64 I Escape to... India
adventurers, mainly Portuguese and Italian, recorded
their experiences at Vijayanagar in the early 1500s.
One wrote: “The bazaars are extremely long
and broad. Roses are sold everywhere. These
people could not live without roses, and they look
upon them as quite as necessary as food... Each
class of men belonging to each profession has
shops contiguous the one to the other; the jewellers
sell publicly in the bazaars pearls, rubies, emeralds
and diamonds.”
Others noted basins full to the brim with
bullion, thousands of regal elephants bedecked in
decorative armour, a city where nobles and ministers
were fantastically rich and whose poor lived in
hovels. The king, it’s claimed, had 12,000 wives, of
whom 4,000 followed on foot wherever he went,
and a few thousand more were carried about in
litters. Religious devotion was intense – when tall
wooden “chariots” showcasing temple deities were
paraded during annual festivals, some frenzied
Below: Vittala
Templedevotees willingly succumbed beneath their wheels.
Hampi’s charming boulder-strewn landscape
cradles numerous Hindu myths and legends. Of
the dozens of temples and shrines still dotting
the countryside, only the Virupaksha remains an
active place of worship. A visit feels like stepping
back into classical civilisation – barefoot pilgrims
brandish offerings of smashed coconuts, garlands
of flowers and blessed food, while in a dim
sanctum, bare-chested priests tend deities with
milk and ghee.
Leaving groups of wild macaques cavorting in
the temple’s busy forecourt, we continued towards
the Tungabhadra River. Winding between rocky
hills, it was this river that lent the site strategic
value and, in medieval times, separated Muslim
dominions to the north from Hindu ones to its
south. Pilgrims toed-and-froed among bathing
ghats, or steps, along its banks, and from one
hallowed spot to another. As the trail winds around