śaiva god Virupaksha, as it had been doing for nearly two centuries; from then on, they were authenticated before another Vaishnava deity, Vitthala, locally identified with Krishna.28 This change in sectarian affiliation is also reflected in the state’s minted gold coins. Between 1377 and 1424, following Vijayanagara’s conquest of the Tamil coastal area, state coins bore mixed Śaiva and Vaishnava images, whereas after 1509 most of the coins’ motifs were exclusively Vaishnava in nature.29
It was in this last phase of metropolitan Vijayanagara’s historical evolution, the first half of the sixteenth century, that its theology most closely matched its imperial ambitions. Having expanded over most of the southern portion of the Indian peninsula, its sovereigns incorporated in the heart of their capital temples dedicated to cults specific to regions they had conquered, or which they aspired to conquer. The city’s temple complex dedicated to Balakrishna – the god Krishna as an infant – was specially built in the Sacred Centre to commemorate Krishna Raya’s 1513 victory over the Gajapati raja at Udayagiri near the Andhra coast. It also houses the Krishna image that was taken from Udayagiri to Vijayanagara. Similarly, the Vitthala Temple complex, the bulk of which dates to the early sixteenth century, reproduces in the imperial capital the worship of Vitthala, which had been centred in Pandharpur, 280 kilometres north-west of Vijayanagara. In 1534 Achyuta Raya built the capital city’s Tiruvengalanatha Temple, which replicates the Venkateśvara Temple at Tirupati, located 120 kilometres north-west of modern Chennai. In this manner, the later kings gathered into their imperial centre ritual representations of the state’s most important constituent sovereign territories, or (as in the case of Pandharpur) would-be territories: Virupaksha for the state’s core in Karnataka, Venkateśvara for the Tamil and southern Andhra country, Balakrishna for the coastal districts and Vitthala for the northern Deccan. The state’s imperial pantheon, made visual in its capital’s built landscape, thus fused its theology with its sovereign territory.
Vijayanagara’s economic history also experienced dramatic changes between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Two distinct periods of the kingdom’s economic growth are seen in the pattern of reservoir construction, projects that were essential to agrarian life in a region as arid as the Deccan plateau. During the century between the state’s founding in 1347 and 1450, thirty-five reservoirs were built in its core region, and twenty more in the first half of the sixteenth century. Between these two peaks of reservoir-construction, however, there was a lull from 1450 to 1500, when only three reservoirs are known to have been constructed on the plateau.30 Nor were any major temples built at this time, or many stone or copperplate inscriptions issued. Whereas the state continuously minted gold and copper coins between 1347 and 1446, only copper coins were issued for the next several decades, and for the next four decades after that no new coins appeared at all.31
This dramatic decline in cultural and economic activity is associated with a period of devastating drought-induced famines that struck the Deccan in the fifteenth century, which in turn triggered a marked decline in agricultural production, land revenue and population. This was exacerbated by the state’s chronic inability to harmonize the agrarian economy of the dry, upland plateau with the highly commercialized economy of the Tamil coast. Until the early 1500s, the plateau and coast practically lived in two separate economic worlds, as is seen in patterns of textile production and consumption. Along the coast, the port of Pulicat had emerged in the fifteenth century as a major centre for the export of textiles produced in both the Coromandel low country and the Kaveri delta. By the early sixteenth century, Pulicat’s annual textile exports to the South-east Asian port of Malacca were estimated to be worth 175,000 Portuguese cruzados,32 reflecting the integration of the heavily commercialized coastal region with the trading world of the wider Indian Ocean. The boom had also improved the lives of Tamil weavers, who in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries won the right to ride in palanquins and blow conch shells on ritual occasions, a sure sign of their rising social status.33
Notably, the Coromandel coast’s manufacturing and commercial boom in the late fifteenth century coincided with the economic stagnation in Vijayanagara’s agrarian heartland. Although the court itself appears to have been consuming increasing amounts of cloth in this period, much of it produced on the Coromandel coast, the kingdom’s upland core region proved unable to profit fiscally from the coastal boom. In 1513 coastal weaving communities even induced the government to rescind an order that would have increased taxes on their looms.34 The court’s inability to impose and collect taxes on such a crucial sector of the economy points to the central government’s structural weakness with respect to its rich coastal provinces. An early sign of this came in the form of a major tax revolt. In 1429 communities of cultivators and artisans in the Kaveri delta, which Vijayanagara had conquered and annexed sixty years earlier, rose up in a widespread rebellion protesting the oppressive taxes imposed by imperial administrators.35 After that revolt, Vijayanagara’s central administration maintained only a loose grip over its Tamil province.36 As a result, the state’s core upland region failed to benefit from the economic boom then occurring in the Tamil country. As one historian remarks, ‘the Kaveri milch-cow of resources for a central Vijayanagara exchequer proved difficult to milk’.37
What is more, the rich Coromandel coast and its considerable wealth soon served as a power base for a succession of military commanders who would shape the state’s destiny. The pattern had already begun in the reign of Deva Raya II, who had granted considerable autonomy to powerful military commanders after the Kaveri delta tax revolt of 1429. In 1456 Saluva Narasimha began making generous endowments to the nearby Tirupati Temple complex, already the most important pilgrimage centre in south India. In the 1470s, gathering supporters through his military prowess and his continued patronage of the Tirupati shrine, he seized control over the entire Coromandel coast from the hill fort of Udayagiri in modern Nellore District down to Rameśwaram, adjacent to Sri Lanka. Although he remained for some time nominally subordinate to his royal overlord in the capital, in 1485 he became the first Vijayanagara general to overthrow the state’s ruling Sangama dynasty and establish a new one, the Saluva.
A violent pattern had now set in. In 1505 the son and successor of the new dynasty’s founder was himself overthrown by Tuluva Vira Narasimha (r. 1505–9), the son of Saluva Narasimha’s chief minister. He then founded Vijayanagara’s third dynasty, the Tuluvas. In 1509 he was succeeded by his half-brother Krishna Raya, the most famous of the kingdom’s rulers. Krishna Raya is celebrated for an unbroken string of military conquests that brought enormous wealth to the capital and helped end the state’s half-century of economic stagnation. The victories began in 1509, when at Koilkonda, 100 kilometres south-west of Hyderabad, he defeated the last remnant of Bahmani power, Sultan Mahmud along with Yusuf ‘Adil Khan, the founder of the fledgling sultanate of Bijapur. The king then led his armies southwards and seized Penukonda, Śrirangapattanam and Śivasamudram from the chiefs of the powerful Ummattur family. In 1513, turning to the southern Andhra coast, he reconquered the fort of Udayagiri, which had fallen into the hands of the Gajapati kings of Orissa. Two years later his armies took from the Gajapatis the fort of Kondavidu in the Krishna delta. In 1517 he took Vijayavada and Kondapalli, also in that delta, and then Rajahmundry, further up the coast in the Godavari delta. With the help of Portuguese mercenary musketeers, in 1520 he reconquered from Bijapur the rich Raichur region, an area that, lying between the Krishna and Tungabhadra Rivers, his Sangama predecessors had perennially contested with the Bahmani sultans. In 1523 he penetrated further north and seized, but chose not to hold, Gulbarga.
Thus ended fourteen years of uninterrupted military success. Especially notable was the king’s brief capture of Gulbarga, the Bahmanis’ second capital and a venerable site of Persianate culture in the Deccan. While he had the city in his grasp, Krishna Raya provocatively ‘appointed’ one of the sons of the last Bahmani sultan as the new Bahmani ruler – even though that state was by then defunct – and styled himself ‘the one who brings about the (re)establishment of Yavana [Turkish] rule’. This insolent gesture was probably made in retaliation for the Bahmanis’ reduction of Vijayanagara to tributary status for most of the first half of the fifteenth century. The boast also affirmed that he, Krishna Raya, now claimed to be the political arbiter of the entire Deccan, capable of establishing – or in this case, renewing – Turkish power. Never before had a ruler of Vijayanagara so brazenly intruded in the affairs of the northern Deccan. Once back in his capital and securely in power, Krishna Raya refrained from planting his kinsmen in central ministries or in command of major forts. Rather, he continued the state’s earlier practice of hiring large numbers of mercenary troops – Deccani and Westerner cavalry, Portuguese gunners – and of placing Brahmins, not kinsmen, in command of the kingdom’s prominent forts. Such measures were aimed at checking the power of quasi-independent warlords. After all, he was well aware of the pattern whereby earlier warlords, including his own half-brother Vira Narasimha, had used major forts as power bases to launch new dynasties.
Accompanying Krishna Raya on his military campaigns was Rama Raya, a chieftain of the Aravidu clan whose performance so impressed the king that he gave him his daughter in marriage. Born in 1484 in Kurnool District, south-western Andhra, Rama Raya began his career in the service of Quli Qutb Shah, the founder of the sultanate at Golconda. That the son of a prominent Vijayanagara general could so readily enrol in Golconda’s service suggests that in the Deccan, as in north India in this age, loyalty to family, faction or paymaster counted far more than loyalty to land, religion or ethnic group. But his service at Golconda lasted only three years. In 1515 Golconda’s neighbour to the west, Bijapur, invaded some districts that were under his charge, and instead of defending his fort he fled back to Golconda. Considering this an act of cowardice, the sultan dismissed the Telugu warrior, who then took up service with Krishna Raya. Once in Vijayanagara’s service, Rama Raya systematically gathered power around himself, his immediate family and his extended lineage, the Aravidu clan. Although Krishna Raya had named his other half-brother, Achyuta Raya, his successor, when the king died in 1529 Rama Raya tried to subvert his father-in-law’s choice by having the late king’s infant son proclaimed king and himself regent. Although the attempted power-grab was blocked by the kingdom’s nobility, Rama Raya exploited his position as minister and his marital connection with the late Krishna Raya by arranging that the command of key forts in the heartland – Adoni, Kurnool and Nandyal – be transferred to his Aravidu kinsmen. This marked an important step in Vijayanagara’s transition to a patrimonial state. Also, like Saluva Narasimha before him, Rama Raya showered lavish patronage on the shrine of Venkateśvara at Tirupati, which had earlier proved such a useful stepping stone to the throne. Whereas Achyuta Raya had granted forty-three villages for the benefit of the shrine at Tirupati, Rama Raya bestowed sixty.38
Rama Raya also benefited from political events to the north of the Krishna. In 1535, Sultan Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah I of Bijapur dismissed all but 400 of his Westerner troops and replaced them with Deccanis. In another instance of elite mobility across the plateau, Rama Raya recruited the 3,000 Westerners dismissed by the sultan, most of them Shi‘i immigrants from Iran.39 When Achyuta Raya died in 1542 and was succeeded by his youthful son, the kingdom’s regent attempted to seize the throne for himself by wiping out nearly the entire ruling Tuluva family. This heinous act so alienated the nobility that Rama Raya, who had fled to one of his estates during the chaos in the capital, suddenly emerged as the rallying point for the kingdom’s salvation. In a rare public display of their covert power, the queens of the royal harem ordered the nobles to hand over the city to Rama Raya, who in the meantime had consolidated his grip over the major forts of the interior uplands. Gathering together large armies from these regions, in 1543 he triumphantly marched up to the capital, where he was hailed as a political saviour.
Riding by Rama Raya’s side through the city’s gates were his two brothers and Sadaśiva, the sole remnant of the ruling Tuluva dynasty to have escaped the violence of the preceding months. The sixteen-year old, a nephew of Krishna Raya whom Rama Raya had spirited off to an interior fort during the turmoil in the capital, would now serve as Rama Raya’s ticket to supreme power. Forgoing the more perilous path of seizing the throne for himself, Rama Raya chose the easier one of organizing Sadaśiva’s formal coronation, with himself as regent. This arrangement lasted until 1550, when Sadaśiva tried to assert himself, to which the regent responded by simply imprisoning his charge, allowing him but one public appearance a year. By now Vijayanagara had become a fully patrimonial state, as Rama Raya appointed his own Aravidu kinsmen as commanders of its principal forts, as high officials at court, and as governors over territories as distant as Sri Lanka. In 1562, he even discontinued the formality of allowing the hapless Sadaśiva his annual public viewing. Though stopping just short of having himself crowned, Rama Raya had emerged as the state’s supreme autocrat.40
To legitimize his power-grab, Rama Raya associated himself and his family with the long-defunct but once mighty and still prestigious Chalukya dynasty, which had ruled over the entire plateau between 973 and 1183 from its capital in Kalyana, in the heart of the Deccan. As in north India, where upwardly mobile chieftains employed specialists to support their claims to Rajput status, court poets and genealogists substantiated the claims that Rama Raya and his Aravidu kinsmen were directly descended from the Chalukya kings of Kalyana. As early as the 1540s, in the early days of his ascent to power, Rama Raya’s family members were praised with titles such as ‘Founder of the kingdom of Kalyana’, ‘Born in the Chalukya line’ and even ‘Chalukya emperor’. Subsequent Telugu poets not only claimed that Rama Raya had descended from the Kalyana Chalukya emperors, but assigned him exalted titles such as ‘Radiant king of Kalyana’, ‘Lord of the excellent city of Kalyana’ and ‘The one who captured the city of Kalyana’.41 Of course such claims had no basis in fact since Kalyana, located 300 kilometres north of Vijayanagara, had for more than two centuries been under the rule of the Tughluqs, the Bahmanis and, in Rama Raya’s own day, the sultanate of Bidar.
Rama Raya’s preoccupation with the Chalukya dynasty and its ancient capital of Kalyana did not stop with titular claims. For more than twenty years, mixing high-handed diplomacy with outright warfare, he worked to ensure that whichever northern sultan he was at the moment allied with also controlled Kalyana, as though that sultan were an intermediary vassal between himself and the former Chalukya capital. Because his own army was larger than that of any of the five northern sultanates, and because those mutually hostile kingdoms were often at war with one another, Rama Raya was able to play them off against each other. This he did from 1543 to 1565 with consummate skill, becoming ever more arrogant and audacious as he methodically humbled one proud sultan after another. In particular, Sultan Husain Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar was brought to his knees, on one occasion being compelled to eat pan (betel nut) from the autocrat’s own hand. While returning to his capital after a second occasion of humiliating that ruler, Rama Raya gratuitously plundered and annexed several districts belonging to Golconda, and even some belonging to his current ally, ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah I of Bijapur.
But this time, the scheming octogenarian had overplayed his hand. Four northern sultanates – Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Golconda and Bidar – suspended their mutual hostilities and combined their forces to challenge the grand army of Vijayanagara. Gathering in December 1564 in the town of Talikota, just north of the Krishna, the four armies forded that river and in late January 1565 engaged an enormous Vijayanagara army near the river’s southern shores. The momentous Battle of Talikota would be Rama Raya’s last. During the conflict he suffered a spear wound that dislodged him from his horse. Snatched by the trunk of one of the coalition’s elephants, he was taken at once to the tent of Sultan Husain Nizam Shah who, confronting his bitter adversary for the last time, ordered him to be beheaded on the spot. His head was then stuffed with straw and displayed to his troops on the tip of a spear. Demoralized, the Vijayanagara army now completely disintegrated. Rama Raya’s brother Tirumala, blinded in one eye, rushed from the battlefield to the capital, where he released Sadaśiva from prison, picked up his family and hastily quit the city just before the advancing allies reached it.
While Tirumala and Sadaśiva were busy transferring the capital to the fort of Penukonda 200 kilometres to the south-east and reconstituting the state there, the victorious allies spent the next six months looting the Vijayanagara metropolis. The once-great city now lost its eminence, as well as most of its population. Wandering about the desolate site several years after the great battle, the Venetian traveller Cesare Federici described the place as ‘not altogether destroyed, yet the houses stand still, but emptie, and there is dwelling in them nothing as is reported, but Tygres and other wild beasts’.42