18 6 august 2018river dotted with sacred islands and holy groves, soon came to
be associated with a variety of divinities. Some spoke of it as
Kishkindha, the kingdom of the monkey king Surgiva who
settled beside the hermitage of the great sage Matanga. It was in
a cave here, so it is said, that Sugriva hid Sita’s jewels when she
was abducted in Ravanna’s aerial chariot. It was nearby, on an
adjacent hill, that lord Ram anxiously waited while Sugriva’s
great general, hanuman, travelled to lanka to find Sita.
Others preferred to remember this sacred landscape as the
abode of Pampa, from whom the modern name hampi derives.
Pampa, the personification of the tunghabhadra, was said to be
the beautiful daughter of Matanga, who was above all deeply
devoted to the great God Virupaksha Shiva. Such was her love
for the God, and so great her attentions to the sages who gath-
ered around his shrine, that they bestowed a boon on her that
Virupaksha would fall in love with her. When he saw her bathe
in the tunghabhadra, the God found her irresistible. their mar-
riage is still celebrated in the Virupaksha shrine every Spring.
Sanctified and charged with immense cosmological and reli-
gious significance by these myths, the city grew with great speed.
the Sangama dynasty which ruled Vijayanagara for its first
hundred years built at first relatively modestly, and the Ramach-
andra temple of Devarya I (1406-22), the biggest of the temples
seen by abdur Razzak, is actually a fairly small building by later
standards, drawing heavily on Chola and Chalukya models.
the Sangamas divided the city into two main zones: a sacred
enclosure, which contained temples conservatively built in
the most traditional Dravidian styles; and a Royal enclosure,
where there was much more stylistic exploration. here palaces,
tanks, baths and elephant stables were designed with great
imagination, employing a number of intriguing and often very
successful attempts to fuse the old Dravidian methods with the
new styles of Vijayanagara’s Islamic neighbours.
It was really Krishnadevaraya who revolutionised the
look of his city, transforming it as augustus had transformed
Rome. It was he who created a new Vijayanagaran temple style,
first with his magnificent additions—halls, courtyards and
gateways—to the city’s central Virupaksha temple, then in his
new Vitthala temple, the most delicate and beautiful of them
all. he also commissioned several magnificent new megalithic
sculptures to adorn his capital. Several have survived intact,
including the spectacular carved granite monolith of Vishnu
narasimha, showing the ferocious lion-headed God sitting in
state of uncharacteristic peace, resting cross-legged in a yogic
position with his legs bound with a yoga-band. Krishnadeva-
raya also provided a remarkable irrigation system, with water
being brought to the city by a network of viaducts.
It was during Krishnadevaraya’s rule that the city was vis-
ited by the observant Portuguese traveller, Domingo Paes. Paes,
like abdur Razzak before him, was almost lost for words at the
wonders he saw, and describes a city now significantly grander
even than that which had awed abdul Razzak: ‘I cannot possi-
bly describe it all,’ he wrote, ‘nor should I be believed if I tried to
do so... for I went along with my head so often turned from one
side to the other that I was almost falling over backwards off
my horse with my senses lost... truly, it seemed as if, that what I
saw was a vision, and that I was in a dream.”
Paes gave an alluring pen portrait of Krishnadevaraya,
describing him as ‘of medium height, and of fair complexion
and good figure, rather fat than thin... he is the most feared ando pe n e s say
This picture of Hindu-Muslim hybridity,
of Indo-Islamic intellectual and artisticfecundity is important, for it comes in such
stark contrast to the received wisdom—
articulated most elegantly by Naipaul—
that for India the medieval period was a
long tale of defeat and destruction