Between 1347 and 1565 Vijayanagara had often been at war with the Bahmani sultanate and the latter’s sixteenth-century successor states. Because the ruling houses of Vijayanagara and its northern neighbours adhered to different religious traditions, many modern historians have construed the Krishna as a civilizational frontier dividing the Deccan into a Muslim north and a Hindu south. In part, this idea is a legacy of historian Robert Sewell who, writing in 1900, first brought Vijayanagara’s history to the attention of the reading public. Sewell famously described that state as a ‘Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquests’,73 thereby contributing to an enduring trope of religiously defined territorial separatism in the plateau. Sewell’s book was published when India’s nationalist movement was in full swing, and when Indian historians were looking to the country’s past for evidence of successful states whose memory might mobilize British India’s population for the nationalist cause. Inasmuch as Indian nationalism for many meant Hindu nationalism, Sewell’s communalized characterization of Vijayanagara found a receptive audience.
But Sewell’s ‘bulwark’ thesis reads history backwards, projecting into the past an early-twentieth-century preoccupation with religious identity and motives. Nor is his thesis sustained by evidence: in fact, it is contradicted by evidence. Peninsular India in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was not so much a sacred realm, far less a zone of two mutually exclusive sacred realms, as it was a crossroads. As in contemporary north India, peoples in the fifteenth- to the seventeenth-century Deccan circulated through overlapping religious, political and commercial networks. Long-distance merchants such as Mahmud Gawan brought horses, precious metals and other goods from the coasts inland and textiles and spices from the interior to the coasts. Jain, Hindu and Muslim pilgrims moved in all directions. Sufis, ascetics and lay seekers circulated from place to place, or from person to person, pursuing salvation, wisdom or more mundane goals. Adventurers and men of arms comprising the plateau’s military labour market moved from court to court seeking promising rulers, commanders or chieftains to whom they might offer their service. None of these people appear to have experienced any civilizational barrier of the sort that Sewell posited – certainly not the 10,000 Turkish archers that Deva Raya II recruited to serve at Vijayanagara. And certainly not the Qutb Shahi prince Ibrahim, who fled south to Rama Raya’s court in Vijayanagara to escape treachery in Golconda, or even Rama Raya himself, whose first patron was Golconda’s Sultan Quli Qutb Shah. As a region where loyalties frequently shifted and alliances were always subject to renegotiation, the peninsula differed little from north India, which experienced a similarly high degree of mobility of goods, peoples and ideas across borders.
Peninsular India, then, is best understood in this period as a single, interconnected zone, a perspective illustrated by the ways in which ordinary people used coinage. When the Bahmani and Vijayanagara kingdoms were established in the mid fourteenth century, both states minted their own coins, which initially circulated only within their respective realms. In the north, the Bahmanis introduced a currency system inherited from that of their parent state, the Delhi sultanate, which was based on the gold dinar and tanka, together with a silver tanka. To the south, Vijayanagara issued a gold coin, the hon, which had derived ultimately from the Chalukya dynasty of kings, whose realm spanned the entire plateau in the tenth to the twelfth centuries. In effect, the Bahmanis introduced a coinage system whose historical roots were alien to the plateau, whereas the kings of Vijayanagara issued coins with a long-standing, indigenous pedigree. Merchants and consumers in both realms consequently invested more trust in the hon than they did in Bahmani coinage. In the reign of the Bahmanis’ second sultan, Muhammad Shah I (r. 1358–75), money-changers would melt down locally minted gold dinars and tankas and send the bulk bullion across the Krishna to Vijayanagara, where it was re-struck as Vijayanagara hons or its smaller denominations.74 The newly minted coins then found their way back north to Bahmani territory, where they were used for commercial transactions. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, twice as much Vijayanagara coinage circulated in the Bahmani state as did the Bahmanis’ own coins. In fact, more Vijayanagara coins circulated in the Bahmani kingdom than in Vijayanagara itself. Yet the southern coins never completely drove the Bahmanis’ coins out of circulation, since the two systems were used by different social communities. Wealthier elites used the larger-denomination gold and silver Bahmani coins for international trade and official salaries, whereas commoners in both rural and urban areas used the smaller, more versatile and more familiar Vijayanagara coins for local purchases and payments.
After the collapse of the Bahmani state in the early sixteenth century, its coins continued to circulate until the 1580s, when Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Golconda began articulating their separate identities by issuing their own silver coins. Yet throughout this period Vijayanagara’s hons still circulated in the northern Deccan. In fact, they were in such demand that from 1513 onwards the northern sultanates, succumbing to reality, began assessing agricultural and commercial taxes in the hon, and not exclusively in their own dinars or tankas. Even after 1565, when the Vijayanagara state was severely crippled following the Battle of Talikota, Bijapur, Golconda and Ahmadnagar not only continued using the Vijayanagara coins in their official transactions, but from the 1580s they began minting their own hons, thereafter the only type of coin mentioned in sultanate inscriptions. These coins bore the same standard of weight and purity as the old Vijayanagara-minted coins, the only difference being that the Sanskrit titles and images of Hindu deities of the old coins were replaced by Persian lettering.
But even this compromise was not accepted by the peoples living within the sultanates’ frontiers. As the older, ‘genuine’ Vijayanagara hons became rarer with the passage of time, their intrinsic value increased relative to that of the sultanate’s newer hons. In their normal transactions, people therefore preferred using the hons that had earlier been minted in Vijayanagara. Nonetheless, the sultanates tried to enforce the use of their own, newer hons. In 1654 ‘Adil Shahi authorities in Bijapur ordered the confiscation of the property of anybody who used the older hons minted by the defunct Vijayanagara state instead of Bijapur’s hons. But such royal edicts evidently failed. Within several decades of that order, even the Muslim functionaries of a Qutb Shahi mosque were insisting that an annual grant made for their maintenance be made not in Golconda’s minted hons, but in ‘genuine’ hons – that is, the currency minted by Vijayanagara over a century earlier, bearing Sanskrit lettering and images of Hindu deities.75
Notwithstanding the bombastic rhetoric sometimes found in contemporary Persian chronicles regarding Vijayanagara’s ‘infidels’, or twenty-first-century talk of a Hindu–Muslim ‘clash of civilizations’ in the premodern Deccan, ordinary people actually living at that time experienced the plateau as a single economic zone that transcended both political frontiers and cultural difference. Their preference for the hon also speaks to a deep continuity over time, as merchants, producers and consumers across the peninsula preferred to use a familiar medium of economic exchange traceable to the Chalukya maharajas of Kalyana. This should not be surprising, for in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries ruling elites on both sides of the Krishna were actively reviving the memory of the Chalukya past. In Vijayanagara, government officials – probably Rama Raya himself – ordered a large, Chalukya-period stepped tank to be disassembled and transported from its original site to the Vijayanagara capital, where it was laboriously reassembled in the heart of the city’s Royal Centre. Meanwhile, Bijapur’s Sultan Ibrahim I (r. 1534–58) installed Chalukya-period stone inscriptions and an ensemble of Chalukya-period columns in the main gateway to his capital’s citadel, while at the fort of Kalyana – the Chalukyas’ former capital – his grandson Sultan Ibrahim II built a palace around a carefully preserved Chalukya-period temple.76
Such evidence speaks of a deeper trend in the Deccan’s cultural history, namely a progressive interpenetration of the Sanskrit and Persianate worlds between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. At the time of the Khalaji and Tughluq invasions of the Deccan in the early fourteenth century, these two worlds had remained quite distinct, sustained by two different literary traditions. But by the sixteenth century their mutual intermingling had proceeded to a remarkable extent. One sees this, for example, in a frieze that runs along the cornice of a gateway at Raichur which Vijayanagara’s Krishna Raya built when he seized that fort from Bijapur’s control in 1520. In the centre is an image of Krishna Raya seated in royal splendour and at ease, surrounded by female attendants [see Fig. 10]. Since the entire frieze narrates well-known stories from the Ramayana epic, the king is contextually associated with Rama, its divine hero. But unlike the panel depicting Rama, Krishna Raya also appears wearing tall, conical headgear called kullayi in Telugu (kulah in Persian). This item of apparel had migrated to India from Iran, where it was associated with high social status, even royalty. With whom, then, is Krishna Raya to be identified – a Hindu deity, a Persian nobleman, or both?
The ambiguity conveyed in this single image, like the assimilation of the headgear’s Persian name into the Telugu language, captures how a sixteenth-century Deccani monarch could draw from two discourses of power and civilization simultaneously. It is a phenomenon that will bear closer scrutiny in the following chapters.