The entire medieval history of India, stretching over a period of about thousand years, from the eighth to the eighteenth century, was dominated by Muslim invaders and rulers. During this period there were only two Hindu kingdoms of subcontinental prominence, that of Vijayanagar and of Marathas. No one would have foreseen this destiny for either of these kingdoms at the beginning of their history, for they were both then obscure mountain kingdoms. This was particularly so in the case of Vijayanagar, which within just a few decades of its founding rose to become one of the two dominant kingdoms of peninsular India, rivalling the Bahmani Sultanate, the other dominant peninsular kingdom.
The early history of Vijayanagar is obscure, shrouded in diverse legends. The kingdom apparently evolved out of Kampili, a chiefdom in the rocky highlands on the northern bank of Tungabhadra. Two related developments facilitated its ascendancy—the subjugation of the long established Hindu kingdoms of South India by Muhammad Tughluq in the first half of his reign, followed soon after, in the second half of his reign, by the collapse of his power in South India. It was out of the political debris left by these developments that Vijayanagar rose to prominence.
According to a plausible and widely held tradition, Vijayanagar was founded by two adventurous brothers, Harihara and Bukka, sons of Sangama, the chieftain of Kampili. But the founding of a Hindu kingdom was not the destiny that their early political career had portended, for it was as minions of the Delhi Sultanate, and not as champions of Hindu political revival, that they first appeared in history. The story is that the brothers were captured by Muhammad Tughluq during his peninsular campaign, and were taken to Delhi, where they were converted to Islam, and then sent back to Kampili to administer it as imperial officers. But about a decade later, when the Delhi Sultanate’s power in the peninsula crumbled, the brothers lost their power base. However, they then rehabilitated themselves by opportunistically reverting to Hinduism and founding a Hindu principality on the southern bank of Tungabhadra. In this venture they were crucially helped by the blessing and support of Vidyaranya, a revered Hindu sage of the region. Vidyaranya, it is said, advised Harihara, the older brother, to adopt Virupaksha, a Shaivite deity, as his patron god, and rule the kingdom as a surrogate of the god, so as to overcome the persisting public misgivings about the legitimacy of he taking on the role of a Hindu raja, because of his former conversion to Islam.
Harihara’s Shaivite affiliation of was a factor in he choosing a site on the southern bank of Tungabhadra for his capital, for it was close to the temple of Virupaksha. Fortuitously—though Harihara would not have known anything about it—the region where the capital was founded had ancient historical associations going back to the period of the third century BCE Mauryan emperor Asoka, whose rock inscriptions have been found along Tungabhadra nearly fifty kilometres from the site chosen by the raja for his capital. The capital was named Vijayanagar, City of Victory, and the kingdom itself came to be known by that name. The kingdom and the city would indeed live up to the portent of that name.
Strategically the site was an excellent choice for the capital of the new kingdom, for the river border provided it a barrier against any military menace that might emanate from the north, the main direction from which it could expect invasions. Further, the site was bordered by three rocky hills, the slopes of which were covered with granite boulders, and that provided another impenetrable defence to Vijayanagar. Over a period of about a decade, Harihara linked together the three hills by building between them high and broad cyclopean walls bordered with deep ditches, so the city became virtually impregnable on all sides. In fact, only once in its long history was Vijayanagar city ever stormed.
Harihara was crowned king in Vijayanagar in April 1336. Under him and his successors the kingdom grew rapidly in territory and power, and at its height covered virtually the entire southern half of peninsular India, from river Krishna down to the tip of India, covering three distinct linguistic regions—of Telugu, Kannada and Tamil—so the kingdom is often described as an empire. The dynasty that Harihara founded was named Sangama dynasty, in memory of the raja’s father, and it ruled Vijayanagar for a century and a half, till around 1486. This dynasty was succeeded by three other dynasties—Saluva, Tuluva and Aravidu—and the kingdom endured in all for over three centuries, till the mid-seventeenth century. But it became considerably attenuated after its calamitous defeat at the hands of the Deccan Sultanates in the battle of Talikota in 1565. In its final phase even this small kingdom fragmented into a number of principalities, all of which were obliterated during the expansion of the Mughals and the Marathas into South India in the late seventeenth century.
THE KINGS OF Vijayanagar were Telugus, but the expansion of their kingdom was mainly into the Kannada and Tamil regions to its south, for it was beyond their power to expand northward to any significant extent, as the territory there was mostly under the rule of powerful Muslim kingdoms, initially under the Delhi Sultanate, and subsequently under the Bahmani Sultanate and its successor kingdoms. Its southward expansion too at first seemed impossible, for right next to it on the south was the large and long-established Kannada kingdom of Hoysalas, which was just then reemerging as an independent kingdom after having been subject to the Delhi Sultanate for a couple of decades. Hoysalas paid no attention to the founding of Vijayanagar, as their king Ballala III was then preoccupied with a military campaign in the Tamil country, to expand his kingdom southward. Moreover, Vijayanagar was at this time a far too insignificant a principality for Ballala to bother about. Even when Harihara began to flex his military muscle and make incursions into the northern districts of the Hoysala kingdom, Ballala ignored him as a peripheral nuisance, and not a threat to his kingdom.
But presently the scene changed altogether. Ballala’s southern campaign ended in disaster, as he was defeated and killed by the sultan of Madurai. And this soon led to the collapse of the Hoysala kingdom. But what was misfortune for Hoysalas was good fortune for Harihara. He now sent his army to invade the Hoysala lands and, overcoming the often unexpectedly stiff resistance of the feudal chieftains there, eventually, in 1346, in a campaign lasting some three years, annexed the whole kingdom.
Vijayanagar thus became the leading Hindu kingdom of the peninsula, indeed, of the whole of India. This achievement was celebrated by Harihara and his brothers by holding a grand victory festival, vijayotsava, in 1346. But presently, in the very year after Harihara’s victory celebration, there arose, immediately to the north of Vijayanagar, a Muslim kingdom, the Bahmani Sultanate, with which, and with its successor sultanates, Vijayanagar would be embroiled in a two centuries long see-saw military conflict, which would finally end in the virtual destruction of the Vijayanagar kingdom.
Harihara died around 1356, after a reign of twenty years. He had no children, and so was succeeded by his brother Bukka I. The Vijayanagar kingdom had been built by the joint effort of Harihara and his four brothers, and its provinces were held by the raja’s brothers as virtually independent rulers, as their share of the kingdom, and which their children in turn inherited and divided among themselves as their patrimony. Bukka viewed this as a pernicious arrangement which would eventually lead to the fragmentation and collapse of the kingdom. He therefore appointed his own sons as provincial governors whenever the opportunity arose, so that the kingdom could be more effectively brought under royal control.
There was considerable expansion of the territory of Vijayanagar under Bukka. He extended it southward by invading and annexing the Sultanate of Madurai, so the territory of Vijayanagar extended as far south as Rameswaram; he also extended the kingdom eastward by annexing portions of the Reddy kingdom of Kondavidu. He was not however successful in his clash with Muhammad Shah, the Bahmani sultan. According to Ferishta—whose account might be biased in favour of the sultan—Bukka was routed by the sultan and had to agree to peace on the sultan’s terms. However that be, the vast expansion of the territory of Vijayanagar under Bukka, and the diversity of the ethnic groups in it, turned the kingdom almost into an empire.
An equally important aspect of Bukka’s reign was that he was a liberal and progressive monarch. Though he was a staunch Hindu, who proudly bore the title Vedamarga-Pratishthapaka (Establisher of the Path of the Vedas), and sought to revitalise Hinduism by commissioning fresh commentaries to be written on ancient Hindu texts, it was not blind faith but open, earnest enquiry that marked his religious outlook. Most commendably, he considered it his duty as king to extend equal protection and patronage to the people of all religions and sects in his kingdom, such as Jains and Buddhists, and even to the followers of non-Indian religions like Jews, Christians and Muslims. Bukka also had broad cultural interests and was a keen patron of poets, such as Nachanna Soma, the renowned Telugu poet of the age.
BUKKA DIED IN 1377, and was succeeded by his son Harihara II, who assumed the grand title, Rajadhiraja, King of Kings, which was not entirely unjustified, considering the vastness of the kingdom he ruled over. But the title was more than a mere status posture; it was also an expression of the raja’s aggressive military policy. He launched a number of military campaigns against his neighbouring kingdoms, in most of which he was victorious; his army is said to have invaded even Sri Lanka and exacted tribute from its king. And he, like nearly every king of Vijayanagar, battled repeatedly with the Bahmani Sultans. Under him the territory of Vijayanagar expanded eastward into Kondavidu and westward into Konkan, and this enabled him to dominate the immensely profitable overseas trade through the eastern and western peninsular ports, the revenue from which significantly added to the resources of his kingdom.
Harihara II reigned for 28 years, and died in 1404. His death was followed by a two-year-long succession struggle between his three sons, in which his youngest son, Devaraya I, emerged victorious. The sixteen years of Devaraya’s reign were marked by continuous wars—with the Bahmani Sultanate, with the Velamas of Rachakonda and the Reddys of Kondavidu. He is also known to have invaded Kerala and subjugated several chieftains there. Because of these victories over tough adversaries, or because he was addicted to wildlife hunting, Devaraya bore the sobriquet Gajabetekara: Hunter of Elephants.
But there was much more to Devaraya’s reign than his military campaigns. He was, like his grandfather Bukka, an ardent patron of scholars, writers and artists, whom he often honoured by literally showering them with gold coins and gems. He himself was reputed to have been a distinguished scholar, and under him Vijayanagar became the main centre of Hindu culture in peninsular India. Devaraya also undertook several major public works, such as the construction of a massive dam across Tungabhadra, and a 24-kilometre-long aqueduct from the river to his capital, to provide water for the city. He also built several waterworks to irrigate farmlands.
There is much confusion about the immediate successors of Devaraya, but it seems likely that he was succeeded by his son Ramachandra, whose reign lasted only for about six months. He was succeeded by his brother Vijaya. But Vijaya had no interest at all in governance, and he left it to his son Devaraya to run the government, and this prince eventually succeeded him to the throne. Devaraya II ‘was of an olive colour, of a spare body, and rather tall,’ states Abdur Razzak, the Persian envoy in peninsular India, who saw him in 1443. ‘He was exceedingly young, for there was only a slight down upon his cheeks, and none upon his chin. His whole appearance was very prepossessing.’ Devaraya II, like several of his predecessors, was a keen patron of literature, and his court was adorned by the celebrated Telugu poet Srinatha.
The main occupation of Devaraya II, as that of most other Vijayanagar kings, was to wage wars against his neighbours, particularly against the Bahmani Sultanate. But he had no success against the Sultanate—in fact, according to Ferishta, the raja, defeated by Sultan Ahmad Shah, had to agree not to molest the sultan’s territories thereafter, and to pay him an annual tribute.
The raja then, according to Ferishta, ‘called a general council of his nobles and principal Brahmins’ to inquire why Vijayanagar invariably lost its wars with Bahmani, and was reduced to paying tribute to it, even though its territories, population and revenue far exceeded those of the Sultanate, ‘and in like manner its army was far more numerous.’ After due deliberation, the council concluded that the victory of Bahmani was due to the superiority of its cavalry and archers. Devaraya then gave orders to recruit a large number of Muslims into his army, and he ‘allotted to them jagirs, erected a mosque for their use in the city of Vijayanagar, and commanded that no one should molest them in the exercise of their religion. He also ordered a copy of the Koran to be placed before his throne, on an ornate desk, so that Muslims might perform the ceremony of obeisance before him, without violating their religious regulations. He also made all Hindu soldiers learn the discipline of the bow . . . [from Muslim soldiers, so that he at length came to have in his army] 2000 Muslims and 60,000 Hindus well skilled in archery, besides 80,000 cavalry and 200,000 infantry, armed in the usual manner with pikes and lances.’ These changes considerably enhanced the military might of Vijayanagar and enabled it to become, during the reigns of Krishnadeva and Ramaraya, the dominant power of peninsular India.
Devaraya died in May 1446. ‘In the evil year Kshaya, in the wretched second [month] Vaisakha, on a miserable Tuesday, in . . . [the dark fortnight], on the fourteenth day, the unequalled store of valour, Devaraya, alas, met with death,’ states an inscription at Sravana Belgola.
THE DEATH OF Devaraya was followed, as on the death of several other Vijayanagar kings, by a period of chaos and succession struggles. His four successors were all effete and utterly incompetent to meet the challenges faced by the kingdom. They would be the last rulers of the Sangama dynasty, and during their rule the kingdom suffered a substantial loss of territory—it lost large tracts of its eastern districts to the king of Orissa, and on the west coast it lost Goa and its adjoining areas to the Bahmani sultan. The loss of Goa was a major blow to Vijayanagar, for it was heavily dependent on Goa for the import of horses from the Middle East, which its army critically needed.
The last two kings of the Sangama dynasty were depraved, wicked scamps. According to Fernao Nuniz, a Portuguese trader who spent some three years in Vijayanagar in the mid-sixteenth century, Virupaksha, the penultimate king of the dynasty, ‘cared for nothing but women and to fuddle himself with drink.’ And his life ended bizarrely, murdered by one of his sons. This prince then, disdaining to ascend the throne himself, raised one of his brothers, Praudha Devaraya, to the throne. But this raja proved to be even more wicked and dissolute than his father, and he immediately freed himself from the debt of gratitude he owed to his parricide brother by assassinating him, and then plunged into a life of wanton debauchery. But before he could do much harm, he was deposed by Saluva Narasimha, one of the leading provincial chieftains of the kingdom, who then ascended the throne. Devaraya offered no resistance to the usurper, but cravenly fled from the capital on the approach of Narasimha. Thus ended, around 1486, the rule of the Sangama dynasty.
Narasimha, who had his fief at Chandragiri in southern Andhra Pradesh, had functioned as a virtually independent ruler for quite some years, and had over the years considerably expanded the territory under his control. Because of the misrule of the last couple of kings of the Sangama dynasty, several provincial chiefs of Vijayanagar, particularly in the southern and eastern provinces of the kingdom, transferred their allegiance to Narasimha. So his position on his accession to the throne was quite strong, though he, like most other rulers of the kingdom, inevitably had to face several internal challenges.
Narasimha ruled for about five years, during which he was engaged in a number of battles, against his adversaries in the kingdom, and to protect the Vijayanagar territory from rival kingdoms. He was mostly successful in these campaigns. But the Saluva dynasty he founded barely survived him. Though Narasimha had two sons, they were too young to rule at the time of his death, so he on his deathbed he entrusted them—and the kingdom—to the care of his trusted minister, Narasa Nayaka, requesting him to rule as the regent till the boys came of age.
On Narasimha’s death, his eldest son, Timma, was crowned king, but the boy was soon killed in a palace intrigue, so Narasa Nayaka placed the raja’s second son, Immadi Narasimha, on the throne, but kept him under his tutelage and himself ruled as the de facto king. But Narasa Nayaka himself died in a few years, upon which his son, Vira Narasimha, took over as the regent. But Vira Narasimha had none of his father’s scruples. Presently he got rid of his ward by assassination, then himself ascended the throne, and founded the Tuluva dynasty, the third dynasty of the kingdom.
This usurpation led to widespread unrest in the kingdom, and several rebellions erupted in its provinces. At this time there was also an invasion of the kingdom by Adil Shah of Bijapur. In the midst of all these troubles Vira Narasimha himself died, in 1509. The major concern of the raja at the time of his death was to secure the throne for his children, so he (according to Nuniz) instructed Saluva Timma, his trusted Brahmin minister, to blind his brothers and raise one of his sons to the throne. But Timma sensibly disregarded the royal mandate and offered the throne to Krishnadeva, the raja’s youngest brother—half-brother, actually—who then ascended the throne, in August 1509.
KRISHNADEVA WAS IN his early twenties at the time of his accession, and had hardly any administrative or military experience. But he turned out to be the most celebrated ruler of Vijayanagar, who was exceptionally successful in administration as well as in military campaigns. In the initial years of his reign, he had the great advantage of having the sagacious counsel of Saluva Timma, whom the raja affectionately called appaji, revered father.
The kingdom that Krishnadeva inherited was, at the time of his accession, beset with several rebellions and invasions, but the raja prevailed over all his adversaries, and in time raised Vijayanagar to the stature of the most powerful kingdom in the peninsula. The first invasion he faced, soon after his accession, was by Mahmud Shah, the Bahmani sultan, who, though he was little more than a figurehead at this time, was prodded by his nobles to lead an army against Vijayanagar. But the raja was equal to the challenge; he not only routed the enemy army massed at his frontier, but pursued it into the Bahmani territory, trounced it again in a second battle, and then went on to capture Gulbarga, the old capital of the Sultanate, as well as Bidar, its new capital. The raja then restored Mahmud Shah to the throne—perhaps because he was innocuous, or perhaps because the sultan was expected to add another unsettling element in the turbulent politics of the disintegrating Sultanate. The raja then returned to Vijayanagar.
After the Bahmani campaign, Krishnadeva was for a couple of years engaged in suppressing a rebellion in southern Karnataka. This was followed by a major campaign by him to recover the eastern provinces of the kingdom lost to Gajapati, the king of Orissa, during previous regimes. This was a prolonged, five year long campaign, but it ended in total victory for Krishnadeva—he not only recovered the lost provinces but even stormed into Cuttack, Gajapati’s capital. There was however no vindictiveness in Krishnadeva’s treatment of Gajapati; rather, he concluded a generous peace treaty with him, by which he agreed to treat river Krishna as the boundary between their kingdoms, and returned to Gajapati all the lands that he (Krishnadeva) had conquered north of the river. And Gajapati in turn gave one of his daughters in marriage to Krishnadeva, to seal their alliance with a family bond.
The other major wars of Krishnadeva were against Golconda and Bijapur, independent kingdoms that had emerged out of the fragmented Bahmani Sultanate. In the war against Bijapur, the raja occupied Gulbarga, destroyed its fortifications, and placed a Bahmani prince, a son of Mahmud Shah, on the throne there as his ward, presumably in the hope of resuscitating the Bahmani dynasty under Vijayanagar patronage. He also took two of the sultan’s brothers with him to Vijayanagar, where they were provided with all princely amenities, but were treated as the raja’s dependants, symbols of his dominance over the Sultanate.
On his return to his capital from the Bijapur campaign, Krishnadeva abdicated the throne in favour of his infant son born to him in his old age, and himself carried on the administration as chief minister, presumably to ensure the eventual smooth succession of the prince. But the prince died after a few months, poisoned in a palace intrigue. Krishnadeva’s only other son was a baby at this time, just eighteen months old, so it was impossible for the raja to arrange his succession. He therefore set his half-brother Achyuta free from confinement and designated him as his successor.
KRISHNADEVA WAS A peerless warrior king and a great military strategist, who was never, even once, defeated in battle. He invariably led his army in person, and often fought in the frontline of his army, thus inspiring valour in his soldiers. He also paid scrupulous attention to the welfare of his soldiers, and after every battle he usually went around the battlefield to take care of the wounded and to offer them solace. Not surprisingly, his soldiers were fiercely loyal to him, which in part explains why he was invincible.
As in military matters, Krishnadeva was thorough in administrative matters also, and was meticulously attentive to every detail. He toured around his kingdom regularly, to ensure that its provinces remained firmly under his control and functioned efficiently. Every aspect of life in his kingdom received similar attention from him. And he took particular care to stimulate the economy of the state. Agricultural prosperity was crucial for the welfare of his kingdom, so he made a major effort to improve the irrigation system in the state by repairing the existing tanks and canals and constructing some new ones, and for this he even recruited the services of a Portuguese engineer. Krishnadeva also lightened the tax burden on the people by abolishing vexatious minor taxes, like the marriage tax, reflecting his general concern for the welfare of the people.
Krishnadeva was equally renowned for his patronage of scholars, writers and artists, and his court was adorned by a group of eight Telugu literary luminaries, known as the Ashtadiggajas. The raja himself was a distinguished poet, and had to his credit the composition of Amukta-malyada, an epic poem in Telugu on Andal—a saint poet of the Tamil Bhakti movement—and of her intense longing for union with god Vishnu. Krishnadeva was a deeply religious person, and he regularly visited temples, often accompanied by his queens, to offer worship. And it was Krishnadeva who ordered the sculpting of the gigantic statue of Narasimha—carved out of a single granite boulder— which still stands in the ruins of Vijayanagar. According to Domingo Paes, an early sixteenth century Portuguese traveller in India, the raja also built near Vijayanagar a new palace complex in honour of his favourite wife, Nagala Devi, named it Nagalapur after her, and made it his favourite residence.
There is a good amount of information, in Indian as well as foreign sources, about the reign of Krishnadeva, much more than about any other Vijayanagar king. These sources also provide vivid descriptions of the appearance and manners of the raja. ‘This king,’ writes Paes, ‘is of medium height, and of fair complexion and good figure, rather fat than thin; he has on his face smallpox marks. He is the most feared and perfect king that could possibly be, cheerful of disposition and very merry; he is one that seeks to honour foreigners, and receives them kindly, asking about all their affairs . . . He is a great ruler and a man of much justice . . . is gallant and perfect . . . in all things . . . The king was clothed in certain white cloths embroidered with many roses in gold, and with a pateca of diamonds of very great value on his neck, and on his head he had a cap of brocade in fashion like Galician helmet, covered with a piece of fine stuff all of fine silk, and he was barefooted.’
The only fault that Paes could find in Krishnadeva was that he was ‘subject to sudden fits of rage,’ and he sometimes, though rarely, treated fallen enemies with unbecoming contempt. Thus, after his 1520 campaign, in which he captured Raichur from Adil Shah, the sultan of Bijapur, he treated the sultan’s envoy with utter disdain, and to his plea that the conquered territories might be restored to the sultan, he haughtily replied that if the sultan came and kissed his feet, he will return the lands.
Such insulting behaviour was however unusual in Krishnadeva, for he was normally mature, sober and thoughtful in all his conduct, in his private as well as public life. And there is a fair amount of data about the private life of the raja, unlike about most other kings of the age. ‘This king has twelve lawful wives, of whom there are three principal ones, the sons of each of these three being heirs of the kingdom, but not those of the others,’ reports Paes. These principal wives are in all respects provided everything equally by the raja ‘so that there may never be any discord or ill feeling between them; all of them are great friends, and each one lives by herself.’
Paes also reports on the king’s daily routine: ‘This king is accustomed every day to drink a three-quarter pint of oil of gingili (sesame) before daylight, and he anoints himself all over with the said oil; he covers his loins with a small cloth and takes in his arms great weights made of earthenware [and exercises with them], and then, taking a sword, he exercises himself with it till he has sweated out all the oil, and then he wrestles with one his wrestlers. After this labour he mounts a horse and gallops about the plain in one direction and another till dawn . . . Then he goes to bathe, and a Brahmin bathes him . . .’ After this morning exercise routine, the raja goes to a pavilion to attend to public business.
KRISHNADEVA DIED IN 1529 and was succeeded by Achyuta, his designated heir, but his succession set off family tensions, with Krishnadeva’s son-in-law, Ramaraya, proclaiming Krishnadeva’s infant son as king, and seeking to rule the kingdom in the infant’s name. This could have led to a civil war, but Achyuta reconciled Ramaraya by sharing power with him. This arrangement however did not last long, and presently, when Achyuta was away from the capital on a campaign, Ramaraya took full control of the government, and he seized and imprisoned Achyuta when he returned to the capital. This was followed by a confusing period of usurpation, counter-usurpation and provincial rebellions, which was, strange though it might seem, brought to an end by Adil Shah, the sultan of Bijapur, who arrived in Vijayanagar as an invader to take advantage of the disarray in the kingdom, but stayed on to affect reconciliation between Achyuta and Ramaraya. By this agreement Ramaraya recognised Achyuta as the king of Vijayanagar, and Achyuta in turn granted Ramaraya full autonomy in his fief. The terms of this agreement were faithfully observed by both princes, and Achyuta ruled in peace till his death in 1542. Adil Shah got a large sum of money, twelve elephants and some horses as his reward for arranging the reconciliation.
Achyuta on his death was succeeded by his minor son Venkata, with his maternal uncle Tirumala ruling the kingdom on his behalf, as his regent. This was followed, as usual in similar situations in Vijayanagar history, by a prolonged and confusing tussle between various contenders for power, in which Adil Shah also got repeatedly involved, as previously. In the course of this turmoil Tirumala strangled Venkata, his ward, slaughtered many members of the royal family, and ascended the throne himself. But his reign was short-lived, for presently Ramaraya advanced against him with an army. Faced with immanent deposition, Tirumala, according to Ferishta, ‘shut himself up in the palace, and, becoming mad from despair, blinded all the royal elephants and horses, also cut off their tails, so that they might be of no use to the enemy. All the diamonds, rubies, emeralds, other precious stones, and pearls, which had been collected [by the Vijayanagar rajas] in the course of many ages, he crushed to powder between heavy millstones, and scattered them on the ground. He then fixed a sword blade on a pillar in his apartment, and ran his breast upon it with such a force that it pierced through and came out at the back, thus putting an end to his existence.’
Ramaraya then raised Sadashiva, a nephew of Achyuta, to the throne, and himself ruled the state as its de facto king. He held Sadashiva under close guard, but kept up the pretence of subservience to the raja by periodically going to prostrate before him. ‘Ramaraaje now became roy of Beejanuggur without a rival,’ states Ferishta. And he then came to be known as Bade Ramaraya: Ramaraya the Great.
During Ramaraya’s de facto rule there was a substantial increase in the number of Muslim officers in high positions in Vijayanagar, in administration as well as in the army. And just as Adil Shah had previously involved himself in the internal affairs of Vijayanagar, now Ramaraya began to intervene in the tussles between the Deccan sultanates, sending his army into their territories. He also engaged in complex diplomatic manoeuvres to prevent the sultanates from uniting and threatening Vijayanagar. In the same aggressive spirit, he sent a military contingent deep into South India, to deal with the rebels there and to extend his dominance right up to Kanniyakumari, at the very tip of India, where he had his army set up a victory tower, to symbolise his absolute dominance in the peninsula. He also conducted a successful campaign to subdue the Portuguese who had, in Goa as well as in San Thome, presumed to take law into their own hands, looting temples and converting Hindus to Christianity.
These aggressive military activities of Ramaraya however constituted only one aspect of his reign. He, like several other Vijayanagar rulers, was a highly cultured man, and a zealous patron of artists and writers, and under his patronage several writers, in Telugu as well as in Sanskrit, flourished in his court. He was also a keen builder, and some of the finest temples of the Vijayanagar period were built by him. And he, though a staunch Vaishnavite himself, was, again like several other Vijayanagar kings, quite tolerant and liberal in religious matters, and treated all people fairly, irrespective of their religious and sectarian affiliation.
THE AGGRESSIVE MILITARY campaigns of Krishnadeva and Ramaraya shifted the balance of power in the peninsula in favour of Vijayanagar. While previously the rajas were invariably the losers in their wars with the sultans, now they were invariably the winners, especially after the Sultanate splintered into five independent kingdoms. This military dominance of Vijayanagar threatened the very survival of the peninsular Muslim kingdoms, and induced them finally to unite against Vijayanagar. In the ensuing battle, the battle of Talikota, Vijayanagar was decisively defeated by the sultans, never again to rise to prominence.
The specific circumstances that led to the battle are not known. Ferishta attributes it to the arrogant and insulting conduct of Ramaraya towards the Muslim kingdoms of the Deccan, and to the atrocities his troops committed in those kingdoms, desecrating or destroying mosques, butchering Muslims and molesting their women. This was the normal mode of conduct of most medieval Indian armies in enemy territories, and in any case these excesses were no different from the excesses committed by the sultanate troops in the Vijayanagar territory. Ramaraya does not seem to have had any religious motive in his military campaigns, but was only seeking to establish the political dominance of Vijayanagar in the peninsula. Similarly, the objective of the sultanates in uniting against Vijayanagar was not religious, but political, to ensure their survival as independent kingdoms, though a religious colouration was also given to the campaign by the sultans, to rouse the valour of their soldiers. The sultans, according to Ferishta, felt that the king of Vijayanagar, ‘who had bound all the rajas of the Carnatic to his yoke, required to be checked and his influence removed from the countries of Islam, in order that their people might repose in safety from the oppression of unbelievers, and their mosques and holy places no longer subject to pollution from infidels.’
In the summer of 1564 four of the five Deccan sultanates—Bijapur, Golconda, Ahmadnagar and Bidar—buried their rivalries and mutual grudges and formed a confederacy against Vijayanagar. Berar stood sullenly aloof from this league, as it was still smarting from the wounds it had received in its conflicts with its neighbouring Muslim kingdoms. The four confederates then sealed their union with marriage alliances. And in the last week of December that year the armies of the four kingdoms assembled together on the plains near Talikota, a small town in Bijapur, and then advanced to the Krishna, the river that at this time marked the northern frontier of Vijayanagar.
Ramaraya was well aware of these developments, and he too organised his forces. His army, according to one estimate of Ferishta—he gives different figures in different places in his account of the battle—consisted of 900,000 infantry, 45,000 cavalry, 2,000 elephants, and 15,000 auxiliaries. These are incredible figures, and are hard to believe, but Ramaraya certainly would have had an army that was much larger than the combined armies of the sultans. From this vast force Ramaraya detached a strong contingent and sent it to the Krishna riverbank, to prevent the enemy from crossing the river.
Confronted with this blocking deployment of the Vijayanagar army, the sultans used a ruse to cross the river. Seemingly disheartened by the impossibility of crossing the river at their chosen ford, they began to march upstream, pretending to look for another ford. Seeing this, the Vijayanagar contingent kept pace with them on the opposite bank, and this went on for three days. Then suddenly the allied army, as planned, reversed its course and quickly, within just a day, doubled back to its selected ford, and immediately sent an advance contingent across the river. This met with no resistance, as the Vijayanagar soldiers were nowhere nearby. That night the rest of the allied army also crossed the river.
The details of the ensuing battle given in various reports are partisan and contradictory. The battle, fought on 23 January 1565, a Tuesday, is usually called the battle of Talikota, though it was actually fought on a plain between two villages, Rakshasi and Tangadi, some 50 kilometres south of Talikota, and is therefore also known as the battle of Rakshasi-Tangadi. The allied forces, as Sewell describes the scene, were drawn up ‘in a long line, . . . each division with the standards of the twelve Imams waving in the van . . .’ The Ahmadnagar contingent was stationed at the centre of this deployment, and it had at its front 600 pieces of ordnance disposed in three lines, one behind the other, with the heavy artillery in front, behind it the lighter artillery, and the swivel guns in the rear. And in front of this artillery deployment were stationed 2,000 foreign archers, to conceal the guns from the enemy.
The particulars of the deployment of the Vijayanagar army is not known, but it was commanded by Ramaraya himself, though he was now a very old man—‘he was ninety-six years old, but was as brave as a man of thirty,’ according to Diogo do Couto, a sixteenth century Portuguese chronicler. The battle began with the Vijayanagar army shooting rockets at the allied army, and peppering it with fire from matchlocks and light guns. Then their cavalry charged. At that point the archers masking the Deccani artillery fell back, and the guns opened up, causing great havoc in the Vijayanagar army.
This was the decisive movement in the battle. As the Vijayanagar army staggered under the impact of the artillery salvoes, the Deccani cavalry charged into them ferociously and scattered them in a short, swift action. Ramaraya himself was captured during the melee, and was immediately beheaded on the orders of Nizam Shah. His severed head was then mounted on a long spear and displayed to the enemy, and the sight of this is said to have so demoralised the Vijayanagar soldiers that they immediately broke up and fled.
The battle lasted only just a few hours, as in the case of most medieval Indian battles, in which the worsted army usually took to flight without attempting to regroup. Though Hindu accounts speak of a more than six-months-long war, and even of single battles lasting as long as twenty-seven days, these are evidently just self-consoling myths.
The sultans won the battle mainly because of their superior artillery (under the command of Rumi Khan, a Turk) and cavalry. The desertion of two Muslim commanders and their contingents from the Vijayanagar army during the battle was also a crucial factor in the rout of the Vijayanagar army. ‘When the armies were joined, the battle lasted but a [short] while, not the pace of four hours, because two traitorous captains [in the Vijayanagar army] . . . with their companies turned their faces against their king, and made such disorder in his army, that . . . [the soldiers in bewilderment] set themselves to flight,’ reports Caesar Frederick, an Italian traveller who was in Vijayanagar in 1567.
THE VICTORY OF the Deccani army was decisive. According to Ferishta, so great was the slaughter in the battle—some 100,000 soldiers are said to have perished in the Vijayanagar army alone—that the waters of a stream flowing alongside the battlefield turned red with blood. The flight of the Vijayanagar army was so pell-mell that they left behind in their camp large quantities of equipments and a good amount of treasure, for the victors to pillage. ‘The plunder,’ notes Ferishta, ‘was so great that every private man in the allied army became rich in gold, jewels, effects, tents, arms, horses, and slaves.’ The sultans reserved for themselves only the captured elephants.
After the battle the allied army took a break for a few days, to rest and to reorganise themselves. Then they set out for Vijayanagar city. The people of the city had initially no sense of the peril they faced, as no Muslim army had ever entered the strongly fortified city, even when, victorious in battle, it had ravaged the environs of the city. But the gravity of the situation dawned on the people when the princes and nobles scurrying back from the battlefield gathered their treasures, loaded those on elephants, and fled from the city for safe refuges far away. They also carried with them Sadashiva, the phantom king.
‘Then a panic seized the city,’ writes Sewell. ‘The truth became at last apparent. This was not merely a military defeat; it was a cataclysm. All hope was gone . . . Nothing could be done but to bury all treasures, to arm the younger men, and to wait. Next day the place became a prey to the robber tribes and jungle people of the neighbourhood. Hordes of . . . [them] pounced down on the hapless city and looted the stores and shops, carrying off great quantities of riches.’ According to Couto, this went on day after day, for six days.
Then the allied forces entered the city. ‘The enemy had come to destroy, and they carried out their object relentlessly,’ continues Sewell. ‘With fire and sword, with crowbars and axes, they carried on day after day their work of destruction. Never perhaps in the history of the world has such havoc been wrought, and wrought so suddenly, on so splendid a city, teeming with a wealthy and industrious population in the full plenitude of prosperity one day, and on the next, seized, pillaged and reduced to ruins, amid scenes of savage massacre and horrors beggaring description.’ Caesar Frederick, who visited the city two years after the battle, noted: ‘The houses still stand, but [are] empty, and there is dwelling in them nothing but tigers and other wild beasts.’
THE DESPOLIATION AND devastation of the city went on for five months without respite. Meanwhile, with Ramaraya dead, his brother Tirumala took charge of the titular raja and set up his government at Penugonda, about 190 kilometres south-east of Vijayanagar, in a defensible, rugged hilly region in the Anantapur district of the modern state of Andhra Pradesh. But Tirumala was immediately challenged by Ramaraya’s son Timma, who had no hesitation even to seek the help of the sultan of Bijapur against his uncle. This move was countered by Tirumala by seeking the help of the sultan of Ahmadnagar. Soon the Vijayanagar chieftains and the Deccan sultans got once again embroiled in several shifting alliances and counter-alliances.
Around this time several chieftains of Vijayanagar threw off their allegiance to the raja and set up their own petty kingdoms. Some of these new states— Madurai under Nayaks, for instance—grew into powerful and enduring kingdoms, but most regions of Vijayanagar simply collapsed into anarchy. And many of the palayagars, who were responsible for maintaining law and order in the districts of the kingdom, now reversed their role and took to banditry. Vijayanagar thus began to implode. Tirumala did not have the resources—or the energy: he was an old man now—to bring the rebels to submission, but he had the wisdom to adopt a realistic policy, of acknowledging the virtual independence of the rebel chieftains in return for their symbolic recognition of the overlordship of the raja and of his own de facto authority. Vijayanagar thus became an agglomeration of semi-independent principalities with Tirumala as its head. And it survived in that loose, withered and crumbling state for nearly another century.
Tirumala did the best that anyone could possibly have done to preserve the truncated kingdom in the given circumstances. And this, he felt, entitled him to be the de jure as well as the de facto king. So in 1570, five years after the battle of Talikota, he crowned himself at Penugonda as the king of Vijayanagar, and founded the Aravidu dynasty, the last dynasty of Vijayanagar. He then divided the kingdom into three roughly linguistic provinces, and assigned these to each of his three sons: the Telugu region to his eldest son Sriranga; the Karnataka region to his second son Rama, and the Tamil country to his third son Venkatapathi. Soon after making this division Tirumala abdicated the throne in favour of his son Sriranga, and thereafter devoted himself to scholarly and religious pursuits. It is not clear what happened to Sadashiva, the phantom king, but it is likely that he was assassinated.
Vijayanagar continued to fragment under Sriranga and his four successors, though it had also a few brief periods of revival. The last phase of the history of Vijayanagar is mostly a story of pathetic, feckless rajas, and of usurpations, rebellions, civil wars, and recurrent invasions by the Deccan sultans. During the reign of the last of these kings, Sriranga III, the Deccan sultans swept into Vijayanagar in a coordinated attack and divided the kingdom among themselves. Sriranga thus became a king without a kingdom, and in 1649 he fled to Mysore to take refuge with the raja there, and died there a couple of years later. Thus ended the three century long history of Vijayanagar. All that remained of this once great kingdom were a few small principalities here and there, but even these were presently mopped up by the expanding Maratha kingdom, which had emerged as the dominant power in India after the decline of the Mughals.
VIJAYANAGAR IS OFTEN portrayed as the champion of the revival of Hindu political power, religion and culture, and as an inveterate antagonist of Muslim kingdoms. But this is not borne out by facts. Though Vijayanagar was the most powerful Hindu kingdom that existed in the entire Indian subcontinent during the nearly half a millennium period from the conquest of India by Turks at the close of the twelfth century to the establishment of the Maratha state by Shivaji in the mid-seventeenth century, and though its rajas were all devout Hindus, and several of them were keen and knowledgeable patrons of Hindu religion and culture, the primary motive of the rajas was to gain and expand their political power, and not to resuscitate Hindu religion and culture. In fact, Harihara and Bukka, the founders of the Vijayanagar kingdom, had at the outset of their political career embraced Islam, because it suited them then, but later reverted to Hinduism, because it suited them then.
Being a Hindu kingdom was incidental to the political history of Vijayanagar. It is significant that the initial territorial expansion of Vijayanagar was not into any Muslim kingdom, but into the Hindu kingdom of Hoysalas, and that too when Hoysalas were engaged in a conflict with the Muslim kingdom of Madurai. Indeed, the expansion of Vijayanagar in its entire history was mostly into Hindu kingdoms, and not into Muslim kingdoms. And throughout its history Vijayanagar was as much engaged in battles with Hindu kingdoms as with Muslim kingdoms. Nor did Vijayanagar kings have any hesitation to ally with sultans against Hindu kings. But then, nor did sultans have any hesitation to ally with Hindu kings against Muslim rulers. The wars of these kings hardly ever had anything to do with religion, but were fought primarily to defend or conquer territory. Though a religious colouration was often given to these campaigns, this was done primarily to gain military advantage by igniting the martial fervour of their soldiers.
In the case of both Bahmani and Vijayanagar, religion subserved politics. Vijayanagar was not an anti-Muslim state. It in fact had a large number of Muslim officers and soldiers in its army, that too in the critically important divisions of cavalrymen, archers, cannoneers and musketeers. Devaraya II in particular took care to show various special favours to his Muslim soldiers; he built a mosque for them, and even placed a copy of Koran on a desk in front of his throne. As for the Deccan sultanates, they all had a large number of Hindu contingents in their army, and their rulers sometimes entrusted the defence of key forts to Hindu officers, as Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar is recorded to have done.
The Vijayanagar rajas were generally quite liberal in their religious attitudes. ‘The king allows such freedom that every man may come and go and live according to his own creed without suffering any annoyance . . . whether he is a Christian, Jew, Moor or Heathen,’ notes Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese chronicler in India in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. ‘Great equity and justice is shown to all, not only by the ruler but by the people to one another.’ There were several instances of acts of liberalism by sultans also. Thus when Sultan Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur heard of a tragedy in the family of King Ramaraya of Vijayanagar—the death of a son of Ramaraya—he personally went to Vijayanagar to console him. And Ramaraya in turn received the sultan with utmost courtesy; Ramaraya’s wife even nominally adopted the young sultan as her son. But on the whole the rajas, being polytheists, were far more tolerant in religious matters than the sultans, who were monotheists.
This liberality and religious tolerance of the rajas however generally applied only in their treatment of their own subjects. In the enemy territory they often acted as vandals, destroying mosques or using them as stables, and enslaving or slaughtering Muslims, and violating their women. This was the common practice of all invading armies during medieval times. In fact, the excesses of Hindu armies in this were not usually as excessive as those of Muslim armies.
On the whole the Vijayanagar rajas provided as good a government as was possible in that age and place. They cleared forests and brought new lands under cultivation, built dams and tanks and irrigation canals. Trade was encouraged. They also systematised revenue administration, rationalised the tax system and abolished vexatious minor taxes. All this contributed to the prosperity and contentment of the people—as well as, of course, to the power of the raja. ‘In power, wealth, and extent of the country’ Vijayanagar was much superior to the Bahmani Sultanate, concedes Ferishta. Exclaims Razzak: ‘The city of Vijayanagar is such that the pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it, and the ear of intelligence has never been informed that there existed anything to equal it in the world.’ Vijayanagar, according to Paes, was ‘the best provided city in the world.’
There was however a dark side to this effulgent picture. The kingdom was ever riven by internal dissensions and conflicts, and was engaged in incessant wars with other kingdoms. Its political history, like the history of most early medieval Indian kingdoms, is a sordid story, though it also had a few periods of impressive material prosperity and cultural efflorescence.