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the Rayavacakamu, or The Tidings of the King, enlarges on this. a
king, he writes, should, ‘increase his wealth by means of cowherd
villages and pleasure gardens, merchant traffic on land and sea, and
forts, protecting them through the mere glance of his eye, which reduces
his enemies to dust.’ he should
Maintain an army composed of the four divisions of chariots,
elephants, horses and foot soldiers ... surround himself with wealth
and grain, buildings and conveyances, relatives, servants, maidser-
vants and other such people.
the most memorable stanzas of Krishnadevaraya’s poem,
however, describe the beauty of the women of the city, and
while the poem is nominally set in southern tamil nadu
during the ninth century, Krishnadevaraya is clearly describing
the alluring and sophisticated city he himself ruled over:
In the gardens,
Dravida women bathe in oval ponds,
Filled with red water lilies,
After smearing themselves with Holy turmeric
They tenderly collect lotuses for their morning puja
Walking along garden paths with flowers in their hands
And water jugs swaying at their hips, their silver anklets glitter
and jingle
As they happily return home singing songs of devotion
Silver fish glimmer in the pure clear water
Of sapphire-ringed roadside wells,
As noisy groups of kingfishers swoop down
From tall trees to catch their prey
Groups of temple courtesans play games on their verandas
As they shake the dice with one hand, their braids come undone
So when they lift up the other hand to fix their hair
Their tight silken blouses and perfect breasts are revealed
Like soft round pillows of the God of Love
And as they throw the dice, the mere jingle of their bracelets
Is enough to stir the hearts of solitary sages.
V
IJ aYanaGaRa WaS fOunDeD in 1336 by two
young hindu princes, of uncertain genealogy, harihara
and Bukka. there is contradictory evidence about the exact
circumstances. But the brothers soon received the blessings of
the influential mahant of the important temple of Shringeri,
and this, and the war that had broken out between the different
sultans of the Deccan, allowed them to lay the foundations of
what rapidly became a hugely successful hindu-ruled empire
in a part of the world that had for over a century been dominat-
ed by a succession of Islamic dynasties. By only 1352, the second
king of Vijayanagara was calling himself ‘the prosperous great
tributary, punisher of enemy kings, Sultan among hindu
Kings, vanquisher of kings who break their word, lord of the
eastern and western oceans, the auspicious hero’.
for a location, the brothers chose a stunning natural fortress,
an amphitheatre formed of a rock-strewn basin of
the tunghabadra river, and here they planned a mighty city
in the shape of a mandala or cosmic diagram. this was probably
already a sacred landscape—after all, the boundaries between
the divine and material worlds are notoriously porous in India.
the actual soil is thought by many rural hindus to be the
residence of the divinity and, in many villages is worshipped
and understood to be literally the body of the Goddess; the
features of the landscape—the mountains and forests, the caves
and crevices and outcrops of rock, the mighty rivers—are all
understood to be her physical features. this landscape is not
dead but alive, and littered with tirthas, crossing place between
different worlds, linked with the tracks of pilgrimage. the
pilgrim who climbs to a hilltop hampi shrine or swims in its
sacred river enters a ford between different states of perception,
where you can cross from the world of men to the world of the
Gods as easily as you might cross a stream in the dry season.
Certainly the fabulously otherworldly quality of these
stone-strewn, monkey-haunted hampi hills, and its mighty