14 6 august 2018n the fall of 1443, a dhow bringing an ambassador from timurid Central made landfall at the port of Calicut on the
Malabar Coast of Southern India.
abdur Razzak Samarqandi was on an important mission to open diplomatic relations between the timurid empire and
what was then the most powerful city-state in India. Vijayanagara, the great hindu City of Victory, was then approaching
the peak of its power, and controlled almost all the rich lands of peninsula India to the south of the river tunghabadra.
abdur Razzak was not, however, in the best of moods. he stepped ashore after a long and gruelling land journey from herat
in Western afghanistan through Persia to hormuz, ‘where the heat was so intense that the marrow boiled in the bones and
the sword in its scabbard melted like wax’. there followed a sea voyage through the Gulf and across the arabia Sea to Calicut,
where the agitated ambassador passed in and out of consciousness with a high fever. then, on arrival at Calicut, the ambas-
sador found himself surrounded by dark skinned and half-naked Malabaris, ‘a strange nation, neither men nor demons, at
meeting whom the mind would go mad. had I seen the likes of them in a dream, my heart would have been upset for months’.
But abdur Razzak had reason to believe this voyage would be worth his while; and indeed things did begin to improve as soon as
he entered the territories of Vijayanagara. even in the border town of Belour, he wrote, ‘the houses were like palaces and the beauty
of the women reminded me of the houris of paradise’. Indeed the Belour temple there was so large that he wrote that he would
refrain from describing it, as he would be ‘suspected of exaggeration’.
Yet not even this prepared abdur Razzak for the magnificence of the capital, which he reached a few days later: ‘the city of
Vijayanagara simply has no equal in the world,’ he wrote. ‘It is such that the pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it, and the ear
of intelligence has never been informed that there existed anything to equal it in the whole world... It is a city of enormous magni-
tude and population, with a king of perfect rule and hegemony, whose kingdom stretches more than a thousand leagues. Most of
his regions are flourishing, and he possesses three hundred ports. he has a thousand elephants with bodies like mountains and
miens like demons.... the empire contains so great a population that it would be impossible to give an idea of it...’
abdur Razzak was particularly astonished at the extraordinary personal wealth visible everywhere—especially the profusion
of jewellery worn by men and women of every social class, and the sophistication of the jewellers who dealt in gems: stalls selling
pearls, rubies, emeralds and diamonds were, he says, doing strong business, drawing in traders from across the globe.
he passed through seven concentric rings of fortifications, each with its own citadel, with walls, he wrote, made of ‘stones the height
of a man, one half of which is sunk in the ground while the other rises above it’. he then found himself in a belt of beautiful gardens
whose orchards were bubbling with runnels of clear water and ‘canals formed of chiselled stone, polished and smooth’. abdur Razzak
noted the magnificent elephant stables with separate stalls for each of the beasts, and the bazaars overflowing with produce filling theThe footprints of Hindu-Muslim hybridity defy the
received wisdom on the fall of Vijayanagara
the untold history
of hampi
o pe n e s say
By William dalrymple
I
Photographs by Bharath ramamrutham