yee

_ Viyayanagara
 renPebale?
Conner
TOENGOS
Director, Centre of South:Asian Studies, University of
a

Cambridge, and Fellow of Selwyn College

i
Associate editors C. A. BAYLY
Smuts Reader in Commonwealth Studies, University of
Cambridge, and Fellow of St Catharine’s College

and JOHN F. RicHAaRDs

Professorof History, Duke University

Althoughthe originalCambridgeHistoryof India,publishedbetween1922,

and 1937, did much to formulate a chronology for Indian history and de-
scribe the administrative structures of government in India, it has inevitably
been overtaken by the mass of new research published over the last fifty ©
years. q
Designedto take full account of recent scholarship and changing conceptions" ‘
of South Asia’shistorical development, The New Cambridge History of India ‘
willbepublishedasa seriesof short, self-containedvolumes,eachdealingwith
a separatethemeandwrittenbya singleperson.Withinan overallfour-part
structure, thirty-one complementary volumes in uniform format will beds4
published during the next five years. As before, each will conclude with a
substantial bibliographical essay designed to lead non-specialists further into.
the literature.
The four parts planned are as follows: ? <i

I The Mughals and their Contemporaries. i

II Indian States and the Transition to Colonialism. 4

III The Indian Empire and the Beginningsof Modern Society.

IV The Evolution of Contemporary South Asia. ig
A list of individual titles in preparation will be found at the end of the volume.
CAMBRIDGE
ERESHORY @r
INDIA
1-2
Vujayanagara
BURTON
STEIN

The right of the

University of Cambridge
to print and sell
all manner of books
was granted by
Henry VIII in 1534.
The University has printed
and published continuously
since 1584,

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE
NEW YORK PORT CHESTER
MELBOURNE SYDNEY
 ©Cambridge
University
Press
1989
Firstpublished
1989
Printed in Great Britain by -
Redwood Burn Limited, Trowbridge, Wiltshire

British Library cataloguing in publication data

Stein, Burton
Vijayanagara—(The new Cambridge history of India).
1.India (Republic). Vijayanagara(Kingdom).
.
I. Title
954'.8

Library of Congresscataloguingin publication data

The new Cambridge history of India/
general editor Gordon Johnson.
associate editors C. A. Bayly and John F. Richards.
p. cm.
Previous published: The Cambridge history of India
Bibliography. pt. 1, v. 2. a
Includes index. ‘g
Contents: pt. 1, v. 2. Vijayanagara/Burton Stein* 4
ISBNO-§21-26693-9(pt. I, v. 2) 3
1. India —History. ~
I. Johnson, Gordon. II. Bayly, C. A. (Christopher Alan) d
IIL.Richards, J. F. IV. Cambridge history of India. 4
DS436.N47 1989 a
954-—dc19 89-690 CIP

ISBNO §21 26693 9

Pin
Li, Frontispiece: An image of Hanuman in front of
the gateway of the Hazara Rama temple.

CE
 CONTENTS

List of illustrations page viil

General editor’spreface 1x
Preface xl
Maps XII—X1V

1 Introduction I
2 The medieval past: continuity and disjunction 13
3 The city and the kingdom a
4 Politicaleconomy and society: thesixteenth century 72
5 Imperial collapse and aftermath: 1542-1700 109
6 Conclusion 140

Bibliographical essay 147

Index 153
 PLATES
Betweenpages50and 51
IEricchant
e stables
2 Courtyard
oftheVirupaksha
ae
-- 3, Octagonal fountain
4 Large step-well
5 A view of the towered gateway (gopuram) of the
Virupaksha temple
6 Eastern towered gateway (gopuram) of the
Virupaksha temple
7 Scenes from the Krishna legend in the Hazara
Rama
temple 3
8The
Pattabhirama
emple temple
Hudiam seenthrough
theChinna va
:
s,
MAPS S

1 The southern peninsula, c. 1400-1500 page xiil |

2 The city and its zones XIV 33

Frontispiece and plates 6-8 by courtesy of George Michell.

Plates 1-5 by courtesy of John Gollings.
 GENERAL EDITOR’S PREFACE

The New Cambridge History of India covers the period from the
beginning of the sixteenth century. In some respects it marks a
radical change in the style of Cambridge Histories, but in others the
editors feel that they are working firmly within an established
academic tradition.
During the summer of 1896, F. W. Maitland and Lord Acton
between them evolved the idea for a comprehensive modern history.
By the end of the year the Syndics of the University Press had
committed themselves to the Cambridge Modern History, and Lord
Acton had been put in charge of it. It was hoped that publication
would begin in 1899 and be completed by 1904, but the first volume |
in fact came out in 1902and the last in 1910,with additional volumes
of tables and maps in rgr1 and 1912.
The History was a great success, and it was followed by a whole
series of distinctive Cambridge Histories covering English Litera-
ture, the Ancient World, India, British Foreign Policy, Economic
History, Medieval History, the British Empire, Africa, China and
Latin America; and even now other new series are being prepared.
Indeed, the various Histories have given the Press notable strength
in the publication of general reference books in the arts and social
sciences.
What had made the Cambridge Histories so distinctive is that
they have never been simply dictionaries or encyclopedias. The
Histories have, in H. A. L. Fisher’s words, always been ‘written by
an army of specialists concentrating the latest results of special
study’. Yet as Acton agreed with the Syndics in 1896, they have not
been mere compilations of existing material but original works.
Undoubtedly many of the Histories are uneven in quality, some
have become out of date very rapidly, but their virtue has been that
they have consistently done more than simply record an existing
state of knowledge: they have tended to focus interest on research
and they have provided a massive stimulus to further work. This has
made their publication doubly worthwhile and has distinguished
them intellectually from other sorts of reference book. The editors
1x
piece work. 5
The original Cambridge rae of India was published ereenes
1922and 1937.It was planned in six volumes, but of these, volume 2 _
dealing with the period between the first century a. D. and the.
Muslim invasion of India never appeared. Some of the material is
still of value, but inmany respects it is now out of date. The last fifty
years have seen a great deal of new research on India, and a striking
feature of recent work has been to cast doubt on the validity of the
quite arbitrary chronological and categorical way in which history
has been conventionally divided.
The editors decided that it would not be academically desirable to
prepare a new History of India using the traditional format. The
selective nature of research on Indian history over the past half-
century would doom sucha project from the start and the whole of
Indian history could not be covered in an even or comprehensive
manner. They concluded that the best scheme would be to have a
History divided into four overlapping chronological volumes, each
containing about eight short books on individual themes or subjects.
Although in extent the work will therefore be equivalent to a dozen
massive tomes of the traditional sort, in form the New Cambridge
History of India will appear as a shelf full of separate but com-
plementary parts. Accordingly, the main divisions are between
I. The Mughals and their Contemporaries, I. Indian States and the
Transition to Colonialism, U1. The Indian Empire and the Begin-
nings of Modern Society, and IV. The ea otaner of Contemporary
South Asia.
Just as the books within these volumes are complementary so too
do they intersect with each other, both thematically and chrono-
logically. As the books appear they are intended to give a view of the
subject as it now stands and to act as a stimulus to further research.
We do not expect the New Cambridge History of India to be the last
work on the subject but an essential voice in the continuing
discourse about it.
 PREFACE

The Vijayanagara kingdom ruled a substantial part of the southern

peninsula of India for three centuries, beginning in the middle of the
fourteenth, and during this epoch this Indian society was trans-
formed from its medieval past toward its modern, colonial future.
At the same time that its kings, or ‘Rayas’, were peninsular
overlords and their capital, ‘the City of Victory’, or Vijayanagara,
was the symbol of vast power and wealth, lordships of all sorts
became more powerful than ever before. This resulted from the
martialisation of its politics, and the transfiguring of older economic
and social institutions by the forces of urbanisation, commerciali-
sation and monetisation. These changes were gradual and only
dimly perceived during the time of its first dynasts, who were
content to be conquerors whose digvijaya, or righteous conquests,
in Tamil country left the ancient royal houses of the Cholas and
Pandyas in their sovereign places, except that they were reduced by
their homage to the Karnatak kings of Vijayanagara.
At the zenith of their power and authority during the early
sixteenth century, Vijayanagara kings were among the greatest
historical rulers of India. They had reduced to subjugation numer-
ous royal and chiefly lineages that they did not uproot and had
humiliated the several Muslim sultanate regimes of Deccan. Yet,
even then, the sovereignty of the Rayas remained what kingship had
long been, that is, ritual, so that, beyond the heartland of their
kingdom, where their hegemony and resource commanded were
formidable, they were content with the homage and occasional
tribute of distant lords. Moreover, they forbore, if they did not
actually foster, the creation by their nominal agents of a whole set of
compact and clonal kingdoms —denominated as ‘nayaka kingdoms’
—whose competition later helped to destroy the kingdom. For the
series of which it is part, this volume seeks to sketch —it can do little
more —the broad development of society in South India from its
medieval foundation to its late, pre-colonial, incipiently modern,
era. Because of the temporal scope of The New Cambridge History
of India, this analysis is most schematic for the early times of the
x1
 » 4|
eieocioetapbidas
E) issues are
en Ctouched upon;
‘ these ir Pit
actual founding of the kingdom around 1340 and its ideological —Be
character then and later. Oriented as this book is toward later
developments, with which other volumes of the series will be
concerned, detailed and systematic treatment of the kingdom begins
sin the late fifteenth century and carries through the late sixteenth
century. By that time, the kingdom was in crisis, unable to recover
its early élan and overtaken by a whole set of new conditions. Yet,
the idea and the structure of the Vijayanagara kingdom lived on in
the smaller regimes spawned by the kingdom. These regimes and
their little kingly rulers came to deny ever larger parts of the
peninsula to the successors of its great sixteenth-century kings.
The Vijayanagaraera was one in whichI see a new form of polity,
_ but one with important links to earlier polities in being segmentary
in character and one in which kings continued to be essentially ritual
figures rather than, like contemporaries in western Europe, auto-
crats ruling bureaucratised, absolutist regimes. But it is less in its
political forms than in others, I believe, that the kingdom attains its
_ primary historical importance. For this we must look elsewhere: to
the massive architectural style that permeated all of the southern
SS peninsula in the building and rebuilding of its temples and to the
e first, permanent, non-religious, or civil, buildings, including royal
= palaces; to the expansion of agrarian institutions as well as its new
towns and its commerce over the whole of the peninsula; and to the
proliferation of whole structures of local rights, or entailments, by
all sorts of social groups who constitute the society over which the
first of the colonial institutions came to be imposed, beginning in the
late eighteenth century.
Inevitably, a work of this synthetic nature bears a large debt to the
scholarship of others of which only some can be acknowledged in
the text or the appended bibliographical note.

Xl
 vere th=17thcentury
traderoutes
Landover500metres(1640
feet)

ff!
jasulipatam
"Aluvakondg
Many F
° i“Awaku
_"GoatyNang
MaYaL*‘Ahobale
Sea lary ie «Udayagiril))
a,
= Anantapur site
=
_Cuddapah6ennar
KC Bay
of
Benga
Arabian veTirupati
4
TONDAI-
IANDALAM
}\
Beas Ih:
Kanchipuram

Ze, ee
“SivngameKanri
nur s
Tiruchirapalli? i
Dindigal. rar)
r vais ay E
><srivliputta”
\ Madurai
saneee
fe
ee
ae
Pe
eC

1 The southern peninsula, c. 1400-1500

nae

X1l
 7s
EY
&
as

oe aS
|
B

0.5 1.0 Km

2 The city and its zones

iv
 INTRODUCTION

The kingdom or ‘empire’ of Vijayanagara takes its name,‘City of

Victory’, from its capital on the Tungabhadra River, near the centre
of the sub-continent. Its rulers over three centuries claimed a
universal sovereignty —‘to rule the vast world under a single
umbrella’ —and they also, more modestly, referred to themselves as
the rulers of Karnata, modern Karnataka. This seemingly humble
reduction of the scope of their suzerainty from the world to a small
portion of the Indian sub-continent is somewhat deceptive. Vijaya-
magara kings seemed to have had the sense that the kingdom
established in the fourteenth century revived an earlier universal
sovereignty in Karnataka, that of the Chalukyas of Badami (ancient
Vatapi in Biyapur district of modern Karnataka). Vijayanagara
kings adopted the emblem of the Chalukyas, the boar, or varaha,
and perhaps quite consciously modelled their capital on the Chalu-
kyan capitals of Vatapi and Aihole of the sixth to eighth centuries,
though Vijayanagara in 1500was a great fortified place covering 10
square miles, dwarfing the Chalukyan cities. Even so, the first
temples which they built in the city were somewhat enlarged
replicas of those found at Chalukyan capitals.
Also as with the Chalukyas, there were several distinct lineages,
or dynasties, of Vijayanagara rulers. The first of these was some-
times called Yadavas, but was more often known as Sangamas, for
the chief whose sons established the kingdom around 1340.
Descendants of one of the sons of Sangama, who ruled as Bukka I
(reign, 1344-77), expanded the city and realm until the late fifteenth
century when a second, or Saluva, ruling line was established briefly
by a Vijayanagara generalissimo, Saluva Narasimha. In 1505, a third
dynasty came into being called Tuluvas, suggesting that they came
from the coastal part of Karnataka called Tulu. Under their four
decades of rule, the realm reached its greatest extent and its rulers
their greatest power. The last Vijayanagara dynasty, of the Aravidu
family, assumed authority in 1542; it was named for another
generalissimo, Aravidi Bukka, whose sons founded a line of rulers;
members of this family held diminished imperial authority until the

I
oon
latepatina Sentuty
when,
asaaayaerepea
Muslimstatesto the North and civilwars within,Vijayanagara
;
authoritywas fragmentedamonga set of smaller,iidependeney
regionaldomainstracingtheirrulingcredentials
fromthekingdom.
Among Indian kingdoms, a rule of three centuries is very long,
and this together with the large territory over which Vijayanagara
kings reigned makes it one of the great states in Indian history. The
realm can be defined by the provenance of royal inscriptions over
some 140,000 square miles, about the same area as the Madras
Presidency in 1900, when the first histories of Vijayanagara
appeared.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

However, a century before, when the presidency was taking the

shape that it was to have until 1947, two partial accounts of
Vijayanagara were presented to the English-speaking world, the
first by Mark Wilks in 1810 and the second by Colonel Colin
Mackenzie in 1815. It was to be another century before Vijayana-
gara history was taken up again, by Robert Sewell, in 1900.
Wilks’s work was prepared while he was the political agent
(‘resident’) for the East India Company at the court of the rajas of
Mysore, after the Wodeyar rajas had been reinstalled in 1799 on a
throne seized some forty years before by Haidar Ali Khan. The
basis of Wilks’s reconstruction was an eighteenth-century Kannada
language work, written on a cotton scroll, by a Brahman savant
known as Pootia Pundit. Colin Mackenzie, a military surveyor
turned antiquarian, collected this and other. accounts as well as
making copies of numerous inscriptions from all over Madras and
Mysore. He was aided bya set of learned Indians who copied and
translated temple inscriptions and ‘traditional histories’ around
1800, which became the first sources of the reconstruction of early
Indian history; they also collected artifacts that became exhibits in
the first museums in India.
Mackenzie only once offered an interpretation of these sources;
this was in an address he delivered to the Asiatic Society of Bengal
on 5 April 1815, though not published in the journal of the Society
until 1844. However, the direct participation of Indians in the
2,
 INTRODUCTION
Mackenzie collections makes their writings of historical accounts of
Vijayanagar among the first in which Indians presented something
ee _of their own history.
Sewell, like his two English predecessors, was an official, and as a
member of the Madras civil service he was charged with collecting
information about the south Indian past and with publishing works
on inscriptions and antiquarian remains in the Madras Presidency.
This task he carried out, like Wilks and Mackenzie before him, with
the help of Indians, whose knowledge of Sanskrit, Tamil, Telugu,
Kannada, and Malayalam —the historical and modern languages of
the southern peninsula —was essential and whose experience with
Sewell prepared some of them to carry out independent researches
which were published during the early years of the twentieth
century. All of this continued investigations begun a century before
under Mackenzie and with the same purpose.
These Britons at opposite ends of the nineteenth century sought
to devise an historical past not for the sake of pure knowing, but for
the purpose of controlling a subject people whose past was to be so
constructed as to make British rule a necessity as well as a virtue.
This intention is exemplified in the only popular work published
by Sewell in 1900,Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar). Here, an outline
of the genealogical and chronological evidence on the dynasties of
Vijayanagara was briefly presented, followed by two long and
historically configuring translations of the accounts of two six-
teenth-century Portuguese visitors to the city. These Portuguese
merchant adventurers knew no Indian languages well enough to
correct their visual impressions through understandings obtained
from verbal or written views of Indians. Vijayanagara kings of the
sixteenth century were presented as oriental despots whose auth-
ority consisted partly of sacred power founded upon, or regenerated
by, royal sacrifices and partly on feudal relations between them and
great territorial lords (‘captains’). Finally, to these was added the
orientalist notion of the fabulous riches of Asia which was sup-
ported by the splendours of the city itself, its vastness, its
monumentality, and the wealth of its citizens.
Chronicles of the sixteenth-century Portuguese visitors have
become important fixtures in the historiography of Viyayanagara,
and rightly, because these were not mere inventions. The royal

3
 ’ $ ve we

VIJAYANAGARA

ceremonies they described have since been authenticated by enact-

ments in numerous royal courts in South India as well as by texts
pertaining to them that were being brought into European know-
ledge in Sewell’s time. Moreover, the vivid descriptions of the city
have since been verified by archaeological research that has been
carried out at Hampi, the site of Vijayanagara, by contemporary
scholars from India and Europe, as well as by photography of the
site that goes back to 1856.
Still, the orientalising intention of men like Sewell cannot be set
aside. Though much of the epigraphical and textual analyses of
Sewell and other European founders of pre-modern history in South
India was done by Indians such as $.M. Natesa Sastri, H. Krishna
Sastri, and S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar, it was a European intentio-
nality that prevailed. Harsh oriental despotisms and factious local
magnates were seen to have led to the dominion of Muslims in the
North of India and they threatened the South as well. Despite the
peril to Hindu institutions posed by Muslim powers in peninsular
India after the fourteenth century, Indians, in this view, could not
overcome the flaws in their political institutions. This task awaited
the British; what even the great Mughals failed to achieve in India,
the British would to create order and progress over the entire
sub-continent.
Such views were bound to change as Indians seized control of
their history. The earliest and most influential successor to Sewell
was S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar. After completing his post-graduate
degree in 1897 and teaching in a Bangalore college for a decade, he
initiated the chair in Indian History and Archaeology established at
the University of Madras in 1914. He saw Sewell’slast works on the
inscriptions and historical chronology of South India through
publication, on the Englishman’s recommendation, and by the
mid-1920s Krishnaswami Aiyangar had published extensively on
topics in Viyayanagarahistory.
He departed in two important ways from the historiography
inherited from Sewell and other Europeans. One was his emphasis
on Hindu—Muslimconflict as being the cause and principal shaper
of the Vijayanagara kingdom and the claim that resistance to Islam
was the great vindication of Vijayanagara. This view is evident in his
first major historical publication, Ancient India (1911), which was

4
 INTRODUCTION

based on his MA thesis of 1898; in later work, especially in his South

India and her Muhammadan Invaders (1921), the view about
Hindu—Muslim conflict is fully worked out. There he spoke of how
the last ruler of the Hoysala kingdom of Karnataka, Vira Ballala III,
‘made a patriotic effort to dislodge the Muhammadans from the
South ... fell in the effort, and brought his dynasty to an end in
carrying on this great national war of the Hindus’ and of how
Viyayanagara succeeded to this ‘patriotic national’ mission.
This early orientation to Hindu—Muslim conflict had another
important manifestation. This was a perception, held by him from
1897, that the patriotic mission of Vijayanagara was passed directly
to the next great defenders of Hindu dharma, the Maratha kingdom
of Sivaji. An historical connection with Vijayanagara was claimed
through Shahji, Shivaji’sfather who had served his Bijapur sultanate
masters for many years in Bangalore, the heart of the waning
Vijayanagara kingdom in the seventeenth century.
Vijayanagara historiography also changed because of Krishnas-
wami Aiyangar’s insistence that literary evidence of that period
should have as much standing in the interpretations of historians as
epigraphy and archaeology. From the very beginning, his writing on
Vijayanagara followed this methodology. Poems of praise (kavya)
and genealogical accounts of great families (vamsavalt) in Sanskrit
and other languages marked a return to the sources that Wilks and
Mackenzie considered the most important; this shifted the focus of
the previous generation of historians. Sewell and others had concen-
trated upon the royal families of Vijayanagara in their great capital
and had relied on Portuguese chronicles and Muslim accounts such
as that of Muhammad Kasim Firishtah which had been translated in
1910. Krishnaswami Aiyangar turned to the study of the numerous
magnates in Karnataka and elsewhere in the ‘empire’, but his
historical reconstructions, while based on literary sources, were
always attentive to evidence from inscriptions. He insisted that the
latter could only provide the ‘barebones’ of historical study, literary
sources must do the rest. This approach was passed to his own
students at the University of Madras until his retirement in 1929.
By that time, and thanks to Krishnaswami Atyangar, the field of
Vijayanagara history was well established, though it was beginning
to reflect new emphases and concerns of that time. Among the more

)
 1S" Presidency:
‘Sspeakers.
especially”
Theimportant
Lanongek
worksoftwoyoung
Since auhe19308
manifestthis:B.A. Saletore
writingon Karnataka
historyand —
a
N. Venkataramanayya writing on Andhra. They adopted Krishnas- ’
wami Aiyangar’s reliance upon literary evidence, but differed from
him in that they looked at Vijayanagara history from the core of the
kingdom, in the border region between Kannada-speaking Karna-
taka and Telugu-speaking Andhra, rather than from either Tamil
- country or the perspective of the peninsula as a whole.
For Saletore, the Vijayanagara kingdom of the fourteenth century
was created by the release of ‘the latent energy of the Hindu Dharma
in southern India’ by Muslim conquest and humiliation. This view
had already been given prominence by Krishnaswami Aiyangar in
Madras, as well as by the Reverend Henry Heras teaching in
Bombay, whose student Saletore had been. But Saletore went
further with this argument. He made Vijayanagara an expression of
Karnataka nationalism. Thus, in the founding of the new kingdom
by the five sons of the chief Sangama
did Karnataka vindicate to the rest of the Hindu world her honour
by sending forth a little band of five brothers ... Karnataka by
birth and Karnataka in valour, as the champions of all that was
worth preserving in Hindu religion and culture.!

Saletore also insisted that ‘ancient constitutional usage’ in Karnataka

(purvada martyade) was maintained by rulers of the new kingdom
even to the extent that by doing so the seeds of the kingdom’s
destruction were sown. Here, again, Saletore was indebted to
predecessors like Krishna Sastri and Krishnaswami Aiyangar who
had said that the ultimate defeat of Vijayanagara resulted from the
failure of its rulers to strengthen central administrative control by
diminishing the ancient authority of village and locality institutions
and their leaders ranging from village headmen to ‘feudatory
families’.
Even as Saletore was completing his University of London
doctoral thesis in 1931, from which the above quotations come,

' B. A. Saletore, Social and Political Life in the Vijayanagara Empire (Madras:
B. G, Paul, 1934), vol. 1,p. 39.
 a in by ire3!a q sed?ayy( 7 : u 4 <i ie pretse:
= bd
a, re a INTRODUCTION We foneee te”r
ae
Venkataramanayya waspreparing a monographdenyingthe Kar-
_ nataka-centred viewsof Saletoreand Heras.
Two of his monographs appeared in 1933 and 1935 challenging
both Karnatak historians. These works presented the counter-
interpretation that the Sangama brothers who founded Vijayanagara
were not Kannada speakers (or Kannadigas) but were Telugus from
the Andhra coast of the Bay of Bengal and that the boar emblem that
was thought to connect Vijayanagara with the ancient Karnatak
kingdom of the Chalukyas of nearly a thousand years before was
really borrowed from the Telugu Kakatiya kingdom of the four-
teenth century. He also argued that two of the foundational
institutions of the Vijayanagara state were introduced by the Telugu
conquerors of Karnataka on the model of the Kakatiyas; these were
the distinctive form of military land tenure called the nayankara
system and the distinctive form of paid village servants called the
ayagar system.
By 1940, the historiography on Vijayanagara had passed through
three stages. European orientalists, using earlier Indian accounts and
with the help of Indian subordinates, opened the field by having
identified its major literary and inscriptional sources and its broad
chronology. This largely technical phase lost its orientalist colour-
ing and assumed another ideological overlay during the intermediate
custodianship of scholars like Krishnaswami Aiyangar and Heras
who, in their somewhat different ways, imbued Vijayanagara histo-
riography with an anti-Muslim and broad nationalistic bias. From
them, and with their benedictions, Vijayanagara history passed into
a third phase when scholars like Saletore and Venkataramanayya
saw in that history a basis for the narrower nationalism or regional
patriotisms of Karnataka and Andhra.
New scholars were slowly being recruited; one was T. V. Mahal-
ingam. Encouraged by K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, who succeeded
Krishnaswami Aiyangar in the history chair at the University of
Madras, Mahalingam undertook work on administrative and
economic aspects of Vijayanagara history. This followed some of
the pioneering work of Krishnaswami Aiyangar on Vijayanagara,
but more especially Nilakanta Sastri’s own work on the Tamil
Chola dynasty of the ninth to thirteenth centuries in which adminis-
trative history was accorded new saliency. Mahalingam and others

ip
“Aes” ae. oe a

VIJAYANAGARA

added to the rich, detailed, and diverse historiography on Vijayana-

gara that had emerged by the 1940s;they explored the rise and fall of
numerous chiefly families everywhere, their alliances and their
oppositions to the Vijayanagara imperial order as well as the
conquests of its kings, or rayas,? and their occasional humiliations.
But none had yet surpassed the breadth of vision of Krishnaswami
Aiyangar during the early years of the twentieth century.
In 1919, he had inaugurated the University of Madras historical
series with the publication of Sources of Vijayanagar History. The
latter work consisted of one hundred texts and translations from
inscriptions and literary works, including chronicles on various
Vijayanagara kings and great families of the age. The historical series
was ably continued under Nilakanta Sastri as professor of Indian
history and archaeology from 1929to 1947; it became the vehicle for
major publications on Vijayanagara during the 1930s and 1940s, and
all reflected the imprimatur of its distinguished editor.
The impact of Nilakanta Sastri upon Vijayanagara history was
profound, though he published no monographic research in the
field. He had taken up one of the strands of Krishnaswami
Aiyangar’s wider-ranging scholarship —that on Chola administra-
tive history —and made it the focus of his major work on the Chola
kingdom. Nilakanta Sastri’s scepticism about historical sources
other than inscriptional ones made some of his writings different
from that of Krishnaswami Atyangar and from that of some of his
own students at Madras. Venkataramanayya and Mahalingam, for
example, depended heavily on literary sources; both used the local
traditions collected by Colin Mackenzie during the early nineteenth
century where it was maintained at the Oriental Manuscripts
Library of the University of Madras; both also used poetical works
as well as Muslim and Portuguese chronicles. In that, they and their
younger colleagues seemed to be defying Nilakanta Sastri’s efforts
to construct a history of pre-modern South India free from the
quirkiness of Indian literary evidence that had drawn the disdain of
European historians from Macaulay in the 1830s onward. To
Nilakanta Sastri, the way to a historiography that Europeans could
admire was through reliance upon the relatively chaste, datable, and
locatable epigraphical records, of which tens of thousands had been
2 The Sanskrit ‘raja’ and its derivative ‘raya’ mean ‘king’.

8
 INTRODUCTION

collected in South India, and by casting interpretations of these

fragmentary data in a universal frame that showed medieval South
Indian administrative institutions to be of the same quality as
European ones. This ambition was partially manifested in the
delineation by Venkataramanayya and Mahalingam of so-called
‘central’, ‘provincial’, and ‘local government’ administrative levels
in Vijayanagara times, though they managed no better than their
teacher to resolve contradictions posed by these variously perceived
levels.
Nilakanta Sastri’s major contributions to Vijayanagara history
were of another sort. One was his sponsorship of a three-volume
Further Sourcesof Vijayanagara History in 1946,edited jointly with
Venkataramanayya; another was his long, synthetic chapters on
Viyayanagarain his A History of South India, first published in 1955.
Further Sources followed the pattern of Krishnaswami Aiyangar’s
collection of sources in 1919; it was justified on the grounds that
‘Hindu literary sources’ corrected the bias of Muslim chronicles and
‘foreign’ accounts. This justified the use of the ‘Mackenzie Manu-
scripts’. The first volume of Further Sources consisted of a 369-page
introduction to the document by Venkataramanayya and consti-
tuted one of the few general histories of Vijayanagara since the early
works of Sewell and Krishnaswami Atyangar; the pioneering schol-
arship of the latter received little notice from Venkataramanayya
except for minor corrections. Still, this ‘introduction’ harked back
to Krishnaswami Aiyangar’s political understandings in two ways.
One was in seeing Vijayanagara history as a heroic struggle to
protect dharma from Islam — ‘the last glorious chapter of the
independent Hindu India of the South’; the other was in seeing the
polity of Vijayanagara to be about relations among great warrior
families, rather than about conventional, centralized administration.
In the latter view, Venkataramanayya implicitly repudiated Nila-
kanta Sastri’s conception of the medieval south Indian state, in
particular, the latter’s interpretation of Chola history as having
precociously anticipated the modern centralised, bureaucratic state.
Such a Chola model still lurked in the characterisation of the
Vijayanagara political system of Nilakanta Sastri’s History of South
India, but different conditions were seen to have made for different
political arrangements. Hence, Nilakanta Sastri took Vijayanagara

9
 VIJAYANAGARA

as a centralised, ‘hereditary monarchy’, which was prevented from

achieving full central authority because of the constant threat from
Muslim states and the ‘intransigence of [its] feudatories’. Both
external and internal threats to Vijayanagara produced ‘the nearest
approach to a war-state ever made by a Hindu kingdom’. And
though central authority failed to be realised, autonomous local
Tamil institutions, which Nilakanta Sastri admired, were fatally
weakened, having ‘suffered abridgment as their officials came to be
linked more and more closely with the central government’.
Nilakanta Sastri’s efforts in the 1950sto make Vijayanagara out to
be a centralised empire has influenced subsequent writing on in two
ways, both negative. One was in A. Krishnaswami Pillai’s The
Tamil Country under Vijayanagara (1964). The politics of the
kingdom are seen by him as ‘feudal’ everywhere in the southern
peninsula, but especially in Tamil country on which his work
concentrated. His was an attempt to provide a positive foundation
for the Vijayanagara state, something better than Nilakanta Sastri’s,
which rested weakly on a conception of flawed centralism.
However, Krishnaswami Pillai’s appliqué of feudalism is unpersua-
sive and diminishes a monograph otherwise rich in detailed analysis,
whose main thrust recalls the earlier works of Krishnaswami
Aiyangar and Venkataramanayya. A second negative reaction to
Nilakanta Sastri’s treatment of Vijayanagara came from the present
author in his Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India of
1980.The latter work on Chola history was concerned to present an
alternative to the centralised political conception of Nilakanta
Sastri. Accordingly, the idea of a ‘segmentary state’ was proposed as
appropriate for the Cholas as well as for Vijayanagara.
In broad terms, that argument of several years ago is still
considered valid, and it informs the present historiographical dis-
cussion and the rest of this study of late Vijayanagara. There are
differences between my 1980 formulation and the present study that
should be noted here. One certainly is an acknowledgement of
criticism of some aspects of the argument in the Vijayanagara
sections of Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India
prompting certain corrections. Another is the incorporation here of
the work that has been achieved in several different international
collaborations on Vijayanagara in recent years: the impressive joint

10
 Tae 1 eee x, 4) aa re ee eer i ite sri Sts

INTRODUCTION

studies conducted by Japanese and Indian scholars on the pre-

modern economy of South India; the work that has been done by
archaeologists, architectural historians and others at Hampi, the site
of the Vijayanagara capital of old; and the recent and continuing
studies by Indian and other scholars of Telugu and Tamil literature
of the Vijayanagara era. All of these contribute to the present work
as well as leading back to the place of S$.Krishnaswami Aiyangar in
the whole historiographical enterprise on Vijayanagara.
Nilakanta Sastri made the centre of his interpretive analysis the
onslaught of Islam. The military consequences of this led to what he
called the ‘war state’ of Vijayanagara. However, such militarisation
would surely have come with the Europeans in the sixteenth century
as indeed it did in the form of guns, mercenaries, and war horses
then. The effects, too, would have been the same in disrupting the
system of medieval political relations. Disruption of older forms
became an irreversible transformation when to the changes in the
levels of force came changes in levels of the economy, especially
commercial developments. The combined impact upon peninsular
India from two massive forces operating in Eurasia —the expanding
Islamic ‘gunpowder empires’ of the Middle East and Mughals of
India as well as the sixteenth-century expansion of Europe —
generated transforming forces of such military and commercial
significance as to render the old regime of medieval South India
impossible to sustain. The demand for Indian spices and textiles
inevitably grew and with that the massive import of bullion, a
conjuncture that could not but alter ancient peninsular forms.
Krishnaswami Aiyangar’s openness about the evolving structure of
society and politics in the peninsula gives his work of the early
twentieth century a remarkable freshness, especially for its readiness
to be aware of some of the new forces at work. Thus, in his
treatment of the complex relations among the rulers of the Deccan
sultanates and the numerous regimes of great warrior families
throughout the South, his writings suffered less of the conventional
regrets about the fissiparous forces that weakened Vijayanagara in
its sacred, dharmic mission. He also eschewed the centrist bias of
many later Vijayanagara historians that saw Hindu opponents of a
Vijayanagara peninsular hegemony as anti-nationalist. In these, he
exhibited a greater detachment from the presentistic preoccupations

rene
 —
/
T
aw
-e—
a=
S

Lol
N
 See LT Ase ge Ori Ree PTETEee ee Pa
7 Ls i

TWO

THE MEDIEVAL PAST: CONTINUITY

AND DISJUNCTION

If the interpretative lead of S$.Krishnaswami Aiyangar and some

historians of Maharashtra is followed, then Vijayanagara was the
precursor of and the precedent for the Maratha state of the seven-
teenth century. Yet, Vijayanagara was also a medieval south Indian
kingdom, one of about fifty royal houses whose inscriptions and
whose sovereign claims extended over more than one of the
linguistic, or cultural, regions of the peninsula from the time of the
Chalukyas of Badami. Some sixty Vijayanagara rulers issued royal
inscriptions claiming universal authority throughout the peninsula
south of the Krishna River. In addition, there exist royal inscrip-
tions of another twenty ruling families who acknowledged the
overlordship of Vijayanagara kings, and another forty or so
independent ruling families left inscriptions asserting sovereignty
over some peninsular territory in the Vijayanagara age.
This multiplicity of sovereignties is very likely an underestimate,
and it poses one set of confusions. Another arises from the fact that
kings of Vijayanagara were of four distinct ruling lineages; they
differed in language and provenance, in their religious affiliations
and even in where their capitals were after the catastrophic sack of
Vijayanagara in 1565. A beginning point in ordering that history is
the founding of the fortified city on the Tungabhadra around 1340;a
possibly earlier beginning point may well be the onset of the
incursions of soldiers serving the Khalji sultans of Delhi, which
allegedly created the reasons and conditions for the new dynasty
and city of Vijayanagara.

THE GEOPOLITICAL PREHISTORY

OF VIJAYANAGARA

Krishnaswami Aiyangar postulated that the ordering principle of

Vijayanagara history was to be a bastion against Islam, and he
delineated the process generated by that principle. His South India
and her Muhammadan Invaders outlined two separate histories

3
meat oi AtoweceshetgVee
Pest
haleye Paie bay
4Pee balk NO oausor ee
eae , A ‘ CL cs seater God
7 VIJAYANAGARA

whose trajectories joined conjuncturally in the founding of Vijaya-

nagara. One traced the fragmentation of the Chola political order
during the thirteenth century, the other the Khalji and Tughlak
invasions of the South during the fourteenth century.
By the beginning of the reign of Rajaraja III early in the thirteenth
century, Chola sovereignty had shrunk to a small portion of what
his namesake and real founder of the ‘imperial’ Cholas held at the
time of his death in 1016. The old core area of the kingdom —
Cholamandalam —was no longer under Rajaraja III’s control. North
of the Kaveri, power had passed to several families of landed
magnates. One claiming descent from the ancient Pallavas ruled a
territory from the Kaveri to the Pennar River, near modern Madras;
to the north of that was another chiefdom claiming descent from the
Cholas themselves and ruling the delta of the Krishna and Godavari
Rivers; while yet another line of rulers, the Kakatiyas, claimed
hegemony over most of interior Telugu country. South of the
shrunken Chola core area was a revived Pandya kingship. All of
these rulers were rightly perceived by Krishnaswami Aiyangar as
contending authors of a new political integration in the South; and
in addition he referred to a large number of ‘chieftains’ from whom
little could be expected except political disorder as each sought to
expand against his neighbours. To this epoch of political reordering,
and drawn by it, came a new and vigorous Karnatak kingship, the
Hoysalas. Its fourth ruler, Vira Narasimha (reign 1220-38), estab-
lished himself in the heart of Chola-Pandya country, at a place called
Kannanur near the Kaveri.
The prospect of victory by any of the principal actors in this
competition was thwarted by divisions within each of them; brother
fought brother among Pandyans (Sundara versus Vira Pandya) and
Cholas (Rajaraja III versus Rajendra III), and the two princely
brothers of the Hoysala Somesvara (reign 1233-67) divided Hoysala
authority between themselves, Ramanatha in Kannanur and Tamil
country and Narasimha IT]in Karnataka with his capital at Dvarasa-
mudram, 200 miles away. Another aspect of diversity arose from
differences in form among the three major kingdoms of the southern
peninsula: Hoysalas in Karnataka, Kakatiyas in Andhra, and the
Chola and Pandya kingdoms of Tamil country. These differences
can be regarded as no more than tendencies now because they have

14
gua! MEDIEVAL
PAST:
CONTINUITY
ANDBT ECoG
been little noted by South Indian historians, most of whom attribute
a sameness to all Indian monarchies purporting to derive from
ancient normative texts on government. However, changed con-
ditions can be discerned, and these shaped the Vijayanagara
kingdom of the fourteenth century and later.
Two factors are important: the resource bases of each of the three
regional kingdoms and the geopolitical context in which each had to
govern. The cores of the Hoysala and Kakatiya kingdoms lay
respectively in the modern Hassan and Mandya districts of Karna-
taka and in Warangal district of Andhra. The resource bases of both
can be assessed from conditions reported in the late eighteenth
century and later. Both were in zones of low rainfall, receiving about
30 inches per year upon which crop production, and thus royal
revenues, hazardously depended; in both realms the proportion of
high agriculture based on irrigation was small, about one-fifth of
sown acres in Hoysala domains and one-eighth in Kakatiya; in both
also the ratio of cultivated to non-cultivated lands was relatively
low, less than half. On agricultural grounds, thus, the central areas
of both northern kingdoms were modest as compared with the
Pandyas and Cholas.
The core territories of the latter nested within rich riverine basins
providing extended zones of irrigated cultivation and thus more
dense populations than could be sustained in the dry northern
kingdoms. A territory like Tirunelveli, part of the Pandyan
kingdom, was able to export grain, cotton, cotton cloth, and
bullocks to the Malabar coast; the trade was balanced by the
importation of money, coconuts, and fish into the principal core of
Pandyan authority in the Vaigai basin at Madurai during the
fourteenth century, according to the recent research of David
Ludden. Even more, the Cholas were beneficiaries of extended
exchange relations that reached to Malaysia, based on grain surpluses
from the Kaveri. Thus, both Pandya and Chola kings could realise
substantial revenue from agriculture as well as from trade that was
available to neither Hoysalas nor Kakatiyas from within their
domains. The central domains of the Pandyas and Cholas were
treated as properties from which the ruling families of both
extracted regular payments in kind and money.
Lacking such resources, the northern kingdoms undertook, on

t5
Ysanak

VIJAYANAGARA

the one hand, to establish and nurture trade centres which could
exploit the slender commodity potentials of their domain and, on
the other hand, to seize control of more established trade centres on
their respective coasts. For them, conquest was an essential means of
increasing the meagre resources they could command to meet the
costs of warfare that this age entailed. An important indication of ©
these differences in the scale and character of resources available and
the strategies for their realisation to the respective kingdoms was the
siting of their capitals.
The Hoysala capital until the late fourteenth century was Dvara-
samudram, established in the hill-bounded area of modern Halebid
in Hassan district by an eleventh-century Hoysala chief. Originally
hill chiefs from the 5,000-foot highlands fifty miles west of Halebid,
the Hoysalas moved from their hill fastness on to the neighbouring
plains and replaced the fading overlordship of the Chalukyas of
Kalyani. Their gradually expanding domain was protected by the
fortified capital of Dvarasamudram set into the rock hills that
extended from the northern highlands such as to effect a defensible
frontier against the Chalukyas. Dvarasamudram was over twenty-
five miles from the major area of agricultural production and
settlement of the kingdom, on the Hemavati River, and forty-two
miles north of the Kaveri, which formed the boundary with
Gangavadi and its ancient Ganga kings to the south. Like the latter,
the early Hoysalas were Jainas, and their capital became an impor-
tant centre of Jainism (as was Talkad, the Ganga capital) until
Hoysala Vishnuvardhana (reign 1110-52) converted to Vaishna-
vism, drove the Jainas from his capital, and built the distinctive
temples to be seen at Halebid and Belur. By then too, the Hoysalas
had become a dominant military power, adding to their realm by
conquests that during the thirteenth century carried their authority
to where the Kaveri delta began, between the centres of Chola and
Pandya power in the south. There the second Hoysala capital
Kannanur was established in the uplands over the gateway to the
Kaveri delta where it resembled the capitals of other masters of river
valleys more than it did Dvarasamudram and thus reflected the now
divided character of the Hoysala kingdom.
The Kakatiya’s Warangal was a twelfth-century capital as well. It
was sited in a countryside even less prepossessing than Dvarasamu-
16
 reeer, hee
ee rae ee oeee ek ealg ie aN eee ee,
Oe a a Pee }Dae: ey" PN, a ad
re see eeae ne 5

oe ey Seal
ae

THE MEDIEVALPAST: CONTINUITYANDDISJUNCTION

dram and chosen for defence amongst great rocky outcrops and
stony ridges. A great fortress was constructed there within whose
walls there was extensive cultivation of dry crops. Irrigated culti-
vation was carried out at nearby Anamkonda, an earlier and less
defensible capital and Jaina centre, where two large irrigation tanks
existed. The Kakatiya captial, like the Hoysala one, was on a
defensive frontier, whereas those of the Pandyas and Cholas were
sited in the centre of the most valuable production for the most
efficient management of their relatively greater resources.
The geopolitical context of the two northern kingdoms offers yet
other explanations. The hill chieftains who established the Hoysala
kingdom developed their military credentials during the twelfth
century as paid soldiers under the older Karnataka kingdoms of the
Kalyana Chalukyas and the Gangas. The centre of their new
kingdom on the edge of the Karnataka plain had previously had no
major political identity, being an area between two ancient terri-
tories —Banavasi and Nolambavadi in the north and Gangavadi in
the south, the ancient Ganga kingdom. During the long reign of the
Kalyana Chalukyan king, Vikramaditya (reign 1076-1126), the
Hoysala chiefs began to be mentioned in inscriptions as subord-
inates who conquered the Ganga country and fought valiantly
against the Cholas and other enemies of Vikramaditya. The Kaka-
tiyas also set up their authority in an interstitial political zone and
they, too, were involved with the Chalukyas of Kalyani. Kakatiya
chiefs served under Chalukya Somesvara I when the latter cam-
paigned in northern Andhra and attacked Kanchivaram and other
places in northern Tamil country. By the late twelfth century,
Kakatiya chiefs were issuing inscriptions of their own boasting of
how they routed the Chalukya king Tailapa III (reign 1149-63).
Both of the new kingdoms strove to establish their power along the
rich trading coasts on opposite sides of the peninsula. The Kakatiyas
extending their control from Telangana to the rich deltaic lands and
ports of the Krishna-Godavarai delta; the Hoysalas, during the
reign of Vishnuvardhana, seized the western coast from the Konkan,
around Goa, south to Malabar. Both royal houses also expanded
northward from their core territories, thereby setting a collision
course with the southward expanding forces of the Delhi sultans
during the fourteenth century.

a7,
 VIJAYANAGARA

MUSLIM INCURSIONS

The encounter with Muslim power from Delhi is perhaps the most
important political fact of the period, as Krishnaswami Aiyangar
and others have insisted. In the far south, Madurai was seized and
brought under the Khalji sultanate in 1310, after their intervention ©
in a civil war was sought by one of two warring Pandyan princes;
Pandyan internecine fighting had already encouraged other inter-
ventions which weakened its authority, notably the invasion of the
Travancore raja Ravivarman Kulasekhara. Further north, the
Hoysala king, Vira Ballala III, was defeated and killed by Muslim
soldiers of the breakway sultanate established at Madurai after he
had reunited the kingdom previously divided between Tamil
country and Karnataka by his father and uncle; later in 1329,
soldiers of the Delhi sultan, Muhammad bin Tughlak, crushed the
Kampili successors of the Hoysalas in Karnataka. Thus, within a
remarkably brief period in the fourteenth century, all older centres
of authority in the peninsula were obliterated by Muslim horsemen,
leaving a vacuum that was to be filled by the able fighters who
established Vijayanagara on the grave of the Kampili kingdom.
This was on the frontier where Muslim power at last took root in
the middle of the peninsula, finding a permanent territorial base
after fifty years of plundering. Between the short-lived Kampili
kingdom and Vijayanagara were many links. Kampili was a mere
twenty miles from where Vijayanagara was later established. The
founder of Kampili, one Mummadi Singa, was, like the five sons of
Sangama, a warrior in search of a territory to rule. In the case of
Mummadi Singa, though, he was clearly awarrior from the hill
country (malnad) of Karnataka, whereas the origin of the Vijayana-
gara founders remains uncertain. When the raja in whose service he
was, Ramadevaraya of Devagiri, fell before the Muslims, Mummadi
Singa fled south to the Tungabhadra where he established a strong
fortress at Anegondi, in the same rocky outcrops along the Tungab-
hadra that shortly afterwards attracted the founders of Vijayanagara.
From here, until his death in 1324, he won territories and followers
from as far south as the Rayadurga, fifty miles away, and also
imposed his authority over Raichur, north of the Tungabhadra, and
even took Badami, seventy miles from his capital. His successor
18
 RE OTRTS hy ee Raa kLeen te,Wisse 14
ws 4 7
ome

_ THE MEDIEVAL PAST: CONTINUITY AND DISJUNCTION

Kampiladevaraya consolidated these conquests with the administra-

tive assistance of Bukka, the son of Sangama, and with the military
help of Bukka’s four brothers who took service under Kampiladeva-
raya in campaigns into Telangana against the Kakatiyas. When the
Delhi horsemen fell upon and killed Kampiladevaraya in 1327it was
ostensibly because the latter had chivalrously given shelter to one of
the commanders of Muhammad bin Tughlak who quit the sultan’s
service. Raichur thereupon came under Muslim rule and remained
the most serious issue of contention between the two states that
succeeded to rule this portion of the central peninsula, Vijayanagara
and the Bahmani sultans.

FOUNDING THE KINGDOM

Bukka and Harihara and the three other Sangama brothers in the
service of Kampiladevaraya escaped from Anegondi when it was —
taken by Muhammad bin Tughlak’s soldiers. Most historians of Kar-
nataka claim that the brothers then took service under the Hoysala
king Vira Ballala III. When the latter’s capital of Dvarasamudram
was in its turn sacked in 1327, Vira Ballala moved his court to Tiru-
vannamalai in northern Tamil country. At the same time, it is again
supposed, Ballala established the fortified city on the Tungbhadra
River across from Anegondi that was to become Vijayanagara.
Among its several names then, the city was called Virupakshapattana
(the town under the protection of Siva as the god Virupaksha whose
shrine was there); this was intended to hold off further Muslim incur-
sions into southern Karnataka. Bukka and Harihara were appointed
to govern the new city according to these historians.
N. Venkataramanayya advanced a different possibility from
documents of the seventeenth century purporting to prove that
Harihara and Bukka had held important posts under Kakatiya
Prataparudra, not Hoysala Vira Ballala. According to traditions he
assembled, when Tughlak forces finally reduced the great fort at
Warangal, the five sons of Sangama (Bukka, Harihara, Kampana,
Mudappa, and Marappa) were made prisoners. They later converted
to Islam and were employed by the sultan to govern the newly
conquered Kampili territories. These persistent traditions plus
others that refer to their later apostasy from Islam under the
GRY! Ree Rehr ag aeenTS te) oe eCoRsk eae: ‘ie:

VIJAYANAGARA | ot
guidance of the famous savant and religious leader Madhavacharya,
or Vidyaranya, and their establishment of a Hindu kingdom com-
prise the central mythical core of the origin of Vijayanagara.
Other elements of these origin accounts stress the incessant
warfare among the numerous Hindu kingdoms of the peninsula
which opened that territory to Muslim conquest. Ambitious war-’
riors assumed royal titles and strove for dominance over kinsmen
and neighbours; mobile warriors like the sons of Sangama roved the
peninsula in quest of a territory to rule. All of this also forms part of
the legend of Vijayanagara’s foundation, and it applies as well to the
ordinary political processes of later medieval South India. To view
this disruption and competition as some sort of inter-imperial
political chaos —as the disorder that followed the fall of older
regimes such as Hoysalas and Kakatiyas or the Cholas and an
anticipation of the new imperial order under Vijayanagara —posits a
false telos. Fundamentally, the founding of Vijayanagara around
1340occurred within and in response toa set of political processes
that existed through much of the medieval era.
One factor, however, must be considered new —the fiercely
expansive Muslim power of the fourteenth century. But even that is
subject to the important qualification introduced by Krishnaswami
Aiyangar, who was among the first to give Islam its critical place in
Vijayanagara history. This was that Muslims had been part of South
Indian society for a long time before Vijayanagara was founded.
Muslim traders and even fighters were known on the Malabar coast
from the tenth century. Arabs and other Muslims formed parts of
the cosmopolitan trading communities found scattered along the
whole western coast of India, and their presence along the eastern
coast was recorded not much after the tenth century. Moreover, as
early as the 1140s there are references to Muslim fighers employed
by Hindu kings, such as the Hoysala king Jagademalla. These
soldiers had no apparent connection with the Turkic warriors from
Delhi who began their incursions into the South in the early
fourteenth century.
The latter constituted a destructive element in the south for about
half a century by amplifying an existing set of fissiparous forces
within South Indian politics, though Turkic Muslims did not create
the pervasive disorder of the age.

20
 PTaeeet, aS ee ee, Pees eae AE
| THE MEDIEVAL PAST: CONTINUITY AND DISJUNCTION

POLITICS AND ECOLOGY: THE

AGRARIAN FRONTIER

That was perhaps more the consequence of other processes, of

which one was a shift of dominance in peninsular politics from the
old riverine core kingdoms of the earlier medieval age to the large
zone of upland, dry zone. Vijayanagara was to prove the grand
apotheosis of this latter type of dominance.
Here, mixed rural economies of peasants, herdsmen, and forest
people were the consequence of an age-long process of movement of
an agricultural frontier from the ancient riverine cores to the
watershed regions of the peninsula. In these areas of sparse rainfall,
hardy peasant groups, prevented by insufficient water from achiev-
ing high levels of multi-crop production, were compelled to pursue
plundering expeditions with fighting skills honed by turbulent
relations with herdsmen and forest people. The Reddis and Velamas
of Andhra and Vanniyars of Tamil country exemplify such warlike
peasantries. Herdsmen, for their part, combined animal husbandry
with dangerous long-distance trading, which was only possible
using bullocks, and with plunder if trade was not possible. Finally,
there were the hill and forest people who combined shifting
cultivation with hunting and with raids upon peasants and
herdsmen; their fighting skills were valued and purchased in the way
that the founding chiefly family of the Hoysala kingdom, among
others, have recounted of their forebears in their own genealogical
accounts.
The opening of the extensive dry zone of the central peninsula —
homelands of Hoysalas, Kakatiyas, and, later, Viyayanagara—was
critically dependent upon tank irrigation. This was an agrarian
technology whose antiquity reached back a millennium to Pallava
and Chalukyan times and involved the bunding of low-lying lands
to serve as catchments of rainfall and streams.
With the thirteenth-century Hoysalas and Kakatiyas, the ingre-
dients for a more warlike age were at hand for peninsular societies.
The superior cavalry and archery of Muslim fighters intensified this
emerging martial quality, gave it an edge that doomed the older,
more prosperous areas of agriculture and settlement in the river
valleys to political subordination and plunder.
Dl
 Bn ErerhersfociathanfortheSouth
Hae thetreasure
rent these
“ae plundering campaigns bought Delhi for Ala-ud-Din Khalji. —
a | However, Muhammad bin Tughlak’s bold decision in 1328 to move
Toh his capital from Delhi to Devagiri brought Muslim power more’
dangerously close. Devagiri was the former capital of the Yadava
ze kings of Maharashtra, (renamed Daulatabad): Muslim occupation
3 there heralded a change in the conditions of Islamic power in the
peninsula. Predation yielded to permanent domain, and Muslim
influences upon a whole range of matters, including military ones,
became more profound,

POLITICS AND THE NEW MILITARY

Contemporary documents confirm the impression among southern

peoples that the Muslim horsemen from the North introduced a
superior mode of cavalry warfare that both intensified military
engagements and made them costlier. The ease with which small
cavalry forces of sultanate soldiers brushed aside opponents points
Es to the decisive edge in tactics and possibly in their élan as pro-
=. fessional soldiers. Ala-ud-Din’s first assault upon the peninsular
=e kingdoms during the 1290s was at the head of 8,000 horsemen who
: crossed the Mahado Hills from around Gwalior to Devagiri, a dis-
tance of 400 miles, to win a treasure that helped to secure the Delhi
throne for him. To succeed against such new foes required Hindu
kings to imitate them: more and better horsemen and stronger for-
tresses. During the Tughlak era in the South, Hindu kings were
compelled to have a core of soldiers in their permanent employ in
order to field forces with more technical abilities than Hindu
armies were required to have in the past. To cope with the large and
mobile cavalry forces of the sultans, a Hindu ruler had to have
similar force even if for longer campaigns he had to depend upon
the levies of local chiefs. The provision of cavalry mounts, the
expense of their maintenance and that of the fighters who used
them was a heavy, new financial charge upon Hindu rulers. War
elephants were another, and the latter became among the most
valuable prizes of warfare and a reason for Hindu kings to have

22
 Mn Seere, A is
ia Ni Se ie wit ~Noeiakee
Aneheera Be
) ME PAST: CONTINUITY AND DISJUNCTION |
r Mode
a ; of,
control J “s :
or good relations 4 forest chiefdoms
with, 4 where elephants heals1
were captured and trained for work or fighting. fi
Other evidence refers to the growing number of fighters seeking f.
_ military employment in the peninsula, among them Sangama and his
sons. The reported standing of Bukka and Harihara derived from
their prowess as soldiers. Military careers offered ever wider
choices of employers, and these increased for any fighter who con-
verted to Islam. While being a Muslim did not confer equality with
the great Turkic commanders, it did nevertheless open great careers.
An example was the Khalji commander Malik Kafur, a Gujarati
convert to Islam, who held the view that Muslim soldiers serving
Hindu kings whom he captured should not be killed because they
could at least repeat the credo. Thus, being a Muslim did confer
standing for any man in a society becoming more urban under
Muslim pressures.
When Muhammad bin Tughlak decided to establish his capital in
Maharashtra, he ordered Delhi citizens to trek the 500 miles to it.
This notorious act is but an extreme manifestation of the urban-
centredness of all Muslim regimes in India. Accordingly, it has
proved pointless to attempt to analyse the administrative control of
the southern countryside under the Tughlaks, because there was no
such control. Great commanders, were granted igta holdings nomi-
nally assignments of land revenue for their maintenance, by the
sultan, but such grants never became reliable sources of income
either to a sultan or to his assignees during the fourteenth century, if
they ever did. When Muslim power struck roots in the peninsula, it
was in cities, even if, as in the case of Muhammad bin Tughlak, these
had to be ‘imported’ from elsewhere. Cities provided military secur-
ity and commercial wealth and became the nodes of Muslim power
and settlement; where the mosque was established the moral centre
of society existed and being a Muslim meant superior standing.

DESTRUCTION OF THE OLD ORDER:

TOWNS, TEMPLES AND COMMERCE

Under the changing conditions of the fourteenth century —a more

professionalised military that offered great careers to Muslim
soldiers and hastened urbanisation —an ancient Indian conception of

23
 ia
VIJAYANAGARA

polity came under threat. This was the idea underpinning the
segmentary political forms of the Chola age and earlier that assumed
that political authority was shared between great kings and local,
landed lordships —the idea of dayada. That this conception was not
wholly displaced, any more than the segmentary forms with which
it was associated, is clear from the seventeenth-century Marathi’
treatise on polity by Banahatti, Ajnapatra. According to this text
that had currency during the age of Maratha supremacy in India, the
small, self-sufficient chiefs of the countryside, deceptively regarded
as ‘office-holders’, in reality were sharers of royal sovereignty. Such
a conception of sovereignty was weakened by Muslim rulers under
whom local Hindu lordships were wholly suspect and for whom
such a notion of sharing was as morally unacceptable as it was
normative for Hindus. But such a weakening provided a new basis
for post-Muslim kingdoms of the south, and most especially that of
Vijayanagara.
The corroding effect of urbanisation upon the old order was not
merely set by military and political factors; temples were another
cause. By late medieval times, when state building and tank building
had becomea single process, both were additionally linked to the
raising of temple towns. The pre-Vijayanagara age saw develop-
ments in temple construction that have become canonical in Indian
art history. Equally well recognised now by economic historians is
the important role of temples in their often extensive rural hinter-
lands. During the late, pre-Vijayanagara age, money and lands were
gifted to temples to support priests and others upon whom worship,
administration and care of temples depended. Acommon method of
resource management by temple authorities with large landholdings
was the deployment of money endowments as investments in
irrigation works in ‘temple villages’ in order to increase the income
upon which temples hada claim. R
By an interrelated combination of political and religious invest-
ments, therefore, many places in the dry peninsula developed
microzones of high agriculture based on tank irrigation and often
upon the production of cash crops like cotton and indigo. The
proliferation of such microzones resulted from the same investment
practices being followed in smaller temples as well as larger ones,
and by great and small chiefs. All contributed to transforming the

24
 ith ile We ied i je Be oe Reeen Ak iw 1 * Me es et 2oe
i ’ G15".

ode ae ae /
THE MEDIEVAL PAST: CONTINUITY AND DISJUNCTION

dry upland interior of the peninsula from a zone of marginal

agriculture and animal rearing into a zone of robust, mixed agri-
culture capable of supporting increasing numbers of people and
more elaborate social and political institutions. And as with frontier
societies elsewhere, those of the peninsular upland were led by
fighting chiefs and its people trained and accustomed to fighting for
their new lands. The Vijayanagara kingdom of the fourteenth
century was a major beneficiary of this long process of develop-
ment, and, in their turn, its rulers lent support to it.
Another prior development from which the Vijayanagara
kingdom benefited was a commercial resource of almost unlimited
potential based upon expanding international trade from the coasts
of the peninsula. While the military impact of Muslims upon South
India and Vijayanagara has beena fixture of Vijayanagara historio-
graphy for over a century, the simultaneous commercial impact is
still too recent as a subject to have been assimiltated to most
interpretations of Vijayanagara. How recent this is may be judged
from the significance accorded to K. N. Chaudhuri’s Trade and
Civilization in the Indian Ocean; An Economic History from the
Rise of Islam to 1750, published in 1985.
The west coast of India was part of a system of “emporia trade’
that stretched over the whole of what Chaudhuri called ‘the zone of
Islamic influence’. This reached from the Atlantic coasts of Iberia
and West Africa to the Indonesian archipelago and China and was
defined by two trade modes, an overland caravan route and a sea
route. The latter began in the Mediterranean and consisted of trade
centres from the Arabian peninsula to India’s western coast, to
Malacca, and to southern China. This oceanic network had come
into existence around AD 1000 replacing more hazardous single
voyages from the Arabian core of the Islamic world to China which
prevailed from the eighth to the eleventh centuries. According to
Chaudhuri, the shaping force was political: the coalescence of two
great political orders at opposite ends of the Eurasian world, which
he dates in the early seventh century with the establishment of the
T’ang dynasty in China and the flight of the Prophet Muhammad
from Mecca to Medina: ‘Separate and unconnected events mark out
a fresh beginning, a new order.’
The seventh-century China-Near Eastern conjuncture was to be

25
 enat 1
an %

| ist by. an expansive Sung ewe ie the Arabic ‘successor:

___ prophet had become absorbed into the ancient politicalformation
the Near East, now revitalisedby Islam under the Baghdadi Abbasid
caliphs continuing an Islamic expansion that profoundly altered the
late medieval Indian world, its warfare, politics, and commerce. ,
a Everywhere in the Islamic world after ap 1000, there was the
growth of urban centres spurred by political integration and nur-
4 tured by new concentrations of administrative-military élites with
te high consumption demands. This ‘universal feature of Islam’, in
Chaudhuri’s terms, stimulated international trade. When the
Abbasid regime was swept away by Central-Asian Muslim Turks
wes and by Mongols during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this
added to the military superiority of Islam without diminishing the
forces of economic expansion. Turks and Mongols were assimilated
= to the prevailing Muslim political and economic order and in the end
= fortified it militarily.
By AD 1500, there were numerous entrepots from East Africa to
Japan, the tempo of whose commerce was fixed by monsoonal
winds which set the timings of all sailings; and of the four major
commodities of this world trade-system, two —sandalwood and
pepper —were contributed by India. As early as the tenth century,
er Chaudhuri shows, products from the eastern Mediterranean region
and those from China met on India’s western coast where san-
dalwood and pepper of Indian provenance were added. Thirteenth-
century writings of the Sung official Chan Ju-Kua, Jewish mer-
chants in western India whose letters were found in the Cairo
Genizah, Marco Polo’s narrative, and Ibn Battuta’s travel account of
the early fourteenth century all document India’s place in this world
trade and provide contemporary descriptions of many of the Indian
emporia. They also took some notice at least of interior urban
centres whose consumption demands buoyed up the coastal
emporia.
Another stimulus to south Indian urbanisation came from Hindu
temples. Many temple complexes served as political capitals, and
others which received royal largesse often afforded occasional
shelter to kings of the pre-Vijayanagara age as they progressed their
realms; at Hindu shrines, kings received tribute of which part was
26
 weak Par as
ONTINt

Dvarasamudram in 1327, he took refuge in the Siva temple-centre of

Tiruvannamalai in northern Tamil country. And the first generation
of Vijayanagara rulers established their moral, or dharmic, claims to
kingship by their publicised protection of Hindu shrines from the
desecration of Muslims.

THE EARLY VIJAYANAGARA KINGDOM

Under these early kings, Vijayanagara became an empire in the sense

of exercising rule over regions and peoples of the peninsula who
were of different languages and cultures. They accomplished this
principally by conquests over lesser Hindu lordships —kingdoms
and chiefdoms —and by defending their conquests against the
sultanate founded immediately to the north by Ala-ud-Din Gangu
Bahmani about a decade after Vijayanagara was established. The
Bahmani capital was at Gulbarga in Karnataka and its first war
against Vijayanagara was launched from there in 1347; thereafter
warfare betweeen the two was frequent. However, when the
founding Vijayanagara dynasty began to experience its most severe
difficulties during the late fifteenth century, it was as a result of
internal dissensions rather than external pressures. These difficulties
were resolved only after two usurpations at the turn of the sixteenth
century which brought the Tuluva dynasty to the throne. Under
them, Vijayanagara authority and glory were revived to a condition
exceeding anything before, especially under Krishnadevaraya (reign
1509-29). In the remaining pages of this chapter, the history of the
first, or Sangama, dynasty will be outlined.
Harihara ruled as king first and was followed by his old com-
panion in arms and office, his brother Bukka. The other three
Sangama brothers each had a portion of the kingdom to conquer and
govern, and each ruled with a degree of independence that prompted
Venkataramanayya to observe: ‘Vijayanagara was more a group of
semi-autonomous states than a unified kingdom.’ The fragmented

27
ay tie SOP FN ee. Ce ee Pe le ee ee ee ero. ae
1 . ine Ls , x

VIJAYANAGARA

state was unified under Bukka’s son, of the second generation of

Vijayanagara kings, who ruled as Harihara II (1377-1404). Central-
ised authority was enhanced by the occasional appointment of
non-kinsmen, including Brahmans, to important military com-
mands, and even to governorships of one of the five core provinces
(rajya, i.e. the king’s) in the centre of the kingdom. But this was not:
the usual policy; most often sons of the king ruled for him as
Harihara’s son, Devaraya, did at the great fortress of Udayagiri in
Telugu country from where attacks against the dominant local lords
there were launched.
The most important of the latter were the Reddi kings of
Kondavidu, and it was Devaraya’s purpose to drive them from their
territories south of the Krishna, hoping to make that river the
north-eastern frontier of Vijayanagara. Devaraya’s campaign
dragged on for twenty-five years, a tribute to the stubborn fortitude
of the professedly peasant Reddi kings of Kondavidu and also other
peasant chieftains of the Velama caste of eastern Telangana. The
Reddis and Velmas not only resisted the extension of Vijayanagara
authority into their lands, but made common cause with the
Bahmanis as well. Thus, attempts to set the north-eastern frontier of
the kingdom was attended by bloody turmoil and a legacy of
distrust and opposition that was to plague the kingdom to its final
days.
To the south and west, conquests were more successful. Under
Bukka I (reign 1344-77), Madurai was freed from the control of
Muslim rebel commanders who declared a sultanate independent of
the Tughlaks in 1334. The Vijayanagara campaign against them was
carried out between 1365 and 1370 by Bukka I’s son Kumara
Kampana and was as much a propaganda as military success
because it was memorialised in numerous inscriptions over the
southern peninsula proclaiming a new dharmic kingship and an end
to Muslim oppression. Another of Bukka I’s sons, who was ruler as
Harihara II (1377-1404), sought to impose the authority of Vijaya-
nagara over the commercially important Malabar coast, displacing a
brief Bahmani overlordship from Goa to Chaul, near modern
Bombay. In the north-west, the River Krishna did become the
frontier of Vijayanagara as a result of wars with the Bahmani which
yielded control of the Raichur tract north of their capital.
28
 THE MEDIEVALPAST:CONTINUITYANDDISJUNCTION
Devaraya I (reign 1406-24) returned to the scenes of his wars as a
prince in the north-east and was again opposed by the Reddis of
Kondavidu and the Velamas of Warangal who allied themselves with
the Bahmanis when necessary and also with the Hindu Gajapati
kings of Orissa. The latter became an increasingly menacing force
during the fifteenth century, extending their power into Telangana
and coastal Andhra and even into Tamil country when any weak-
ness or preoccupation of the Vijayanagara kings permitted, as after
the death of Devaraya II in 1446,the last strong king of the Sangama
line.
Devaraya II’s Vijayanagara was impressive. He succeeded in
winning the Velamas over from their Reddi and Bahmani allies and
with their help defeated the Gajapatis, though that eastern region
remained a troubled one. His successors were more lasting else-
where, as in his reassertion of Vijayanagara dominance over the
commercially important western coast. Much of his success came as
a result of having recruited Muslim soldiers into his armies, by
conferring high posts and rewards upon them and by constructing a
mosque in Vijayanagara. Devaraya also improved the quality of his
cavalry by controlling Malabar ports through which horses from
Arabia passed. In addition to all of this, his court was famed for its
brilliant literary circle in which the king was a participating maker of
Sanskrit verse and whose most celebrated member was the Telugu
poet Srinatha.
After his death, the Orissan Gajapatis, who had fared badly in
their wars against him, launched a powerful counterattack against
Vijayanagara authority in Andhra. This the Gajapatis now claimed
for themselves, and they also drove all Vijayanagara authority from
the Tamil plain north of the Kaveri by seizing Tiruchirappalli. To
this humiliation lethal rivalries among members of the royal line
were added, which permitted power to pass to the trusted comman-
der, Saluva Narasimha. He defended the kingdom until the late
years of the fifteenth century when he murdered the last of the
Sangamas and established himself as king. When Narasimha died in
1491, he left a young son as the ward of his favourite general, a
warrior from Tulu country on the western coast, Narasa Nayaka.
The latter in his turn seized the throne at Vijayanagara, thus
inaugurating the third dynasty of the kingdom, called the Tuluva.

29
 pinstices on the Gajapatisledive theirwarrior
eee iy
~ Kapiladeva.But the major cause of Vijayanagaradeclinewas
- dissensionamongclaimantsto the throneandtheirmachinations,_a
aaa which finallyinducedSaluvaNarasimha,themilitarysaviourofthe
dynasty iinitslastyears,toseizepower.Hewasto beabridgeintoa
newpoliticalphaseofVijayanagara history.

30
 THE CITY AND THE KINGDOM

The city was known by several names besides ‘Vijayanagara’,which

is hardly surprising since the earliest inscription from the place in
Brahmi script dates from about the second century. From the
, eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, several other inscriptions are
found, including one registering gifts made to the temple of the
goddess Hampadevi (or Pampadevi) from which the modern village
on the ruins of the city, Hampi, presumably comes. Hoysala-period
inscriptions refer to the place as Virupakshapattana or Vijaya
Virupakshapura in honour of the god Siva,as Virupaksha, protector
of the large settlement the place had become in the fourteenth
centruy. These pre-Vijayanagara references make it clear that the
future capital of the Vijayanagara kingdom was one of the many
places in modern Bellary with a past history dating to Mauryan
times when Ashokan edicts were inscribed within thirty miles of
Hampi, along banks of the Tungabhadra.
Seventy-seven inscriptions of the Vijayanagara age itself have
been discovered around Hampi. Most (sixty-five) are found
inscribed on temples along the banks of the Tungabhadra; the
balance are in parts of the city that were added during the massive
constructions of the sixteenth century by kings of the Tuluva
dynasty. Fully half of the inscriptions found on the riverside were
on the Vithala shrine. The temples upon whose walls and basements
most inscriptions are found display a cosmopolitan character befit-
ting an imperial capital. Stylistic variety and other cultural features
of the ruins at Hampi have been carefully analysed during the
remarkable efflorescence of Vijayanagara studies that began in the
1970s, to which valuable contributions have come from foreign as
well as Indian scholars. Among the former is the architectural
historian George Michell, who has documented something of the
variety of styles in the built environment of Hampi.
He and others delineate three broad zones within the walled
capital city. One extends along the Tungabhadra bank and has been
called ‘the sacred centre’ of the city; a second broad zone is called
‘the urban core’. This part of the Hampi site is designated as ‘the

31
 -. LENcentre’,
. oneich noRee 1
found. Thesacredcentre
andurban ag
core,withitsFreyacentre,
are
separated from each other by an irrigation canal that defines an
intervening agricultural zone of Hampi as shown on Map 3.
Since the ‘royal centre’ includes some sixty ruined temples, the ‘

designations ‘sacred’ and ‘royal’ should not be taken as rigorous

categories of built space and function in the city. Among the oldest
shrines in the ‘royal centre’ is a second dedicated to the god
Virupakasha in the city, the other being the larger and older temple
on the river. Michell and others believe that the smaller, fourteenth-
century Virupaksha shrine may have served as a royal chapel; it
displays many elements of temple architecture found north of the
Tungabhadra and is thus designated as ‘Deccan style’. Most smaller
shrines in this southern part of the Hampi site display a similar
Deccani style. However, with the fifteenth-century Ramachandra
temple in the royal centre elements of ‘southern style’ appear. These
were derived from late Chola and Pandya temples first seen during
fourteenth-century conquests. ‘Southern’ or ‘Dravidian’ architectu-
ral elements were adapted to older Deccani ones by adding such
distinctive features as high-walled enclosures forming interior
walkways around an often older central shrine, pillared halls,
sculpted basements, and, most distinctively of all, towering gate-
ways set into the high walls.
The best examples of temple building in the sixteenth-century
heyday of Vijayanagara are found in the northern section of Hampi,
the ‘sacred centre’ along the riverside. Here are found complete
temple complexes dedicated to Virupaksha, Balakrishna,
Tiruvengalanatha (the god Venkatesvara from Tirupati or ‘Achyu-
tadevaraya’s temple’), Vithala, Ragunatha, and Pattibhirama. These
severalshrines manifest —indeed they constitute —the first examples
of what art historians call the Vijayanagara temple style, one that
spread widely with the conquests of the Tuluva kings during the
sixteenth century.
Excavations in the vicinity of these several temple complexes now
permit a better understanding of why each seemed to have a
somewhat separate and independent identity in inscriptions. The
precincts of the old, riverside shrine ofVirupaksha in the north-west-
ern part of Hampi was called Virupakshapura in an inscription of

32
 - Ba *

# ve
)sala Ballaalll; thee Krishna eitihe north of the
Lut
dividing irrigation canal, was known as Krishnapura. That the
designation ‘pura’, or ‘city’, was more than a conceit honouring the
god whose temple formed the focus of the quarter is indicated by
recent excavations. Fronting all of the principal temples were long,
paved roads. The road in front of the riverside Virupaksha temple
ee extends for one-half mile and along its sides are structures of various
sorts, some probably being public buildings, perhaps audience halls,
and others being shops and residences of merchants. A sixteenth-
century inscription refers to the road beginning in front of the
Ramachandra temple as ‘big bazaar street’.
Domingo Paes’s description of the city in 1520retains remarkable
freshness; it is also one whose accuracy is validated by each new
excavation at the Hampi site. Paes entered the city by its western
gate:
The king has made within it a very strong city, fortified with walls
and towers, and the gates at the entrance are very strong ... these
walls are not made like those of other cities, but are made of very
strong masonry ... and inside very beautiful rows of buildings...
with flat roofs. There live... many merchants, and it is filled with
a large population because the king induces many honourable
merchants to go there from his cities ...!

Not far from the western gate was the Ramachandra temple, before
which, Paes reported:
You have a broad and beautiful street full of fine houses ... and it
is understood that the houses belong to ... merchants, and there
you find all sorts of rubies, and diamonds, and emeralds, and
pearls ... and cloths and every sort of thing there is on the earth
that you may wish to buy. Then you have there every evening a
fair where they sell many common horses, and also many citrons,
and limes, and oranges, and grapes, and every kind of garden stuff,
and wood; you have all this in the street [which] ... leads to the
palace.”

There was found the king, Krishnadevaraya, who was

of medium height, and of fair complexion and good figure, rather
fat than thin; he has on his face signs of smallpox. He is the most
1 R. Sewell, AForgotten Empire (Vijayanagara) (London: Sonnenswahnheim, 1900),
p. 244; Delhi edition, 1962: p. 236 ie ier
2 Sewell, Forgotten Empire, London edition: pp. 246-7; Delhi edition: p. 239

33
 ; and am a seks aie ice ee ba
api Archaeological findings have confirmed inscriptions and India : =
- literary evidenceaswell as the accounts of foreigners who visited the _S
BRS city before and after Paes. As a result of all of this, the city can be
understood more clearly than ever before.
a Its northern flank was the Tungabhadra on whose north bank
were defensive walls anchored on the east by the fortress and town
of Anegondi. This fortified town was constructed by the Kampili
___ kings of the fourteenth century, and their defensive walls reached
northward into the Raichur countryside. South-west of Anegondi,
on the south bank of the river, is ‘the sacred centre’ of Vijayanagara,
__where, strung along the Tungabhadra, like so many jewels, are the
remarkable temple complexes. These are nested into small valleys
23s that break the rocky ridgeline which follows the southern bank of
: the Tungabhadra.
Immediately south of this broken riverside ridge lies an extensive
irrigated, agricultural zone defined by a shallow valley that was
probably an ancient course of the river to which it is even now
opened on both of its ends. The canal still passes through this valley
and makes it a verdant zone of irrigated cultivation; the canal
receives water from the river through each of the small valleys that
breach the ridge and provide the settings for each temple complex.
Ancient bridges cross the canal, connecting two major roads that
pass from the southern parts of Hampi —‘the urban core’ —to the
river.
South of the agricultural zone, the landscape changes only slightly
to open onto a broken flat area, studded with massive boulders and
rock outcrops that were ingeniously incorporated into an intricate
series of defensive walls within which nested other wall-enclosed
structures. Here, in ‘the urban core’, are found the remains of wells,
tanks, pottery, and other signs that this was the place where most of
Viyayanagara’s citizens lived. Among these were Muslim soldiers
and artisans who served the kings of the sixteenth century and who
were permitted mosques and tombs and cemeteries. Remains of all
of these are found on the eastern edge of the urban core of the

> Sewell, Forgotten Empire, London edition: pp. 255-6; Delhi edition: pp. 246-7.

34
 a = Ye 459ce or . ’ 4 . oe
Tampi site as well as in two of the southern suburbs of the city, -
-Kamalapuram and Kadirampur. These Muslim-style structures
seem to date from the early fifteenth century, and one, a mosque,
has an inscription dating the building from 1439.
What scholars of the city are calling ‘the royal centre’ lies in the
western half of the urban and residential core south of the irrigation
canal. Here are the largest and possibly the earliest extant remains
of what can be called ‘civil monuments’ in South India in the sense
that these structures which were not the shelter of gods and institu-
tions of religious activity. Another defining characteristic of the
royal centre is a system of roads, many stone-paved, radiating
outward from an open area in front of the Ramachandra temple and
reaching all parts of the site south of the agricultural zone and a few
of these extending northward to the Tungabhadra banks.
In the capitals of the Cholas, Pandyas, and Hoysalas —Tanjavur
and Gangaikondacholapuram, Madurai, and Dvarasamumdram —
were large temples, and some may have served as the residences of
kings. But in Vijayanagara there are the remains of imposing secular
buildings which match the detailed descriptions of Paes and another
Portuguese traveller, Fernao Nuniz, who was there in 1535. Thirty
or so ‘palaces’ have now been identified in various parts of the city.
Most are in the south-western portion, or the royal centre, and
several have been fully excavated. One set of these structures is
found north of the irrigation canal, and in it has been found a large
“number of Chinese porcelain pieces, possibly brought from the
west coast ports where Chinese commodities were reportedly
exchanged for commodities from India and the Near East. The
largest of these ‘palace’ buildings so far found 1ssouth of the canal
and covers an area of 7,700 square feet, not including its walls. The
idea that these buildings were shelters for royals and other impor-
tant residents of the city is based partly upon the evidence of Paes,
Nuniz, and other fifteenth- and sixteenth-century visitors, partly
on their inappropriateness as religious buildings, and partly also on
the evidence that in them household-scale cooking went on and
some rooms may have served as offices. The largest number of
extant great houses are found in close proximity to the Ramachan-
dra temple and near a set of other ceremonial structures which are
certainly the same ones described by Paes, Nuniz, and others as

be)
 PS
antetheafee royal
Sparescalled Ma;ar ass a
performed.
Among the most striking of all of Henig s ruinedbl siiithe
structures areeta
those where royal ceremonials were conducted. While these struc-
tures contain architectural and iconographic elements commonly
found on temples of the time, there were no cells in which the
images of gods could be placed and worshipped nor are these
structures oriented appropriately. Some of these ‘civic’buildings
possess structural elements that provide for substantial wooden and
cloth superstructures of a sort described by foreign visitors. One of
these has a floor area of 5,300 square feet rising by a series of
sculpted terraces to some 40 feet above a base measuring 11,700
square feet. This ‘great platform’, or ‘mahanavami dibba’ as the
modern residents of Hampi call it, is aremarkable structure which
during the sixteenth century was surmounted by another level
supported by wooden columns. It is probable that the platform
dated from the fourteenth century and therefore that many of
Vijayanagara’s rulers received the homage and their tutelaries the
worship of their subjects before the time of Krishnadevaraya when
the final layers of sculpted panels are thought to have been affixed.
Close to the great platform the ruins of encircling walls and of
elaborate tanks and aqueducts are found. Among these an exquis-
itely constructed, large step well has recently been excavated, in a
design heretofore seen primarily in southern Maharashtra, thus
extending the symbolic reach of this City of the Rayas. Also near the
platform other important structures have been found. One of these
has a floor area twice as large as the ‘dibba’. This is a hall in whose
floor extending over 17,000square feet are footings for one hundred
columns to support another storey connected to the first by a stone
stairway that still stands. This must be the building mentioned by
the horse trader and emissary Abdar Razzaq during his visit to the
city in 1442-3 and which he called ‘the royal audience hall’. Another
notable recent find is a set of dressed stone slabs that appear to have
been brought to the city for use in sixteenth-century constructions
from early Buddhist sites in northern Karnataka.
The designation by site archaeologists of many of the ruined
structures as ‘palaces’departs from their otherwise prudent practice
of not attributing functions to particular structures as older scholars

36
 THE CITY AND THE KINGDOM

of the site did when whole sections of the site were identified as
bureaucratic offices, such as a ‘mint’. There is no evidence that such
offices existed. The attribution of ‘palace’ to some of these buildings
may be justified, however, and other sets of structures may also
justifiably be said to have had public functions.
One such cluster is in an area north of the great platform of the
royal centre. It consists of a set of buildings that are so well
preserved and have such markedly Muslim features that some earlier
commentators have proposed that they may have dated from after
the sack of the city in 1565. One of these is a two-storeyed pavilion
long called the ‘lotus mahal’ which is richly decorated with Hindu
and Muslim elements, thus adding to the new and eclectic architec-
ture identified with Vijayanagara. Within the same walled enclosure
other notable buildings in the same style are discovered. These
include a building with eleven domes that was almost certainly an
elephant stable, another was an arched building still preserved, that
may have served as a ‘guards’ quarters’, and in an adjoining
enclosure there is a water pavilion which may have served as a royal
bath and was earlier called ‘the queen’s bath’. The notion that these
are creations of the post-1565 life of the city is not accepted by art
and architectural historians.
Secular or civil buildings of the royal centre south of the agri-
cultural zone of the city, together with the temple complexes in the
northern sector of the Hampi site, give an expressive, or emblema-
tic, character to the whole of Hampi that is most manifest in the
annual ten-day Mahanavami Festival, conducted during the lunar
month of Asvina (September/October). Celebrated in this rite were
the victories, powers, and protection of the tutelary goddess of the
kings, the apotheosis of perfect kingship as symbolised by the god
Rama, and the puissance and protection of all of the gods and people
‘of the world’ by the Vijayanagara kings who were the focus of the
festival. This annual, royal rite was probably the most important
ceremony that occurred in the city during its two centuries as a great
capital, and it serves as a means of understanding the relationship
among some of the key structures of the royal centre, especially the
Ramachandra temple, the great platform, and the hundred-pillared
hall. All are mentioned in the descriptions of the Mahanavami
Festival by sixteenth-century visitors to the city.

37
 *Sune he . 7
This is not an easy question to answer. Fortinstance, if the triage .
sometimes used to categorise pre-modern cities is applied to Vijaya-
nagara, the outcome is so ambiguous as to cast doubt upon the
categories themselves. Vijayanagara was a regal-ritual centre and an
administrative centre and a commercial centre: it was these and
more.
It certainly was a royal city and one in which ritual was very
important in at least two ways. Temples of the so-called sacred
centre were replete with divine and royal potency. The goddess
Pampa, consort of Siva,continued to be protector of the city and its
kings even under the post-Sangama rulers who were personally
devoted to such Vishnu deities as Krishna and Tiruvengalanatha for
whom temples were built by Krishnadevaraya and Achyutadeva-
raya, and the Rama temple of the royal centre was the focus of the
royal rituals of both. The Balakrishna image installed in a new
temple by Krishnadevaraya was both his personal god and a trophy
of his prowess in having seized the image from Udayagiri when that
fortress was taken from the Gajapatis in 1515. Achyutadevaraya’s
temple to Tiruvengangalnatha similarly honours the personal god of
the king (i.e.Venkatesvara) and celebrates his coronation before that
god in 1529 under very troubled conditions. The Vithala temple
begun by Devaraya II was possibly the most popular temple of the
| sixteenth century and remains one of the most beautiful temples in
all of India. Curiously, this manifestation of Vishnu is better known
in Maharashtra than in Karnataka or further south and therefore
may take note of Krishnadevaraya’s northern conquests. Hence, all
of the great shrines of Vijayanagara, including that of Virupaksha, in
one way or another, ritually focussed upon powerful royal benefac-
tors; the regaland the ritual constituting as powerful a composite for
the Vijayanagara kings as for most other Indian kings. As a ritual or
ceremonial centre, the city was a greatly enlarged, yet unified,
version of the Chalukyan royal centres of Aihole and Pattadakal,
according to the descriptions and poetry of contemporaries and to
what can be beheld by the modern sojourner at Hampi.
But Viyayanagarawas also an important commercial centre. It was

38
 A = ‘s C \/ fo
(ae ae Sy bs r
— 2ae “ g aD t= x, q
r

the focal point of severaltranspeninsulartrade routes, and the |

commodities which found their way to the city impressedPortu-
guese visitors of the sixteenth century by their variety and quality.
Wares would have been seen at the four large bazaars that were said
to exist in the royal centre alone; in addition, each of the temple
complexes along the river had a bazaar street whose trade, along
with that of the several southern suburbs of the city, was conducted
by the merchant guilds of each. All of this together with the vivid
descriptions by Paes and Nuniz of the trade that had lured them to
the city, make Vijayanagara a thriving emporium and production
centre. And, of course, it was a centre of vast consumption as the
administrative centre of a great kingdom.
Vijayanagara was the place where its kings conducted their
political business for substantial parts of each year, where tribute
from powerful provincial lords of the realm was received during the
mahanavami festival, and where the rayas’ army was garrisoned and
resupplied when it was not in the field. Foreign commentators
documented all of these activities. Among the earliest, Nicolo di
Conti reported that the city accommodated an army of 90,000 in
1420, and later fifteenth-century witnesses referred to even larger
numbers of soldiers who were garrisoned and otherwise cared for
there. Nuniz listed the great commanders of these and other forces |
of the kingdom from whom Achyutadevaraya received substantial
tribute payments in gold coins. While there were said to be some
two hundred of these ‘captains of his kingdom’, Nuniz recorded the
tribute received from only eleven, and he stated the territories of
each. These tributaries paid the king between a third and a half of
their money collections, retaining the balance to support their own
armed forces. Nuniz observed that Achyutadevaraya employed
officials to record and collect the revenues from lands around the
city —‘the King’s own lands’ —but that there were no royal officials
responsible for the general revenues of the kingdom.

FISCAL BASIS OF THE KINGDOM

The modest assessment of Vijayanagara state administration set out

by Paes and Nuniz, and accepted by Robert Sewell, has not been
contravened by later historians, nor by the excavations being

39
 VIJAYANAGARA | Ke
conducted at the Hampi site. For instance, the large enclosure
within the royal centre that was designated as the ‘mint’ by earlier
historians (most of whom had never visited Hampi) has been
rejected partly because there are no material traces of minting and
partly because the ruined structures of most of the walled enclosures
are now thought to have been residential quarters —‘palaces’ —on "
somewhat better, though still slender, evidence. There is an under-
ground chamber in the royal centre that may have served as a
treasury, but this merely underscores the modest character of
administrative functions in the city. What other administrative
functions might have been present in sixteenth-century Vijayanagara
has something to do with how the political structure of the kingdom
is viewed.
As already noted, historians of Karnataka and Andhra perceive no
differences between the Vijayanagara regime and its predecessors,
nor do they admit of changes in the kingdom from the time of its
founding until, possibly, the sacking of the city in 1565;some do not
even regard that event as an important turning-point. Tamil his-
torians, however, see Vijayanagara differently, if only in the sense
that the Tamils ceased to be subjugators of other peninsular people
and became the subjugated. But even this reversal is not seen by
most older Tamil historians as more important than the vaunted role
of Vijayanagara kings as defenders of southern dharma from Muslim
desecrations.
The recent research findings of N. Karashima and Y. Subbarayalu
are important departures from the older historiography in several
ways. They proceed from a perspective of the pre-Vijayanagara state
and society, and they make significant temporal comparisons as well
as being explicitly concerned to stipulate and to theorise the
connections between the Vijayanagara state and the local lordships
with which their evidence deals. Karashima at times adopts a feudal
interpretation of Vijayanagara, one that is focussed upon relations
between kings and local lordships, emphasising the following
elements: personal and fealty affinities, a notion of fief attributed to
landholding terms such as sirmai and nayakattana; the appearance
of what he calls sub-infeudation among nayakas; and the complex
landholding rights of Vijayanagara times as compared with the
communal unity of the Chola period. However, these sorts of

40
 nee. | Meera. ee ET, A eee Oe LOY hea ee ak OE A? oe
9 r ré ‘
THE CITY AND THE KINGDOM

relations are not claimed for Tamil country until the sixteenth
century. Before that the picture presented by Karashima and others
in unclear. It seems to be that during the fifteenth century, Vijayana-
gara soldiers are seen to be agents of a conquest state, charged with
extracting a large money revenue from the conquered Tamils, and
producing peasant resistance against the extortionate demands of
these military agents and their Brahman and Tamil landlord allies.
Relations between local lordships and Vijayanagara kings —
whether seen as feudal or other —cannot be verified except from
local documents of the sort studied by Karashima, Subbarayalu, and
others. Hence, the discussion of this political dimension will be
treated in the following chapter. Here, the broader history of the
Vijayanagara kingdom and its political structure will be outlined.
Two fundamental changes seem to have occurred around the time
of Devaraya II, in the middle of the fifteenth century. First, he
strengthened the military base of the kingdom by improving the
quality of war horses and the training of horsemen and archers
under his personal command and resources, and, second, he estab-
lished deeper political control over west-coast emporia, thus linking
military reform with international commerce.
Military and administrative dominance over the major ports on
the Arabian Sea provided Devaraya II with a new and different
source of state finance that his predecessors ever enjoyed, though
exactly how trade profits were appropriated during the fifteenth
century cannot now be ascertained. Fifty years later, there is some
evidence to suggest that a standard means of realising revenue was
through tax-farming, though whether tax-farmers were agents of
the rayas or of other imperial grandees is uncertain. Nevertheless,
contemporary inscriptions and later literary sources document that
in addition to older forms of tax in kind, especially on the pro-
duction of grain and some cash crops, there was added a whole set of
cash revenue demands. The latter were collected from trade and
from the production of textiles and metal goods either from the
headmen of artisanal groups or traders or by contracting out, or
farming, revenue collections to men with independent military and
political powers and authority and sometimes to merchants directly
involved in trade. Customs collections at major trade centres were
let on rent agreements (or gutta) from powerful, state-level

41
 iz,for
example)
Feporad
in1535
we! customsfromoneofthegateways
ofilies was
12,000 gold coins. While a full range of taxes collected during the
fifteenth century is not retrievable, customs, or tribute paid by
merchants, from port towns in the time of Devaraya II could have
provided the means for him to pay for horses imported from Ormuz
and elsewhere as well as providing a surplus to pay for the skilled
horsemen to use them.
SaluvaNarasimha continued Devaraya’s policy of making larger
appropriations where possible from west-coast emporia and went
further by attempting to achieve the same in Coromandel. By
seizing direct control over the northern Coromandel plain and
extirpating those conquered regimes that had previously been left in
place on condition of accepting the supremacy of Vijayanagara,
potential central resources were increased. The initial Vijayanagara
conquests under Kumara Kampana during the late fourteenth
century merely demanded the homage of the Sambuvaraya chief of
Tondaimandalam and that of the royal houses of Cholas and
Pandyas. This practice of an ancient notion of righteous conquest,
or digviyjaya,was departed from by the earliest kings only in the
northern portions of the Tamil plain following the defeat of the
Yadavarayas of Chandragiri.
There, in northern Coromandel, three new provinces, or rajyas, of
the Vijayanagara kingdom were created and placed under men loyal
to the Sangama rayas. Among these commanders was Manugudeva
who governed the new Chandragiri rajya; his great-grandson, Saluva
Narasimha, used this as a base, first, to launch his career as a Vijaya-
nagara generalissimo and then to win the throne in 1485. The two
other new rajyas created from the conquered territory of the Yadava-
rayas were Padaividu (modern North Arcot) and Tiruvadi (in
‘modern South Arcot). From here, Vijayanagara commanders main-
tained a fortified military presence on the fringes of the prosperous
plains of Chingleput and Cuddalore without any apparent inter-
ference beyond collecting customs along the main trade routes
nearby. For the rest of Tamil country after the first Vijayanagara
conquest, old authorities continued until they were swept away by
SaluvaNarasimha and the Tuluva kings who succeeded him.

42
 OLD CHALLENGES,NEWRESPONSES
_The Tuluvas, or more especially Krishnadevaraya, faced a threat to
the kingdom as grave as any before. To the north-west of the
heartland of the kingdom was the new sultanate at Bijapur with
ambitions to seize Raichur; on the north-eastern frontier were the
expansionist Gajapatis of Orissa, and to the south were a set of
Karnatak chiefs who had opposed the Tuluva usurpation and under
the Ummattur family were expanding across the peninsula into
Telugu country thus threatening to cut the rayas off from their
Tamil dominions.
Krishnadevaraya’s solution to these threats was the old and
reliable one of a brilliant series of military campaigns followed by a
bold policy for reducing chiefly power. In a double-sided attack,
chiefs in the core of the kingdom were constrained from above by a
system of royal fortresses under Brahman commanders (durga
dandanayaka) and garrisoned by troops drawn from two sources:
Portuguese and Muslim mercenary gunners and footsoldiers
recruited from non-peasant, or forest, people (vedar) found over
much of the central peninsula. From below, the king devised
another sort of challenge; this was the enfranchisement of a new
strata of lesser chiefs totally dependent upon military service under
Krishnadevaraya; these were the ‘Poligars’ as the British called them
(from the Marathi palegar, as borrowed from the Tamil palaiyakka-
rar, and rendered in Telugu as palegadu and in Kannada as palaga-
raru). Literary and inscriptional evidence of the sixteenth century
speaks of Krishnadevaraya’s Brahman scribal and military officials
and his foreign mercenaries, but it is principally to the later
documentaion of Colin Mackenzie that we owe our knowledge of
the numerous poligar families in the Karnatak-Andhra core of the
kingdom who came into existence as military servants of Krishnade-
varaya as adjunct infantry and keepers of his forts. His unrivalled
power in Vijayanagara history resulted as much from his control of
great warrior households in his domain and his reliance on Brahman
agents who had no territorial bases of their own as to any other
cause.
The brilliance of this strategy for attaining a more centralised state
by checking the authority of ancient territorial chiefs was as great as

43
ayle toanticipate
a itfailed
inayatime
be hisCon itis
necessaryto understandtheimportance
of fundamental
political
and economic division of the peninsular polity he was attempting to
fuse. Essentially, his strategy depended on the wealth from areas of
high agriculture, population and commerce providing the means for
controlling the powerful chieftaincies of the dry upland, the very
heart of his kingdom. During the late fifteenth century there were
really two countrysides, wholly different rural structures, that
conditioned all of the politics of the later Vijayanagara kingdom.
However different, though, both kinds of rural structures posed
difficultiesto a Vijayanagarastate striving for the levelof centralised
power and authority required to fend off other conquest regimes of
the time.

POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

Demography and the moving agricultural frontier are two factors

that determined the dual character of political and agrarian institu-
tions in the South. The population of the peninsula south of the
Krishna was large relative to other world societies of the sixteenth
century. It may have been around 25 million, if the population of all
of India was about the 150million that has been estimated. But then
as now, the absolute population of the southern peninsula was less
significant than its distribution, bearing in mind the differing
capacities of various parts of the peninsula to support people.
The extended Cormandel plain between the deltas of the Krishna-
Godavari and Kaveri Rivers and the narrower, but even better
watered, plain on the western coast were zones of high populations.
Along with these coastal plains, there were other zones of high
agriculture and population in the riverine basins of the Palar, Vaigai
and Tambraparni and in the Karnatak maidan of the upper Kaveri.
The whole of the plateau upland between the two coastal plains was,
and remains, a zone of thin population, but one that appears to have
grown steadily from 1500 as a result of colonisation and natural
increase. Present knowledge about these processes at that time
permits speculation only, and it should be noted that even after three
centuries, that is in 1800, colonisation and natural increase resulted

44
 Tir i 4 ow be) = : ee’ | a ‘ > ie —_ 5, sk els
i %
eHeayMsTeseoar

THE CITY AND THE KINGDOM

in quite low densities of population in many parts of the upland,

about seventy per square mile.
The dry upland of the peninsula ranges between 1,000and 2,000
feet above the coastal plains from whence came most of the people
who colonised the interior. This was a process that was perhaps a
thousand years old in 1500,judging from early Tamil poetry which
deployed an elaborate poetic code for different landscapes and kinds
of production in diverse peninsular environments. Later, in Chola
and Pandya times, field agriculturists from both coasts made their
way onto the interior upland. Though they were permanent settlers,
they nevertheless retained names that recalled their earlier coastal
homes. During the same time, organised groups of northern Tamil
cultivators set up strong chieftaincies from Nellore across the
peninsula to the Karnataka maidan and the western ghats. Later,
during the period of Hoysala ascendency in the thirteenth century,
Kannada-speaking cultivators spread southward in the wake of their
kings, as the Hoysala historian J.D.M. Derrett deploringly
observed. Derrett spoke of this thirteenth-century expansion south-
ward into the heart of Tamil country as an ‘historical aberration’ of
Ballala II in that it diverted the Hoysalas from their proper mission
of creating a ‘national empire’ in Karnataka. Apart from the
anachronistic hyperbole of this judgement, it fails to appreciate the
lure of the rich lower Kaveri for the poorly resourced but militarily
strong Hoysalas. High agriculture had by then becomea prize for
the strong of the peninsular dry zone.
More striking even than the Hoysala bid for overlordship in the
lower Kaveri was the penetration of Telugus into both the open
country of the central Deccan and into Tamil country during the
fifteenth century. Telugu cultivating groups had begun migrating
from their coastal homelands to the interior upland of Telangana
from about the twelfth century and from there they continued their
movement westward into what became the heart of the Vijayanagara
kingdom. They had modified an irrigation technology based on
wells in the coastal and deltaic area to that of rain-fed tanks that the
topography of the upland permitted; they also carried a martial
tradition that was required to win new tracts from often fierce forest
peoples above the ghat, whom they partly displaced and partly
incorporated. During the fifteenth century, these hardy warrior-

45
_ peninsula southward to the very southern tip of the sub-continent, ©
partly in the service of Telugu conquerers of Tamil country and
partly as a continuation of a colonisation process that predated
conquest. :
Telugu migrations resulted in significant demographic changes in
many parts of Tamil country. Referred to as vadugan (northerners)
by Tamils, Telugu farmers and traders took over parts of the upland
stretching southward into Tirunelveli. At times this meant displac-
ing or subordinating older Tamil peasant occupants, but often it
meant opening whole new tracts to field cultivation and developing
tracts of tank-irrigated agriculture. Both provided the means for
supporting numerous small chieftaincies. The latter allied them-
selves to Telugu commanders of Vijayanagara armies that con-
quered and reconquered parts of Tamil country during the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries.
The causes of this explosion of Telugu cultivators are disputed.
One seems to have been the opportunity to use their fighting skills
to augment the wealth that could be produced by dry-land
cultivation, which always involved considerable spatial mobility in
any case. Another probable cause was the lure of sparsely populated
and weakly held tracts of black soils which Telugu cultivators had
learned to exploit earlier on the eastern plateau. Telugu settlement in
Tamil country follows the distribution of black soils there quite
closely as a result of which Telugu farmers and merchants came to
constitute major elements of the populations of Coimbatore, Salem,
Madurai, and Tirunelveli. To these ‘pull’ factors a ‘push’ factor must
be added. That is the Muslim pressure for revenue and military
manpower as the Bahmani sultans penetrated Telugu districts
followed by their successors, the Golconda sultans. Accounts of
Telugu migrants in Tamil country given to the British orientalist-
official Mackenzie around 1800 refer, quite plausibly, to being
driven from their Andhra homelands by the demands of sultan
officials. The accounts of many other local Telugu chiefs who
remained in Andhra suggest that they took service under the same
sultanate regimes that drove compatriots into Tamil country.
Martial peasantries such as these on the agricultural frontiers were

46
 Ay cbelote the+ee craliaaesrevenue-
e compliant ResRR “seeking ae
; te sort that Krishnadevaraya sought to create. The
)- Rey of such migrant communities,like that of the Vijayanagara
expansion itself, was the same tough, Telugu soldiery. Raising a
regular revenue from such cultivators led by fighting chiefswould
have been difficult. Less so was gaining revenues from the older,
much richer, wet cultivation zones of the peninsula.
Here, the pattern of exploitation by sixteenth-century conquerors
seemed to be a combination of tax-farming and tribute methods.
Collections at points of production and exchange were contracted
out by landed magnates from whom tribute might be demanded by
even greater lords, including the Vijayanagara kings themselves.
Money was the vital link in all of this, and the increase of money-use
is verified in two principal ways. One was the shift in temple
endowments during the Vijayanagara age from payments in kind to
direct money endowments or to the grant of lands yielding a money se
income to religious beneficiaries; the other was the vastly increased
demand for money taxes of all sorts.

THE APOGEE OF VIJAYANAGARA POWER ig

That more of land revenue was collected in money during Vijayana-

gara times than previously is acknowledged by all scholars. One
cause for, or consequence of, this greater monetisation is given by
Nuniz, a witness to events in the 1530s. Nuniz was describing the
system of great commanderies established by Krishnadevaraya for
controlling the major chiefs of his realm. This was the moment in the
history of the kingdom when central authority was greatest, shortly
after Krishnadevaraya’s death.
Nuniz listed the leading Vijayanagara ‘captains’ of Achyutadeva-
raya’s time, the territories they held, and the money they collected
and shared with the king. Nuniz made clear that he was not
describing ‘officers of the King’, but rather ‘lords, of the kingdom’s
greatest territories’. Sewell underscored Nuniz’s distinction
between ‘the King’s own personal lands’ —‘his home farm so to
speak’ —and those ‘provincesand estates . . .entrusted to anoble who
farmed the revenue to his own anes paying a fixed sum every
year to the king’. This understanding of Nuniz is superior to that of

47
surpluses | = SyBa:
tener|

An instance of the autonomous authority of these great lords of

the kingdom comes from an inscription from Mangalagiri, in
modern Guntur district, Andhra, referring to Krishnadevaraya’s°
Brahman minister, SaluvaTimma, and the latter’s two nephews; all
held nearly independent authority under the king and were instru-
mental in the victory gained against Gajapati forces at Kondavidu as
can be judged from this inscription ordered by Saluva Timma in
1515,which read in part as follows:
The great chancellor, the glorious Salva-Timma, the best of
ministers, rules the empire of the glorious king Krishnaraya ...
When Salva [‘hawk’], surnamed Timma ... after having captured
the swan-like kings appointed by Gajapati in Kondaviti, is plan-
ning an attack, the hostile princes absconding ... resembling birds
... The sister’s sons of the glorious minister, Salva Timma, who
continued his family, were the excellent ministers Nadinla-Appa
and Gopa ... [the former] obtained from the glorious king,
Krishna and the minister Timma, a palanquin, two chauris [fly
wisk emblem of royalty] and a parasol, and the posts of super-
intendent of [the fortresses at] Vinakonda, Gutti ... of comman-
der in chief of a large army ... and sole governor of that kingdom
[Gutti]. The glorious Salva-Timma ... gave to ... Gopa, the best
among governors and an excellent minister, the post of governor
of Kondaviti, together with an army ... of elephants, horses and
infantry and a palanquin and two chauris.4
First among the ‘great captains’ whom Nuniz later named was
another commander, ‘Salvanayque’(Saluva Narasingha Nayaka, or
Chellappa), a Tamil Brahman. He was one of those to whom
Krishnadevaraya delegated vast governing responsibility, and he
retained these powers as Achyutadevaraya’s ‘minister’ and the
latter’s strong supporter against his rival for the throne in 1529,
Aliya Rama Raja. Saluva Nayaka’s yearly income was reckoned at
over a million gold pieces collected from Tamil chiefs of which he
paid a third to Achyutadevaraya and retained the balance in order to
maintain his army of 30,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry, and 30 war

* V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar, ed., Selected Telugu Inscriptions (Madras: University

of Madras, 1952);Teluguedn., N.Venkata Rao, pp. 128-46.

48
 ‘ r * . ‘
e THE CITY AND THE KINGDOM

elephants. His territory comprised most of the Tamil plain. Second

after Saluva Nayaka was one whom historians identify as Saluva
Timmarasu, a Telugu (Niyogi) Brahman and, like Chellappa, a
former minister of Krishnadevaraya. He ruled Telangana for
Achyutadevaraya, and his collections were valued at 800,000 gold
coins each year. Of this, less than half was reportedly given to the
king, and the balance was spent on his army of 25,000 horsemen,
1,500infantry, and 4o elephants. In addition, SaluvaTimmarasu was
responsible for three strategic fortresses —Udayagiri, Kondavidu,
and Gandikota —as well as for securing two major trade routes
linking Coromandel and Andhra coastal areas with Vijayanagara,
one through Kondavidu and the other through Penukonda. Other
‘captains’ in a descending order of gross collections and military
obligations held the following territories: Bankapur, a major
pepper-producing and cattle-breeding area in north-western Karna-
taka; the southern border area of the city in central Karnataka; the
area around modern Mysore and Bangalore, and others around
Chitaldrug, Bangalore, and Kolar. Two other magnates mentioned
by Nuniz held the country around the fortress at Gooty, with its
valuable diamond mines, and around Mudkal in Raichur. Apart
from Saluva Narasimha’s domination of Tamil territory, these
lordships of the 1530s were either gateways to major commercial
zones of the peninsula or tracts commanding trade routes, or they
were territories which had strategic importance in the defence of the
Vijayanagara core area of the Tungabhadra-Krishna basin.

RESOURCE LIMITS OF VIJAYANAGARA KINGS

Even the most powerful Vijayanagara rulers of the sixteenth century

~ Krishnadevaraya, Achyutadevaraya, and Rama Raja —enjoyed
only a part of the revenues collected from the richest provinces of
the realm. These, of course, all lay well outside the kingdom’s core.
One was the Karnataka maidan of the upper Kaveri, but it was
gradually lost to any substantial appropriative benefit by Vijayana-
gara kings during Achyutadevaraya’s time when a young chief,
odeya (which becomes the dynastic name ‘Wodeyar’), established
his family’s control over the fortress of Srirangapattanam. This

49
 ipieenuys
Havee
ome
to the
be Halebid,following
thedemise
oftheHoysalas
whomtheyse
Having entered the service of Vijayanagara, they benefited from
_ Krishnadevaraya’s defeat of the Ummattur chiefs of around Sri-
rangapattanam, increasing their lordship over the fertile lands
around Mysore and Bangalore. Tribute and soldiers were supplied +
by the growing chiefdom during the times of SaluvaNarasimha and
Krishnadevaraya, but after that the Wodeyar chiefs slipped central
obligations and ruled with increasing independence.
Another rich zone of agriculture far from the capital were the
wealthy, surplus-producing regions of Tamil country: the Palar
basin in the centre and the Kaveri basin in the South. These were
under the stewardship of Saluva Narasimha Nayaka from 1510 to
1531.This Tamil Brahman enjoyed great titles, responsibilities, and
privileges during the time of Krishnadevaraya. He even made land
grants to temples without referring to the king. Chellappa, as he was
called, must also have passed a substantial tribute to Krishnadeva-
raya as he did for a few years to Achyutadevaraya, but this financial
support to the latter was not nearly as important as Chellappa’s
military support of Achyutadevaraya against the conspiracy of
Rama Raja.
Chellappa rose against Achyutadevaraya in concert with other
Tamil chiefs in 1531.Inscriptional evidence of the time suggests that
the reason for Chellappa’s rebellion was his resentment that Achyu-
tadevaraya interfered with his powers to make and protect religious
endowments in Chola country. Most historians reject this as an
implausible cause, but serious political consequences could well
have resulted from challenging so significant an aspect of regal
power as Chellappa had long possessed, even under Krishnadeva-
raya. Other reasons for Chellappa’s rebellion pertain to the conspi-
racies of Aliya Rama Raja. The latter’s plans to displace Achyutade-
varaya began with the removal of such stalwart supporters as
Chellappa and their replacement in the rich provinces they con-
trolled by his own supporters. However, when Chellappa was
defeated in 1532,he was succeeded by Salakaraju, an affinal kinsman
of Achyutadevaraya and the latter’s keen supporter against Rama
Raja; he ruled rule over Tamil country until 1543 when his royal
ambitions were revealed in a rebellion against central authority.

5O
yuey
sajq
1
tV
o
C2he
yeu
urle
£
itk

[o
pepet “

eys
Jo
oyi
pet
Y
Ma
apd
ay
(wv
Ae
S $
ei ts
re
1e
Wi
Yt
cl us
pa
fo
ay
9
vy
ap
Ae
ae
ae
ao
Wot
SIU
3yt
be
euys
puas
aydu
oy
ul
CIV
PUL
 .
Cali
Mame a

8 The Pattabhirama temple seen through the Chinna Hudiam temple

 Se pe
he DPeerhoe,
Bobo2Bor
C8
id ee
a ee Bi eS as hears):
i lik ae er ; pe ieeeBh epee:
-

THE CITY AND THE KINGDOM

Thus, the Kaveri milch-cow of resources for a central Vijayana-

gara exchequer proved difficult to milk. During the time of
Krishnadevaraya and a few years of his successor, most of the
Tamil plain was under Chellappa who proved a loyal servant and
provided some financial assistance to Krishnadevaraya and his
successor as well as a great deal of political support. For the next
ten or so years, after Chellappa was defeated, the vast wealth of
the Tamil plain and its ports was in the hands of the ambitious
and powerful Salakaraju family and provided them with the means
to pursue dynastic aspirations of their own. Moreover, the wealth
available from other parts of the far south of Tamil country
remained out of even the merely potential tributary catchment of
Viujayanagarakings. Chellappa’s allies in revolt included two chief-
tains who held most of Madurai and Tirunelveli; another was the
raja of Travancore. By their alliance with Chellappa, they not only
denied the Vijayanagara kings of the resources and homage of
much of Tamil country, but required an expensive campaign to
thwart.
If regular revenue from the richest areas of South India proved as
difficult for the rulers of the kingdom to command as that from the
numerous, tough chieftains of the dry upland of the realm, what
then of possibly large revenues from the vigorous international trade
around the coasts of the peninsula? There is some evidence to
support that this first became available in the time of Saluva
Narasimha, while he served Vijayanagara and, later, when he was
king late in the century.
But when this evidence is carefully evaluated, it is difficult to
sustain the view that a major and regular component of the revenues
of the Kingdom came from the great and growing trade at Arabian
Sea ports. Accounts of foreigners —Europeans and Muslims —
confirm that Vijayanagara rulers like Saluva Narasimha and the
Tuluva kings offered importers high prices for horses, even dead
ones, so as to monopolise the traffic in horses. However, there 1s
almost no information about foreign trade that can be gleaned from
indigenous historical sources of the Vijayanagara period, notwith-
standing the considerable, ostensible importance attributed to
foreign trade by Krishnadevaraya. This is found in the Telugu
didactic poem, Amuktamalyada, thought either to have been com-

ji
work,
Krishnadevaraya maximises as follows: ay.
A king should improve the harbours of his country and so
encourage its commerce that horses, elephants, precious gems,
sandalwood, pearls and other articles are freely imported ... He
should arrange that the foreign sailors who land in his country on
account of storms, illness and exhaustion are looked after in a
manner suitable to their nationalities ... Make the merchants of
distant foreign countries who import elephants and good horses
be attached to yourself by providing them with daily audience,
presents and allowingdecent profits. Then those articleswill never
go to your enemies.°
If the Vijayanagara kings realised even a fraction of the great
wealth generated by trade along their western coast, this might have
sustained the military and other works necessary to achieve
Krishnadevaraya’s quest for a centralised kingship. Extant indige-
nous evidence indicates that the most important centres of foreign
trade could have yielded little on a regular basis to the central
treasury of the kingdom.
Tulu country was one of the chief areas of this international trade
and was probably the ancestral homeland of kings of the third
dynasty. Along this Arabian Sea littoral were several of the major
emporia of the time: Bhatakal, as already mentioned Barakuru, and
Mangaluru. The monograph on Kanara by K. V. Ramesh exhaust-
ively examines the extant epigraphical evidence and shows that
references to the international trade that we know existed were both
rare and indirect. While he notes that most taxes were paid in
money, as elsewhere in the kingdom, and that each of the two
headquarters of the province —Barakuru andMangaluru —had mints
whose coinage circulated there along with coins from elsewhere,
Ramesh insists that most revenue collected was from agricultural
production. He notes few references to commercial taxes as com-
pared to the many pertaining to agricultural production.
Still, Ramesh has much to say about corporate mercantile and
artisanal bodies throughout Kanara or Tuluva. The wealth and
prestige of such groups are celebrated in their donative inscriptions
on Hindu and Jaina shrines, where they figure as arbitrators in
> Rangasvami Sarasvati, ‘Political Maxims of the Emperor-Poet Krishnadeva Raya’,
The Journal of Indian History part 3 (1925) pp. 70 and 72

52
 dispul
esand
asprebens
aflees ei blsteheate
; all|
kings. Therearealsoreferences
toallkindsofinternationally
traded
commodities handled by merchants of Tuluva including imported
ceramic and cloth wares from China and export goods brought into
Tulu country from the peninsula above the western ghats. The
wealth derived from this trade is attested by Portuguese and Muslim
commentators of the time.
Impediments to centralised appropriation of some part of that
wealth were numerous. The rule of Vijayanagara kings or their
agents (karyakarta) was intermittent and often weak from the time
that Tulu country was madea royal province by Devaraya II. The
coastal tract had to be reconquered by Devaraya, but this made little
difference, and Kanara was conquered yet again in 1522 during the
reign of Krishnadevaraya. The latter led an army there against one of
the several large, ancient chiefs of the region, and though the king
remained for sometime while a commander of his fought the
Portuguese, he left behind no permanent apparatus for revenue
extraction. Indeed, between his time and that of Sadasivaraya, that is
from 1529 to 1576, none of the governors who ruled from Barakuru
or Mangaluru were appointed by Vijayanagara kings.
Evidence of Kanara indicates that Vijayanagara kings can have
received little on a regular basis from its valuable trade. That was the
preserve of a set of Hindu and Jaina magnates whose local authority
was fortified by an interlinking of several distinctive elements,
which proved as difficult for Vijayanagara kings to penetrate as it
was to prove for the British in the nineteenth century. One was that
landholding in this highly favoured zone of wet cultivation was
based on compact ‘estates’, as the British were to call them, under
the control of warrior families who were linked to ruling chiefs
(often calling themselves rajas) through kinship and marriage. Grain
and pepper production of the region was in the hands of trading
corporations, called nagara and settikara, who paid a part of the
profits of this trade to these local magnates. The difference between
the two trade corporations seemed to be that the first was probably
involved in international trade and the second in domestically
produced commodities and grains. In addition, there were in Tulu
country corporate groups of artisans, called hanjamana or nagara-
hanjamana, distinguishing, again, producers and traders of locally

53
Tonkthejoo lecentres oftrade, ai asBa a Ao
settikaragroups. Endowments toHindu andspies apaceindicate
that s uchg roups operated within discrete chieflyterritoriesexcept
in the main foreign trade centres; all traders enjoyed the protection.
of chiefs in whose territories they operated and to whom they paid ;
:
revenue on their trade and industrial production. It is probable that
Kanara magnates of the time participated in the trade through agents
called rajasresthi, royal merchants, as other west-coast rulers did
during the twelfth century and later.
Opportunities for central appropriation of wealth from overseas
~ trade on the opposite, or Coromandel, coast appear no more
promising as the historical relations of Vijayanagara there make
clear.

COROMANDEL POLITICS

Early in the first dynasty, two powerful chiefdoms on the eastern

frontier of Vijayanagara were conquered. This was to gain security
against Reddi and Velama kingdoms of coastal Andhra and Tel-
angana, but another reason was to open the rich trade coasts and
adjacent zones of advanced agriculture to Vijayanagara domination
and its tributary catchment.
The first of these conquered tracts was centred on the northern
Tamil plain around Chandragiri where the Yadavaraya chiefs had
held sway; the second was in the area south of that, including much
of the modern Arcots then under the Sambuvaraya chiefs. The
Yadavarayas were local, but claimed to be connected with the
ancient Eastern Chalukyas and Cholas; the Sambuvarayas were
Vanniyar chiefs, part of that group of peasant warriors —like the
Reddis and Velamas of Andhra —who rose to local prominence
under the imperial Cholas to become the dominant peasantry in
many parts of the Arcots and Kanchipuram by the fourteenth
century. Both of these chiefdoms were defeated by Vijayanagara
soldiers under the command of the general Mangudeva, a subord-
inate of Kumara Kampana, brother of the king Harihara I, with
whom Mangu campaigned in southern Tamil country. His reward

54
 pe tt : Os

forthes eservices) as thegovernorship of Chandragiri, newly consti-

; tuted from part of the territory taken from the Yadavarayas.
_ Mangudeva and his descendants extended the Chandragiri rajya
northward to include Guntur and neighbouring parts of southern
Andhra; they also gained territory to the south asa result of Vijayana-
gara forays into Tamil country in the time of Devaraya II, into whose
family the Chandragiri chiefs were now married. These successors to
Mangu now called themselves, with some justice, ‘Saluva’(‘hawk’),
and the greatest of them was Saluva Narasimha whose rise from
around 1460 culminated with the throne itself in 1485.
Saluva Narasimha drove the Orissan Gajapati from the border
country between Karnataka and Andhra and pursued them north-
ward over 150 miles to fortified Udayagiri, which he seized.
Returning south, he established direct Vijayanagara authority over
the entire Tamil plain for the first time, reaching Ramesvaram in the
1470s. Like other generalissimos of the fifteenth century —Perma-
ladeva, Devaraya II’s commander and possibly his co-ruler, and
Mangudeva, his own ancestor —Narasimha commanded a large
royal army for service against Muslim and Hindu enemies; and like
the others, the army was Narasimha’s instrument for gaining ever
greater power within the kingdom. Even before he seized the throne
for himself, military subordinates of his had begun to make names
for themselves. One was Isvara Nayaka, whose son Narasa Nayaka
established the Tuluva Dynasty in 1491; the other was Aravidi
Bukka, whose descendants established the last Vijayanagara dynasty
in the 1540s.
From the very onset of the loose Vijayanagara overlordship in the
fourteenth century, most of the Coromandel plain was under rulers
who were independent of royal control. The Coromandel’s trade
emporia from Motupalli in the delta of the Krishna~-Godavari to
Tuticorin in the far south and its high agriculture from Chandragiri
to the Tambraparni basin in Tirunelveli yielded wealth to other
lords. At first, these included the subjugated Sambuvarayas, Cholas,
and Pandyas, but in the time of Krishnadevaraya, the beneficiaries
had come to include a set of politico-military personages who
sprung from the Vijayanagara armies. The latter, soon after the
reconquest of Tamil country, launched themselves upon indepen-
dent careers which ultimately limited royal appropriations from the

55
 wares KRISHNADEVARAYA’S
KINGDOM 7
BN Mey” AND ITS DISSOLUTION
a Tg

But before opposition in Tamil country could be quelled, Krishna-

_-_— devaraya faced more immediate dangers on taking the throne
vacated by his half-brother, Vira Narasimha, in 1509.
Danger was removed bya series of brilliant military campaigns
against Muslims and Gajapatis on the northern and eastern flanks of
the Vijayanagara core territory, and Krishnadevaraya returned to
met: his troublesome Tamil subjects with enhanced reputation and
San confidence. His achievements were posted a mere six months after
— his coronation in an inscription engraved on the Virupaksha temple
in Hampi. In this record of January 1510, the titles of “Hindu Sultan’
and ‘feverto the elephants of Gajapati’ were added to his coronation
title of being an incarnation of the god Krishna. Next, the king
turned to a quarter from which a threat was posed on his western
flank by a Karnatak chief of the Ummattur family. Gangaraja had
: built strong fortresses in the upper Kaveri at Srirangapattanam and
BS Sivasamudram; from these fastnesses he had launched campaigns
er across the Karnataka and Andhra plains to Penukonda, threatening
hy both western and southern approaches to Vijayanagara. To subdue
ae Gangaraja, Krishnadevaraya is said to have summoned a large force
; of cavalry and infantry from local military chiefs who were as
worried as the king by the expansion of Gangaraja’s authority, and
the latter was killed in 1512and his fortress at Sivasamudram razed.
Notwithstanding this rebellion, as it was conceived, Gangaraja’s son
and descendants were permitted to continue to rule from Sriranga-
pattanam. Later, southern Karnataka was to fall under the rule of
three of those military leaders who had joined in Krishnadeva-
raya’s campaign against Gangaraja of whom one, Kempe Gauda,
became the ruler of Bangalore and its countryside and another, the
Tamil Brahman generalissimo Saluva Govindaraja, was entrusted to
the government of parts of southern Karnataka.
Other of Krishnadevaraya’s trusted soldiers of these several
campaigns were also destined for important independent careers.

56
 a “
jon ys ona, HECITVasnteHeInepOM 0!
_Two of these were Nagama Nayaka and Chellappa Saluva Nayaka,
brother of Saluva Govindaraja. Krishnadevaraya gave both major
responsibilities and privileges in Tamil country, and both were
ultimately to rise against their Vijayanagara masters, Nagama
against Krishnadevaraya and Chellappa against Achyutadevaraya.
The territories from which the rebellions of both were launched had
been formed by lands taken from the ancient holders of royal
authority in Tamil country and placed under Vijayanagara men
who, in the end, violated their sovereigns’ trusts, but were true to
the times in seeking royal fortunes for themselves.
Nagama Nayaka’s treachery is recounted in chronicles of the rise
of the nayaka kingdom of Madurai. The generalissimo Nagama was
supposedly dispatched by Krishnadevaraya to punish the Virasek-
hara Chola for despoiling the Pandayans who were under protection
of Vijayanagara. Having dealt with the Chola, Nagama proclaimed
Madurai his own. He, in turn, was denied the fruits of disloyalty by
his son, Visvanatha Nayaka, who delivered his father over to
Krishnadevaraya. As a reward, the more loyal subject than son,
Visvanatha, was appointed governor of a large part of southern
Tamil country; he and his son Krishnappa supported successive
rayas until the sack of the city in 1565. Then, with the Vijayanagara
king in flight, Krishnappa set an independent Madurai kingdom
whose expansion and consolidation owed much to the help of his
father’s able minister, Ariyanatha Mudaliar. Thus, the extensive
domains of the ancient Pandyas, valuable alike for its agriculture and
its trade coast, provided little regular sustenance to Vijayanagara
kings and required several chastising campaigns even to secure
homage.
Ina like manner, other Vijayanagara generalissimos sent to pacify
the Tamil plain and secure Vijayanagara hegemony there ended up
by launching independent kingdoms. One was in a territory reach-
ing from Nellore to the Kollidam (Coleroon) River, with a capital at
the fortress of Gingee. This was Tubaki Krishnappa, son of
Krishnadevaraya’s general Vaiyappa Nayaka. The even more valu-
able domain of the Kaveri basin was also denied to Krishnadeva-
raya’s successors by descendants of the latter’s general, Sivappa
Nayaka. Unlike the Brahman Chellappa, Sivappa was the
descendant of peasant warriors who formed the core of the rayas’

a7
Fecae ities a even marteninto
ue es famiybe
being
appointedtoTanjavur.
Inscriptions
fromtheKaveribasic
confirm
thatSivappa
remained
loyal,
butheseems
tohaveavoided
some of the campaigns launched in the far south by Rama Raja of the
Arividu family, who was Sadasivaraya’spowerful generalissimo and
virtual co-ruler. These campaigns of Rama Raja were to regain
Vijayanagara control of Chandragiri and to punish a set of Tamil
chiefs for failing to pay tribute. Not only did Sivappa stay clear of
such military expeditions, but he seems to have devoted himself to
enriching Tanjavur beyond its grain surpluses by entering into
arrangements with the Portuguese whereby the latter paid gener-
ously to have trading stations along the coast of Tanjavur.
In the grandest days of Vijayanagara, during the time of Krishna-
devaraya, it is obvious that the resources capable of being regularly
appropriated by its kings were those in the Tungabhadra heartland
of the kingdom. This was not a small region, nor were its resources
meagre. That heartland extended over 30,000 square miles, from the
Kannada-speaking, modern Bellary district to the Telugu-speaking
districts of Kurnool and Cuddapah. This was approximately the
same territory administered by Thomas Munro between 1800 and
1808as collector of the ‘Ceded Districts’ of the Madras Presidency,
and its population in the sixteenth century may not have been very
different from that two centuries later, that is, about two million.
Tuluva kings of the first half of the sixteenth century drew upon a
large agricultural zone in the midst of whose dominantly dry
cropped fields were small regions of high agriculture based on tank
irrigation. In this region there were among the best cotton soils in
the peninsula as well as some of the largest pasturages that supported
the herding of both cattle and sheep. Thus, cotton and woollen
goods were exported from the region as well as bullocks. Bullocks
were used in large numbers to move commodities over a peninsular
trade region that centred on the city of Vijayanagara; bullocks also
began to replace others who had long been aristocrats of the animal
kingdom —war horses and elephants —because bullocks pulled the
guns that now appeared in all armies.
The north-western flank of this peninsular trade system centred
on Vijayanagara was Bankapur and the south-western flank was

58
a major emporia sek the Arabian Sea coast from Chaul in H3 north
to Cannanore in the south. Substantial customs dues were collected
from the trade, these interior towns, and others like Mysore and
Ikkeri, also served as assembly points for commodities and therefore
additional custom revenues. On the eastern flank of this trade
system there were the Coromandel ports from Motupalli south to
Pulicat, just north of modern Madras. They were connected to
Vijayanagara by a major route linking the important pilgrimage
centre at Tirupati, the manufacturing and trade town of Penukonda,
and the important fortress towns of Chandragiri and Chitaldrug.
Scattered over this dry upland heart of the kingdom there were
many pockets of high cultivation and population based on the
development of tank irrigation by chiefs such as Saluva Narasimha.
He not only increased irrigation in the Chandragiri area, his base,
but also encouraged temple authorities at the nearby temples of
Tirupati and Kalahasti to invest money endowments to improve
tanks and 1irrigation canals in hundreds of nearby temple villages.
This practice was imitated by other magnates, among the most
important of whom were the eighty or so within the Vijayanagara
heartland itself.
Contemporary inscriptions and later accounts collected by the
first British administrators in the core of the old Vijayanagara
kingdom provide valuable evidence on the political authority of
these chiefs, most of whom were called ‘Poligars’ by the British. The
heyday of these chiefs was the first half of the sixteenth century, but
most seem to have come into existence during the early sixteenth
century as a result of Krishnadevaraya’s policies for diminishing
older chiefly families.
Thomas Munro, the famous first collector of the region, regarded
these chiefs as the major centres of resistance to British rule, and he
justified their removal on the grounds of their historical political
authority. In Munro’s time, 2,000 villages were held by eighty
poligari families of different statuses. The highest and perhaps oldest
of such local magnates are found in modern Bellary district. One
was the chief of the Anegondi, calling himself the Tirumala Raja and
claiming descent from a Vijayanagara ruling family; this chief held
114villages in 1800. Fifty miles south-west of Anegondi and Hampi

2
ata ontheoan basis
ofhis
watchman’
sgboan\
nenore we
villages.
The number of villagesheld by these numerous ruling families in
Vijayanagara times is not always known from the family records
said to have been consulted by Munro. Those of the Anegondi and -
Harapanahalli chiefs during the sixteenth century are not known,
but another, the Jaramali poligar, held 309 villages then and appears
to have supplied a force of 3,000 foot-soldiers and 500 horsemen to
the kings. The Rayadrug chief, Venkatapati Nayaka, paid no money
to Vijayanagara kings either, but contributed 2,000 infantry. Evi-
dence of around 1800 suggests that other of the eighty poligars of
this Vijayanagara heartland held some villages free of any payment
to the Vijayanagara kings and held other villages as tax-farmers. In
addition, they were obliged to maintain some mounted and some
foot-soldiers for royal service. Many of the smaller poligars and
most of the infantry they maintained were Bedars or Boyas,
swidden cultivators and hunters of the forests, and of these many
were Lingayats. During the sixteenth century, also, several of these
chiefs were Muslims. Munro estimated that over 1,200 villages were
under poligars until 1660 when the former Vijayanagara heartland
had come under the control of the Bijapur sultans or their comman-
ders, such as Shahji, father of Sivaji. Of these villages, 682 were held
free of any money demands and 535 were held as tax-farms for
which money was paid to sultanate officials. The same eighty
poligars supplied a total of 29,000 infantry and 1,200 cavalry to
Bijapur armies.
Asa rough estimate, half of the villagesthought to be held by local
chiefs in the core of the kingdom paid some money to the Vijayana-
gara kings. The probability is that much of the surplus production in
other villages of the core of the kingdom was shared between the
Rayas and Brahmans and other religious beneficiaries so that in the
very core of the kingdom, the royal share of surpluses may not have
been very high. Elsewhere it was less. The revenue beneficiaries of
the thriving international commerce seem to have been the numer-
ous, small lordships on the western coast and the larger lordships on
the eastern, or Coromandel, coast. Kings could not have benefited
60

a
‘K i a
a es aiics like Cuslagpe inine timeWe
was loyal. Also, while it is true that revenue from
in
much of agriculture was in cash, as were inland customs and dues
extracted from merchants and artisans, there is no evidence that this
money —or much of it —found its way to Vijayanagara and the
treasury of the kings.
The resources for achieving what Krishnadevaraya sought to curb
the territorial magnates of the peninsula were therefore not abun-
dant. His wars brought prizes to the city and paid for its many
monuments, but it is doubtful, again, that this contributed more to
central power than was lost by the spread of military leaders ever
more deeply into the peninsular countryside. Warfare tested and
fortified the military capabilities of the numerous military chiefs of
the south; wars also spread the poligar institution. Fighters seized or
were granted income from villages as a means of maintaining the
petty armed forces used in the wars of greater lords; otherwise, local
cultivating and trading groups seeking some protection from the
violence of the times paid for the protection of poligars in many
places of the far south, as implied by the term padikaval used in
Ramnad and Pudukkottai. No chieftains could remain aloof from
nearby warfare, which was bound to lead to a reshuffling of local
power that left the strong stronger and pushed the weaker into yet
greater vulnerability and submission. Scattered contests for local
dominance changed balances between local lordships and the com-
munal bases of their rule on the one hand and between these local
lords and the kings of Vijayanagara or their agents on the other.

THE OED AND NEW POLITICAL ORDER

The sixteenth-century system of political relations marks a major

change from all states before Vijayanagara in the South; it is also
different from the first century of Vijayanagara kings.
Previous kingdoms —Cholas, Pandyas, Hoysalas, and Kakatiyas —
were aggregates of numerous chieftaincies over localised, communal
organisation. The adu in many parts of the South, the okkalu of
Karnataka, and the highly territorialised caste organisation of
Reddis and other dominant agricultural communities all point to
this underlying character of pre- and early-Vijayanagara society and
61
 “masteryoverareas‘ofhighagricultureandpopu ation,in |
conquerors,andin beinganointed.The authorityof manyprery
___-Vijayanagarakingsandallchiefswasanextensionof communalve v

morality and lineage or clan organisation. Most chiefs in late

fee medieval times, at any rate, sought to escape the confines of the
a communal sources of their authority by establishing relations with
~ anointed kings, and seeking thereby to acquire some extra-
‘ communal, royal authority over resources and people; the kings
ee with whom such relations came to exist magnified their royal claims
thereby, but the substance of their authority was command over the
rich and populous river valleys during pre-Vijayanagara times.
Then, too, kings claimed rights to a major share of material and
ae human resources within their realms as ksattra, possession by
= lordship. Chola kings, for example, enjoyed this in the Kaveri basin
—the core of their realm —and less consistently in the Palar basin as
well; they claimed the same lordly possession in Pandya country,
but never achieveda sustained mastery there. Non-royal, or chiefly,
power and authority arose from headship over dominant, local
peasant groups. Yet, titles affected by chiefs among Tamils, Telugus,
and Kannadiyans all derive from a Dravidian root, utai, which, as
utaimai, had the same meaning as ksattra. Hence, the language of
royal and chiefly claims was the same, and this is one manifestation
of what I elsewhere call the ‘segmentary state’. According to this
notion, the Chola state and other medieval states of the South
existed as states in the recognition by dispersed locally based
lordships of the ritual sovereignty of the most powerful of their
number, the anointed king. Relations between such autochthons
and anointed kings during the pre-Vijayanagara age were essentially
ritual, expressed in the dharmic idioms of royal protection and
lordly service. This occurs in the Tamil muvendavelar (a chief who
serves the three anointed kings over Tamils: Chola, Pandya, or
Chera) adopted by great men of the Chola age.
During the time of Krishnadevaraya, as well as before and after,
sovereignty in the Vijayanagara kingdom was conceived of as
divided or shared. Its kings claimed to rule the whole of the
peninsula south of the Krishna River, a claim which is denominated
here as ritual sovereignty, distinguishing, thereby, between the
62
 . .
Prov ce

liticalauthority
thatnumero Sposses-
and the

protection and welfare of all in the kingdom, possessed powers

conferred by rajadharma as well as ksattra in his central domain.
These two sources of authority —ksattra/utai and rajadharma —
were complementary; together they fulfilled the conception of
appropriate authority in Hindu kingdoms of the age, including
Vijayanagara. It is in this sense that the concept of dayada, or shared
sovereignty, is crucial, and it is also in this sense that the Vijayana-
gara state, and others of the age, may be regarded as polities of
chiefs.
Monarchies of the medieval age in South India were intended to
express and preserve chiefly authority and were therefore founded
on aclass formation in which the ruling class was a stratum of chiefs.
The legitimacy of the latter stemmed from their protection of a
whole structure of communal entitlements of stratified groups
within their chiefdoms. Among the latter were the leading landhold-
ing groups, major merchant and artisanal groups and most religious
bodies. Ultimately, the success of Krishnadevaraya’s policy of
reducing the authority of chiefs and increasing royal authority
depended on the conviction of many in his kingdom that their
collective entitlements would be preserved under the greater
centralisation he sought. To the extent that his measures increased
and strengthened prebendal entitlements, or new rights to wealth,
the king’s measures must have seemed as threatening to com-
munally-organised constituents of chiefly authority as to the ancient
and new stratum of chiefs themselves.
Krishnadevaraya’s bold attempt to extend the reach of central
authority was a major innovation of the age, though it was based on
certain prior developments. Before his time, the ubiquitous Vijaya-
nagara term for the bond between lesser lord and king was karya-
karta, that is ‘agent’, a seeming denial of any autochthonous
authority by the king’s chiefly subjects. Those with the title of
‘nayaka’ in Vijayanagara times represented a new kind of local
lordship in two ways. One was the rhetorical shift from the earlier
implication of terms like nattar, the leaders of the nadu, which

63
 aisense
ancient :ieee_=~Vijayanagara
“ofjanapada. O time
conception
continues,
butmustthenbeunderstood
notasaboniute’ LY

dominion —arising from a group having tamed a forest to regular

cultivation or from a conquest of existing cultivators, about which _
all south Indians would have agreed earlier. Now, there was little of
such claims of absolute dominion, but only relative communal
conceptions or rights to be set off against new and different rights of
agency held by powerful individuals. A second difference was that
rights of agency were derived from a king, hence these are prebendal
rights, different from and in potential conflict with rights derived
from a community or communal rights.
The meaning of lordship began to be transformed during the time
of Devaraya II with the granting of enlarged importance to soldiers
and to military rank and associated political powers and superior
landed rights based on military service to the rayas. This is the
meaning of the term amara (from the Sankrit samara, ‘war’) and the
associated specific entitling land right, amara-magani, and the title,
amara-nayaka. Lordship thus becomes a conception of authority
that, in being understood as derived from the distant authority of a
high Vijayanagara official, say a mahapradhani, or the king, chal-
lenged and weakened locally-derived and protected communal
rights, even when the agent was not actually a ‘foreigner’, as the
Telugu vadugan was in Tamil country.
Though there are differences among historians of Tamil country,
Karnataka, and Andhra about the decline of local corporate institu-
tions and communal rights during the Vijayanagara age, on the
whole it seems true that rights to local resources and power changed
during the sixteenth century. This was the general effect of the
confrontation of older systems of communal rights by new preben-
dal claims of all sorts. New and challenging claims are observed in
another aspect of lordship in South India. That is, the fiscal demands
of all superordinate authorities were satisfied only by money. During
Chola times, references to taxes in money (kasu ayam) are rare in
comparison to payments in kind or in labour. By the sixteenth
century, ten categories of money taxes (suvarna sunka) were
collected that had scarcely ever been mentioned before. These
included money taxes on agricultural and herding, on forest pro-

64
 THE CITY AND THE KINGDOM

ducts; on various industrial and commercial activities, including

taxes on goods imported from overseas; military and police taxes, or
fees, paid for the protection afforded by a local fort, military
commander, or to a local watchman, called kavalgar or taliyar;
professional taxes paid not only by barbers, washermen, and
goldsmiths, but also by leatherworkers (madiga), hunters (bedar or
boya) and even by Brahman priests; sets of communal taxes
(samaya-sunka), including marriage taxes and fines levied on speci-
fic castes such as one of the time of Venkataraya II (reign 1586-1614)
raised for the benefit of a Reddi headman (desai, from desa or
‘locality’). Notwithstanding all of these, and other money taxes
found in sixteenth-century inscriptions, neither Venkataramanayya,
who most completely canvassed these terms, nor other scholars of
the period have been able to determine whether such money taxes
went to a central treasury. Prebendal entitlements, such as amara
nayankara, that came into existence during the later fifteenth
century were not the cause of the monetisation of the age, but
without that these entitlements could not have been realised by the
new stratum of prebendal lords.
Nor can it be said that these new prebendal rights were legislated
by Vijayanagara kings. It is well to remember that the records of
payments to satisfy the demands of superior political authorities
came not from account books of revenue departments, nor even
from contemporary administrative texts like the Mughal Azn-1-
Akbari, but from thousands of records of religious endowments and
later texts collected by Mackenzie.
Apart from prebendal rights and institutions, such as nayankara,
the Vijayanagara age saw temples emerge as major political arenas.
Temples and sectarian (matha) centres were supported by those in
political authority through their donations of money revenues from
that income enjoyed as a political right. This was the same whether
the grantor was Krishnadevaraya, who gave 10,000 gold coins to
various major temples in Tamil country, or a headman for the
benefit of a local shrine.
Arjun Appadurai demonstrated how money as well as land was
circulated in such a way as to lash together three great institutions of
the Vijayanagara age: kings and their great commanders, the heads
of major Hindu sectarian groups, and temples. He documents how

65
 Vijayan
relations
between
afeconquerors
andail major temples
ast
-Srirangam
through
theintermediary
activities
ofsectarian
leaders.
The latter —members of the Vaishnava Uttamanambi family —
‘translated gifts from Vijayanagara kings to temple managers at
Srirangam in return for which the royal or official donor received »
li
the first and highest honours from the god Sriranganatha, thus
fortifying the royal claims of the conquerors. The Uttamanambi
intermediaries, for their part, assumed a more strategic place in the
management of the temple. The same process was repeated in many
other places, then and later. Saluva Narasimha seized commanding
influence at the important Vishnu temple of Tirupati in collabor-
ation with another sect leader, Kandadai Ramanuja Atyangar.
Narasimha’s large endowments of land and money were made to the
god Venkatesvara through Kandadai Ramanuja who was thereby
entitled to portions of the honours and wealth which was used to
advance his own position and that of his followers with authorities
of the temple. Appadurai shows how this was replicated elsewhere,
including at the Sri Parasarati Swami temple at Triplicane in modern
Madras during the time of the Vijayanagara kings Sadasivaraya and
Venkata II (1537-1614).
Appadurai’s brilliant analysis concluded that kings and other
great men of the Vijayanagara age exchanged material resources
which they commanded for temple honours through the agency of
sect leaders in order to gain control of political constituencies that
might otherwise have proved refractory. It is important to notice
that there appears to have been no attempt by these Telugu outsiders
to preserve an identity as outsiders as might have been thought
useful to a conquering élite. The contrary is the case. The objective
of these royal agents, notwithstanding the efforts of Vijayanagara
kings, especially Krishnadevaraya, was not to forge a unified and
centralised polity out of the formidable divisions in the southern
peninsula. Rather, the use by Telugu and Kannadiyan outsiders of
the temple and sectarian leaders with large, popular followings was
to enable ambitious military commanders and chiefs of the time to
create political regimes and to establish political relationships that
were essentially local, more integrated with older forms of affinity
and organisation —thus more manageable, than that achievable
66
 ‘THECITYANDTHEKINGDOM
under the faperal umbreila of Vijayanagara kings. This was one of
the factors that proved the undoing of Krishnadevaraya’s centralis-
ing innovation, but there were even more general problems.

CRISES OF THE NEW ORDER

Two crises threatened the protection of his imperial umbrella; both

arose from the activities of Krishnadevaraya’s kinsman, Aliya
(which means son-in-law) Rama Raja. In 1529 and again in 1535, he
challenged Achyutadevaraya, Krishnadevaraya’s chosen successor
for the throne of the kingdom, and though these attempts failed, his
actions did much to divide the great imperial families of Andhra and
set the stage for their internecine warfare shortly after. Asecond
way in which Rama Raja laid the foundations for the demise of the
Vijayanagara kingdom was by his aggressive interventions into the
territories of the sultanates on the kingdom’s northern frontier. His
adventures there temporarily converted the warring successors of
the Bahmani rulers of the Deccan into a coalition against Vijayana-
gara which resulted in a humiliating defeat, Rama Raja’s death and
the sack of the city. The first of these two portentous actions by
Rama Raja must be considered here, leaving for a later discussion the
conditions which led:to the humiliating defeat of 1565.
Historians of the kingdom have condemned Rama Raja for
abandoning Krishnadevaraya’s centralising initiatives against terri-
torial chiefs of the realm, but they have been more forgiving of his
Machiavellian policies against the Deccani sultans, possibly because
they have accepted the purportedly dharmic mission of the
kingdom. Neither position seems justified. To take up the adventu-
rism in the Deccan first, it should be said that the Raichur and
Krishna River frontiers of the kingdom were never accepted by
Vijayanagara kings as fixed; these tracts were always prospective
areas of expansion for the fighting chiefs of the core area of the
kingdom, just as Tamil country was. Rama Raja’s interventions in
the Deccan differed from others in being more successful and in
being carried out by diplomacy as well as military force. As to his
reversal of Krishnadevaraya’s centralising policies, this was but a
return to the established politics of the age, the recognition that the
kingdom was in essence a polity of chiefs and a state only in the

67
 —VIJAYANAGARA ©

sense that the numerous and powerful chiefs of the southern

peninsula recognised and offered their homage to Vijayanagara
kings.
Rama Raja was one of several sons of Aravidi Bukka, acomman-
der of Saluva Narasimha’s armies and a soldier who, with the Tuluva
Narasa Nayaka, helped to make Narasimha the power behind the ©
last Sangama holders of the throne and then their successor. During
the reign of Narasimha, Aravidi Bukka attained the independent
status of generalissimo, a position he fortified by shifting his
support from Narasimha’s successor to Narasa Nayaka and the new
Tuluva kings. He was one of the great men of the kingdom present
at Krishnadevaraya’s coronation in January 1510, and for his
support Krishnadevaraya gave one of his daughters and other
honours to the generalissimo’s capable son, Rama Raja. As an affine
of the royal family and heir to the large, well-placed followership of
his father, Rama Raja contested for the Vijayanagara throne in 1529.
His challenge was formidable because his kinsmen held some of the
strongest fortresses in the Vijayanagara heartland: Adoni, Kurnool,
Awuku, and Nandyala.
Achyutadevaraya survived this threat by his courage and impress-
ive allies of his own. When his brother died, Achyutadevaraya had
himself crowned at the Tirupati and Kalahasti temples, the major
Vishnu and Siva shrines of the eastern heartland of the kingdom,
near Chandragiri where he had either been content, or constrained
by Krishnadevaraya, to live, well away from the capital. His
powerful brothers-in-law, the Salakarajus, one of whom had served
as the late king’s treasurer, threw their support to the king as did
Krishnadevaraya’s Brahman military commanders. Of the latter, the
most important was Chellappa Saluva Nayaka, governor of Chola
country. The combination of moral advantage in being his brother’s
choice, his timely temple coronations, and the strength of his allies
seems to have checked Rama Raja’s scheme and permitted Achyu-
tadevaraya to proceed to Vijayanagara for a third coronation. He
followed this, as his brother had done, with creditable victories,
throwing back another Gajapati invasion of Andhra —the last —and
checking incursions from the Golkonda sultans on the eastern
frontier of the kingdom. These successes, plus internal political
turmoil in the Bijapur sultanate, spared Achyutadevaraya the full-
68
 Oa SO eNO Nie BE Nia Coil
rai UhMlGosa eM a laf
P THE CITY AND THE KINGDOM

ness of the danger that had confronted Krishnadevaraya in 1509,

though, like his brother, Achyutadevaraya had also to put down an
uprising by Ummattur chiefs in southern Karnataka. So vigorous
was Achyutadevaraya’s defence of his throne that Rama Raja, after
briefly sulking among kinsmen in Andhra, joined in the suppression
of Chellappa’s rebellion in 1531.
Within a few years, however, Rama Raja was again threatening,
supported as before by the numerous, powerful progeny of his
father and by two other adroitly contrived elements of strength.
One was winning one of the Sakalaraju brothers from his alliance
with Achyutadevaraya; the other was a windfall of military assist-
ance. The last was an outcome of the serious internal conflicts that
had rent Bijapur earlier and now resulted in a new sultan of Bijapur
dismissing several thousand foreign Muslim soldiers who had
opposed him. Rama Raja is reported to have immediately engaged
these soldiers and made another bid to topple Achyutadevaraya in
1535.
Again, the king succeeded in parrying the challenge. One of the
methods he adopted was to persuade some of the mightiest military
commanders of the kingdom to make large and conspicuous dona-
tions to the god at Tirupati, Achyutadevaraya’s tutelary, proclaim-
ing their loyalty to him. Having twice mobilised and therefore
divided the great men of the kingdom in contesting Achyutadeva-
raya’s kingship, Rama Raja in the end succeeded in realising much of
his ambition. After Achyutadevaraya’s death in 1542, and possibly
even before, Rama Raja became the virtual ruler of the country
through Achyutadevaraya’s young nephew and successor, Sadasiva-
raya, upon whom Rama Raja forced his regency.
During the middle of the sixteenth century, partly as a result of
Rama Raja’s machinations and partly as a result of deeper processes
of which Rama Raja was a symptom, rather than a cause, extensive
lordships were created throughout southern India. The agents and
beneficiaries of this development were those military commanders
whose service to Vijayanagara kings gave them the means to
establish their own political places, aprocess which completed itself
by the creation of a series of new kingdoms in the South: Mysore
and Ikkeri in Karnataka and Gingee, Tanjavur and Madurai in Tamil
country. Such state building had proceeded throughout the Vijaya-

69
 nip
as never
raidaneag ie political
activities
bygr
‘menof the time. That some of these activitiesresulted in dy astic
changesafter1480merelymaskedthe deeperprocessesat workto
frustrate the creation of a more centralised regime over all of the
South. Opposing centralising forces were not only a host of
ambitious men at all times, but still powerful community forces that
biased political solutions to local rather than imperial levels of
organisation.
The critical contribution of the Vijayanagara imperial order was
precisely in weakening many ancient forms of communal organi-
sation and allegiance and in empowering a whole new estate of
warrior chiefs —some as military agents of the Rayas and some as
local chiefs —to make political niches for themselves, often in
opposition to the Vijayanagara rulers. Historians of the Vijayana-
gara age have universally lamented the constant building of such
anti-imperial centres; they mistakenly take as subversion of the
Vijayanagara political order what was fundamental in the creation of
that order during the fifteenth century as well as its destruction
during the sixteenth century.
The old, south Indian medieval regime was actually finished by
1450,and a new kind of political structure had emerged as a result of
the policies adopted by Devaraya II, an unrecognised architect of
the Vijayanagara imperial order. His military improvements, based
on the recruitment of Muslim fighters, set Vijayanagara on a path
wholly different from that of all previous regimes in South India; his
determination to control the major west coast ports from which war
horses and trade treasure could be obtained was equally innovative;
and his reliance upon and rewards to great military commanders,
while temporarily strengthening his regime, created the new Vijaya-
nagara generalissimos, men outside of the royal family whose
capability as commanders gave them considerable, independent
political standing. Moreover, Devaraya’s opening to Muslim
soldiers, his permission to construct mosques and cemeteries in the
city, must shatter any remaining illusions of historians that the
Hindu and dharmic ideology which may be attributed to the
Sangama founders of the kingdom, continued to shape imperial
policies. In the time of Devaraya, and later, the kingdom and the city

7°
 vdiyie ee |= 5fis jhe | 7adie.Ve Vie Tigh,
rea oe.tj ike ale Wty.
J: me
# oy.TereA“raeeeea 7) Whot
Fy viayee ; et' v : Se %; mS , «‘ A y . ld ; j Tait
ri J
THE CITY AND THE KINGDOM

came to represent a highly successful conquest state, indistinguisha-

ble from sultanates of the time and realised even more completely in
the Maratha kingdom of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Saluva Narasimha crowned the transformation initiated by Deva-
raya II and in the process crowned himself. By checking the
expansion of the Orissan Gajapatis into the wealthy coastal territory
of the Krishna~Godavari delta and the Coromandel, he not only
protected his Chandragiri patrimony, but set the stage for sub-
jugation of the Tamil plain. His Tamil conquests differed from all
previous Vijayanagara forays into the South by setting aside the
ancient authority of Tamil kings and chiefs, whom he replaced by
men like himself representing the new imperial order. Narasimha,
like Devaraya II before him, also strove for more complete control
of the west coast emporia to secure something of the trade wealth of
the region and all of its imported war horses. His military successes
against the Gajapatis and against Tamil foes came as the sons of
Devaraya II (Mallikarjuna and Virupaksha IT)quarrelled and fought
each other, thus affording an opening for the political destiny that
his vaulting reputation as military saviour of the kingdom promised.
But even as Narasimha was achieving this, his own military com-
manders —Narasa Nayaka and Aravidi Bukka —were attaining
something like the same status as generalissimos, thus creating the
conditions where his new line of Vijayanagara kings was immedi-
ately placed in danger.
That Narasimha established a new kingship in 1485but not a new
and more secure capital as he might have, say at Chandragini,
indicates the widely held recognition of the city as the political
centre of the entire South —the political capital had become political
capital. Before its destruction in 1565, the city had come to
symbolise a state that not only halted the advance of expanding
Islam, but had extended its own authority over the whole of the
South. For some time after its devastation, the city continued to
stand for an exalted kingship to which lords throughout the
southern peninsula offered homage and military service, if little else.
But then, little else was really demanded beyond the homage that
was owing to the great, conquering kings in their city that called
itself ‘Victory’.

Jak
 éa age 5:7
A. % . , FOURTs na ,
Nga hy.
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIE THe
~ THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
~The dharmic ideological impetus attributed to the formation of -
Vijayanagara in the fourteenth century was spent by 1450when the
~ reign of Devaraya II ended. Then, and thereafter, Vijayanagara was
itself a successful conquest state, with much of Tamil country,
Karnataka, and Andhra under Telugu and Kannadiga chiefs whose
ruling authority was based upon military service to Vijayanagara
kings. By the late fifteenth century, too, earlier, medieval political,
social and economic institutions in the older settled, coastal parts of
the southern peninsula had been weakened and no longer were the
model of society that the Vijayanagara state had ostensibly been
created to defend. Another system of politics, society, and economy
had become ascendent, one that developed in the interior upland, on
the dry and high Deccan plateau. The beneficiaries and major
propagators of this new system were not only military servants of
Vijayanagara kings, but local-level chieftains of Karnataka and
Andhra who found new opportunities under the kingdom of
Vijayanagara, which was now a conquest state.
In the previous chapter it was argued that while Vijayanagara
military domination over the southern peninsula was established
with surprising ease, the fiscal and political reach of the Rayas was
both short and erratic. This loose suzerainty may account for part of
the ease of the Vijayanagara conquest. What the sixteenth-century
city on the Tungabhadra could command of the resources ostensibly
available to its kings is neither precisely known nor knowable.
There is not even the very generalized inventory of resources
claimed as the political fruit of hegemony, such as that available for
the Mughals in the Ain i Akbari, and surely, Vijayanagara claims to
revenue came nowhere near what some scholars assume was avail-
able to the Mughals, that is, about 50 per cent of gross agrarian
production. In the very heart of the Vijayanagara kingdom were
numerous independent chiefs who, like the Mughal mansabdar and
jagirdar, contributed troops and military leadership to imperial
defence and aggression. However, the great chiefs of the Vijayana-

72
 peers Weare.ty ie eee eee SPD 3 ty ee te
_- POLITICALECONOMYANDSOCIETY
gara heartland were not royal officials whose military support could
simply be commanded nor could they be transferred about from one
prebend to another. A Vijayanagara chief was more like aMughal
zamindar, an autochthonous local lord of a domain that might be
scattered over hundreds of square miles and therefore the bane of
any overlord, whether Mughal or Vijayanagara, who sought a
larger share of local resources and political tractability, dependence
and order from local authorities.
The domains of such chiefdoms never appear to have had definite
boundaries. Each chief, whether great or small, was identified by the
central core of his authority around a major fortified town and often
by a family name. The actual region under the domination of a chief
was not, except at its core, a territory of consolidated power and
authority. There are two important implications to be drawn from
the dispersed character of political territories. One is that even the
smallest chief could attempt to gain the protection of some distant
great chief against another who might be closer. There appears to
have been no conception of continuous territorial dominance at any
level beyond certain ethnically defined cores, as a result of which
great chiefdoms were mosaics of overlapping interests and hegemo-
nies consisting of personal relations between some small magnate
and a great one, and the durability of such relations could be fragile.
The second implication stemming from this is that a conception of
feudalism gains theoretical credibility. But there are still numerous
reasons for rejecting the appropriateness of the feudal conception,
among which the very high levels of exchange and commodity
production is very important.

LORDSHIP AND COMMERCE

It has been shown that expanding, robust international trade was no

more easy for the kings of Vijayanagara to tap for their uses than it
was for the Mughals, in fact probably a good deal less easy. But this
does not mean that there were no important consequences of the
vigorous trade around India’s coasts after 1500, during the “Vasco da
Gama era’. One major consequence was the substantial increase in
money media which attended foreign trade of that time. All
evidence points to the favourable trade balances of international

73
 fs | f thes
~payments
as ai*) foreign
ery pierchanien Only oneSomnader fs t
EeasiabiceTheimportation ofwar-horses, known from thetime of|
Marco Polo i nthe latet hirteenth
century, increasedinvolume and
value during the Vijayanagara period, and so did imported cannon
and hand guns. These war commodities were paid for by Indian
exports and bullion according to the accounts of trade at the time.
Weak additional support for this proposition comes from coin
hoards, such as one of fourteenth-century coins found in Broach, on
the western coast. Coins from everywhere in the Mediterranean and
Indian Ocean were present in this find except for those from the
horse-exporting Persian Gulf principalities. Apart from gold and
silver hoarded or recast as personal or religious uses, most of the
imported money media, including copper, and even cowries, added
to the stock of money and made possible the expansion of money
revenue demands everywhere in India and stimulated internal trade.
Great wealth could be had by those either directly involved in
trade or politically positioned to take some portion of its rich
proceeds. The review of trade and politics on the Kanara coast in the
previous chapter leads to the conclusion that the major political
beneficiariesof the rich trade there were local Hindu andJaina chiefs
during the sixteenth century.
But local Hindu and Jaina chiefs of the Kanara coast were not the
only ones to benefit, as the recent research of Sanjay Subrahmanyam
shows. Rajas on the Malabar coast south of Kanara also gained new
resources from the increased trade of the sixteenth century and
readily turned these resources into political assets. Others who
found ways to convert trade wealth into political dominance were
Muslims, among the most active traders. Tbn Batuta (d. 1377)
mentioned one Jamal-ud-Din, son of a Goan shipbuilder and
merchant, who used his family’s trade wealth to hire an army of
6,000 and a fleet of over fifty ships. With these, he established
himself as ‘sultan’ of Honavur, midway between the ports of Goa
and Mangaluru. Jamal is said to have paid some tribute to Harihara I
of Vijayanagara. By 1500, Portuguese records show that Honavur
had reverted to Hindu rule, its chief paying tribute to Vijayanagara,
but only after an invasion by Devaraya II. Another example of
Muslim trade and political ascendency on the west coast is that of a

74
 EPEC Gree Pa se eh tm
Bi Cyey Oe
AS i‘. y > :
a
> ¥ Peeae
2) . 4 4
¥. 4 Hyf
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY 7

Mapilla (Muslim convert) trading family of Cannanore in Malabar

who achieved a monopoly of trade with the Maldive Islands and
thus of the coir ropes used by west coast ships between 1500 and
1530by successfully fending off Portuguese interlopers.
Conditions on the eastern, or Coromandel, coast afforded no ,
greater direct benefit to the Vijayanagara state. By the sixteenth
century much of Coromandel trade was in the hands of Muslim
traders —some Arabs, but mostly Marakkarar converts; others
included Armenians and Portuguese deserters; the rest were Telugu
Balija and Komati merchants who linked Pulicat with interior
markets and production centres. In Pulicat, San Thome, or Naga-
pattinam, according to foreign descriptions, which alone provide
evidence on the matter, corporate groups managed the trade,
administered the ports and collected the customs. The direct
revenue benefit to the Rayas cannot have been high. However, the
Rayas would have realised customs revenue as goods passed along
the high roads connecting the principal Coromandel port at Pulicat
and that of the Kanara coast, at Bhatkal, with the capital city.
The sixteenth-century population of the city, over 100,000, was
an enormous magnet for consumer goods, and the routes connecting
it with both coasts are reported to have had special military
protection from Vijayanagara kings. Sixteenth-century Rayas
sought stable and peaceful relations with the formidable newcomers
to their shores, the Portuguese, from whom war goods came as well
as desirable, exotic commodities for court consumption. It is not
surprising to learn that despite conflicts between the Portuguese and
traders on both coasts during Vijayanagara times, the trade was so
valuable to the Portuguese that the defeat of the Rayas in 1565 was
seen as a disaster. They feared that the victorious Deccan sultans
might deny them a future place on the coasts because of their
long-standing trade with Vijayanagara. Even more, however, the
Portuguese feared that with the defeat of the Rayas general political
conditions would decline everywhere and with that valuable trade.
Such fears were misplaced, as we now know. Defeat in 1565 did
not end the resistance to Muslim expansion southward; this con-
tinued with perhaps an enhanced place for the Portuguese. But, in
the end, the trade hegemony that the Portuguese had wrestled from
the Muslims during the sixteenth century was lost by them to other

7)
Jen “eeuae uaBAFIAR upon mickthevalueofth s
guese monopoly depended grew s tronger
throughout the seen
century, obedient to processes of which the Portuguese were not
the cause. Among these processes were changing forms of lordship
throughout the southern peninsula during the Vijayanagaraera, not.
only in the coastal areas of high agriculture and ‘high seas’ com-
merce, but in the dry interior plateau above the coastal plains where
political and economic changeshad been quickening since the four-
teenth century.

REGIONAL VARIATIONS IN THE KINGDOM

Tamil country was the major imperial frontier during the sixteenth
century; the processes of change there are analysed in recent work
of Karashima, Subbarayalu, and Ludden.
Karashima’s analysis of interior sixteenth-century Arcot was
intended as a contribution to a debate on feudalism in India.
However, his findings defeat this objective. More significant than
whether or not it is correct or useful to speak of ‘feudalism’ is his
general finding about the continuity as well as the changes in
ancient rights of established landed communities and their commu-
nal control over agrarian production and temples in the Arcot
portion of the Tamil plain. He examined inscriptions found around
the Vijayanagara strongholds of Padaividu and Gingee and, his
speculations on feudalism apart, Karashima provides further docu-
mentation in support of Arjun Appadurai’s explanation of how
powerful outsiders, like Kannadiga warriors in this Tamil tract,
strengthened their local suzerainty through mastery of temple
affairs. This they accomplished by their endowments of lands and
money, by their adjudication of conflicts among devotees and
priests, and by encouraging, partly through example, the exca-
vation of tanks and the improvement of water courses in temple vil-
lages. By these means, Karashima shows, Vijayanagara warriors
received shares of valuable offerings of consecrated foodstuffs (pra-
sadam) and other honours as benefactors and protectors of the
gods, both of which fortified their ruling credentials. Temples
having become major commercial centres also offered income from

76
 abe
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY
xf

customs to locally powerful men for fostering and protecting these

places.
Trade in the Arcot border country between the eastern ghats and
the rich coastal agricultural zone was encouraged and exploited by
soldier-agents of the Rayas and their local allies. The creation of
markets (pettai) and fairs (sandai) was encouraged by tax concess-
ions to those who settled in new market places: merchants, weavers,
oil producers, betel sellers, and various artisans. Karashima even
suggests that compulsion was used to increase production of cash
crops such as sugar and pepper, another linkage between local
production and international trade. Finally, he draws attention to
the emergence of new landed groups, those who had no previous
standing as landlords: Chettis, or merchants; Reddis, or soldiers;
Kaikkolars, or weavers; and Manradis, or shepherds. These new
entrants to local dominance displaced older groups, often adopting
their titles, such as ‘Natter’; they also undertook irrigation improve-
ments with wealth acquired from trade, production and even office.
A companion study of the Vellar River valley in southern Arcot,
by Karashima and Subbarayalu, provides a valuable comparative
view of conditions of the fifteenth century with those of the
sixteenth. By the earlier period, this part of the Tamil plain had been
twice overrun by Vijayanagara soldiers who levied such high
demands upon local cultivators, merchants, and artisans that they
rose in revolt in 1429. Information on this uprising, said by
Subbarayalu to be the first ‘peasant revolt’ in Tamil country, is
drawn from inscriptions found in several places in the northern
border country of the Kaveri basin. Alliances were formed among
members of the two broad and usually conflicting groups of Tamil
castes —right and left castes —to resist new demands by their
conquerors. These included the introduction of a land measure
disadvantageous to local cultivators, but there must have been other
demands involving trade and production because local artisans
and petty merchants of the left division of castes joined their
traditional agrarian rivals of the right caste division in opposition.
Many of the conditions described in these analyses of late
fifteenth- and sixteenth-century inscriptions from this area on the
fringes of the Kaveri basin were replicated elsewhere in the southern
Tamil plain. Foreign magnates —nayakas —closely involved in and

fa
payae Tamils
intheupper
Vellar
valley
andthose
inthemiddle
io
parts of the river basin. In the latter place, it was not so much
warlord outsiders who exercised local dominance during the-
fifteenth century, but older locality authorities, in loose subordi-
nation to foreign warlords. These local magnates ruled in collabor-
ation with a local soldiery, callingthemselves ‘Vanniyars’ and drawn
from Palli people from the nearby hill tracts. There were few foreign
nayakas in the middle reaches of the Vellar during the fifteenth
century; independent authority was exercised by local chiefs who
added to their ancient title of ‘Nattar’ the more fashionable Tamil
equivalent of ‘Nayaka’ (Tamil: mayanar) and they were not super-
seded by outsiders until well into the sixteenth century.
Ludden’s research on Tirunelveli and on the relationship there
between Vijayanagara conquerors from the north and older Tamil
lordships of various kinds augments the findings of Karashima and
Subbarayalu in the central Tamil plain. Pandyan rule over Madurai
and Tirunelveli had progressively weakened from 1350 as a result of
Muslim incursions as well as a brief revival of Chola power; this set
the state for the imposition of Vijayanagara rule in 1550.
Among the Vijayanagara men who placed their stamp upon this
far southern region was Saluva Narasimha. While still a loyal
generalissimo, he rescued the goddess Andal from neglect by
becoming a generous patron of her temple at Srivilliputtur, in a
stroke bringing fame to himself and to the goddess. Another
vaduga, or northerner, left amore permanent mark, because he and
his family remained in Tirunelveli. This was Ettappa Nayaka.
Beginning his rise as a warrior in the same Chandragiri that had
nurtured Saluva Narasimha, Ettappa in 1423led a band of followers
to Madurai seeking service with the still independent, though weak,
Pandyan king. By 1567, his descendants held a large domain of
black-soil land in the eastern dry zone of the region and a fortress
named Ettatyapuram; this warrior family then cast its lot with
Visvanatha Nayaka when the latter seized the governorship and
established his independent rule over the territory. In addition to
warriors like Ettappa and his successors, Telugu merchants and

78
ae CadeniesPre £1trekRe: Allfound
ae within
~ the changing society of this region.
Tirunelveli town had been the southern capital of the Madurai
Pandyan dynasty and the territory called Pandimandalam. The
Nellaiappa temple there had been a royal shrine of the Pandyan
kings of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and it benefited
from the royal support given for the construction of anicuts to
extend irrigation from the Tambraparni. The enriched central
Tambraparni river-basin was, and remained, under control of landed
Brahman communities holding large, self-governing brahmadeya
villages in alliance with members of the Vellalar cultivating commu-
nity. When Pandyan royal authority was displaced in the sixteenth
century by that of Vijayanagara commanders and other military
adventurers from Andhra and by petty Maravar chieftains from the
southern fringes of the Tambraparni basin, the central valley
continued to be controlled by Brahman and Vellalar groups who
enjoyed the right of kami, or communal ownership of land, as
kaniyatchikkaran. Other migrants to Tirunelveli, like the Shanar
palmyra-growers of Travancore and Maravar fighters from
Ramnad, were also denied access to land in the central river-basin
and therefore settled in the dry areas to the north and south of the
valley. Neither they nor the Telugu conquerors themselves proved
able to penetrate the Brahman-Vellalar monopoly over riverine
fields, as a result of which Telugus settled on land in the eastern parts
of the dry zone where they found black soils like those they left in
their homeland. Interestingly, however, Telugu Brahmans along
with Brahmans from Karnataka were permitted to join the Tamil
Brahmans in the rich central plain, perhaps to preserve ancient
Brahman privilege.
Lordships in sixteenth-century Tirunelveli reflected the distri-
bution of its varied peoples in Vijayanagara times. The western
foothills were settled by Maravars principally, and here a large
number of Maravar palaiyakkarar were found; Telugu and Kannidi-
gas settled the black-soil tracts in the eastern portion of the dry zone
of the region and established many chieftaincies, including that of
Ettaiyapuram. Even the lowly Shanars of Travencore were numer-
ous enough to support a Shanar chiefdom in the south-eastern
foothills. All of these chiefs passed under the hegemony of the

iy
 if
aaiayales Liteaumn of1ee
veddeu idan
rap
"Tirunelveli town served as a Rebelde epi as i
Pandyantimes. “
Sixteenth-centuryAndhra offersan instructivecontrastto Tamil
country in that local lordships, though powerful under the Gol-
konda sultans, enjoyed lessindependencethan their counterparts in»
Tamil country under Vijayanagara. John Richards’ monograph on
Golkonda shows that Telangana had a political order very like that
of Tamil country and Karnataka before the sixteenth century. From
the Kakatiya period, when they held the major fortresses of the
kingdom, Velama and Reddi ‘warrior/cultivators’ constituted a
‘nobility’ in Telangana and Rayalaseema, or northern and southern
interior Andhra. They and their military followers first fought
against, then joined, Muslim conquerors of Telangana. The ancient
Velama/Reddi ‘nobility’ henceforward was a divided one, those of
Telangana serving Muslim regimes and those of Rayalaseema, to the
south, the Vijayanagara kings. Under the strong Qutb Shahi ruler
Ibrahim (reign 1530-80), Reddi and Velama warriors found secure
political niches. Ibrahim tempered military domination with con-
siderable sympathy for Telugu culture acquired during a long stay in
Vijayanagara as a political exile from his murderous brother. This
together with his Telugu wife and the realities of politics encouraged
the sultan to incorporate Telangana warrior chiefs into a single,
Muslim-dominated political order. Moreover, state patronage of
Brahmans and temples as well as Telugu poets continued. In
characteristic Telugu royal style, encouragement was given to large
and small tank-irrigation projects.
None of these measures would have been sufficient for a stable
Golkonda regime had not Ibrahim also decided to leave the chiefs of
Telangana with considerable autonomy in their ancient territories.
Hence, when the challenge of Vijayanagara expansionism under
Aliya Rama Raya occurred between 1542 and 1565, Golkonda’s
Telugu soldiery remained faithful to their Muslim ruler against the
Hindu king, while their own kinsmen in Rayalaseema supported
Vijayanagara. Until it was seized by the Mughals in 1687, the
Golkonda political order remained unchanged. While Hindu chiefs
ruled the countryside, the sultans built their new capital of Hyder-
abad in part from booty taken by Golkonda soldiers in the sack of
80
 eS ie as rn a i hd eT sve tau ees

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

Vijayanagara in 1565. There, and at the old and strengthened fort of

Golkonda, the sultan maintained their overlordship with a Muslim
warrior aristocracy of heavy cavalrymen supported by a European
artillery corps; the former held large lands for their maintenance,
most realising their incomes through Hindu —mostly Brahman —
bankers and tax-farmers. A royal monopoly of newly discovered
diamonds gave the central regime the means of financing part of the
new capital, paying mercenary artillery-men and buying their
cannons, and supporting an elaborate court life. Diamond exports
added to older valuable textiles in making Masulipatam the premier
port on the Coromandel coast. That delta port eclipsed Pulicat,
which faded quickly after the 1565 defeat of Vijayanagara, and by
1590, Masulipatnam rivalled the Mughal port of Surat on the west
coast with whom it began to compete in the Indian Ocean trade.
The Muslim Golkonda regime rested on the collaboration of
Telugu chiefs and Brahmans. Brahmans were the clerks of the
central administration of the sultanate in Golkonda and its ubiqui-
tous tax-farmers (Telugu: sunkarulu; Persian: ijaradar). Trade tolls
and customs were left for others to collect; these were tax-farmers
recruited from trade guilds whom the sultans, as the Kakatiya kings
had before them, left free to manage their own trade and the ports
where the trade was conducted. Telugu chiefs continued as before to
be linked to others by ties of kinship marriage and interest. Under
Golkonda, they continued to hold fortresses, but these were now
under some Muslim control. To compensate for this these chiefs
received royal honours from the Qutb Shahi court. As a locality
‘aristocracy’ drawn from ‘Telugu warrior/cultivator castes’,
nayakas, and especially the greatest of their number, retained
ancient chiefly authority. That was strengthened by their connec-
tion with a Muslim kingdom, more powerful than any predecessors
because of its Muslim cavalrymen and its European gunners, and
more centralised than the Vijayanagara kingdom, hence its preben-
dalism correspondingly stronger. By the sixteenth century, differ-
ences between Hindus and Muslims were no more a barrier to
political collaboration in Golkonda than they were in Vijayanagara.
Local lordship in Karnatak was different from that of sixteenth-
century Golkonda in the greater independence of chiefs from central
authority and thus its weaker prebendal forms. During the fifteenth
81
 teenth
cecturieet
heplain
was nominally underan agentof the.
headquarterswasthefortress
atduitteapne intheupperKaveri.
This agent, often dignified by historians with the title of ‘viceroy’,
was responsible for collecting tribute from surrounding chiefs,
usually calling themselves odeyar, of whom one was the chief of:
what became Mysore town, ten miles from Srirangapatnam. There
were other such chiefs in this part of the upper Kaveri valley which
was destined to become the core of the seventeenth-century Mysore
kingdom. On the northern boundary of the future core of that
kingdom was the area called Morasu-nadu (modern Bangalore and
Tumkur districts) dominated by one of the large sections of the
southern Karnatak peasantry, Morasu Vokkaligas, who seemed to
have been Telugu migrants to the area in the fourteenth century. To
the south of the core of the future Mysore state was Kongu with its
mixed population of Kannadigas, Telugus, and principally Tamils;
to the east and north-east there were Telugu chieftains the most
powerful of whom was the lord of Mulbagal.
Odeyars (or ‘wodeyars’, to add the Dravidian phonological glide)
of Mysore arose as minor chiefs during Vijayanagara times; they are
first glimpsed in the early sixteenth century in a Kannada literary
work of the time of the chief Chamaraja (1513-53), purportedly a
local subordinate of Achyutadevaraya. Chamaraja’s domain began
as a handful of villages along the Kaveri where he established a small
fortified place called Mahisura-nagara (from which Maisur and
Mysore). The first inscriptions of these modest chiefs came in the
time of Timmaraja Wodeyar, in 1551. By the 1570s the chieftaincy
had expanded to thirty-three villages protected by a force of 300
soldiers, and in 1610, the last of the Vijayanagara agents at
Srirangapatanam sold the fortress to Raja Wodeyar (1578-1617)
under whom the chiefdom expanded into a major principality.
A more powerful chiefly family there during the sixteenth
century was that of Yelakanda in the northern part of modern
Bangalore district. This was a chiefdom established by Tamil
warriors who migrated from the Kanchi region in the early fifteenth
century and served in Vijayanagara armies. Most famous of these
chiefs was Kempe Gowda who assumed the chieftaincy from his
father in 1513.

82
 _ The modestc chi jie isapes in the title Sow
Pe ly Creobing‘villageheadman’, a lineagetitle used by the family
~ founder, Jaya Gowda. His Heshendant Kempe seems to have been
responsible for the expansion of a modest chiefly patrimony.
During the time of Krishnadevaraya villages were added to the
family’s holdings around Yelakanda, doubling its area, and in the
time of Achyutadevaraya, Kempe Gowda founded the fortified
town of Bangaluru and gathered to himself yet more villages.
Kempe enlarged Bangaluru in the time of Sadasivaraya, building
several tanks and temples; he also began to mint his own coins then
and possibly joined with other Karnatak chiefs in opposing the
Rayas in the late 1550s, perhaps objecting to Aliya Rama Raya’s
deposition of Sadasivaraya. For the last (but not his other aggran-
disements) Kempe served some years in prison before being ran-
somed and released. Shortly after, in 1569,he died.
Vijayanagara kings endeavoured to maintain some authority over
the chiefs of southern Karnataka from several fortified places there
that were entrusted to members of the royal family or to loyal
soldiers. This proved difficult as a result of which their overlordship
was weak even in this region close to the kingdom’s heartland. The
frustrations of their overlordship are exemplified by their relations
with the Ummattur chiefs of Sivasamudram. These chiefs carried on
unceasing aggression against neighbours even though subjected to
punitive expeditions from the time of Narasa Nayaka, after he
seized the throne in 1497, and Krishnadevaraya from 1510to 1512,
as already noted. Even after the brilliant military successes of the
first years of his reign, Krishnadevaraya was unable to end Ummat-
tur influence in southern Karnataka, for he appointed the son of
Gangaraja, the Ummattur chief he had defeated in a difficult
campaign, to rule over Srirangapatanam, and descendants of that
family held this fortress until it was yielded to Raja Wodeyar in
1610.
Besides the chiefs of Ummattur and Mysore who bore the title of
odeyar, there were others in southern Karnataka who maintained
their independent rule through most of the sixteenth century.
In northern Karnataka there was an even more impressive chiefly
house that arose in Vijayanagara times and came to enjoy an
extensive sovereignty. These were the Keladi chiefs who later

83
 “VIJAYANAGARA
founded the Nayaka kingdom of Ikkeri. At its greatest, the Tkkeri
rajas controlled a territory nearly as large as the Vijayanagara
heartland, some 20,000 square miles, extending about 180 miles
south from Goa along the trade-rich Kanara coast.
The Keladis emerged from obscurity in the decade before
Krishnadevaraya’s reign. Then, a young farmer-become-warrior.
chief, one Chauda, distinguished himself in service under a Vijaya-
nagara commander, on the strength of which he strove to create a
domain of his own. Divine intervention provided him with the
means to build a fort and add to his followers; this was in the form of
a treasure-trove pointed out by a goddess as other divines had
yielded the same knowledge to Kempe Gowda, another peasant
man, and to a young shepherd who founded the Gingee chiefdom in
Tamil country. Chauda’s metamorphosis was completed in January
1500,when he installed himself as Chaudappa Nayaka of the Keladi
Mula Samasthan (the pivotal great house of Keladi) and consecrated
a temple dedicated to Siva. He served Achyutadevaraya faithfully
during the latter’s travails against Chellappa and Rama Raya and
was rewarded in 1535 with the governorship of Barakuru and
Mangaluru on the Kanara coast at the base of the ghats on which his
domain was.
Chaudappa Nayaka’s son ruled as Sadasiva Nayaka from about
1540to 1565. He moved to a higher level of lordship as acomman-
der of the Rama Raja army that humiliated the Bijapur sultans in
southern Maratha country by seizing the fortresses of Ahmednagar
and Gulbarga. As a reward, the Vijayanagara king granted him the
title ‘SadasivarayaNayaka’, and for his later military services he was
granted the title of ‘RajaNayaka’ and the same Kanara governorship
previously enjoyed by his father. Under such royal sponsorship, he
began to assume direct control over contiguous tracts of poligar
holdings and thereby extended his realm over all of Tulu country
and much of neighbouring Shimoga, or Araga. To temple building,
close relations with the Sringiri matha, endowments to Jaina and
Virasaiva shrines, military service to Vijayanagara, and local con-
quests that enlarged his realm, Sadasivaraya Nayaka of Ikkeri added
the royal activity of founding new towns and markets. He created
the pilgrimage centre of Sadasivapura in honour of the king or
himself, we cannot know. This was a Brahman settlement, or

84
 . ae
a *a pai a, Lay
Wee ee te eo! ue ee OeRe ee,CYA
t eal

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

>

agrahara, to which the Raja added the usual privileges to attract

merchants and artisans who would make it into a rich revenue
resource for himself and his successors; privileges included defer-
ring customs collections for some years and permission for mer-
chants to build warehouses and residences around the bazaar street
as well as providing special quarters for various artisan-traders.
Though a palace was also constructed in Sadasivapura, he promised
that there would be no royal interference in the town’s government
by its Brahman and merchant residents. Another new chiefdom of
the sixteenth century arose at the eastern margins of Karnataka, at
Lapakshi. This was founded by three sons of a merchant of that
town. They, like their contemporaries at Keladi, rose to prominence
as soldiers in the armies of the rayas, bringing fame and fortune to
their natal town through their military exploits during the sixteenth
century. As commanders, and later as provincial governors, they
deployed their royal rewards to create a substantial patrimony
around Lapakshi and to make the town one of the great Siva
pilgrimage centres of the century. One of the three, Virapanayya
Nayaka, became governor of Penukonda-rajyam on whose south-
ern borders Lapakshi was situated; his capital during the reign of
Achyutadevaraya was Gooty according to a 1529inscription. Other
brothers held offices under the same king in the fortress of Chitra-
durga. All were devoted Virasaivas, as were the Keladi chiefs, and all
established and supported Virasaiva mathas or seminaries wherever
they held authority in the Kannada—Teluguborder country.

THE ANATOMY OF SIXTEENTH-CENTURY

CHIEFDOMS

Chiefs such as these attained fame and wealth as leaders of military

contingents in the service of Vijayanagara kings of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries. As benefactors of temples and as town builders,
they are mentioned in inscriptions of the time. However, most of
the South Indian countryside was ruled by chiefs of amore modest
sort, who would have been totally lost to history except for accounts
of them gathered by Mackenzie during the early nineteenth century.
Among the most important revelations of the Mackenzie collec-
tion are those pertaining to administration. Just as coercive means

85
e; ocalae osesowereadministrative oat I
Jismandmodestbureaucraticisation
wasnotimposed fromabove,
_by royalofficials
forexample,
itarosefromthebaseofthepolitical
a
system, from its many chiefs, its numerous villages, and its temples.
Three modes of administration converged to form a single general
form during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One Mackenzie
identified as the corps of Brahman accountants and scribes serving
great imperial households: those of royal lineages and great com-
manders of the rayas. As both of these kinds of households moved
from the Deccan heartland of the kingdom into the south, they were
accompanied by Brahman coadjutors, either Deshastas from
northern Karnataka or Niyogi Brahmans from Andhra. The latter
groups gathered information on villages and towns under the
expanding authority of their warrior masters and negotiated the
relationships betweeen the latter and the Brahman-dominated
temples with whom these Vijayanagara agents sought to create an
enduring conquest. Resource inventories would have been obtained
by agents of the Rayas from several sources which together consti-
tuted other modes of existing administration, that of village and
locality organisations as well as managers of temples. Records of
landholdings and of shops and artisanal producers were maintained
by village accountants (e.g. Tamil: nattukaranam or Telugu: des-
pandya). Most were Brahmans, though in Tamil country they could
also be Vellalars or Pillais.
One surviving administrative record of resources is for the town
of Aluvakonda, or Alamkonda (modern Kurnool district), dating
from 1563.! This was an inventory prepared when the town was
granted as an entitlement to income for military service, or amaram,
by one Rangapparajaya to a subordinate. This Rangapparajaya
seems to have been an important chief in the Rayalaseema judging
from his land gifts to the nearby Vaishnava shrine of Ahobalam at
the time. According to an account collected by Mackenzie in 1800,
Aluvakonda was founded by some shepherd chiefs calling them-
selves ‘YadavaRajas’ and was enlarged and fortified during the early
fifteenth century by a chief named Gaurappa Nayudu. Gaurappa’s
' K. A. Nilakanta Sastri and N. Venkataramanayya, Further Sources in Vijayanagara
History (Madras: University of Madras, 1946); vol. 3, pp. 121-6.

86
 5 ae eee
BY
prands ! againstthe new, Tuluva kings| as a result of
onbecame a rebel
which Vira Narasimharaya(reign 1505-9),Krishnadevaraya’solder _
brother and predecessor, seized Aluvakonda, razed its fort, and
killed its chief. An inventory of the town and chieftaincy of twelve
___ villages was prepared at that time. Its comprehensiveness and detail
offers strong testimony of the quality of administration available to
even moderate chiefs of the time.
According to the inventory, the total money income realisable
from rents and fees was 4,460 gold coins (gadyana, a coin of 52
grains). About three-quarters of this total money revenue can be
accounted from the following sources. Dry fields around the town
were rented by eighteen different people whose money payments
comprised a mere 9 per cent of the total income of the town while
the few wet fields yielded a small money rent and some paddy.
Thirty-nine shops were enumerated in the town, and these were
owned by four men: the previous chieftain Gaurappa owned nine of
them; two, possibly Balija Chetti Telugu merchants, owned six
each, another man owned six, while the remaining twelve shops
were owned by smaller Balija Chettis. It was noted that seven of the
shops paid no rent while the rest paid an aggregate rent of 53 gold
coins, about 1 per cent of the total rental value of the chieftaincy.
Looms were subject to a tax and some 400 were reported in the
town. Of these, half produced red cloth for sale in the bazaar
established by and named for Gaurappa Nayudu, Gaurap-
payanipeta. Forty-one of the looms paid no tax; the remainder paid
the cash equivalent of 5 per cent of the total income, and weavers of
the town additionally paid a perquisite (vartana) to Gaurappa as
well as a smaller payment to support the fort that he had built.
Herdsmen of the area contributed taxes equal to 4 per cent of the
total income; and certain groups paid jati siddhya, a small commu-
nal, or caste tax. The largest single source of the town’s revenue was
from betel traders, oil millers, money changers, liquor makers,
cotton cleaners, and indigo producers, who paid 1,217gold coins, or
27 per cent of the total. The chiefdom’s twelve dependent villages
contributed about a quarter of its total income. Of those villages that
can be identified now, several were quite distant from Aluvakonda,
two being around 50 miles away, thus good examples of the
scattered interests of contemporary chiefdoms. Each of these vil-

87
 “its ‘obligations by payments from a head merchant (pedda sett
ys
ae for the shops in and around the tributary village from a
headman of local herders (golla), and from a cultivator headman
(reddi). By the late sixteenth century, when Aluvakonda was
reassignedto the military dependent of Rangapparayaya, its annual :
rental and tax income had increasedfour-fold and the villagesunder
its domination had risen to forty-three. The wealth of this chief-
taincy had now become large enough for 10,000 gold coins to be
alienated for the benefit of Brahmans and temples.
Of sixteenth-century chiefdoms, Aluvakonda was neithermeee
nor important; its administrations would have been dwarfed by
those of the great chieftaincies in the Rayalaseema region of Andhra
or some parts of Tamil country and Karnataka. Fortified and
commercial places like Gandikota in the hilly Cuddapah country-
side of the middle course of the Penner River, or Nandyal, 30 miles
from Aluvakonda in Kurnool, were the seats of great chiefly houses
at the time. Another such place was Anantapur town which was
called ‘Hande Anantapur’ until well into the nineteenth century, an
acknowledgement of the dominance of the Hande family whose
authority reached over a large part of Rayalaseema. The chief
Rangapparajya who held Aluvakonda is said to have been a depend-
ent of the Hande samasthanam. The Pemmasani family of Gandi-
kota and Nandyala chiefs were part of the widely ramified coalition
of Aliya Rama Raja and contributed to the latter’s overwhelming
power in the middle of the sixteenth century; they continued long
after Rama Raja’s time to hold great power in the erstwhile eastern
heartland of the Vijayanagara kingdom. Controlling numerous
villages and many large towns, these powerful chiefs commanded
large mercenary armies that were the vanguard of Vijayanagara
forces during the sixteenth century. While we have no records of
their administrations,they would have had to be quite substantial.
Equally complex and elaborate administrative organisation would
have been found at temples, especially larger ones, during the
sixteenth century. One of the largest was that at Tirupati, 125 miles
south-east of Aluvakonda and set like it at the edge of a range of hills
on one of whose crests was Tirumalai, the major shrine of the god
Venkatesvara. Between 1450 and 1550, the Tirupati-Tirumalai
88
 cords , , “so at ’eee eg ~sa,| bey it a i —i an See ivina
ee es
‘

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

temple complex became the most important pilgrimage and secta-

rian centre in all of the south. This makes it a unique temple, no
doubt, but the causes of its development were shared by many
temples of the time.
Two factors account for the transformation of this small, ancient
shrine into a teeming centre of pilgrimage and political influence.
One was the patronage of political notables, in this case Saluva
Narasimha, whose Chandragiri headquarters was nearby. The
second factor was the irrigation investments by managers of the
temple (sthanattar) in lands donated to the god. Both factors came
into operation at the same time. The first recorded irrigation
investment of amoney endowment ina Tirupati temple village dates
from 1454, when a Brahman priest of Chandragiri gave 3,000 gold
coins (panam of about six grains of gold each) to the temple to
provide a daily food offering for twelve other Brahmans. This
endowment specified that the money be used to excavate irrigation
channels in temple villages and that part of the higher crop yields
from this investment was to provide the specified food offering. The
Chandragiri Brahman donor was most likely an agent of Saluva
Narasimha anda sect leader since the beneficiaries of the grant were
a group of Brahmans who otherwise performed no services at the
temple; hence this provides another instance of how funds passed
from a powerful lord to a sectarian leader and from him to a temple
conferring merit and honour on both. In 1456, Saluva Narasimha
made the first of many endowments in his own name to the Tirupati
temple by granting a village free of all taxes.
Subsequently he and his successors to the Vijayanagara throne
enlarged their support to the temple, royal endowments reaching a
high point in the time of Achyutadevaraya. In the middle of the
1530S,numerous endowments for the merit of the king were made.
This reflected more than Achyutadevaraya’s personal allegiance to
Venkatesvara, whose protection he had sought and before whom he
was crowned after the death of his brother, Krishnadevaraya. These
large endowments by royals and their military servants may have
been intended as a public acknowledgement of support for the king
in his struggle against Aliya Rama Raja. Between 1530 and 1542, a
total of thirty-nine different land grants resulted in the alienation of
income from forty-three villages for the benefit of the Tirupati

89
 nihunsdierieaye
Lisa re
ival,Rama Raja,wiewa
ivignd Sadasivaraya’
sthrone, afterAchyutadevaraya.
grantedsixtyvillagesand 190,000smallgold coinsto the a
_Venkatesvara.
By Rama Raja’s death in 1565,which marked the end of Vijayana-
gara greatness and of much of its munificence, the Tirupati temple
.ae
held 170villagesof which about one hundred had received some sort
of irrigation investment from money endowments. All of the
transactions —the original gift of a temple village and the subsequent
investment in irrigation improvements — were punctiliously
recorded and supervised by temple authorities. Accountants of the
temple (there were thirteen according to an inscription of 1546)
maintained the elaborate accounts necessary to ascertain that the
offerings for which endowments had been made —usually the
presentation of cooked foods to a deity —were carried out. This
meant organising the food-stuffs and supervising their preparation
in the kitchens of the temple, then seeing to it that the valuable
consecrated food was distributed to various named beneficiaries in
accordance with the terms of the endowment as recorded in an
inscription. All of these arrangements required the attention of a
very large set of temple servants, from treasury officials to a public
works department to carry out irrigation improvements. It is
difficult to conceive that even the Vijayanagara kings maintained an
administrative capability much more elaborate than some temples
with their extensive holdings of land, their hundreds of priests and
other employees, including scribes, engravers, accountants, and
irrigation specialists.
Accountants, scribes, and bankers constituted an administrative
infrastructure supporting all major lordships of the later Vijayana-
gara age. This was a diverse structure of authority, ranging from the
highest level of Vijayanagara kings and collateral members of ruling
lineages, and the most trusted military commanders in a descending
order of lordships to village headmen. All depended on record-
keepers and other administrative ancillaries including money
specialists, from minters of coins to handlers of bills through whom
tribute was transferred over long distances. Local accountants and
scribes, as well as money men, were essential links between the

90

a
 LE
eras
SySC 8sAR
vay, .
is i ‘ Dee ile aeMeee ne ite at
PO LITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

variety of lordly recipients of wealth and the productive base that

they exploited. Administrative specialists provided a web upon
which the entire fabric of Vijayanagara politics was intricately
woven.

KINGS AND CHIEFS

The fragmentary character of Vijayanagara politics and society

could be ameliorated, but not overcome, by any administrative
structure as long as lordship itself continued to be segmentary.
Every magnate, large or small, exploited all within his political
sphere so as to maintain or increase his power with respect to
aggressive neighbouring lords and so as to increase his standing with
the warlords whom all were under pressure to serve. Vijayanagara
political relations had none of the remedies for fissiparous and
fragmented lordship thought to be found elsewhere in India. There
was nothing of what many scholars of Mughal society presume in
their conception of a patrimonial-bureaucratic state or that some
students of Vijayanagara history presume in their conception of a
feudal Vijayanagara. Lordship in Vijayanagara times was shaped by
different factors. Some of these operated at all levels of sixteenth-
century society, including village society; other factors are to be
found specifically in political relationships, including those between
Vijayanagara lords and Muslim regimes north of the Vijayanagara
kingdom. The first set of these factors impinging on Vijayanagara
lordship are explored in the remaining pages of the present chapter;
the second will be dealt with in the following chapter.
At the highest level of lordship, competition within and among
royal lineages for the throne set a limit on the degree of centralised
power attainable in the absence of the sort of imperial military and
administrative corps of foreigners that could serve as the flywheel of
the contemporaneous Mughal polity. Yet, even in the Mughal
regime, succession struggles and even assassinations occurred as they
did in the Vijayanagara kingdom, where the threat of violent death
and usurpation at the hand of some relative or military commander
was ever present. Candidates for the Vijayanagara throne main-
tained coalitions of supporters who were always ready to resist
counter-coalitions and any effort toward centralisation. Indeed, at

91
 ‘orfive
hedoiné
‘Each
ofthesons
ofSenetruled
seer
governor, or mahamandelesvara, except that there was no sovereig
and each ruled over a rajya, or kingdom, on the various frontiers of
- Karnataka.
‘
i
How it was that Bukka I emerged as supreme cannot Beceesone
structed now, but it was his sons and their descendants that became .
‘,

the main royal line for the remainder of the first dynasty. This
created a more powerful, single kingship, but one that was rarely
free from deadly competition from agnatic and collateral kinsmen of
disinherited princes. Five assassinations and four usurpations occur-
red before the Sanagama line itself was displaced by Saluva Nara-
simha in 1486;hence Narasimha’s action was an innovation in only
ae
A
+.
ae one sense—itsignalledthe claimfor sovereignty by great commanders
of the kingdom. Even this opening of the throne to military talent
beyond the royal line was anticipated in the time of Devaraya II when
enlarged royal mercenary forces began to confer major power and
influence upon commanders, transforming them into generalissimos
with considerable independent political standing.
This was an important change in political forces at the imperial
level. It added to the already complex mosaic of great houses, with
their overlapping claims and conflicts, an enhanced power for some
who, by virtue of leadership of the best armies of the time, were able
to advance their own territorial interests against the claims of rivals
and monarchs alike. Thus Saluva Narasimha assiduously expanded
his patrimonial base in Chandragiri to include much of the northern
Tamil plain of Tondaimandalam before he seized the throne. Later,
Aliya Rama Raja’s leading commanders of the Pemmasani, Hande,
and Nandyala families did the same over much of Rayalaseema and
Telangana. The proximity and overlappings of territories of these
major allies of Rama Raja meant that as each strove against the
others to gain land and followers, and there was no way to ascertain
the boundaries of any. Boundaries, in fact, mattered less than the
personal relations between a great and a small chief, however
separated in space they might be; protection in return for military
service guided political relations, and these relations were as firm, or
as fluid, as personalities and circumstances dictated.
However, in the manner of segmentary political forms anywhere,

92
 reer PRI ee ee pues

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

competing chiefs combined when their overlord called upon them

and when it was in their interests to do so. This happened during
Rama Raja’s two challenges to Achyutadevaraya, in 1530 and 1535;
it happened again when Rama Raja launched his expansionist drive
across the Tungabhadra and called upon his client chiefs to lead the
assault against the sultanates there. This Vijayanagara thrust
inevitably produced a similar combination among the Muslim
regimes that had superseded the Bahmani sultans, for Rama Raja so
threatened the sultanate regimes as to force them to set aside
long-standing conflicts to defeat their common Hindu enemy in
1565.
The first Tuluva kings, Vira Narasimha and his brother Krishna-
devaraya, appeared determined to bring the great chiefs of the realm
to heel, possibly because of the widespread opposition to them from
Karnatak and Tamil chiefs. It is not at all clear what prompted this
opposition around the turn of the sixteenth century. It is probable
that the fratricidal conflict among the last of the Sangamas led to the
development of factional coalitions among powerful houses in
Andhra and Karnataka and encouraged many to pursue aggrandis-
ing objectives that depended on a weak central authority. Saluva
Narasimha quelled some of that by the sheer weight of his military
power, but the coalition building that led to the replacement of his
son as king reopened the arena of conflict among ambitious chiefs.
This may explain the vehemence of Vira Narasimha’s suppression of
the Aluvakonda chiefdom and the determination with which
Krishnadevaraya broke the back of the Ummattur-led rebellion of
southern Karnatak chiefs. He then went further and developed a
more comprehensive strategy than punishing errant chiefs; he
sought to create a more certain monopoly of force under royal
control based, as already noticed, on the fuller use of Brahman
agents, royal fortresses under Brahman commanders, and garrison
as well as local militia forces recruited from among the tough forest
people of the peninsula, his poligars.
The Telugu didactic poem, Amuktamalyada, said to have been
composed by Krishnadevaraya commends Brahmans as provincial
governors and fortress commenders because their first loyalty
would be to the king and because they would strive to overcome the
disdain of Kshatriya and Sudra officers. Forest fighters, Boyas or

93
~ during military
campaigns
andasdependable
gar
3principal
objecttobeachieved
wasthereduction
ofindepei
chiefs:
That king can lay his hand on his breast and sleep peacefully who
appoints as masters of his fortresses such Brahmins as are attached
to himself, are learned in many sciences and arts, are addicted to
dharma, are heroic and have been in ... service since before his
time ... [and] who give to the subordinate chiefs (samanta) lands
and other things without lessening in the slightest the degree of
arrangement with them... [while] minding the (small) faults of the
forest chiefs ... [without] extensive power is like trying to clean a
mud wall by pouring water over it. If... [the king] gets angry with
them he cannot destroy them utterly. If (on the other hand) he
attaches them to himself by kind words and charity they would be
useful to him in invading foreign territory and plundering their
fortresses .. .?
Royal retribution for the sedition or insubordination of chiefs
became canonised in the late sixteenth-century Telugu poem, the
Rayavachakamu, which recalled the reign of Krishnadevaraya.
There the king confided to his trusted Brahman minister, Appaji, a
desire to visit ‘those kingdoms, forts, countries, strongholds, Visnu
shrines, the estates of subordinate chiefs and the frontiers’ of the
kingdom he had received from his brother, father, and grandfather.
Appaji and other ministers approved:
One should tour the country ruled over by one’s ancestors.
Nothing can be known if one remains stationary . . . it is necessary
that the people ... should know Your Majesty ... establish your
glory by touring the kingdom in all dirctions, accompanied by the
four-fold army so as to create terror in the mind of enemies and
subordinate chiefs.*
Launching a digvijaya, or tour of conquest, was conventional
advice, of course, but there is more meaning in the verse than that.
This is the notion that personal rule must be established over all
chiefs. The Marathi text of governance of a century or so after, the
Ajnapatra speaks a similar language of suspicion toward local chiefs
* Rangasvami Sarasvati, ‘Political Maxims of the Emperor-Poet Krishnadeva Raya’,
The Journal of Indian History 4, part 3 (1925), p. 72.
> K. A. Nilakanta Sastri and N. Venkataramanayya, Further Sources in Vijayanagara
History (Madras: University of Madras, 1946),vol. 3, p. 141.

94
ped nsion (bheda)to makeany lordshipdifficultsincechiefsare.
ever concerned to protect their hereditary rights of rule and
possession (vatan) against royal or prebendal demands. Neither the
Telugu Rayavachakamu nor the Marathi Ajnapatra offer solutions
to the conflict of interests between kings and chiefs beyond a
personal relationship of dominance over a chief either directly by
the king or through a personal agent of the king (karyakarta).
Failure to achieve such a relationship meanta loss of prestige and
tribute to the king and the risk to the chief of royal chastisement if a
demand for tribute or troops was not met.
This was an age when all lordships from the king to even the most
modest chief were becoming more powerful. Greater militarisation,
more lethal arms, larger treasuries based upon the expanding
commerce of the time, and more efficient fiscal controls assured that
this would be true. And, because all lordships —the great and the
small — strengthened themselves simultaneously and in the same
ways, the hazards to all increased simultaneously. Yet there were
constraints upon the powers that could be garnered to any lord as
already noticed in the case of the kings themselves and some of the
great chiefs. Other constraints upon lordships came from below.

THE SOUTH INDIA ‘COMMONS’

Local politics and property relations, whether in the riverine zones

of ancient, high agriculture or in the extensive areas of dry-
cropping, were founded on corporate control, either of communal
holders of special privileges, usually Brahmans and temples, or of
corporate landed lineages. Private landed proprietorship did not
exist in its modern meaning, though it is assumed by Karashima and
Subbarayalu on the evidence of land transfers among individuals
dating from Chola times. In most cited instances, the acquisition of
land by a chief was preliminary to making a gift to some Brahmans, a
temple, or a matha; thus, they were special cases of chiefly preroga-
tive. Invariably, such records are temple inscriptions and therefore
pertain to gifts; if non-religious sales of land were common during
the sixteenth century, or before, there is no way of knowing it.
However, because such transactions of which there are records were

>)
.intended
’tdahanee hetiatAo Eeee
theFaleeee en
chiele”
in vt
sceotaanes
a
with prevailing notions of rajadharma or dana (gift), it should not
be overlooked that religious endowments resulted in various kinds
of advantage for the chiefly donor besides public esteem and
religious merit. In many temples, donors were entitled to portions
(as much as a quarter) of the offerings to a god, prasadam; this was
valuable and could be gifted or sold. Chiefly and royal donors also
sought and received administrative and judicial rights in temples
which conferred material and status benefits. Hence, in rejecting
Karashima’sclaim that private proprietorship of land is attested by
gifting activities, it is recognised that substantial material benefits
were nevertheless obtained by the great donors of the age.
Still, the underlying communal character of landholding during
Vijayanagaratimes cannot be questioned, nor is it by Karashima and
Subbarayalu. The political power arising from the communal
organisation and ideology of leading sections of dominant landed
castes on irrigated coastal tracts was very great; this included
Brahmans, Tamil Vellalars, Kannadiga Vokkaligas, and Telugu
Reddis. But no less great was that of the major landholding groups
in the interior upland frontier during the sixteenth century, when
the same high degree of communal property and politics existed, but
it was differently constituted.
The dry-cropping zones between about 1,000and 3,000 feet over
the coastal plain constantly expanded; this was the agricultural and
political frontier of Vijayanagara times. Many of the new settlers
were migrants from the coasts, such as the Reddis of Telangana and
Rayalaseema,for example. However, others who opened new tracts
of field agriculture were those who previously lived by herding
combined with extensive dry-cropping and even slash-and-burn
cultivation in the still heavily-forested upland. Dry lands of the
interior had to be conquered by an armed peasantry under fighting
chiefs if they were to be held against the opposition of conquered
cultivators and herdsmen.
Thus, scattered over the uplands of Andhra, Karnatak, and Tamil
country were mixed communities of farmers and herdsmen ruled by
fighting chiefs. These were not an easy people for any would-be
centralising regime, as that of Krishnadevaraya, to subdue, domi-
nate, and from whom to realise much financial or political benefit.

96
 cry

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

Here, communal property and privilege was defended partly by
the fighting capabilities of martial peasantries, but against larger and
more persistent external foes, such opposition could take other
forms. One was the convening by village and locality headmen of a
kuttam, or assembly, of cultivating and other groups of a locality to
agree measures for opposing demands from above. Resistance could
range from the withholding of money dues to an overlord to a
temporary abandonment of villages for the refuge of forests until
negotiations led to a satisfactory settlement of differences. Assem-
blies of this sort are known from the fifteenth century, as noted
above in connection with peasant opposition in Tiruchirappalli in
1429-30; they continue to be reported in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries as an established means of coping with
oppression from above as well as of settling serious internal dis-
putes. Desertion of their lands was a last answer to oppression by
dry-zone cultivators; it was often not difficult for these motile
cultivators to obtain other lands and possibly less demanding
masters elsewhere. Thus, dry-zone cultivators were armed against
oppressors by more than their spears (and increasingly their match-
lock guns). Cultivation skills, material resources, and organisation
for teasing food and commodities like cotton from harsh soils gave
them mobility and an ability to bargain favourable terms as valuable
additions to ambitious lords anywhere, for more men, especially
potential fighting men, meant more political and economic power.
In all of these upland communities were found administrative
offices such as village and locality headmen, usually filled by
members of the dominant landholding groups, village and locality
accountants, usually Brahmans, anda variety of lesser offices. All
were remunerated by chiefly grants of tax-exempt land holdings —
frequently from scarce irrigated holdings — designated by the
Sanskrit word, manya, which implies an honour as well as an
income. This method of paying for local administration was con-
tinued by the British in the interior districts of Madras Presidency;
the landholdings in lieu of money payment for village and locality
officials were then called by the Arabic term imam, and these were
continued until well into the nineteenth century, even though such
privileged landholdings might comprise as much as half of all
cultivated land.

97
 ven
ae hodnen
eta eosking
tek Fees
were
far
—evidenthere,or indeltaicAndhra,thantheywerein thespacious
- interior upland of the peninsula judging from the relatively few
Vijayanagarainscriptions found in the wet zones. In areas of ancient
high agriculture, local authority was held by corporate bodies rather
than poligars or villageand locality headmen. Groups of prestigious
holders of land rights, such as those in Tamil country, were called
kanwyatchikkaran,or collective hereditary land owners. During the
colonial epoch, when such communal holders in irrigated zones
were dubbed with the Persianised title of ‘mirasidar’, they proved as
resistant to the centralising aspirations of the British as they had
done to the Vijayanagarastate and their successors, the nayaka kings
of Tanjavur (1530-1680) and of the Maratha Rajas of Tanjavur
(1680-1800).
In the irrigated central valley of the Tambraparni, Ludden notes
the absence of village or locality headmen, accountants, and
watchmen in early inscriptions. Nineteenth-century reports confirm
this. Older inscriptional sources without exception place local auth-
ority over these most valuable irrigated villages in the hands of a
communal élite of Brahmans and Vellalars. Such village services as
they required were paid for in cash, just as they paid for the services
of fighters to defend their wealth from external predators with the
temerity to challenge the landed wealth that went with high ritual
status. By the sixteenth century, communal land holding was
strengthened through other forms of wealth and influence: involve-
ment in the trade of grain, and scribal and accountancy offices held in
the regional regimes in the river valleys. Altogether, these holders of
the kani-right were ‘the government of the wet zone, not only at the
villagelevel ... [but as a] subregional ruling class’,as Ludden states.
How the ancient privileges of the wet-zone élite could have
survived the penetrations of martial Vijayanagara requires expla-
nation. There appear to be several reasons for it. The river valleys of
the peninsula yielded the most reliable tribute to Nayaka agents of
the kingdom because of their large, annual surplus production.
Providing that the appointed Vijayanagara agent was loyal, money
tribute was transferred to Vijayanagara. Such was the case under
Kumara Kampana in the fourteenth century and when Chellappa

98
 eee ee ee ET 2Sey oe, Mi ne eT
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

Saluva Narasimha Nayaka served Krishnadevaraya in the Kaveri

valley.
But, Chellappa ceased sending tribute and threatened the entire
kingdom by his revolt in 1531. So great were the resources available
to him that Achyutadevaraya mobilised the rest of the kingdom to
suppress this Tamil wet-zone revolt. Achyutadevaraya’s hold on the
throne was tenuous then as a result of the machinations of Aliya
Rama Raja and his powerful coalition of Rayalaseema chiefs. Hence
the decisiveness of his response to Chellappa’s sedition indicates
how critical this challenge was seen to be. Moreover, Rama Raja
shared this view for he temporarily suspended his active opposition
to the king during the revolt in the southern peninsula.
Even with the most reliable subordinates and agents, it would still
have been difficult to increase the level of royal tribute demanded
from the Kaveri region or the Tambraparni without replacing the
ancient communal holders there, the kanzyalar, and thus attacking
the religious privileges long vested with the riverine élite. To do this
might have jeopardised the successful strategy of making the Vijaya-
nagara lordship acceptable through their dharmic participation in
temple affairs. And, of course, river-basin societies had military
protection. In Tanjavur, a part of the large money wealth was
deployed by the corporate landed élite to pay Vanniyar soldiers
from north of the Kaveri and Kallar soldiers from the south to
defend the delta from attacks; similarly, the Tambraparni valley was
defended from predations by hiring Maravar soldiers as well as
Telugu fighters, even though both were excluded from holding
lands in the irrigated valley. It is true that the warrior folk protecting
the river-basins of Tamil country gradually did encroach upon wet
lands at the edges of the irrigated systems, but such encroachments
added an interest for these warrior groups to defend and therefore
raised the price of more central control by Vijayanagara and its
successor regimes.

COMMUNITY AND EXPLOITATION

Among the differences between the riverine and dry-upland soci-

eties was the way that wealth was produced and labour was
organised. Wealth in the irrigated zones of the peninsula was

99
 : 4
VIJAYANAGARA ©

produced by the labour of a large agrestic servitude class and was

realised, in large part, by the export of its rice surplus to Sri Lanka,
northern Coromandel, and Malabar. While the internal bulking of
rice surpluses seemed to have been in the hands of the landholding
élite, foreign traders, as on other coasts of the peninsula, were the
major Coromandel trade castes —-Tamil Chettiyars and Telugu »
Komatis and Balijasas well as indigenous and foreign Muslims. The
high level of wealth generated by reliable rice surpluses was pro-
duced by the labour of low-status cultivators who held little or no
land of their own. Control of this labour force was as important as
adequate water for cultivation for the wealth produced in places like
the Kaveri and Tambraparni valleys; the kami right pertained
especially to water and labour. Maintenance of existing irrigation
works and drainage systems and their regular extension to new lands
was no more the responsibility of a central state in the sixteenth
century than it was in previous centuries. Communal holders of the
Kani right deployed part of their labour control to maintain anicuts
and other irrigation works, and they collectively supervised the
distribution of water among fellow kani-holders. Temple lands in
the river valleys were similarly managed and enriched as an exten-
sion of the high-caste élite landholding in any locality.
However, all in the Tamil wet zone depended upon the labour of
despised and untouchable Pallas and Pariyans. The formation and
maintenance of this workforce was as vital to wet-zone agriculture
as water itself, but little is known of the ways in which this force of
low workers were bent to their exploitation. In the absence of a state
policing capability to support agrestic servitude, the most plausible
explanation for the continued expansion of the riverine workforce is
that people from the adjacent uplands and dry plains were willing to
exchange their hazardous independence in this turbulent age for the
secure food and shelter offered by labour in the wet fields of the
Brahman and Vellalar élite of Tanjavur and Tirunelveli and the
Kamma and Reddi landed élite the Krishna-Godavari delta. Sub-
mission for survival made for a tractable lower stratum in these river
valleys, one that did not threaten the élite management there nor
combined to challenge outside oppressors as the people in neigh-
bouring Tiruchirappalli did in 1429.
Tiruchirappalli was one of the intermediate, mixed-cropping
100
 POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

zones between the riverine basins with social hierarchies dominated

by communally organised élites of Brahmans and Vellalars, and the
clan-organised, more egalitarian societies of the dry zones of the
peninsula. In mixed-cropping zones —including the greater part of
the Vijayanagara heartland —the potential for reliable irrigation was
lower than in the river valleys and was achieved by tank reservoirs
and wells. Here, high-status cultivating groups, who eschewed the
plough in imitation of Brahmans in riverine areas, cultivated both
wet and dry fields. Such mixed zones of wet and dry cropping
comprised substantial parts of Madurai, Arcot, and Kongu in the
Tamil plain, the Karnataka maidan and some parts of Rayalaseema
and Telangana.
Mixed- and dry-cropping zones contributed such major commo-
dities as cotton and indigo to the peninsular economy; they were not
merely backward versions of riverine economies. Beginning in
Chola times, such areas, along with coastal ports, comprised scat-
tered centres of high commerce and were major corridors of trade.
During the Vijayanagara period the pace of commercialisation had
quickened led by two factors: overseas trade and the deliberate
policy of territorial magnates of augmenting their money revenues
through customs fees. In upland Kongu, modern Coimbatore, and
Salem, in the low southern plain of modern Pudukkottai and
Ramnad, and in the northern Tamil and Andhra dry plains of
Tondaimandalam and Rayalaseema, were numerous trade centres
where commercial groups gathered and which they controlled
through a head merchant, where they supported temples, and where
commodities from all over the dry- and mixed-cropped areas were
assembled for shipment, usually by bullock trains, to markets near
and far. The commodities that made up this trade were textiles,
cotton, indigo, garden crops, oil seeds, millets, and palm and fruit
products. Bullocks used in long and short transport and in culti-
vation everywhere were reared in these mixed and dry zones which
afforded the required pasturage. Moreover, here, more than in the
wet zones, temples provided the vital centring to all local commu-
nities which in the wet areas was achieved by élite communities of
ancient corporate privilege with heavily inscribed religious
sanctions.
‘Community’ in Indian sociological and popular usage means
Io!
 inthesame
place
andsharemany
valuespeallbutdisappea
and with that the possibilityof defininglocalaffinitiesinterms other
than the ranking of social groups in accordance with normative
principles that might have little to do with how actual local societies
were, or are, constituted. Caste was surely one of the principles of
social organisation in sixteenth-century South India, but there were
other kinds of affinities that were more important. Certainly,
political and religious affiliations and their interrelationship during
Vijayanagara times was of the first importance if on no other basis
than the evidence of that time speaks much more about chieftaincy
and sect than about caste. But it is necessary to admit that not much
is known about the religious component of local identities then,
however more is known about that than the usual preferred
explainer of most Indian social phenomena —caste.

REE EG VON; soO\GTEAR YANDoh Gta: Gay

Aggregative assessments of temples in the Vijayanagara kingdom —
the number of temples, their distribution, their sectarian affiliations
—arefew, and the same is true (if anything, our ignorance is the more
profound) about religious networks centred on the sectarian organi-
sation (matha, ‘seminary’ or ‘monastery’) of the age.
The leader of a sectarian centre, mathadipati, was among the most
powerful men of the Vijayanagara age. Many enjoyed royal patron-
age and confidence that resulted from serving as the spiritual adviser
(rajaguru) of kings and great chiefs of the realm. Saluva Narasimha’s
preceptor, Kandadai Ramanuja Ayyangar, was the head of the
Tengalai Srivaishnava matha at Tirupati, and as a result of Narasim-
ha’s support, this Brahman held affairs of the Tirupati temple in his
grip during the late fifteenth century. Similar influence over the
affairs of the Ahobalam temple was exerted by the head of the
Vadagalai Srivaishnava matha there who served as the guru of the
powerful Nandyala chief. Krishnadevaraya’s preceptor was the
head of the Madhva matha at Tirupati.
Unlike other religious personages of the time, the head of a matha
was not limited by collegial relations with other priests. All prop-

102
 neeke
jonatedtoamatha tosupport instruction
a esis: a
"sectarian propaganda was the personal wealth of the head, who
ee ie
fea a
determined those to be initiated and who was to be appointed his
successor. A head of a matha was usually a Brahman except in the oh
case of Virasaiva’s whose non-Brahman heads enjoyed the same Oe
i high standing among devotees and others. The mathadipati toured ty
: the areas where his followers lived, and his progress was conducted a
in the manner of a king, on elephants, with the royal paraphernalia
of umbrellas and drummers, and with large retinues. And like the
Vijayanagara rayas, these heads sent their agents to where their
followers lived to advise them in matters spiritual and secular, to
collect funds for the order, sometimes to initiate new members, to
arbitrate disputes among them, and to preach the doctrines of the
sect. Among the most vigorous and successful of such itinerant
propagandists were those attached to the Srivaishnava matha at
Tirupati and at Ahobalam and the karayakarta and mudrakarta
attached to the Virasaiva matha at Srisailam.
At the opposite pole of political authority from kings and great
chiefs and their preceptors was the world of local chiefs whose
relations with local temples, sects, and cultural traditions were as
important. We are afforded an excellent insight into this by Rogh-
air’s study of “The Epic of Palnad’ or ‘the story of the Palnad
heroes’: palnati virula katha. In this remote, western corner of
Guntur, the struggle between local Velama cultivators, under their
epic chief, Brahma Nayudu, and their Haihaya Raju overlords has
been recited and re-enacted for possibly eight centuries. At another
level, the struggle was also between the ‘indigenous’ Vaishnavism of
the Velamas and the ‘foreign’ Virasaivism of their opponents. This
story (katha) was probably committed to written Telugu in the
early fifteenth century at about the same time that inscriptions were
engraved on two of the temples of Karempudi where the epic is
centred and where Brahma Nayudu and the heroes of the epic are
worshipped. Inscriptions of Karempudi continue to refer to the
‘heroes’ until as late as 1625, and during the present century, the Siva
‘temple of heroes’ has been the seat of Brahman preceptors of the
Velama cultivators and others who worshipped there.
Temples and matha were prime instruments for Vijayanagara
political purposes; they enjoyed a moral standing which no Hindu

103
pee Poulreer oroppose. Every
Hencecantbesaidto have
represented,
ortohaveconstituted,
asa singleentitythevee
peoples
whoseworshipit attracted.
Whileit is truethatmajor
Hinduinstitutions
wereincreasingly
to befoundinurbansitu-
ations, sixteenth-century South India was still rural, and older
communal agrarian rights, which remained intact, were registered
in, as well as protected by temples. In villages and localities there
were often the shrines of guardian deities —usually goddesses —
whom all of the place worshipped; there were also lineage shrines
sheltering the tutelaries of dominant landed folk as well as the
shrines of deities who protected the people and welfare of larger
territories. These territorial guardian temples existed before Vijaya-
nagara and were dedicated to some manifestation of Siva in Tamil
country as in Telangana.
Gods selected as well as protected their worshippers, which lent
temples their social significance during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries and made them prizes for Vijayanagara to win over.
Temple worship involved the complex transactions of a body of
worshippers and the god of their devotion; there was selection of
who could offer worship and who could receive the fruits of
worship. The last were usually transvalued substances such as food
offered for the sustenance of the or clothes for his or her
adornment; these were returned to devotees asprasadam, the god’s
grace. Eligibility to give to and to rec¢ivefrom a god, and the order
in which giving and receiving occurred, was monitored by priests
and devotees, for such transactions defined an entire community
and the ranking of persons and groups within it. Accordingly, the
lowest social groups were excluded from worship, adding to their
isolation and degradation. Failure to assure that only those fit to
worship participated, and in the correct order, could discredit and
shamea deity and its devotees.
The ease with which the remote sovereignty of the rayas came to
be exercised over the Tamils and others depended upon the favour
they showed to Tamil deities; but it depended, too, upon the same
sort of favour to most local magnates in their undisturbed mastery
of the countryside and many of the new towns. Chiefs, for their
part, used their connections with the largely ritual Vijayanagara
kingship to enhance their authority on their own turfs. Thus the

104
 rr er einen OP re he hn
-. '
‘ |
POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY
{

great foreign sovereigns of Vijayanagara added to the greatness of

the little kings of Tamil country and elsewhere. This was dayada of
the Ajnapatra, the sharing of sovereignty between great kings and
territorial chiefs.
The latter were principal movers in the integration of religious
affiliations in which often humble lineage and clan shrines under
their protection mimicked the grandeur of canonical temples. But
more was done than this. Such new shrines ‘explained’ themselves
and their status in new texts. Temple chronicles of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries —mahamatya and sthalapurana —provided
myths about two sorts of connection: that between a particular
people and their guardian deity —most often a goddess —and that
between the latter and older territorial gods of the great pantheon,
usually Siva. Tamil poems of praise —satakam —of the same period
added to these ideological constructions. In the process, chief-
tainship and the standing of the dominant landed people represented
by chiefs were enhanced by the binding of local guardian spirits to
more distant and majestic divinities. This was but an extension at the
level of religion of what had been happening in secular politics to
bring local magnates and superior lordships of the Vijayanagara age
into closer relationship. Political integration of the age was thus
matched, especially in the extensive agricultural and political
frontier, by a linking of local magnates, their penates and ancient
canonical gods. That would seem to be the evidence of Tamil
country at least.
Enhanced and more integrated secular and divine lordships in
Tamil country and elsewhere closed some of the distance between
Vijayanagara kings and the multitude of chiefs of the peninsula. But,
at the same time, this amalgamation of secular and divine lordship,
by strengthening territorial bonds and resistance to external coer-
cion, limited the centralising forces emanating from sixteenth-
century Vijayanagara. Most of the means at the disposal of Vyaya-
nagara kings and their agents for extending central authority were
also available to lesser magnates: better and more armed soldiers,
larger money revenues, and closer administrative control from
urban political and commercial centres. There seems to have been no
lag between the adoption of stronger, centralised control of people
and resources by the Vijayanagara ruler and by ‘subordinate chiefs’

105
 evaraya
was
purp
orted!
lyins
to overawe according totheRaaeen ar were stre
ened simultaneously, and o nec onsequence ofthisw as
t he sreressoa
exploitation of lower orders of the society by both local and central
authorities; another consequence was an era of military adventurism
by Vijayanagara against the Muslim regimes to the north as a means
of expanding the prizes of lordship in the peninsula. This second
consequence will be dealt with in the next chapter.
South Indian communities were not single, undifferentiated
moral entities in the sense that caste implies. Dominant landed
communities were internally differentiated. All major landed
groups in South India were territorially subdivided into local
segments which in places like Kongu acted as clans, possessing their
own chiefs and guardian deities within which interactions and
loyalties were the most enduring. Marriage arrangements also
differentiated families in any subcaste or clan of landed folk. Within
landed groups considerations of rank and standing entered into
marriage alliances among families; these considerations were most
exacting among chiefly families and more loosely graded with social
distance from ruling lineages. Finally, wealth entered the calculus of
marriage alliances within all landed groups, for marriage was one of
several strategies for increasing the land held bya family.
It is also probable that the definition of ‘lower orders’ had
undergone many changes by the sixteenth century. During the
thirteenth century the southern peninsula began to undergo an
urbanisation driven by the development of larger temples and
chiefly fortifications. With their large priestly and non-priestly
staffs and their ever-increasing throngs of pilgrims, temple centres
fostered elaborate urban facilities and attracted permanent commer-
cial and artisanal populations. Religiously-inspired urbanisation
was soon augmented by political factors as chiefdoms and kingdoms
became ever larger, better fortified and competitive. It was this
which led to the demise of the Cholas and Hoysalas in their turn,
especially when Muslim soldiers raised the whole level of military
activity and violence. All of this had created the conditions for the
rise of the Vijayanagara.
By the sixteenth century, the forces tending toward greater
urbanisation were crowned by the cumulative impact of Vijayana-
106
 aa SOE. (Sega eS Raea baySei gt Tree
— s,s POLITICAL ECONOMY AND SOCIETY :
“a
¥ ‘gara rule. Agents of the Rayas were urban magnates; their fortified j
__ headquarters were garrisons that underpinned dispersed Vijayana-
gara authority, and large bodies of soldiers and numerous chiefly
courts made towns centres of wealth and consumption. Such
political centres either were temple centres at the outset or they
became that as a result of the largesse of chiefs. In these numerous
new towns of the Vijayanagara period a major redefinition of ‘lower
orders’ occurred, this having to do with the division of right and left
castes.

In myth and in social process, the left division of castes in the

Vijayanagara domains suffered the historical disadvantage of being
marginal to the dominant rural-centred society in which they lived.
The core of the left division in most places consisted of highly skilled
artisan-trading groups and regional merchant groups; to this core
was added a substantial section of untouchable producers of com-
modities such as the widely-traded leather commodities of Tamil
and Telugu scavengers and leather workers (Chakkilars and
Madigas). Additionally, in Tamil country, the left division included
the large cultivating group of Pallis. This was anomalous since most
important cultivating groups —Tamil Vellalars, Karnatak Vokkali-
gas, and Telugu Reddis —were either affiliated with the right
division or were regarded with Brahmans and some transregional
merchants and bankers (such as Telugu Komatis) as neutral or
unaligned. The Palli affiliation to the left may be explained by their
late emergence as dominant landholding cultivators and by their
claim to a prior martial history and Kshatriya status. To the core of
cultivators of the right division were added other agrarian groups
such as most herdsmen, grain traders and transporters, those
providing goods and services for village people, such as potters,
barbers, washermen, non-Brahman priests, and untouchable field
labourers (Tamil Paraiyans, Karnatak Holeyas, and Telugu Malas).
Differences between the interests of these two broad coalitions of
agrarian and non-agrarian groupings certainly resulted in conflicts,
and the pre-Vijayanagara historical record contains many examples
of that. However, there is as much evidence of co-operation in
support of temples and against outside oppressors as occurred at the
fringes of the Kaveri delta in 1429-30 against the demands of
Vijayanagara agents and their Tamil allies.

107
Fcastes.
Wibyi (ing soueeaEthe
ae division,
awhose
core
“ interests
CO
wereagrarian, had become deeply implicated in town life and in the
more generalisedexchangesystems of the age.At the same time, the _
left division of castes, the core of whose interests were commodity:
production for extended exchange, and whose locus of operations
were the new towns of the southern peninsula, were in a better
position to demand quality of status and socialprivileges with those
“of the right division. From the time of Devaraya I to Achyutadeva-
raya, inscriptions are found in many parts of the southern peninsula
entitling right and left castes to the same privileges, including the
privilege of holding processions and displaying emblems. Royal
adjudications were sought and gained by the leading groups of left
castes, skilled artisan-traders called Kanmalars among Tamils, Pan-
chala in Karnataka, and Panchanulu in Andhra.
The increasingly congruent interests of leaders of the right and
left coalition and the readiness of state-level officials to certify
demands for equality of social standing by left castes were important
changes. Now, equalising privileges that marked status could be
achieved without resort to the violent conflicts that sometimes
erupted before, and this diminished the needs for internal solidarity
of both coalitions. There seems little reason to doubt, and some
evidence to support, the proposition that heightened demands for
money revenues through the entire chain of lordships in the
sixteenth century were passed by the more powerful to the less
powerful in the chain of production from which all wealth came.

108
 FIVE

IMPERIAL COLLAPSE AND AFTERMATH:

1542-1700

The Vijayanagara kingdom at its greatest moment during the first

half of the sixteenth century consisted of few durable elements.
Though between 1509and 1565Krishnadevaraya, Achyutadevaraya,
and Aliya Rama Raja proved competent warriors and statesmen, all
were aware of the dangers of assassination by kinsmen and usur-
pation by other powerful families. By the sixteenth century both
threats had been realised too many times for any ruler to be secure.
Another hazard were the shifting alliances among the great warlord
families of the kingdom. This was especially the condition in the
Karnataka and Rayalaseema heartland, the base of royal authority
during most reigns. Any king’s power depended upon a coalition
whose focus he was; a personal relationship with the king opened
wide possibilities for any great Deccan magnate. Often a personal
relationship could be strengthened by marriage of a daughter into
the royal lineage. The powerful Rama Raja, titled aliya, ‘son-in-
law’, claimed the throne as husband of the daughter of Krishnadeva-
raya, and though he was long frustrated in that ambition, some of his
considerable authority later derived as much from this affinal
connection as from being the son and successor of Aravidi Bukka.
Combinations amongst powerful families were shifting and
complex; all were alert to advantages and ready to seize political
initiatives when the powers of a neighbouring chief or the king
weakened.
Adding to this competitive and dangerous world of the great
households of the kingdom was the Muslim factor. Throughout
Vijayanagara history Muslim warriors played a part of coalition
building. This began in pre-Vijayanagara times when Ala-ud-din
Khalji’s trusted commander Malik Kafur, a converted Hindu, was
invited into the succession struggles between Pandyan princes and
laid the foundation for the short-lived sultanate regime there.
Though the Vijayanagara kingdom itself was launched with an
ostensibly anti-Muslim ideology, in less than a century Muslim
fighters served as commanders in Devaraya II’s army. A prospective

109
 y

rtd
| eng esslim %a“:
aHinds
by2 a Mashereither" the MuslimGolconda«
Beneath the world of aristocratic coalitions and counter-
coalitions was the no less politically contentious world of chiefs and_
their constituencies. These were based upon communal institutions:
of kinship, locality, occupational/caste affiliations in the right and
left divisions, and upon sect and temple. While much of this
communally based world of localities had been altered by the
sixteenth century —partly the result of the character and structure of
Vijayanagara power with its intrusive military outsiders and partly
as the result of the forces of commercialisation and urbanisation —
local sodalities in the southern peninsula retained a large capacity to
frustrate the ambitions of the mighty.
For most historians, the kingdom was what Nilakanta Sastri
called a ‘war state’, one ruled by warrior-chiefs whose whole being
was bent on attaining ever greater military force to be applied to any
enemy, Hindu and Muslim. The large and expanding frontier of the
kingdom, it must be remembered, had long been to the Hindu
South, not the Muslim-ruled North; the fruits of military success —
in wealth, territory, and sovereignty —were principally garnered in
Tamil country. Vijayanagara was also an incorporative regime, one
that sought to win to itself the allegiance and military capability of
the many warriors throughout the peninsula. These objects of
Vijayanagara courtship were also chiefs, or ‘little kings’ —with
armed men, horses, and firearms at their disposal and hence worth
the wooing. And furthermore, Vijayanagara was a parasitic regime
that extracted tribute from the productivity and commerce of its
peoples and contributed little itself to either.
It is, of course, true that the Vijayanagara kings boosted the level
of violence through its armies and the attendant privileging of its
military agents to the greatest dignities and wealth available in the
southern peninsula, but historians usually justify this by the heroic
defence of Hinduism against Islam. Still, it is difficult to identify the
ways in which Vijayanagara as a state madea difference. It is perhaps
strange, and it may appear trivial, that one way in which Vijayana-
gara influence may be seen to have mattered was in changes of
architectural styles of temples.

IIo
 EMBLEMATICTEMPLES
ae already observed, art and architectural historians speak of a
‘Vijayanagara temple style’ whose features distinguish it from all
others. The researches of George Michell at Hampi and his com-
parative grasp of temples elsewhere in the peninsula leads him to
observe that there was a sudden break in the style of temple
construction in the fourteenth century. Temples in the Hoysala and
Kakatiya styles of the previous two centuries virtually ceased to be
built, and, for a time during the fourteenth century, a simpler and
earlier Deccan style was reverted to for shrines built at Vijayanagara
and elsewhere in its hinterland.
The very first datable shrines constructed at Hampi during the
first dynasty of Vijayanagara were devoted to Jaina deities. This not
only manifested the continued importance of that religion in
Karnataka, and perhaps even the allegiance to it by the early
Vijayanagara kings, like the earliest of the Hoysalas, but also
suggests a deliberate symbolic shift from that of previous Hindu
regimes whom Vijayanagara had succeeded. A style very like that of
the ancient Chaluyan kingdom of Badami and its temple complexes
at Aihole and Pattadakal seemed to be affected. The anachronistic
Deccan style of temple found at Vijayanagara was imitated at the
Saiva centre of Sringiri; for example, the Vidya Shankara temple of
the mid-fourteenth century, associated with Vidyaranya, the Raja-
guru of the founders, was built to a Deccan plan.
By the middle of the fifteenth century, when a distinctive
Vijayanagara style of temple had begun to evolve, its core design was
derived from Tamil-country and late Chola shrines. The Ramachan-
dra temple was at the symbolic centre, the urban core of Viyayana-
gara, where royal ceremonies were enacted; it was probably begun
by Devaraya I in the early fourteenth century in imitation of late
Chola temples. Other places where this southern temple style was
found at about the same time was Penukonda, at temples dedicated
to Siva and to Rama, and at Srisailam, another Saiva centre patron-
ised by the Saivite kings of the first dynasty. Amature Viyayanagara
style was only achieved in the time of Krishnadevaraya.
This style continued Chola forms, but certain Chola elements
were raised to a previously unknown monumentality, especially the

Ta
 jn Cie

eaevayne or_gopuram. the Vireabehe carole atH amp

foundations are ancient, was substantially rebuilt in Roshni
raya’s time; similarly, the Vithala shrine, begun by Devaraya I, was
expanded at the time of Krishnadevaraya. Shortly after, other major
temples of Hampi were constructed to the same large scale as were
temples in such chiefly centres as Tadpatri and Lepakshi and at the.
older temple centres of Ahobalam and Kalahasti. The mature
Vijayanagara style began to find its way back to its origins in Tamil
country with additions to the Ekambaranatha and Varadaraja
temples at Kanchipuram, the Nataraja temple at Chidambaram, the
Jalakanteshvara temple at Vellore, and at Srirangam and Tiruvanna-
malai. All came to be marked with the distinctive towering gateway
called ‘Rayagopuram’, and many also had portrait statues of Vijaya-
nagara kings and other important patrons. Thus, personal icono-
graphic connection was established between these most important
shrines and the great political figures of the time. The seventeenth-
century Nayaka kingdom temples of the peninsula steadfastly held
to this Vijayanagara style, displaying even more monumentality and
elaborating the motif of sculpted animal pillars introduced earlier.
Considering the symbolic power of temples in Vijayanagara
times, it is likely that these stylistic developments conveyed impor-
tant meanings to contemporaries, as they do to the modern archi-
tectural historian. One meaning was that the Vijayanagara state was
of surpassing ritual importance for Tamil, Telugu, and Kannadiga
subjects of the rayas and their chiefs. Historians have insisted that
there was much more to the Vijayanagara state, of course, and one of
the chief foci of their arguments pertains to what is called ‘the
foreign policy’ of the kingdom during the last several decades of its
greatness. One reason for attention to this policy is that its failures
served to explain why the great kingdom collapsed, leaving the way
open for Islam to resume its march southward in the seventeenth
century. If not the result of the bold, if perhaps misconceived
foreign policy of Aliya Rama Raja in the middle decades of the
sixteenth century, why should this powerful kingdom have so
suddenly and catastrophically crashed? Such a question does not
parody the conventional historiography on Vijayanagara, but it
does draw attention to the false robustness attributed by most
historians to the kingdom and their unwillingness to apprehend the
1 Wd
 is ee ee "*\" >. sisvaw
igFy. ee ul- “se? 5

IMPERIAL COLLAPSE AND AFTERMATH

many limits upon Vijayanagara power and authority even in its

heyday.

RAMA RAJA’S RISE AND DIPLOMACY

None probed these limits so completely or so ruthlessly as Rama
Raja, son-in-law of Krishnadevaraya, contender against the latter’s
chosen successor, Achyutadevaraya, and the most powerful Vijaya-
nagara lord of the mid-sixteenth century.
His father, Aravidi Bukka, was a major player in the dangerous
game of usurpation at the time of Saluva Narasimha. Even more
dangerously, Aravidu Bukka shifted his loyalty to the rising Tuluva
nayakas before they snatched the throne from Saluva Narasimha’s
son. With what in other times might have been deemed sedition,
Rama Raja appears to have served for a time as commander in the
army of the Golkonda sultanate as other Rayalaseema chiefs did and
were to do again. Then, with his father, he shifted allegiance to the
Tuluvas and served Krishnadevaraya at the same lofty rank as his
father. As acommander of the Raya’s army he distinguished himself
against the Orissan Gajapati and also in campaigns against Bijapur
and Golkonda. Having married into the royal family as well as being
widely regarded as a suitable candidate for the throne, Rama Raja
was supported by a broad coalition of magnates to succeed in
preference to the two brothers of Krishnadevaraya, Tirumala and
Achyutadevaraya. The latter was designated as his successor just
before Krishnadevaraya died, and at the same time Rama Raja was
appointed his chief minister. When Krishnadevaraya died in 1529,
the powerful coalition backing Rama Raja, including many of his
kinsmen, challenged the late king’s decision and openly supported
Rama Raja’s enthronement.
Twice thwarted, it is hardly surprising that when Achyutadeva-
raya died in 1542Rama Raja should again have been pressing against
the royal gates of Vijayanagara nor that by then he should have been
successful. But this success required raising the military stakes even
higher to overcome his opponents. Unhesitatingly he did this by
entering into an agreement with the sultan of Bijapur. The latter was
to join in the struggle against the still powerful allies of Achyutade-
varaya, the Salakarajus, who now supported the candidacy of their

Er
 Lie RR RENE
5Se
between thetwocoalitions
—atGandikota,
Penukonda.
Ku
and Adoni—beforesuccesscameto RamaRaja,and this was only _
after his ally Ibhrahim Adil Shahi entered the fray. In 1543 the —
adolescent Sadasivarayawas crowned and Rama Raja was declared
his regent.
To the older nucleus of the regent’s power, consisting of the
powerful chiefs who had followed his father, were added his two
seasoned warrior brothers, Venkatadri and Tirumala, and his own
five sons and other kinsmen. All were given high posts as governors,
often replacing Brahman officers; this fortified the coalition of
chiefs on whom Rama Raja had long depended and who provided
the troops and their commanders for his strong rule over the great
peninsular territory that acknowledged the sovereignty of the
youthful Sadasivaraya. When that unfortunate boy attained his
majority in 1550,he was deposed, possibly imprisoned, and Rama
Raja began to rule in his own name.
Even before this, however, Rama Raja had launched new imperial
initiatives on two fronts. Early in his regency, he sought a more
secure imperial presence in the far south where nayaka control over
Madurai was being consolidated. Rama Raja’s aim was not to abort
the latter development, but to check growing Portuguese influence
along both rich trade coasts at the southern tip of the peninsula. To
frustrate this, in 1544he dispatched a large army under his nephew
Vithala to punish the Travancore raja Unni Varma for encouraging
Portuguese encroachments and for refusing to transmit a portion of
the trade tribute gained from the Portuguese to Vijayanagara.
Vithala was assisted in the campaign by Visvanatha and his son
Krishnappa, the nayaka rulers of Madurai, and the successful
progress of the campaign against the Portuguese and the Travancore
raja can be traced in inscriptions of the time as well as from Jesuit
records of Unni Varma’s Portuguese ally. As a preliminary to this
campaign, Rama Raja had taken the precaution of proclaiming direct
rule over Tirunelveli, thereby denying it to either Madurai or to
Tranvancore, both of which regimes sought control of the central
Tambraparni basin. After victories on the west coast, Vithala led his
army across the peninsula, seizing the port of Tuticorin; he

114
 eS memes Lee ey Semgee, Ne ie emmy(mrs T
5
‘ yi 7 + y : Fe ¢ ¢ yd 3
ees IMPERIAL COLLAPSE AND AFTERMATH J

_remained in the far south for a decade longer in order to forestall a

renewal of Portuguese penetrations on the Coromandel coast. That
Vithala made Tiruchirapalli, rather than Madurai, his head-
quarters during these years suggests that neither he nor his mentor
Rama Raja were much concerned about the ambitions of the
Madurai nayakas. No efforts were made to deflect the consolidation
of their authority suggesting that such a large and independent
authority in distant Tamil country was not seen as a threat to or
departure from the political arrangements thought proper and
desirable under Vijayanagara.
The second front on which Rama Raja sought to establish greater
imperial control was north of Vijayanagara. Here the game was
more dangerous and, in the end, disastrous for the Rayas.
From the beginning, Vijayanagara kings had looked to northern
Karnataka as a potential zone of authority; in this sense, as well as in
their early temple building, theirs was a Karnatak kingdom. Vijaya-
nagara inscriptions are found in northern Karnataka and in southern
Maharashtra until the fifteenth century. However, the early
Bahmani sultans Muhammed I and Mujahid (c. 1358-78) waged
such successful wars for this territory that during the fifteenth
century the Tungabhadra became a boundary between the two
kingdoms, with the interfluvial tract of Raichur constituting a buffer
that changed hands frequently. Krishnadevaraya’s early sixteenth-
century campaigns put Raichur in Vijayanagara hands for a time and
provided a base from which Rama Raja launched his more
aggressive northern campaign.
A combination of high skill and arrogance characterised Rama
Raja’s policies toward the Muslim sultanates of the Deccan in the
judgements of most historians. The skill of his diplomacy produced
an extended period —over a decade —of Vijayanagara hegemony in
northern Karnataka, opening a new frontier of opportunity for
warrior chiefs devoted to his interests. However, that balance of
power hegemony sowed seeds of the bitter fruit of 1565 when the
great city was humiliated and destroyed.
The five sultanate regimes that partitioned the Bahmani Deccan
territory around the beginning of the fifteenth century were given
an unforgettable infancy at the hands of Krishnadevaraya. The
Nizam Shahis of Ahmednagar, the Imad Shahis of Berar, the Barid

DS
 ~ later.
Each core toreplace Bahmani euthone and res le
x- against
southward march ofIslam i nthep eninsula;bute achalso
sah .
internal enemies. This not only delayed the resumption of —
southern expansion to the verdant river valleys to the south, with .
the prospects of wealth unknown in the dry upland of the Deccan,
but regularly threatened the existence of each regime. Krishnadeva-
_ raya proved the implacable barrier to the realisation of their dreams
of expansion southward after he smashed their alliance against him
in 1510.That victory also won Raichur back and the possibilities of
deeper penetrations by Vijayanagara into northern Karnataka and
southern M~rathi country.
When Krishnadevaraya died and the turmoil of Achyutadeva-
4 =. raya’s succession and Chellappa’s rebellion still raged, the Deccan
ee sultans struck back. Quili Qutb Shah successfully attacked the
a fortress of Kondavidu in 1530, but was forced to abandon it by
ey Achyutadevaraya’s vigorous counter-attack led by his governor of
ee the eastern rajya, Salakaraju Tirumalayadeva, acting with the
a powerful local chief of the Velugoti family which dominated the
: - Venkatagiri area from the thirteenth century. While Achyutadeva-
of raya was thus engaged on his north-east frontier and soon after with
= Rama Raja’s attempted coup and Chellappa’s rebellion in the south,
> Ismail Adil Shah of Bijapur seized the Vijayanagara forts at Raichur
and Mudkal acting in concert with Amir Barid of Bidar. The two
allies fell out soon after and therefore relieved Achyutadevaraya of
the threat poised against the city itself. Shortly thereafter, more
breathing- space was created by the death of Ismail Adil Shah in 1534
and a succession struggle there. To add to these convoluted politics,
one of the candidates in the Bijapur succession struggle, Asad Khan
of Belgaum, on the border of northern Karnataka and southern
Maharashtra, entered into an agreement with Achyutadevaraya and
the Portuguese to support his candidacy for the Bijapur throne.
Achyutadevaraya duly invaded Raichur both to regain his territory
and simultaneously to defeat enemies of Asad Khan. A recon-
ciliation between the new Bijapur sultan and Asad Khan ended the
possibility for Achyutadevaraya to achievemore than this restoration
of Raichur. There matters stood when Achyutadevaraya died in
116
 he ae rye f Cay yh io. Seles |i pc ad Parent ae ae, wha
Oeearn as
f © if | -7 . ¥ 5 .
ey 7S
IMPERIAL COLLAPSE AND AFTERMATH
1542 and Rama Raja became the virtual ruler of Vijayanagara as
regent.
The momentary dissaffection of Asad Khan exposes a deeper
characteristic of politics of the era, whether among Muslims or
Hindus. That was the constant grasping about by great and small
lords of the Deccan for advantage through coalitions and alliances, a
strategy which recognised no frontiers between the Hindu kingdom
and its supposed Muslim adversaries to the north. Contemporary
Muslim chronicles and accounts later gathered by Colin Mackenzie
document such activity and its consequences in the grand alliance of
sultans formed against Rama Raja’s Vijayanagara and, after his
defeat in 1565, the cynical and violent efforts that were made by
Vijayanagara grandees to put themselves into the same regency role
as that held by Rama Raja, that is as the greatest generalissimo of
South India.
One set of complicated diplomatics began in 1543or 1544,just as
Rama Raja, as regent, took direction of the kingdom. The sultan of
Ahmadnagar, Burhan Khan (reign 1509-53), and Ibrahim Adil Shah
of Bijapur agreed that Ahmadnagar would invade and seize territory
from his enemy the sultan of Bidar while Ibrahim would invade
Vijayanagara. Each thus sought to assure that the other ally would
not be free to seize their lands while they were engaged in plunder-
ing other neighbours. Rama Raja foiled this, cleverly, by a stunning
long-distance strike against Ahmednagar where he managed to
capture Burhan Khan. The latter was easily persuaded to ally
himself with Rama Raja and with the new sultan of Golkonda,
Jamshid (reign 1543-50), for an invasion of Bijapur. Ibrahim Adil
Shah met this danger by entering into a separate peace with Rama
Raja through the concession of territory; this freed him to deal with
his less threatening Muslim enemies whom he defeated. In 1549,
another intricate, machiavellian dance was begun with Biyapur,
again, the chief prospective victim. This time the allies of Rama Raja
held fast permitting him, with an army led by Sadasiva Nayaka of
Ikkeri and by Burhan Khan, to defeat Ibrahim at Kalyani, the
ancient Chalukyan capital.
Rama Raja added to his weapons against Muslim enemies by
sheltering a Golkonda prince named Ibrahim from the wrath of his
sultan father, and when the latter died, Rama Raja provided the

Li7
 brothe
theseefforts
toeratean‘llyinCe Golkonda.
oe RajaHdecides
aving
mac
to:
take up the cause of a now weakened Bijapur against Golkondaa
few years later. This was not the first time that Rama Raja sought to
arbitrate power there, as his arrangement with Asad Khan and the.
Portuguese some time before indicate.
However, in 1555, Rama Raja shifted his policy, and when his
Golkonda protégé, Ibrahim, and the sultan of Ahmadnagar invaded
Bijapur, he supported Bijapur, perhaps hoping thus to make it a
client. Still later, Rama Raja struck again against his protégé the
sultan of Golkonda, by unleashing close supporters in Rayalaseema
to seize southern Golkonda territories for themselves. The chiefs of
Kandbir, Rajamundry, and Venkatagiri took Golkonda forts and
their adjoining territories at Kondapalli, Ellore, and Gandikota. The
Vijayanagara regent tried to strike even closer to the heart of his
erstwhile protégé by fomenting a conspiracy among the Telugu
commanders of garrison troops (nayakawari) of forts in the centre
of Golkonda; they agreed to hand their forts to Rama Raja’ssoldiers
when the latter invaded Golkonda. This conspiracy was discovered
by Ibrahim and thwarted by a large-scale massacre of Telugu
garrison soldiers.

DENOUEMENT

For twenty years Rama Raja’s daring and ruthless policy had
worked well. Vijayanagara was seldom exposed to the dangers the
city had known from the Bahmanis during the fifteenth century. To
achieve all this, Rama Raja had to have a strike-force able to
intervene in affairs north of Vijayanagara on short notice, and this
was supplied bya set of chiefs in Karnataka and Rayalaseema willing
to risk war for a portion of sultanate territory near their chiefdoms
and the loot that came with seizing a sultanate city. Over the years,
his men held major parts of Dharwar and Bankapur and many lesser
places in Raichur and elsewhere, and manya chiefly temple must
have been built with the pillage from Bijapur or Ahmadnagar. The
main commanders of this force were his brothers —Tirumala and
Venkatadri —and Sadasiva Nayaka of Ikkeri, his Marlborough. All
118
hadbecome caperin
inause
ae lee bythen, evencoederr
gunners were
foot-soldiers
Portuguese
orMuslim,
of the Muslim
just
regimes
a sthelight
horse-and
were often Marathas.
Moreover, Muslim chroniclers of the time were persuaded that
Rama Raja’s great advantage over any of his Muslim rivals was his
treasury burgeoning from customs collected from the ports and
towns of Vijayanagara. Such wealth both necessitated a recon-
ciliation among the sultans and offered the prize of permanent
possession of its sources.
Rama Raja’s great game could not be played much longer, for
he was now, in 1564, eighty. Anticipating the retribution that must
come against Vijayanagara he had added to the defences of the city
and other fortresses south of the Tungabhadra. He cannot have been
surprised when the sultans agreed to end their long, divisive
quarrels.
The initiative for this diplomatic revolution came from the most
recent heavy losers in Rama Raja’s game —Husain Nizam Shah of
Ahmadnagar and Ibrahim Qutb Shah of Golkonda. The latter
achieved the most difficult task of persuading Husain and Ali Adil
Shah of Bijapur to give up their struggles in Maratha country and
to seal their amity with a royal marriage. When Rama Raja learned
of the grand alliance against him, he produced one of his own,
calling upon dependent chiefs near and far, including the nayaka of
Madurai, Krishnappa, who had recently succeeded his father Visva-
natha. Krishnappa is said to have sent his able minister and chief
agent of his consolidation of power in Madurai, Ariyanatha Muda-
liar, with a large force to join Rama Raja as he marched northward to
meet the assembled Muslim force on the Krishna River, eighty miles
north of Vijayanagara. There, on the south bank of the river, in late
January 1565, the Vijayanagara armies were at last decisively
defeated, Rama Raja and many of his kinsmen and dependants were
killed and the city opened to sacking by a combination of Golkonda
soldiers and poligars from nearer to Vijayanagara.
Rama Raja’s warrior brother Tirumala survived the battle and
brought the remnants of the once great army to Viyayanagara.Soon
after, at the approach of the celebrating Golkonda army, he sought a
place of greater security. This may have been Penukonda, a long-
time royal stronghold, 120 miles and eight days’ journey south-east

119
 The
Muslim;
Poncaes apat oftheter:
vntaediatel
peicemost
tory that had been seizedby RamaRaja during the previous twenty
years, but certain placesremained in Hindu hands for a longer time:
Adoni was held until 1568and Dharwar and Bankapur until 1573..
- After looting and a brief occupation, Vijayanagara was left to a
future of neglect which has only been lifted recently by archae-
ologists and art historians working at Hampi. Less than a year later,
the sultanate confederates fell out. Bijapur attacked Ahmadnagar
and Golkonda joined forces with the latter. Some contemporary
accounts even relate how Tirumala was approached to become a
co-belligerent against Bijapur in the resurgent struggles! This last
scheme did not materialise, leaving Tirumala free to commence his
rule of the kingdom, nominally as regent, for Sadasivaraya was still
alive and remained so until perhaps 1575. Vijayanagara appears to
have been reoccupied by Tirumala for a time after his victors
departed, but his efforts to repopulate the city were frustrated by
attacks upon it by Bijapur soldiers who might have been invited
there by Peda Tirumala, Rama Raja’s son, who opposed his uncle’s
seizure of the regency. Tirumala may also have decided to leave
Vijayanagara because of the support that Peda Tirumala, his
nephew, enjoyed there. In any case, he moved back to Penukonda
where the court was to be.

THE KINGDOM DYING AND DIVIDED

Tirumala, a younger son of Aravidi Bukka, ruled as regent until

1572; his son, Sri Ranga, ruled as king as did his grandson, Venkata
I, who succeeded in 1586, and Sri Ranga H, in 1614. In 1630, the
royal line reverted to the descendants of Rama Raja through Peda
Tirumala, with Venkata III and Sri Ranga III ruling until 1650. Thus
did the Aravidu dynasty survive for a century the defeat of 1565 and
the flight from Vijayanagara. For the most part these late kings were
pathetic pawns in the struggles among the great Telugu houses
either to seize and revive the Vijayanagara throne or to prevent
others from doing so. Not surprisingly therefore, the later kings had
to seek the goodwill, or self-interest, of sometime Muslim allies

120
 »Bae eee cere;PIERRE?)
Die
tat
a eeREA,
tage ea)bbSisay
Sib
"IMPERIAL
i iheak
‘AND
AFTERMATH
| against other Hindu and Muslim foes. Neither proved Heike
instruments for restoring the great kingdom, of which only a shell
remained. Stull,that was enough for some imperial grandees to fight
two civil wars, while at the same time, others were establishing new
kingdoms whose legitimacy derived from the ‘Raya samasthanam’.
The latter included the kingdoms of the nayakas of Karnataka and
Tamil country and the hundreds of ‘little kingdoms’ of poligars and
other smaller sovereignties.
The nayaka regimes appear to have come into existence around
1530, well before the defeat of Aliya Rama Raja’s army on the
Krishna River and the sacking of Vijayanagara. Though some
historians haggle about when it is appropriate to speak of these
purported Vijayanagara ‘successors’, there is general agreement that
it might well have been around 1530. Given this agreement, there is a
paradox that has never been faced, much less resolved, in Vijayana-
gara historiography. It is this: at the moment that the kingdom was
at its greatest, during the reign of Krishnadevaraya, who died in
1529, ‘successor’ regimes existed, and the kingdom, or ‘empire’, was
beginning to be partitioned into independent states consisting of
some of its richest parts: Tanjavur, Madurai, Gingee, and Ikkeri.
Obviously, this contradiction can itself be dissolved only by con-
ceding that the Vijayanagara kingdom, at the moment when its
central authority was greatest, was a weakly-centralised polity, one
in which the most important of its parts were regarded by con-
temporaries as independent in every respect save that they could not
claim to be fully-fledged kingdoms. This last condition was to be
achieved not long after the time of Aliya Rama Raja. But even during
a time of his vigorous authority, in the middle decades of the
sixteenth century, we have seen that in relation to the Madurai
nayakas, neither he nor his nephew, Vithala, attemped to alter the
considerable independent power that was being consolidated at
Madurai under its nayaka rulers. Presumably it was not deemed a
breach of Vijayanagara royal authority for Visvanatha Nayaka and
his son Krishnappa to exercise independence over a principality of
over 36,000 square miles.
The crucial element of the history of the final century of Vijayana-
gara by successors of Rama Raja, descendants of Aravidi Bukka, was
the struggle to reconsolidate a degree of central authority against

12m
 Hce
aah eour.
andolkonde:
Both
nae Eis since 3pre
ethele aa’LX
foundation
century
before,
become
moreeffectively
centralised
regimes
than|
Vijayanagarain the sense that both had arrived at stable, hegemonic
superiority over local chieftains. Both now sought to extend their .
authority southward in order to enlarge the base from which wealth
could be appropriated from agricultural production and internal
commerce or from the rich trade emporia on both coasts of the
peninsula. By the late seventeenth century, this aggrandising expan-
sion had been turned to a desperate flight of these sultans from the
encroaching Mughals who soon after ended the careers of both.
After the defeat of 1565, two events signalled the futility of
reconstituting a single, powerful kingdom. One wasa civil war that
began in 1614 and lasted for a decade. This involved scions of the
royal Aravidu family for control of a throne which now possessed
neither a capital nor evena fixed territory. The war began with the
death of Venkata II, a nephew of Rama Raja and second son of the
king Tirumala. Venkata had ruled from 1586to 1614;his designated
successor, Sri Ranga, failed to win the support of many imperial
grandees on grounds of his doubtful legitimacy and capabilities.
Many also considered Sri Ranga too dependent upon Raghunatha,
the Nayaka ruler of Tanjavur, who had links to the displaced Tuluva
family through his father and founder of the Tanjavur nakayaship,
Sevappa, a brother-in-law of Achyutadevaraya. Such a connection
placed Raghunatha outside the charmed circle of kinsmen of Aravidi
Bukka. High Telugu imperial families thus were divided between
supporters of the new king, Sri Ranga, led by Yachama Nayudu, or
Nayaka, of the Velugoti family of Venkatagiri in Nellore, and
another faction of grandees who supported another doubtful son of
Venkata II, Ramadeva. The latter faction was led by a brother of the
favourite queen of Venkata named Jagga Raya whose family held
sway in eastern Kurnool.
Jagga Raya seized the initiative in a ferocious manner by murd-
ering Sri Ranga and his family, an act which apparently lost him
enough supporters to cause his defeat in a battle against Yachama
Nayaka in 1616. This was fought on the Kaveri, near Tiruchira-
palli, possibly because of the alliances betweeen Telugu royal
I22
 ER i iy
. ee .'
Ae” a

aspirantsandtheir Tamilallies.Yachamahad the supportof the

Z nayaka of Tanjavur whereas Jagga Raya had the support of the
nayaka Madurai, Muttuvirappa, and the nayaka of Gingee, Krish-
nappa. The only gainers from this warfare, in which Jagga Raya
died, were the nayaka of Tanjavur who acquired valuable territory
from neighbouring Gingee and the nayakas (or rajas) of Mysore and
Ikkeri, who, by remaining aloof from this struggle, were free to
strengthen their respective holds over Karnataka. Finally, there was
the sultan of Bijapur for whom the warfare and divisions among the
most powerful Telugu warlords opened new southern tracts in
western Kurnool to his conquests. Any possible recrudescence of a
powerful Vijayanagara was thereafter sealed by another period of
blood-letting among the great households of Vijayanagara.
This occurred after the turbulent reign of Ramadeva in 1630.
Then, the latter’s choice of successor was contested by another of
Rama Raja’s relatives, and for five years longer the great Telugu
households fought each other with nayaka kings of Tamil country —
Tanjavur, Madurai, and Gingee supporting one set of Telugu
grandees and Chamaraja Wodeyar of Mysore, and at one point the
Dutch, supporting another faction.
The nayakas of Ikkeri in northern Karnataka, who had played a
vital role in Rama Raja’s adventures in the Deccan, stayed out of
these two wars. During the first, in 1614,Venkatappa Nayaka (reign
1586-1629) opportunistically extended his power over neighbour-
ing chiefs, bringing the Ikkeri kingdom to its apogee, with control
over all of the Kanara coast (Tulu rajya) and a great part of the
adjacent upland (Male rajya). His successor Virabhadra Nayaka
(reign 1629-45) had little choice about fishing the waters stirred by
the second Vijayanagara succession war of the 1630s, for he was
preoccupied with recalcitrant chiefs whose powers his father had
sought to expunge, but who now strove to wrest back lost authority
and lands. In addition, Virabhadra had to fend off a usurpation of his
throne by a royal kinsman, Virappa Nayaka. During the course of
this second epoch of wars, Ikkeri and other Karnatak lords also
faced two invasions by Bijapur, just as Telugu and Tamil magnates
faced a similar onslaught by Golkonda into the Coromandel plain.
Lethal, fratricidal warfare among the great households of Vijaya-
nagara during the middle 1630s stemmed not only from the determi-

123
 ee ne a8 sheTee ee war,
sian i|
inflected strategiesofallwho inherited aapaaneSaneireinthe— *
mre

southern peninsula. Thisw ast hedegree towhich

become the basis upon which all great households
kinship
constituted
had
and
— as

preserved their power and formed alliances.

Aliya Rama Raja appears responsible for this patrimonialism. At
the outset of his direct rule of the kingdom in 1542, after Achyu- a
tadevaraya’s death, he replaced the Brahman commanders of major
fortresses of the Karnatak-Andhra heartland of the kingdom with
his kinsmen; he permitted more autonomy to the Telugu warrior
chiefs, upon whom his power depended, than they had in the reigns
of Krishnadevaraya and Achyutadevaraya, when significant auth-
ority had been vested in the Brahman servants of the kings in Tamil
country as well as in Andhra. These Brahmans were not ritual
specialists, nor sectarian leaders, nor scholars, but men trained in
scribal, accounting, and military skills. They had stood above the
framework of kinship affinities and allegiances of territorial chief-
taincies in the core of the kingdom. This made them particularly
suitable administrative and military instruments for Krishnadeva-
raya’s daunting task of establishing royal authority in those tracts
which his brilliant military victories won for his new dynasty. There
seems to have been a backlash of chiefly authority against the
restrictions imposed by Krishnadevaraya, and this was nurtured and
exploited by Rama Raja, whose formidable coalition of Telugu
chiefs was united by marriage ties among each other and often with
the ruling family itself. Rama Raja, it is recalled, was married to a
sister of Krishnadevaraya, and the Salakaraju family, upon whom
Achyutadevaraya depended for his throne and his life against the
cabals of Rama Raja and the rebellion of Chellappa, also had
marriage links with the ruling family.
Rama Raja’s reversal of Krishnadevaraya’s policies for creating a
more centralised regime meant a return to the earliest days of the
kingdom when the five brothers of Sangama ruled the parts
independently, except now there was a strong focus of royal
authority in Rama Raja. He placed all of the parts of the kingdom
under his sons and gave the high command of his army to his two

124
 ALCOLLAPSE Co
AND

le brothers,Tirumalaand Venkatadri.Thiswas a familybusiness

of British rule, in the late eighteenth century. As long as Rama Raja

held hegemonic royal power, he was willing for distant great
households like Madurai and Ikkeri to grow stronger in return for
. their contributions to his armies. Beneath the power of Rama Raja
_ and his weaker and beleaguered successors, patrimonial relations
; came to dominate all others as the basis of rule, and patrimonial
politics —the wars among the great households —prevented either
resistance to the encroachments of the sultanate regimes or the first
flutterings of intervention of Europeans in the great political games
of the time.
During the middle of the sixteenth century, Bijapur followed the
lead of Vijayanagara in concluding treaties with the Portuguese by
offering trade concessions in return for an uninterrupted supply of
war-horses and other trade goods; this reversed several decades of
attempts by the Muslims to drive the Portuguese from the western
coast. In 1639, during the second civil war among Vijayanagara
grandees, the Portuguese were enlisted as military allies by the
nayakas of Madurai while the Dutch Company sided with the raja of
Ramnad in one phase of the war; at the same time, Venkatapappa
Nayaka of Ikkeri reversed his predecessors’ opposition to the
Portuguese trade monopoly on the Kanara coast.
Patrimonialism and trade became the two historical motifs of this
last phase of Vijayanagara. The first had become the essential
condition of politics in the post-Rama Raja era owing, in part, to the
latter’s preference for (or obligation to follow) this sort of politics
and, in part owing to the fading significance of a ruling family which
had no territorial base of its own as its kings fled successively to
Penukonda, Chandragiri, and Vellore. The beleaguered kings had
become a burden to those magnates, like the raja of Mysore, who
occasionally appeared to be committed to preserving a viable
Vijayanagara kingship and who therefore supported one or another
of the successors of Rama Raya.
The latter’s twelve-year campaign for the throne after Krishnade-
varaya’s death meant successive additions to his coalition of chiets
and concessions to chiefly power. By the time he had secured the

125
 rom
ebove
through
asystem
ofSond
forts
beds
abn and
a x belowby supportingthe local rulingcredentialsof the many—
<a -poligarswhogarrisonedroyalfortsandheldsmallchiefdoms.The
Piaey tiger of chiefly power that Rama Raja rode successfully threw off his. *=
weaker successors. Now, great and small chiefs could no longer base a
their regimes on service ties to great kings, for there were none.
Bereft of personal ties with and service under great kings, ‘subord-
inate chiefs’ were left with little else but a reversion to an earlier
form of ritual obedience to shadowy Vijayanagara kings, while
ee
relying concretely upon the unifying relations and idioms of
kinship. Territorial magnates sought to reinforce the patrimonialism
that was thrust upon them; they contrived ideological and
institutional surrogates for that earlier provided by the Vijayanagara
kings. Anew form of kingship was evolving during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, one that took its principles from the late
Vijayanagaraera of Rama Raja rather than that of Krishnadevaraya.

DHE LATE MONAR GH YI NTERNATLLONAE

TRADE AND REVENUE
Before discussing these new forms of monarchy, it is necessary to
return to the world of commerce that provided development and
therefore made it possible in the form it took then. The recent
doctoral thesis of Sanjay Subrahmanyam on trade and the regional
economy of South India from 1550 to 1650 provides valuable new
documentation on the relationship of overseas, coastal, and inland
trade and permits a somewhat better assessment of the political
economy of the late Vijayanagara era when great commerce and
changing political forms went hand in hand.
What is known of the international trade of the peninsula —its
major ports, traders, and commodities —is far greater than what is
known about the coastal and inland trade upon which it depended.
There were always two different sets of commodities: high-value
pepper, ginger, sandal, and fine textiles, and low-value paddy,
timber, and coir. These commodity sets were complementary since
the international trade vessels plying from Pulicat or Masulipatam,

126
| Baehin or Bhatkal bby on the coastal and inland trades for —

part of their cargoes and for provisioning while on shore. Therefore,

when the international port of Pulicat declined after the sack of
Vijayanagara, it did so slowly and continued to service established
commercial networks of coasters and bullock trains from the
interior. The supersession of Pulicat as the primary Coromandel
port of Vijayanagara by Masulipatam, Golkonda’s chief port, was
hastened and encouraged by the direct interest of the Qutb Shahi
sultans in trade and pilgrim passage as well as by the early interest of
Portuguese and Dutch traders. Masulipatam’s situation and the
trade attracted by its large population of 100,000 by the end of the
sixteenth century helped to make it the major Coromandel port
until it was overtaken by Madras around 1680.To provision its large
population, Masulipatam had to be supplied from often distant
places. After 1570,supplies for the town came from coastal Orissa in
an annual flotilla of some forty ships bearing rice and other grains,
edible oils, and other food-stuffs and carrying back raw cotton,
tobacco (introduced here and in Tirunelveli by the Portuguese at
about the same time), iron, and crucible steel smelted in the
Masulipatam hinterland of Telangana.
Frustratingly little new information is available on two other
aspects of the trade systems of the time: who were the major Indian
participants in the international and related trades and what were the
fiscal demands upon these trades?
From Subrahmanyam we learn that coastal traders differed from
those involved in overseas trading. On the south-west coast, long-
distance traders were foreign Muslims (parades) whereas the coastal
and local trade were in the hands of local Muslims, or Mapillas. On
the Kanara coast to the north, Konkani-speaking Saraswat Brah-
mans were the most important coastal traders with minor roles for
other Hindu and Jaina merchants, but overseas trade was dominated
by Arabs, Jews, Armenians, and some Christian offsprings of
Portuguese miscegenation. In northern Coromandel, most coastal
and inland traders were Telugus —Balija Nayudus, Beri Chettis, and
Komatis —and in southern Coromandel ports, indigenous Marak-
kayar Muslims were important.
Subrahmanyam called the most important of all Coromandel
trader ‘portfolio capitalists’.This was a recognition of their complex

£27
A eae oi iesare companies. eee suck rrieeell
alte,
ofthe
aS
earlyseventeenth century
were the T eluguBalija brothersAchyu-
tappa and Chinnana who were at the apex of internal and external —
a

trades on their own accounts and served the Dutch as brokers and:
bankers. In addition to all that, they also held tax-farms under
Golkonda, the rajas of Chandragiri (who were scions of the
Vijayanagara royal family) and other local rulers. Not surprisingly,
this family of merchants provide the best-documented information
on the linkage between the great trades of the age and fiscal systems
and demands of various Coromandel regimes.
By the early seventeenth century, when Achyutappa and Chin-
nana and their kinsmen strode the commercial stage, there was no
single political regime over the peninsula that the Vijayanagara kings
had once called their own. But, neither then, when a Vijayanagara
king claimed the entire peninsula, nor later, did royal treasuries
regularly benefit from customs receipts from expanding commerce.
Subrahmanyam finds no basis on which to support the notions of
some scholars that anything besides tribute payments from foreign
traders was realised by Vijayanagara kings; he also, with good
reason, denies propositions about ‘forced commercialisation’ as
Vijayanagara state policy. The benefits of commerce and its profits
were obvious to all who had participated in commodity production
and exchange in the southern peninsula whether Indian or foreign.
A distinction less fully developed by Subrahmanyam and others
pertains to the fiscal implications of there being two fundamental
production zones in the peninsula. On the riverine plains and along
the coasts there were established production and crafting centres
which permitted lucrative revenue-farming contracts. Here were
valuable and viable circuits of production and exchange into which
profitable investment could be made from the revenues that tax-
farmers contracted to collect on behalf of the powerful Golkonda or
the weaker nayaka regimes of Gingee or Chandragiri. However, in
the upland zone of dry and mixed cultivation, the same level of
production and exchange did not exist; all there was too dispersed
for ‘portfolio capitalists’ like Achyutappa to combine tax collecting,
agricultural trading, irrigation investment, and long-distance ship-
128
 st auto - wep lela
nd banking intoarate hater profitable operation.This
o
nal distinction depends, of course, on seeing revenue--farming, as.
~ Subrahmanyam rightly does, playing a constructive economic role,
not a parasitical or extortionate one. In the extensive dry upland
where large mercantile capitals were more difficult to mobilise, the
role of entrepreneurs was more modest and was taken by local big
men and chiefs. It was they who set up markets (petta/) in towns and
organised the weekly fairs (sandat) that attracted merchants and ies.
consumers; it was these local big men who provided inducements to ee
weavers and other producers to settle and work in small towns and 7]
aeee industrial villages; and it was they who derived the revenue benefits
ee bs
from such entrepreneurship.
It is important to appreciate that such mercantilist activities were %
essential to those who dominated the upland agrarian frontier of the ie
_ Vijayanagara age. For them, land revenue was not, nor could it be, 7%
__ the sole source of money income required to meet military and other
costs. Soldiers, especially foreign mercenaries, were paid in cash as
were many indigenous fighters, but most local soldiers were given Pe
land on which very low revenue was demanded. Chikkadeveraya of
Mysore followed the latter practice in the seventeenth century,
which caused a widespread uprising of ordinary cultivators led by
Virasaiva priests (Jangamas); that was bloodily suppressed and
resulted in the flight of Virasaivas from southern Karnataka.
By 1800, when British records became available, the extent to
which such concessionary arrangements of the land-tax to soldiers
existed is documented in the old Vijayanagara heartland and else-
where as historical landed privilege called by the Persian term in’am.
In 1805, Thomas Munro reported that over half of the 3.3 million
acres of cultivated land in the Ceded Districts of Madras was held
under tenures that paid almost no land revenue, and this was after
efforts by several Muslim regimes during the eighteenth century —
Tipu sultan and the nizam of Hyderabad —to claw back alienated
revenue for their own uses.
Such massive alienations of revenue lands as reported by Munro
in the Ceded Districts of Madras were matched, if not exceeded, by
the tax-free status of lands held by temples and other religious
institutions throughout the southern peninsula. This must cast
serious doubt upon the persistently expressed view of scholars that

129
~mixedRalivinonwere
irrigatedBy:ane orsrwells; theses
heritable
holdings
ofvariousprivileged
groups:priestlyfamilies,
headmenoraccountant
families,
ortheywereheldasthecommunal ©
propertyofdominant
cultivating
families
ofa locality,
onshares
whichwereperiodically
reapportioned
among families.
This meant that most regimes of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were dependent on taxes raised from trade and industrial
production to meet their needs. The sixteenth-century findings
from the town of Aluvakonda, discussed in the preceding chapter,
supports such a proposition, for it was found there that a large
portion of the money revenue upon land was granted by chiefs of
that town and territory as income to temples, and the largest
category of revenue payers were industrial producers and mer-
chants.
The nayaka kingdoms established during the sixteenth century
offer other examples of the same processes, though each was
organised in different ways. Yet more striking examples of how
cultivated lands, which allegedly supported state regimes, were
actually alienated by their rulers come from among the last of
regimes to be established under the auspices of Vijayanagara in
Ramnad and Pudukkottai.

THE NAYAKA KINGDOMS

Vijayanagara historians designate as ‘nayaka kingdoms’ three in

Tamil country and two in Karnataka: Madurai, Tanjavur, and
Gingee and Ikkeri and Mysore. These regimes are distinguished
from all others in the southern peninsula in being larger than others
and in enjoying a special historical significance in the minds of
modern scholars. Madurai under Tirumala Nayaka, 1623-59, and
Ikkeri under Venkatappa Nayaka, 1586-1629, were as extensive as
the heartland of the Vijayanagara kingdom under Krishnadevaraya.
Tanjavur and Mysore were not so large, but both had been and were
to be kingdoms in their own rights, the former with its Chola past
and Maratha future, and Mysore with its future kings who patron-
ised modern historical scholarship. The standing of Gingee appears

130
 Soe tA ee ele ab od Be eat Rees een A ea ae ees ci oe Pe eee

IMPERIAL COLLAPSE AND AFTERMATH

to rest on a Tamil-language history prepared in 1803 by a

descendant of the shepherd chief who founded and first fortified
Gingee. Narayana Pillai was encouraged to compose his Karnataka
Rajakkal Savistara Charitram by the first British collector of the
Gingee region, William Macleod, a military colleague of Thomas
Munro who was also assigned administrative tasks; Narayana
Pillai’s history became part of the corpus of Mackenzie documents.
These several regimes share another important attribute: they
were not located in Andhra and therefore they were not centrally
involved in the coalitions of Telugu grandees and chiefs who fought
over control of the Vijayanagara throne during the seventeenth
century. Still, all of the nayakas, except those of Ikkeri, took some
part in the complex and violent machinations of would-be succes-
sors of Rama Raja, and like other participants in these dangerous
politics, the nayakas sought to avert the re-emergence of a strong
Vijayanagara king capable of reducing their authority and territorial
ambitions.
Another attribute which the nayaka regimes are thought to share
by many historians is that they were ‘successor states’ in the same
sense that Avadh and Hyderabad were of the Mughals. But the
nayaka kings were not successors of Vijayanagara; they emerged as
independent polities at the very zenith of the Vijayanagara
monarchy, during the early sixteenth century. However, although
these regimes exhibited clear characteristics of Vijayanagara, they
also differed in important ways from it and from each other
according to political, economic and cultural features of the regions
of their provenance. Apart from the cynical participation of some of
them in the travails of the Vijayanagara kings after the 1565 defeat,
these five kingdoms, like the Vijayanagara order from which they
emerged, were all patrimonial, military regimes; they all found ways
of trenching upon the wealth of commerce and commodity pro-
duction without, however, achieving (or even seeking) direct
control over their regional economies; and they all patronised local
systems of religious affiliation and made themselves masters of
religious institutions. How these tendencies were manifested in the
several nayaka regimes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
was conditioned by particular and prior conditions found in each
region; it was also important that the two Karnataka regimes were

131
 WITAYANREARAeee ae
ruled by indigenous chiefly families,while those of Tamil country
were ruled by Telugus.
Histories of the three Tamil kingdoms were published between
forty and sixty years ago and all sought to soften the charge that
these regimes contributed to the ignominious demise of the Vijaya-
nagara kingdom. Generally, the attempt is to date the independent
rule of each as late as possible and to claim that its nayaka rulers
before that time were loyal ‘governors’ or ‘feudatories’ of the
Vijayanagara kings. But the facts are obstinately otherwise for the
most part. The Ikkeri regime began when Chaudappa founded his
samasthanam at Keladi before 1500 (Ikkeri, six miles away, was
made the seat of its rulers around 1560 and remained so until 1640
when Bijapur invasions forced the better defences at Bednur, 40
miles from Ikkeri). The last of the eighteen crowned rulers of Ikkeri
was deposed by Haidar Ali Khan in 1763,ending a royal line which
lasted 265 years. The Mysore kingdom was founded bya line of
chiefs whose local authority dated from the same time and was
fostered in the same way by military service to Vijayanagara;
however, the rule of the Wodeyar rajas of Mysore extended into
India’s independent era. The kingdoms of Madurai, Tanjavur, and
Gingee were established less than half a century later by sons of
Vijayanagara military commanders proclaiming themselves kings
and undergoing royal anointment (pattabhisekha).
Little is actually known about the coronation rituals of any of
these kings. Probably, though, the Vijayanagara model was fol-
lowed as it was at Madurai according to the Telugu Rayavachakamu
composed there in the late sixteenth century. Reminiscent of
Vijayanagara coronation rites were the important place of the royal
tutelaries. Krishnadevaraya’s evocation of the divinity of his family
tutelary is described by Portuguese witnesses of the mahanavami
festival at Vijayanagara, and Achyutadevaraya, who was thrice
crowned, invoked the authority of his personal god, Venkatesvara,
at Tirupati, the major territorial Siva at Kalahasti, and the Tuluva
tutelary at Vijayanagara. Also conspicuous in these coronations was
the participation of Brahman ministers of the king, as in the cases of
Krishnadevaraya and his minister, Saluva Timma, in 1509, and later
Ragunatha Nayaka of Tanjavur and his illustriously learned minis-
ter, Govinda Dikshita. However, when kings were made, as Sadasi-

132
 or eet yy
ae ft RR ee ME ee ne
7

IMPERIAL COLLAPSE AND AFTERMATH

varaya was by Rama Raja in 1542, it was the non-Brahman

king-maker, Rama Raja, that played the conspicuous role. The
frequent inscriptional and literary referencesto coronations and also
to the practice of ruling kings installing their sons as heirs-apparent
(yuvaraja) makes a nonsense of the pious reiteration of historians
that the nayakas of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century were
merely royal officials. For the people that they ruled and in the
inscriptions that they caused to be engraved, they were kings, even
though they acknowledged the superior kingship of the rayas.
A widespread, if not universal, royal ceremony which followed
immediately upon the anointing of a maharaja of the Tuluva or
Aravidu lines, or a raja in the nayaka realms, was common food-
taking by the ruler and his closest kinsmen and supporters. This
signified a kind of parity among the participants in the sense of being
members of the same ruling lineage (Sanskrit: varga; Tamil: varuk-
kam). This practice was followed in Madurai and helped to define a
ruling order of princes (Rumara-varukkam) in that kingdom during
the reign of Visvanatha Nayaka, which began in 1529. Madurai’s
nayaka rulers appear in other ways to have been more imitative of
Vijayanagara royal practice than other great households.
But in Madurai, there was more than mere imitation of the rayas,
for the Telugu rulers there seemed to have reached back to a
pre-Vijayanagara method for achieving political solidity. They
resurrected a Kakatiya practice of symbolically associating
territorial chieftains of that realm with its kings by the metaphoric
use of the royal fortress to stand for the realm as a whole. Great
chiefs were notionally made responsible for a bastion of that fortress
and hence for the kingdom as a whole. The inventive Visvanatha
Nayaka recovered another Kakatiya practice by devising a system of
military dependencies during the sixteenth century. ‘Palaiyam’
means military encampment and the keepers of them, called pal-
aiyakkarar in Tamil, were constituted as a formal system of
authority consisting of seventy-two autonomous chiefs —Telugu
and Tamil —who were conceived as a ruling set, each the protector of
a bastion of the Madurai fort and thereby a member of Madurai’s
ruling estate, the kamara-varukkam. Evidence from no other great
household of the sixteenth century quite suggests the degree of
integration of kinship and military and chiefly authority that was

£33
 eeefieae
ha neihet piles nor ee aa innares nayakarealms t 1e
relations
between rajaornayaka andsubordinate chiefswasmore —
openlyconflictful.
-Nayakas in Tanjavur and to a lesser degree in Gingee left the
ancient landed élite of Brahmans and Vellalars dominant over the
rich, irrigated cultivation systems in both places. The share of
production which these nayaka regimes enjoyed was possibly not a
different from what it had been in Chola times, though it was
received in money, not kind. However, the fiscal regimes of these
nayaka kingdoms drew substantial wealth from the advanced com-
merce in rice and textiles of the sixteenth century, much of which
was also in the hands of the Brahman and Vellalar élite. Similar
indulgence was shown by the nayakas of Madurai to the same élite
landholders in the Vagai and Tambraparni river valleys, but there is
8Ss
€LPhe
rohit
eae
BJe
;raee
sn
OM a difference of importance to be noted. In Madurai, there was a
highly-organised military force sustained by the palaiyam system
that gave protection to the wet zones of the kingdom as well as the
rest of its territory. In Tanjavur, and possibly also in Gingee,
military protection was provided by mercenaries, paid out of the
rice and textile surpluses and advanced commerce of both coastal
realms. The nayakas of Tanjavur and also of Gingee appear to have
realised their major income from the farming of the fixed shares of
production claimed by them to élite tax-farming contractors. The
latter purchased the right to collect the revenue which was partly in
rice and textiles; this was then sold by the local tax-farmers to
regional merchants who carried the commodities by oxen-loads
either to the coasts for export to Sri Lanka, Malabar, and South-East
Asia or to other interior market centres in the peninsula. The money
received by the rulers of Tanjavur and Gingee from contracting out
revenue collections permitted the hiring of fighters from the neigh-
bouring dry zones or from some coastal communities where Euro-
pean deserters and their mestizo offspring offered themselves for
military service.
In Karnataka, the ruling Ikkeri and Mysore houses seem not to
have discovered satisfactory ways of dealing with the independent
chiefs of their realms. During the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies, both ruling houses fought to maintain their overlordships

134
 IMPERIAL COLLAPSE AND AFTERMATH

against minor chiefs, from the one side, and the invasions of Bijapuri.
soldiers —often with the connivance of chiefs —from the other. Little
wonder, therefore, that both Karnataka kingdoms steered a careful
course around most of the civil strife of the time. Exceptionally, the
Wodeyar raja of Mysore, Kanthirava Narasa, invaded the northern
Madurai tract of Dindigal around 1655 possibly as his solution to
the problem of recalcitrant chiefs; for one way of minimising his
predecessors’ problems with local Kannadiga chiefs was to extend
his tributary catchment southward into Dindigal and Kongu
(modern Salem and Coimbatore). But that kind of solution to
recalcitrance among Karnatak chiefs fetched dangers as great, for the
Wodeyar raja’s incursions were met by counter-invasions from
Tirumala Nayaka of Madurai with an army that reportedly had
25,000 Maravar troops. Tirumala Nayaka was probably exacting
more than vengeance, for he, too, sought more tractable zones of
exploitation than those of his southern flank, Ramnad and Puduk-
kottai, where martial Maravars were local rulers. In these last two
places are discovered what was perhaps the fullest realisation of the
connection of patrimonial authority and trade in Ramnad and
Pudukkottai.
The Maravar kingdom of Ramnad was inaugurated by the
Madurai nayaka Muttu Krishnappa in the early years of the seven-
teenth century, an act of conventional Indian overlordship. Mara-
vars were a people with a notoriety as fierce hunters and fighters as
ancient as the Tamil Sangam poetry of about the third century.
Later, they served as soldiers under Pandyan, Chola, and Viyayana-
gara kings. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Maravars should
have had powerful chiefdoms in Ramnad, nor that under their
fighting chiefs they should have spread into Tirunelveli and other
southern places by the fourteenth century, finally finding service in
the armies of the nayakas of Madurai. The Maravar homeland
remained in Ramnad, however, and here a major chieftainship arose
centred upon Ramesvaram, sacred in the Ramayana legend as the
link between India and Sri Lanka.
From the fifteenth century, the temple at Ramesvaram, also called
Sethu, was under the protection and patronage of the Maravar chiefs
who assumed the title of Udaiyan Sethupatis (‘chiefs who were the
lords of Sethu’). Visvanatha Nayaka of Madurai conquered Ramnad

5)
trade
there
and
iitscustoms
income.
This
re aejahupat
chiefs of their glorious responsibilities and honours; but later.
‘

Madurai nayakas reinstalled them, and by 1606 another Udaiyan

Sethupati was issuing inscriptions commemorating his gifts to the
god Ramanatha at Ramesvaram and constructing new shrines there.
Thus, all of the appropriate royal activities were followed by the
newly-minted Maravar kings of Ramnad, but the basis of their
power remained the ancient military organisation of Marava clans-
men to which had recently been added money income from the
trade of their coastal ports. Portuguese and Dutch traders paid well
for the right to trade exclusively on this famous ‘Fishery Coast’ of
Ramnad, and the Portuguese were not inhibited from converting the
fisherfolk there, the Paravars, to Christianity. Proceeds from this
tribute plus the customs collected from pilgrims and traders to and
from Ramesvaram supported a substantial military force whose core
consisted of Maravar clansmen, organised under Maravar chiefs
with ties of ritual and service to the royal Maravar Sethupati.
Kallars in Pudukkottai developed a similar type of organisation,
and thanks to the recent ethnohistorical account of Nicholas Dirks,
we are able to examine in greater detail how the military power of
the Tondaiman rajas of Pudukkottai was sustained.
This was a small principality of 1,000 square miles lodged
between the nayaka kings of Tanjavur and Madurai. It had been
settled by field agriculturists during Chola times when the tract
constituted a buffer between the Chola kingdom and the Pandyas; it
was also a major trade corridor connecting ports at the south-
eastern tip of the peninsula with Chola and Pandya countries as well
as with the major transpeninsular trade routes linked to Malabar
ports on the Arabian Sea.
Like the ruling Maravars of Ramnad, the Kallars of Pudukkottai
mounted their military power upon an elaborate subcaste organi-
sation which extended the reach of the Kallar Tondaiman raja’s
authority over the whole of Pudukkottai. The Tondaimans, while
still one of several major Kallar chiefly houses, served as fighters
under the Sethupati rulers of Ramnad; eventually they entered
marriage relations with the Sethupati family, which secured the
more reliable military services of the Tondaiman chiefs to the

136
 IMPERIAL COLLAPSE AND AFTERMATH

former and also added prestige to the Tondaiman lineage by

differentiating them from other Kallar chiefs. That was in the late
seventeenth century when lesser Kallar chiefs also subordinated
themselves to the Tondaiman chiefs, accepting their protection in
return for which these chiefs provided the Kallar Tondaiman rulers
with military service. Ruling authority by Tondaimans as well as by
lesser Kallar chiefs was shared and was constantly reaffirmed by
transactions of durbar deference from Kallar chiefs and royal
honours conferred by the Tondaimans.
Like Maravars, the Kallars of Pudukkottai based their warrants
for local rule (patta) upon protection (kaval) of people and their
localities, hence upon the right of pattakaval. Kallar chiefs, araiyar,
as protectors (deskavalkaran) also patronised temples and Brah-
mans; and for their protection and king-like patronage, they
received a share of agricultural production as well as first temple
honours. By the sixteenth century, several Kallar chiefly families
began to assume royal titles and prerogatives on the claim of serving
the Vijayanagara kings; one of these was the Tondaiman chief.
Tondaiman traditions collected by Colin Mackenzie’s ubiquitous
Brahmans recorded seventeen generations of rulers between the
seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. They were kings within
Pudukkottai and also proudly bore the title of poligars as military
servants of the nayaka kings of Madurai and as protectors of one of
the bastions of the Madurai fort. Along with other Kallar chiefs, the
Tondaimans of Pudukkottai served other great households of the
southern peninsula, including the Sethupatis of Ramnad and the
nayakas of Tanjavur. All of these great lordships recognised the
local lordship of the Tondaimans, with the highest honour and
recognition being the title ‘Raja Tondaiman’ conferred by the last of
the Vijayanagara kings, Sri Ranga III, who died in 1672.
Kallars were political masters of Pudukkottai, even though they
were a majority in only a few parts of the realm. Their authority
originated from clan rights they enjoyed in various parts of the
territory, which entitled them to hold superior land rights as well as
such offices as village or locality headmen. Kallar clans, or subcastes,
were called nadu, an ancient Tamil term designating a tract of land
or an assembly of groups controlling the tract. Each clan territory
might consist of some fifteen villages and in the principality as a

Lyd
 VIJAYANAGARA
whole there were thirty of these territories, each with its Kallar chief
and its major temple sheltering a local tutelary (usually a goddess)
under the protection and patronage of the locality chief.
Rights to land by Kallar clansmen derived from an ancient con-
quest, but they were fortified by warrants (patta) issued by the
Kallar Tondaiman raja. Dirks found that about two-thirds of all cul-
tivable land in Pudukkottai was held under such warrants from the
raja, amassive degree of royal largesse. As in the heartland of Vijaya-
nagara, temples and Brahmans were the principal holders of these
lands (45 per cent) on which no or very low taxes were due; but
unlike the Vijayanagara heartland, with its hundred or so major
chiefly families, one third of the alienated land in Pudukkottai was
held as nearly autonomous domains by several collateral members of
the royal lineage who were responsible for maintaining a large
portion of the 8,000or so fighters (amarakarar), the core of the raja’s
forces during the eighteenth century. These Kallar fighters served
under commanders drawn mostly from affinal kinsmen holding
large landed estates. It seems probable that in earlier times the pro-
portion of cultivable land alienated to support soldiers of the Ton-
daiman rajas was as high as that granted to the support of temples and
Brahmans. It is obvious, therefore, that only a very small revenue
could have been raised from the land by the seventeenth-century
Tondaiman rajas since the bulk of these revenues were in the hands
of Kallar chiefs composing the core of their soldiers.
Lacking the large money incomes of the Tanjavur and Gingee
nayakas, where the share claimed by the ruler from the substantial
surplus of grain could be contracted to merchants for sale elsewhere
in the peninsula, or overseas, most lordships of the southern
peninsula during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were
fiscally dependent upon taxes from commodity production. This
would have to be true for the Tondaimans whose territory was an
established trade corridor linking the Fishery Coast with the Kaveri
and interior Kongu (Coimbatore and Salem) and thence with
Arabian Sea ports. The most important sources of commercial
revenue consisted of customs collected on goods transiting the
realms of the numerous lordships of the time, taxes raised from
producers of non-agricultural commodities, especially cotton,
indigo, and textiles; taxes on mercantile establishments, bazaars and

138
 lh pI (lalalaliii ha ig tala
IMPERIAL
COLLAPSE
AND
AFTERMATH
fairs; and tribute paid by European or Muslim traders who con-
ducted their trade at and usually controlled any ports that might lie
in any realm. To tap these sources of state revenue required that
rulers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries involved the more
. substantial merchants of their realms or attracted others to act as
their money agents and their negotiators with foreign trade-groups
and to take tax-farmers.
Pre-eminent among such moneyed men were the ‘portfolio
capitalists’ that Subrahmanyam spoke of; such men were the Malaya
family of Telugu merchants, founded by one Achyutappa Chetti at
the turn of the seventeenth century. He began serving the Dutch
Company on the Gingee coast as a translator and broker around
1608 and was engaged by them to negotiate a trade agreement with
the nayaka of Gingee for the creation of a port in his territory at
Porto Novo. This successfully completed, Achyutappa became
more deeply involved with the Dutch as their principal banker. His
Dutch connection did not inhibit an approach to the rival English
East India Company with an offer to procure textiles. By the 1630s,
Achyutappa and his brother Chinnana had become the major
procurement agents for the Dutch in Tanjavur as well as Gingee, and
both had also become shipowners and exporters on their own
accounts, trading with Sri Lanka, Burma, and Malaya. The brothers
also began to farm revenues in the Gingee and Chandragiri terti-
tories, especially around the ports of Pulicat, Puducheri, and Porto
Novo. In these ways, these traders and other merchants and bankers
contributed to the increasing trade along Coromandel and to the
generation of new and large taxes for the lords of Gingee, Tanjavur,
and Chandragiri. In return, the merchants gained administrative
powers as tax collectors to back their diverse commercial and
banking enterprises. Seshadra, a nephew of Achyutappa, later
became the powerful chief merchant of the English Company at
Madras, thereby forging another of the many links between later
Vijayanagara institutions and the new era of British dominance that
was beginning to take shape in the southern peninsula.

39
 STxaN

CONCLUSION

The Tondaiman chief received his title of raja from the last of the
Vijayanagara kings, a strange and ironic conferment. For this was a’
symbolic entitling of a ‘little king’, already master of a small realm,
by the last of a line of kings that had dominated the southern
peninsula for three centuries, but who was master of little more than
titles to be exchanged for military services he desperately needed
merely to stay alive. But more linked the beleaguered Sri Ranga ITI
and the Tondaiman raja than an entitlement, which hardly created
the rajadom of Pudukkottai. The more significant connections were
of another sort which had to do with what had become essential
about the Vijayanagara kingdoms from the fifteenth century on.
The Vijayanagara epoch saw the transition of South Indian
society from its medieval past to its modern future. During the time
that the rayas were peninsular overlords and their capital the symbol
of vast power and wealth, south Indian society was transformed in
several important ways. Through most of the first dynasty, Vijaya-
nagara kings were content to be conquerors whose digivajaya, or
righteous conquests, of Tamil country left the ancient Cholas and
Panyas in their sovereign places, except that they were reduced by
their homage to Vijayanagara. Until the early sixteenth century, the
latter were ritual sovereigns everywhere outside their Deccan heart-
land; apart from occasional plundering forays, they were content
with the homage of distant lords.
Krishnadevaraya changed much of this. He replaced earlier royal
predecessors by his own Brahmans and military commanders —the
great Telugu nayakas —and charged his agents to extract money
tribute from subordinate lords who had previously been required to
pay nothing to Vijayanagara, merely to acknowledge the latter’s
hegemony in a number of symbolic ways, including the acceptance
of an important role in temple affairs by royally sponsored sectarian
leaders. Economic relations became increasingly monetised as a
result of the demands upon rayas and chiefs alike to pay for soldiers,
arms, and horses, demands which were made possible by the vast
increase in gold and silver from the international demand for Indian

140
 CONCLUSION

commodities. Urban settlements proliferated both to stimulate and

then to tap the increasingly generalised exchange of the southern
peninsula as well as to serve as fortified headquarters of military
lordships —Pudukkottai, the capital of the Tondaimans, meant ‘new
fort’. Temples of the epoch fed this urbanising process as these
institutions became the arenas where the new stratum of local lords
—often outsiders —sought to ingratiate their armed rule by raising
local deities to new, august statuses. Throughout the Vijayanagara
period, but especially after 1500,the pace of agricultural expansion
quickened from older zones of riverine cultivation to drier, upland
tracts for centuries, bringing whole new regions under the plough
and commodities like cotton and indigo into markets to supply a
textile industry growing ever larger to meet external demand.
In the beginning, the Vijayanagara kingdom was not very differ-
ent from its medieval predecessors, Hoysalas and Kakatiyas. But
one difference there was, and it explained why the latter two
kingdoms were replaceable. That was the urgency to develop better
military means to cope with Muslim newcomers to the peninsula.
The Sangama founders of Vijayanagana knew the new conditions
better than most, having been victims of Muslim expansion against
Kakatiya and having later taken service under their Muslim con-
querors. The lesson of improved war capability was dearly learned
until the fifteenth century when Vijayanagara rulers began incorpo-
rating Muslim and later European fighters into their forces. What-
ever the lost dharmic credentials of this decision —which seems to
have meant more to twentieth-century historians than to the
Vijayanagara contemporaries —it was more than compensated by an
enhanced ability to hold off Muslim predations and, later, to allow
counter-incursions into sultanate territories.
But this very success bore other costs for the kingdom. Paying
for mercenaries, their guns, and for better war-horses meant violat-
ing ancient institutional immunities protected by previous south
Indian lordships and communities. Thus, Krishnadevaraya cast
aside the ancient Chola and Pandya kings in the South and installed
military commanders who not long after established centres of
sovereignty opposed to his successors. Indeed, all kings from Deva-
raya II in the middle of the fifteenth century to Sriranga III were as
often captives of their powerful generalissimos as their masters; and

I4I
 e. as\ aehe’
Ys .,ins
"am: 7 2 ia east,
eat y ndKarnataka, es .tl
vee
ae oflocal
ruling
institutions
wasattacked
by
~ whosecredentialsto rulewere gainedfrom their servicein. yaya-
nagaraarmies.
Still, many earlier communal forms — entitlements and institu- —

e
E
tions —remained in the late seventeenth century when the last of the ©
Vijayanagara regimes was established in Pudukkottai. Rights and
‘immunities originating from royal grants to Brahmans, temples and
even to certain of the cultivating groups of the river valleys con-
tinued to be honoured and protected by overlords; and powerful
kinship-based authorities —such as the Tondaiman rajas of Puduk-
kottai —were able to resist attacks upon their clan-based power by
dint of their military abilities. Not even the new era of sultans of the
eighteenth century —the Mysore usurpers Haidar Ali Khan and
Tipu Sultan and the Mughal-sponsored Nawab of Arcot —could
extirpate communal rights in their domains. Thus, dual sovereignty
continued. On the one hand, there were intrusive royal powers and
prebendal entitlements, and, on the other hand, there remained
communally derived and sustained entitlements. The latter were
destined to be strongly entrenched when the British assumed their
territorial rule in the late eighteenth century.
These two sources of authority can be variously designated, as
royal and chiefly, central and local, prebendal and communal; they
were not introduced during the Vijayanagara period, but much
ee
ale
earlier. In Chola times royal gifts to individual or groups of Brah-
mans as brahmadeya may be understood as the joint action of a
king or his agent and the major landholding and sometimes com-
mercial groups of a locality (i.e., madu) acting corporately as the
people of the locality, or mattar. Enormous Brahman villages were
created in Tamil country by such joint enactments, which often
included immunities from local demands and protection by local
chiefs as well as distant kings. However, enactments such as these
were restricted to Brahmans or temples then. Similar collective
entitlements continued to be awarded in Vijayanagara times,
though seldom for the great Brahman villages of old. During
Vijayanagara times, temples became the major recipients of royal
and chiefly largesse, and, as in earlier days, this involved under-
takings between royals, or their agents, and temple managers who

142
 Bestimes,
3 ein new
Renaaes came
into
ineBy
which amara, or nayankara, entitlements were the most general and
penetrating.
It was, after all, military modernisation that spurred the trans-
formation of the late medieval South Indian state —improved
war-horses and archers to match those of the Muslim fighters and
guns which they also introduced. Monetisation and urbanisation,
while shaped by religious and commercial processes, as well as
political, also supported the military programme of Vijayanagara
rulers, beginning in the fifteenth century. Europeans, when they
appeared, intensified the commercial and monetising forces har-
nessed by Vijayanagara kings of the sixteenth century, and Portu-
guese soldiers added necessary gunnery skills to the armies of
Krishnadevaraya and his successors.
ielientne
Miet
ba
ate
in None of these developments required or generated a substantially
more centralised administration in the kingdom. Administrative
forms of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries certainly improved and
were widely adopted by all lordships. But the model for this
improved administration was more the temples of the age than the
Vijayanagara state apparatus, which remained primitive. Krishnade-
varaya’s considered appointment of Brahmans to higher offices,
including military ones such as fortress commanders, was reversed by
Aliya Rama Raja within twenty years, and a more pervasively patri-
monial regime was created involving as its principal actors the great
Telugu households of the sixteenth century. It was the unleashing of
armed competition among these Telugu houses that prevented the
restoration of vigorous royal authority after the defeat of 1565.
Different configuring factors operated in the contemporary
Deccani sultanates. As already noted, the Muslim rulers of Gol-
konda made large accommodations to the sub-stratum of Telugu
territorial chiefs of their realm. They and the sultans of Byapur
offered military service to and patronage for the cultural and
religious institutions of their Hindu subjects; both also left terri-
torial chiefs in undiminished, if not enhanced, authority in their
local domains. In this, neither regime had much choice, since each
was based upon an élite of Muslim warriors that was Deccani, not
foreign, in culture and affinity and whose numbers were never so

143
 ; greatastooverwhelm 1eealancient,
Hindulordships.Notrith-
a Bi. standingtheselimitations
upontheambitions oftheseMuslim
regimes,theirsweremorepowerfully centralised
polities
than
Vijayanagara.
Though theywererooted
intheirDeccan
situation
by
s i, generations of coresidence and even inter-marriage with Hindus,
ay the ruling warrior and learned élite of these sultanates were self-
consciously Muslim, and that Islamic identity and its institutions
ee (such as the robust Sufi tradition of Bijapur analysed by R.M.
a Eaton) provided an ideological frame very different from that of
i Vijayanagara. No notion of shared sovereignty, claims of dayada,
nF were brooked in Golkonda or Bijapur, however substantial the |
degree of local power held by Reddi, Velama or Maratha chiefs,
whereas this was the core of Vijayanagara sovereignty from first to
last. Also, prebendal rights conferred by Muslim regimes, whether
to Muslim grandees or to such devoted servants of Bijapur as Shahji
Bhonsle, were less easily transformed into hereditary chiefly rights,
though — as Frank Perlin has shown — such communal appro-
priations did occur among some of the great service and chiefly
households of Maharashtra during the seventeenth century. One
other factor lent a relatively greater potential for central power to
the Golkonda regime, at least. This was their direct involvement in
the rich Coromandel trade as active administrators and as traders,
A both of which brought resources for strengthening their central
authority beyond any available to the Vijayanagara kings.
Nevertheless, everywhere in the southern peninsula, among the
warring Telugu imperial houses, the more prudent nayaka king-
doms, and the great host of lesser lords, prebendal rights began to
compete with as well as to complement older communal ones. The
eventual stand-off between these two fundamentally different forms
of right can be attributed to the persistent strength of the latter and
to the fact that prebendal rights from the start in Vijayanagara —as
elsewhere in India and elsewhere in the pre-modern world —always
tended to become hereditary and hence were lost to royal, central,
or service-connected employment. Thus, the effect in many parts of
the Vijayanagara South was merely to introduce a new stratum of
power and authority. Most conspicuously, this consisted of Telugu
and Kannadiga military agents of the rayas in Tamil country, but it
also included the enhancing of the authority of some local chiefs

144
 CONCLUSION

against others (such as the Tondaiman Kallar against other Kallars)

and some local groups against others (such as the Vanniyar peasant-
warriors against Arcot Vellalars).
The Vijayanagara transformation of the old regime out of which
its early rulers emerged was not complete by the late seventeenth
century, but it was an irreversible change from that old order. In
fact, the supersession of local chiefs as the protectors of the structure
of communal rights by centralised authority in the peninsula was
not accomplished until British times. Neither the Marathas nor the
Muslim sultans of Mysore —Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan —achieved
this end, though that is precisely what the latter strenuously sought.
This is a major reason for continuing to think of the Vijayanagara
kingdom as a segmentary state. In sucha polity, historical commu-
nity entitlements and institutions remain vigorous. It is true that
communal rights and such rights protecting bodies as the nadu in
Tamil country were weakened by the imposition of Vijayanagara
prebendal rights. But the latter in their turn strengthened other local
institutions, such as local chiefs and temples. This was both a
symptom and a consequence of the weak prebendalism of Vijayana-
gara which, in its turn, manifested the weakly centralised character
of that kingdom. Its élite stratum of warrior chiefs easily and
continuously transformed rights gained from the state, with their
attendant authority and military powers into more formidable
chieftaincies. In the long run, and despite Krishnadevaraya’s efforts,
this defeated any attempt to increase centralised authority in the
kingdom. Only by fundamentally changing the balance between its
kings and its ruling chiefs as was more successfully accomplished in
the Muslim conquest states of the Deccan could that balance have
been shifted. Both local chiefly authority and ancient, though
modified, community rights remained intact structures in the south-
ern peninsula until the early nineteenth-century consolidation of
colonial power there. This was the impressive legacy of the segmen-
tary politics and society of the Vijayanagara age.
Thomas Munro, a shaper of the colonial regime in the peninsula
grasped this point firmly while he was a young soldier in the East
India Company army. He seemed to see that Haidar Ali Khan and
his son, Tipu Sultan, had the ability and the determination to achieve
the elusive quest for an effectively-centralised political system. This

145
 iefly
authority:
In1790,he eto hisfatherin
nparing
‘theMaratha
andae cbeinés andcriticising
— 4
superiors
whothoughttheMarathas
thegreater
threattoEnglish
Fee
supremacy in the peninsula. Tipu Sultan’sregime, Munro wrote,
isthe most simple and despotic monarchy in the world, in which
every department, civil and military, possesses the regularity and
system communciated to it by the genius of Hyder, and in which
all pretensions derived from high birth being discouraged, all
independent chiefs... subjected or extirpated, justice severely and
impartially administered ... a numerous and well-disciplined
army kept up, and almost every employment of trust and con-
sequence conferred on men raised from obscurity gives the
government a vigour hitherto unexampled in India. [Marathas, by
contrast, were]... a confederation of independent chiefs possess-
ing extensive dominions, and numerous armies, now acting in
concert, now jealous of each other, and acting for their own
advantage, and at all times liable to be detached from the public
: cause ... can never be a dangerous enemy to the English.!
Krishnaswami Aiyangar, in the earliest phase of Vijayanagara
historiography proposed that the flame of Vijayanagara passed
directly to the Marathas and meant by this the defence of Hindu .
society and culture, which he and other Indian nationalist historians
considered the mission of the Vijayanagara kingdom. That ideo-
logical framing of Vijayanagara history is rejected here. However,
the structure of politics in both the Vijayanagara and Maratha
__ kingdoms was certainly similar, as Munto implicitly observed. This
similarity derived from the same general processes that funda-
mentally altered the political economy of the Deccan inherited from
ee the ancient Chalukyan kingdom at Badami and set both Vijayana-
gara and Maratha kingdoms upon a road to more centralised and
effective rule, which neither, however, fully travelled.
' G.R. Gleig, The Life of Major-General Sir Thomas Munro, Bart. and K.C.B., Late
Governor of Madras, London, 1830, vol. 1, pp. 84-5.
 I SOURCES

Full translations and summaries of inscriptions from the Tamil, Telugu, and
Kannada continue to be published by the Archaeological Survey of India in
South Indian Inscriptions and Epigraphia Indica, as well as in inscriptional
series of Tamilnadu State, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka; Lewis Rice’s
multi-volumed Epigraphia Carnatica of the Mysore Archaeological Series |
(16 volumes, 1889-1955) has now been substantially revised and extended
and may be republished in the near future. Glossaries such as D. C. Sircar’s
Indian Epigraphical Glossary, Delhi, 1966,indexes such as Annual Report
on South Indian Epigraphy, which date from 1887 and summarise newly
copied inscriptions, and other reference aids for using inscriptions provide
access to this primary source, permitting the reader to go beyond the
readings which follow.
Literary sources from the Vijayanagara period, ranging from complete
translations to abbreviated summaries, have long been available, beginning
with S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar’s The Sources of Vijayanagara History,
Madras, 1919, and continuing with the much larger Further Sources of
Vijayanagara History, 3 vols; edited by K. A. Nilakanta Sastri and N.
Venkataramanayya, Madras, 1946. To these were added the valuable
translations of the oral and manuscript accounts collected by Colin
Mackenzie during the early nineteenth century under the editorial direction
of T. V. Mahalingam, Mackenzie Manuscripts; Summaries of the Historical
Manuscripts in the Mackenzie Collection, 2 vols., Madras, 1972.

2 GENERAL WRITING

Two types of general works on the Vijayanagara kingdom may be

distinguished: one that attempts to cover all major aspects of the history of
the kingdom and another that treats some specific aspects over the entire
history. Pride of place among histories of the kingdom has usually gone to
Robert Sewell’s A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar), London, 1900;
however, this work is valuable not so much for its treatment of the whole of
the history of the kingdom as for its translations of Portuguese sources of
the sixteenth century. Sewell’s contributions to the opening of Vijayana-
gara history are better represented in other of his works upon which other
early historians substantially drew and through which the first generation
of Indian historians of the kingdom became familiar with modern, Euro-

147
 . ae nen a. Pon a ;
‘el ath ams Dg ac teat Pe ye- a8 a ai
ty: eo RIDE GAL ESSAY Te
d : |
pean historical methods. Among these other works o
;
t Searell
GreeHiei 5
the Inscriptions
andSketchoftheDynasties
ofSouthernIndia’and‘Listof
the Antiquarian Remains in the Presidency of Madras’, published in
7 ArchaeologicalSurvey of Southern India, vols. 1 and 2, Madras, 1882;The
HistoricalInscriptions
ofSouthernIndia(collected
till1923)andOutlinesof
Political History, edited and completed by S. Krishnaswami Atyangar _
(Madras, 1932). The latter went on to make the most important contri-
butions to the general history of Vijayanagarain his Ancient India, Madras,
1911;South India and Her Muhammadan Invaders, Madras, 1921; and his
Evolution of Hindu Administrative Institutions of Southern India, Madras,
1931.By then, the 1930s,there was a flowering of Vijayanagara studies that
included the publication of Further Sourcesfor which N. Venkataramanayya
prepared a monograph-length general historical introduction. In addition,
Karnatak historians produced a large volume commemorating the founding
of the kingdom three hundred years before —Vijayanagara Sexcentenary
Commemoration Volume, Dharwar, 1936, containing studies of religion,
art history, architecture, and literature as well as conventional political
history. A major point of the volume and a good part of its argumentation
was to oppose a ‘Telugu’interpretation of the founding of kingdom in 1336
that had been presented in several works of N. Venkataramanayya,
beginning with his 1929monograph, Kampili and Vijayanagara, Madras,
and reinforced by his monumental, Studies in the Third Dynasty of
Vijayanagara, Madras, 1935.Another publication of about the same time
was B. A. Saletore’s University of London doctoral thesis of 1931 under
the title Social and Political Life in the Vijayanagara Empire, 2 vols.,
Madras, 1934.Severalsynthetic histories of the Vijayanagara kingdom were
produced in the next two decades culminating in K. A. Nilakanta Sastri’s
two long chapters in his A History of South India, Madras, 1955.
Other works that treat some aspect of the whole of Vijayanagara history
include studies of other regional polities of the Vijayanagara period:
A. Krishnaswami Pillai, The Tamil Country under Vijayanagara, Anna-
malai, 1964; K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, The Pandyan Kingdom from the
Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century, London, 1929; K. V. Ramesh, A
History of South Kanara, Dharwar, 1970; M.D. Sampath, Chittoor
Through the Ages, Delhi, 1980;H. K. Sherwani and P. M. Joshi, History of
Medieval Deccan (1295-1724), 2 vols., Hyderabad, 1973; P. Gururaja
Bhatt, Studies in Tuluva History and Culture, Manipal, 1975; G. Yazdani,
The Early History of the Deccan, 2 vols., Oxford, 1960; H. Krishna Sastri,
‘The First [Second and Third] Vijayanagara Dynasty: Its Viceroys and
Ministers’, Archaeological Survey of India; Annual Report, 1907-8,
1908-9, 1911-12, Calcutta, 1911-13; “The Ajnapatra or Royal Edict’. The
Journal of Indian History 8, 1929, 83-105 ; 207-33; V. D. Rao, ‘Ajnyapatra
Re-examined’, The Journal of Indian History 29, 1951, 63-89. In addition,
there were studies of social and economic aspects of Vijayanagara society
found in: A. Appadorai, Economic Conditions in Southern India (A.D.

148
 5. 3
«J

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

1000-1500) 2 vols., Madras, 1936; T. V. Mahalingam, Administration and

Social Life under Vijayanagara, Madras, 1940;and his EconomicLife in the
Vijayanagara Empire, Madras, 1951; Vijaya Ramaswamy, ‘Artisans in
Vijayanagar Society’, Indian Economicand SocialHistory Review 22, 1985,
417-44; B. Stein, Peasant State and Societyin Medieval South India, Delhi,
1980, and B. Stein (ed.), South Indian Temples;An Analytical Reconstruc-
tion, New Delhi, 1978; B.A. Saletore, Medieval Jainism with Special
Reference to the Vijayanagara Empire, Bombay, 1938;T. K. T. Viraragha-
vacharya, History of Tirupati, 2 vols., Tirupati, Andhra Pradesh, 1953.
Other valuable studies include: F. C. Danvers, The Portuguese in India,
2 vols., London, 1894;Tapan Raychudhuri, Jan Company in Coromandel,
*S-Gravenhage, 1962; T. Raychaudhuri and I. Habib, The Cambridge
Economic History of India, vol. 1, Cambridge, 1982; and D. Ludden,
Peasant History in South India, Princeton, 1985.

3 PREDECESSORS, FOUNDERS AND LOSERS

The conditions under which the kingdom was established in the fourteenth
century are analysed in the following works: J. D. M Derrett, The Hoysa-
las. AMedieval Indian Royal Family, London, 1957; H. K. Sherwani, The
Bahmanis of the Deccan, Hyderabad, 1953; M.Somasekhara Sarma,
History of the Reddi Kingdom (ca. A.D. 1325 to ca. A.D. 1488), Waltair,
Andhra Pradesh, 1948;Vasundhara Filliozat, L’Epigraphie de Vijayanagara
du début a 1377, Paris, 1973, and her La Ramayana a Vijayanagar, Paris,
1983; M. Habib (ed.), AComprehensive History of India, vol. 5, The Delhi
Sultanate (A.D. 1206-1526), Delhi, 1970. A valuable discussion of the
historical debate about the origins of the first dynasty of the kingdom and
whether they were from Karnataka or Andhra is found in Hermann Kulke,
‘Maharajas, Mahants and Historians. Reflections on the Historiography of
Early Vijayanagara and Sringiri’, in A. L. Dallapiccola (ed.), Vijayanagara—
City and Empire, vol. 1, Stuttgart, 1985, 120-44.

4 VIJAYANAGARA: THE CITY

The earliest of the long list of descriptions of the city are contemporary,
beginning with Nicolo de Conti’s of about 1420, contained in R. H. Major
(ed.), India in the Fifteenth Century. Being a Collection of Narratives of
voyages to India ... London, 1857, and a later set of descriptions com-
menced with the colonial report on the city of E.C Ravenshaw, “Trans-
lation of Various Inscriptions found among the Ruins of Vijayanagar ...’
Asiatic Researches 20, 1836. More contemporary descriptions are had from
A. H. Longhurst, Hampi Ruins, Described and IIlustrated, Calcutta, 1917
and G. Michell and V. Filliozat, Splendours of the Vijayanagara Empire:
Hampi, Bombay, Marg, 1981; M.S. Nagaraja Rao, Vyayanagara —Pro-
gress of Research, 1979-83 [1983-84], Mysore, 1983 and 1985; J. Fritz,

149
 BIBLIO
oe
Aja
re ry eport,
RepeMebourne,
ourne, 1984.
19 iE he mostrecent ompré
scholarlydiscussionsof the capitalcityin its imperialsettingcanbe
in the set of essayseditedby A. Dallapiccola,Vijayanagara—City and
_ Empire,2 vols.,Stuttgart,1985. : :

5 TRIUMPH AND DEBACLE

Venkataramanayya’s Studies in the Third Dynasty, of over half a century

ago, continues to be the authoritative interpretation of the early sixteenth-
century kingdom; Henry Heras, The Aravidu Dynasty of Vijayanagara,
Madras, 1927,continues the political account to the end of the kingdom in
the seventeenth century. A valuable recent work on the contemporary
economy is $. Subrahmanyam, “Trade and the Regional Economy of South
India, c. 1550 to 1650’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Department of
Economics, Delhi School of Economics, 1986, and forthcoming from
Cambridge. While there are several translation projects of the Telugu
w
poem, ‘Amukatamalyada’ attributed to King Krishnadevaraya, reliance
must still be placed on the partial translation of A. Rangasvami Sarasvati,
ss Political Maximsof the Emperor-Poet, Krishnadeva Raya’, TheJournal of |
oS 5 Indian History 4, 1925,61-88; there is a biographical study of this king by
M. Rama Rao, Krishnadevaraya, New Delhi, 1971. Sewell’s older trans-
lation of the Portuguese Paes and Nuniz has been re-examined in, The
_ Vyayanagara Empire: As Seen by Domingo Paes and Fernao Nuniz, Two
= Sixteenth-Century Chroniclers, edited by V. Filliozat, New Delhi, 1977;
s and the following works are important on Tamil localised societies of the
See time: N. Karashima, South Indian History and Society; Studies from
Inscriptions, A.D. 850-1800, Delhi, 1984; Y. Subbarayalu, ‘The Peasantry
of the Tiruchirappalli District from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth
mee Centuries’, Studies in Socto-Cultural Change in Rural Villagesin Tiruchi-
%y rappalli District, Tamilnadu, India, Tokyo, 1980; N. Karashima, ‘Nayaka
x Rule in North and South Arcot Districts in South India during the
Sixteenth Century’, Acta Asiatica [Tokyo], 48, 1985.

6 SIMULTANEOUS AND SUCCESSOR REGIMES

The defeat of Vijayanagara and the sack of the city in 1565 by the
confederacy cf sultanate forces ushered in a period of extended chaos and
decline that is treated both generally and in terms of Tamil country by
R. Sathianathaier, Tamilaham in the Seventeenth Century, Madras, 1956;
other important studies of the era are: the same author’s (under the name
R. Sathyanatha Aiyar) History of the Nayaks of Madura, Madras, 1924;
K. D. Swaminathan, The Nayakas of Ikkeri, Madras, 1957; V. Vriddhagi-
risan, The Nayaks of Tanjore, Annamalainagar, 1942; C. Hayavadana Rao,
History of Mysore, 2 vols., Bangalore, 1948. This later period has been

150
 )ehforatesy
é ;1988
. ree
"hi
BIB
ciety
o>Konku,
Vancouver,
1972,
while
aspects
ofpolitic
© developments,especially
i nAndhra,aref ound
_ Administrationin Golconda,Oxford,1975.
in
J.F.
R ichards,
Mughal
7 THINGS TO COME
The current efflorescence of Vijayanagara studies has made the present
work different in many ways from previous works, but, because some of
the best of the most recent work consists of unpublished theses available _
principally in India, and there on a restricted basis, citation of them is
pointless for the general reader. However, these studies will be published in
the coming years and therefore mention should be made of them here. -
Among the most valuable of such studies are theses of the Centre for
Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University including those of
J. Lakshmi, on Telengana; Ravi Palat on northern Tamil country; and
C. N. Subramanian on Tanjavur. Other similar research that has proven
useful is the Aligarh Muslim University thesis of Parvathi Menon on the
Carnatic; the University of Hawaii thesis of Venkata Raghotham on Tamil
country; and the University of Wisconsin thesis of Philip Wagoner on the
‘Rayavacakamu’. The Vijayanagara project of the Karnataka State Depart-
ment of Archaeology, whose publications are cited above, continues to
produce archaeological and art-historical documentation from Hampi, and
new work is in progress on translations and analysis of Vijayanagara period
texts in Tamil and Telugu, involving Velcheru Narayana Rao, David
Shulman, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and others. All of this buttresses the tens
of thousands of published stone and copper-plate inscriptional records that

a
ee have constituted the foundation of Vijayanagara history.

151

ath
ata
ig
 im op”Brae : .
i 4 rv
=,

oa r-

: Poebdar
eae Razzaq, fi 58, 82; peak Aa
brabmadeyaor agrabara (Brahman
settlements), 79, 84, 142
entitlements, 108; Deccan sultanates, Brahmans, 88; accountants and scribes, 86;
116; rebellions, 57, 68-9, 89-90, 99, administrators, 81; landed communities, —
116, 124; temples,
: Senibieracon: 38,Brahmans,
87, 90; 89 93-4, 79
Bukka I (1344-77), 19, 27-8, 92
124; modes, 86; temples, 88-90, 96; Bullock transport, 101
village and locality, 86
agricultural frontier, 21, 44, 96, 105, 141, cash crops, 24
_ Ahmadnagar sultan Burhan Khan
cash revenue demands, 41
(1509-53), 117 caste, 102
obalam, 102, 112; mathas, 103 Chalukyas of Badami, 1, 13, 54, 111, 146 :
Ain-i-Akbari,65, 75 Chalukyas of Kalyani, 16-17 Hae
Ajnapatraof Banahatti, 24, 94-5, 105 Chaudhuri, K. N., 25
Ala-ud-DinKhalji, 22 chiefs, 43, 70, 73, 87, 105, 144; and
AliyaRamaRaja48, 50, 58, 68, 80, 83-4, temples, 103, 145; coalitions, 109, 117,
88-90, 112, 121;and Achyutadevaraya, 125; Lingayat, 60; marriage ties, 124;
67; and Portuguese, 118; biographical, protectors of communal rights, 110, 145;
113; brothersTirumalaand Venkatadri, scattered interests, 87
118;commanders,92; customswealth, Chinese porcelain, 35
119; Muslim soldiers, 69; nephew Vithala, Chitradurga or Chitaldrug, 85
114-15; patrimonial politics, 124, 143; Chola kingdom, 7-8, 14 , 16-17, 20, 42,
rebellions, 93; supporters in Rayalaseema, 54-5, 57, 61-2, 141; capitals, 35; history,
118 9-10; resource base, 15; royal gifts, 142;
Aluvakonda, 86-9, 93, 130 temples, 32, 111
amaram grant for military service, 86, civil war 1542-3, 114, 121-3

143 coastal trade, 127

Anantapur Hande chiefs, 88 Cochin, 127
Anegondi, 18-19, 34; chiefs, 59 commercialisation, 76-7, 101, 110; and
Appadurai, Arjun, 65-6, 76 chiefs, 85; temples, ror ;
Aravidi Bukka, 55, 71, 113; son Tirumala, commodity production, 53-4, 141; cotton Ps
120 and indigo, 101 :
Aravidu lineage, 1, 122 communal, 96; agrarian rights, 104; control
Ariyanatha Mudaliar, 57 of irrigation, 100; (‘community’) defined,
Asad Khan of Belgaum, 116 101-2; élites, 98-101; entitlements and
Ashokan edicts, 31 institutions, 63-4, 70, 95-6, 106, 142,
ayagar system, 7 144; property, 96, 130; resistance, 97 iS

ee Badami, 18 dayada or shared sovereignty, 24, 63, 105; in

Bahmani sultanate, 19, 27-8, 30, 46, 67; Golkonda and Bijapur, 144
_-
—_ Muhammed I and Mujahid (c. 1358-78), Deccan sultanates, 75, 93, 115; and
Krishnadevaraya, 116; compared
115
| Bangaluru or Bangalore, 82-3 Vijayanagara, 143-4; grand alliance of
Bankapur, 58 1504, 11 7sebLOs.120
. Bedars or Boyas, 60 Derrett, J. D. M., 45 -
Bhatkal, 127 Devagiri (renamed Daulatabad), 22
Bijapur sultanate, 43, 68, 113, 122, 127; Devaraya I (1406-24), 28-9; communal
Ibrahim Adil Shahi,-114, 117; invasions, entitlements, 108
Devaraya II (1424-46), 29-30, 38, 42, 71-2;
123

153

=
me
 eee 19; resource
‘toda
Cheaiphay.
139;
civil
war,
vecca 125 temples, 111
Kalahasti temple, 59, 112
amudram,
16,19 Kallar Tondaiman rajas of Pudukkotai, —
¢bei > 144 98-9; labour, 99—100;
variation, 136-8, 140, 142
Kampili kingdom, 18-19
_ mixed-cropping zones, 101; wet zone, Kanara country, 52—3
kani or communal rights, 79, 98-100
Karashima, N., 40, 76, 95, 96
Karnataka country, 44-5, 49, 83, 115
a -feudal
Raerpietions
ofVijayanagara,
40-1, Kaveri basin, 51
Keladi chiefs, 83-4
eras, OL Kempe Gauda, 56, 82-4
acta Gajapati kings of Orissa, 29-30, 38, 43, 48, Khalji sultans of Delhi, 13-14, 18, 22
55, 68, 71, 113; invasion, 68 Krishna Sastri, H., 4, 6
_ Gandikota Pemmasani chiefs, 88 Krishnadevaraya (1509-29), 27, 33;
_ Ganga kingdom, 16-17 Amuktamalyada, 51-2, 93-4;
_ generalissimos, 22, 55-8, 68, 70-1, 92, commandaries, 47—9; ‘Hindu Sultan’, 56;
EaIy, 1Ar Kanara, 53; political strategy, 43-4, 61,
Gingee nayakas, 57, 69, 84, 131 63, 67, 93-4, 114, 124, 126, 140, 143,
Golkonda sultanate, 46, 68, 80-1, 113, 118, 145; rebellions, 57; temple endowments,
122; Coromandel trade, 144; Qutb Shahi 38, 65
Ibrahim (1530-80), 80, 117; Telugu Krishnaswami Aiyangar, S., 4-11, 13-14,
chiefs, 143; uprising of garrison troops 18, 146
(nayakawari), 118 Krishnaswami Pillai, A., 10
Gooty or Gutti, 85 ksattra, 63
_ Gulbarga, 27 Kumara Kampana, 28, 42, 98
kuttam \ocal assembly, 97
Haidar Ali Khan, 142
Hampi, 31-2, 38, 40, 59, 111 Lapakshi, 112; chiefs, 85; Siva centre, 85
Harapanahalli chief, 60 Ludden, D., 15, 76, 78
Harihara I (1336-57), 19, 27
Harihara II (1377-1404), 28 Mackenzie, Colonel Colin, 2, 5, 8, 15, 43,
Heras, Henry, 6-7 46, 65, 76, 78, 85-6, 117, 137
Hoysala kingdom, 5, 14, 16, 20-1, 50, 61; Madhavacharya
or Vidyaranya,
20
< capitals, 35; resource base, 15; temples, Madurai, 15, 69, 78
poo 111; Vira Ballala III (1291-1342), 19, 27, Madurai sultanate, 18, 28
; + 33; Vira Narasimha (1220-380), 14; Mahalingam, T. V., 7-9
ee Vishnuvardhana(1110-1152), 16 Malik Kafur, 22, 109
ig Mangaluru or Mangalore, 84
As in'am or manya, 97, 129
Mangudeva, 54—5
;4 international trade, 25, 53, 55, 73; and Maratha chiefs, 144
chiefs, ro1; and Islam, 26; and revenue, Maratha kingdom, 5, 13, 71, 146
126; commodities, 126; groups, 75—6, Maravar kingdom of Ramnad, 135; chiefs,
100; Portuguese and Dutch traders, 127; 79; Portuguese and Dutch, 136; soldiers,
rice and textiles, 100, 134
99
igta holdings, 23 martial peasantries, 21, 46, 47
Isvara Nayaka, 55 Masulipatam, 81, 126-7; matha (‘seminary’
or ‘monastary’), 102
Jagga Raya, 122-3 Michell, George, 31-2, 111

154

e
 eS pai
agplle ein rdininlstealne oeak PF

ammad bin Tughlak, 18, 19, 23 population,44-6, 79, 82 Be Yai:

aiplayeeay we
Portuguese,3, 114;chronicles,5,
uhammad Kasim Firishtah, 5
itiver Thomas,
58-9,
129,
145 75; soldiersin Vijayanagara,
rights,58;Vijayanagara
143;trade
politics,125
‘aa Muslims: cavalry, 22; chiefs, 60; chronicles, pre-Vijayanagara regimes, 24, 61-3, 70, 72,
5, 8; conquest, 20; converts, 23; soldiers in 141
Vijayanagara, 29, 109, 120; trade, 74-5; prebendalism, 64, 81; entitlements, 63, 65,
warriors Deccani culture, 143 142, 144
Mysore kingdom, 69, 146; chiefs 134-5; private landed proprietorship, 95
Chamaraja (1513-53), 82; foundation, production zones in the peninsula, 128-9
132; Raja Wodeyar (1578-1617), 82 Pulicat, 81, 126-7

Nagama Nayaka, 57 Raichur, 18-19, 28, 34, 67, 81, 115-16,

Narasa Nayaka, 29, 71 126-7
Nattar leaders of the nadu, 63, 78, 142 fajya or province, 28, 42
Nawab of Arcot, 142 Ramachandra temple, 32, 33, 35, 37
Nayaka kingdoms, 63; commerce and Ramesh, K. V., 52
commodity production, 131; origins 121; Ramesvaram temple, 135
ritual aspects, 133; ‘successor states’, 69, Rayalaseema country, 86, 88; chiefs, 99, 113
I2I, 131-2 taxes from commodity Rayavachakamu, 94, 95, 106, 132
production, 138; temples, 112; Reddi caste, 21, 61, 80; chiefs, 54, 144
territoriality, 130 Reddi kings of Kondavidu, 28-9
Nayaka kingdom of Gingee, 123, 134 Richards, John, 80
Nayaka kingdom of Ikkeri, 69, 84, 132; right and left castes, 107-8
chiefs, 134-5; Sadasiva Nayaka (1540-65), Roghair, Gene H., 103
84, 117-18; Venkatappa Nayaka
(1586-1629), 123, 130 Salakaraju chiefs, 50, 51, 68, 113, 124;
Nayaka kingdom of Madurai, 80, 114, 123; Salakaraju Tirumalayadeva, 116
invasion of Mysore, 135; Krishnappa, 57, Saletore, B. A., 6-7
119; military dependencies, 133; Tirumala Saluva Narasimha (d. 1491), 1, 29, 42,
Nayaka (1623-59), 130; Tirunelveli, 114; 50-1, 55, 59, 66, 78, 89, 92; chiefs, 93; oi
Visvanatha, 114 political changes, 71; preceptor, 102
Nayaka kingdom of Tanjavur, 98, 122; Saluva Nayaka (Chellappa), 48, 57, 99;
and landed élite, 134; Sivappa Nayaka, rebellion, 50-1, 99
57 Saluva Timma (minister), 48
Nayankara system, 7, 143 Saluva Timmarasu, 49
Nilakanta Sastri, K. A., 7-11, 110 Sambuvaraya chief of Tondaimandalam, 42,
Nuniz, Fernao, 35, 39 54-5
Sangama dynasty, 1, 27, 42, 92; and chiefs,
Odeyar chiefs, 82 93; sons of Sangama, 19
segmentary polity, 10, 24, 41-2, 62, 91, 92,
Paes, Domingo, 33-5, 39 145
Pallava kingdom, 14 Sewell, Robert, 2-4, 9, 39
Pandya kingdom, 14, 16-17, 42, 55, 57, Shahji Bhonsle, 60
61-2, 141; capitals, 45; resource base, 15; Shanar chiefs, 79
temples, 32 Sringiri matha, 84
patrimonial politics, 92, 125-6, 131; and Srirangapattanam, 59
trade, 125 Srisailam temples and matha, 103, I11
peasant resistance, 21, 41 Stein, B., 10
Penukonda, 111, 119 Subbarayalu, Y., 40, 76, 95-6
Perlin, F., 144 Subrahmanyam, S., 74, 126-8, 139
‘poligars’(or: palaiyakkarar, palegadu, Sufi tradition, 144

mo)
 hi ‘ierigatioh,
3I,24 Viapabgata: a‘segmentary scares 45; " Sy
assassinations, 91-2, 109; cecal ang ten
tax farming,
41,
a Brahmans,
47,
128-9,
134,
81;Golkonda,
128
1395 94-5, 105; competition of royal ese
J

Telangana, 45, 54;chiefs,80; Saivism,104 91-3; coronations, 132—3;foreign policy, -¢

ey Telugus:BalijaChettimerchants,87, 128, 112; ideology, 146; inscriptions, 31; late
a —139; chiefs, 46, 81; cultivators, 45; capitals, 119,125; mercantilist activities,
migrations, 46 129; military modernisation, 29, 43, 95,
temples, 88; accounts, 90; administration, 119, 141, 143; revenue base, 60-1, —

143; aggregative, 102; and community, 129-30; ruling lineages, 1, 13, 120;
103-5, and politics, 65; commerce, 76; Sadasivaraya (1542-76), 69, 114, 120;
Decan style, 111; irrigation investments, socio/political transformation, 106, 140-5;
24, 89-90; urbanisation, 24, 26, 106 studies, 31; Telugu and Kannadiga
Tipu Sultan,142 military agents, 144; temple style, 32,
Tiruchirappalli, 29; revolt of 1429, 100 I11—12; use of artillery, 119; usurpations,
Tirunelveli, 15, 78-9 27, 91-2, 109; Vira Narasimharaya
Tirupati-Tirumalai temple complex, 59, 66, (1505-9), 87; weak prebendalism, 145
69, 88-9, 102; mathas, 103 Vijayanagara city, 38, 39; architectural style,
Tiruvannamali, 19, 27 37; as a market, 75; civil monuments, 35,
trade customs, 42 36; goddess Hampadevi (or Pampadevi),
trans-peninsular trade routes, 39 31; mahanavami festival, 36, 37, 39, 132;
‘Travancore, 18, 51; raja Unni Varma, 114 Muslim residents, 34; Muslim structures,
tributary payments, 39, 47 35; names, 19, 31; palaces, 35-7, 40; sack
Tughlak sultans, 14 of 1565, 80, 81; temple complexes, 32,
Tuluva dynasty, 27, 29, 31-2, 42-3, 58, 68, 34; Virupaksha temple, 112; Vithala
68, 87, 113; and chiefs, 93 temple, 31, 38, 112; zones, 31, 34
Tuticorin, 114 village accountants karanam, 86
village and locality headmen, 90, 97, 137
Udayagiri, 28 Virasaivas, 103; mathas or seminaries, 85;
Ummattur chiefs of Sivasamudram, 43, 50, shrines, 84
56, 83, 93
urbanisation, 24, 107-8, 110, 141, 143; war commodities, 22, 74
lower orders, 106-7 Warangal, 16, 19
utaimai or ksattra, 62 Wilks, Mark, 2, 5

Vanniyar peasant-warriors, 21, 99, 145 Yadavaraya chiefs of Chandragiri, 42, 54-5
 } i. ae
7 2 Lr¢ at ¥ oF
I The te Contemporaries
Mughalsand their a, a

Joun F. Ricnarps, Mughal State and Society

M.N. Pearson, The Portuguesein India* ’
CATHERINE B, AsHER,Mughal Architecture
Mito C. Beacu, Mughal Painting
Peter Harpy, The Ideas and Beliefsof the Moghuls
Bruce B. Lawrence, Indian Sufismand the Islamic World
BurTON STEIN,Vijayanagara
RicHarpDM. Eaton, SocialHistory of the Deccan

II Indian States and the Transition to Colonialism

C. A. Bayty, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire*

P. J. MarsHatt, Bengal: The British Bridgehead*
STEWARTGorpbon, The Maratha Empire
Om Prakasu, The Northern European Trading Companies and India
RICHARDB. BARNETT,Muslim SuccessorStates
: J. S. Grewat, The Sikhs in the Punjab
Davip WasHBROOK,South India

III The Indian Empire and the Beginnings of Modern Society

GorDON JOHNSON,Government and Politics in India
F. Conton, Modern Maharashtra
Sucata Bose, The Agrarian Development of Modern Bengal
Davip LupDEN, Agriculture in Indian History
Susan Bayy, Castein SouthAsia ieee
B. R. Tomiinson, Economic Growth, Change and Stagnation 40
Tuomas R. Metca yr, /deologies of the Raj gers
K. W. Jones, Social and Religious Reform Movements in British India “58
B. N. Ramusack, The Indian Princes and their States arb

IV The Evolution of Contemporary South Asia ce:

Paut Brass, The Politicsof India sinceIndependence
Ant SEAL, The Transfer of Power and the Partition of India
| Ray CHANDAVARKAR,The Urban Working Classes
j GERALDINEFores, Jndian Women in the Twentieth Century
Francis Rosinson, Islam in South Asia
Gyan PanpeEy, Peasants and Politics
SHAHID AMIN, Economy, Society and Culture

* already published
rR
 srs

=e
citeres
fe
ae
tes
steebioetass

aie
3 if
Si
ahrene
eeaerryErich
ytHzeHuh
anit
pauleceureatiae
nea
ante aititn
Seay
Hroterasteeatia
iuast
feeiisre
F

ait Heatt Herienaaens

ueSinaa
: ie Ren
ts: a
Raises esa td
PavaiaHae aera ncaeee
a
a a

cee
Ge
Seat
i

aie
os
ates"
reetra
3}

=e Sena
eu

pearseiecerteronre
ecenatersege
ines
seve
nes asaan
y