20 6 august 2018it embodied had become backward looking and stagnant: it
had failed to develop, and in particular had failed to develop the
military means to challenge the aggressive Muslim Sultanates
that surrounded it. Instead, fatally, Vijayanagara was ‘commit-
ted from the start to the preservation of a hinduism that had
already been violated, and culturally and artistically it [only]
preserved and repeated; it hardly innovated... the hinduism
Vijayanagar proclaimed had already reached a dead end’.
the origin of naipaul’s understanding of Vijayanagara has
its roots in the thinking of the British empire. the Muslim
invasions of India tended to be seen by historians of the Raj as
a long, brutal sequence of rapine and pillage, in stark con-
trast—so 19th Century British historians would have it—to
the law and order brought by what they saw as their British
‘Civilising Mission’. In this context, the fall of Vijayanagara was
written up in elegiac terms by British historians such as Robert
Sewell, whose 1900 book A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar,
first characterised the kingdom as ‘a hindu bulwark against
Muhammadan conquests’, a single brave but doomed attempt
at resistance to Islamic aggression. this idea was eagerly picked
up and elaborated by hindu nationalists in the early 20th Cen-
tury who wrote of the empire as a hindu state dedicated to the
containment of Islam and to the preservation of the traditional,
peaceful and ‘pure’ hindu culture of Southern India.
It is a simple and attractive vision, and one that at first sight
looks entirely plausible. naipaul’s musings are eloquently
and brilliantly written, and are a key to understanding his
view of India as a country whose ancient civilisation was
‘mortally wounded’ by invasion, and which is still stultified
by the effect of centuries of ‘defeat’. the problem is that these
ideas rest on a set of assumptions which recent scholarship
has done much to undermine.
a
n eSSaY PuBlISheD in 1996 by the american scholar,
Philip B. Wagoner, was an important landmark in this
process of reinterpretation. the essay, entitled ‘a Sultan among
hindu Kings’—a reference to the title by which the Kings of
Vijayanagara referred to themselves—pointed out the degree
to which the elite culture of Vijayanagara was—perhaps
surprisingly—heavily Islamicised by the sixteenth century, its
civilisation ‘deeply transformed through nearly two centuries
of intense and creative interaction with the Islamic world’.
By this period, for example, the kings of Vijayanagara
appeared in public audience, not bare-chested, as had been
the tradition in hindu South India, but instead dressed in
quasi-Islamic court costume—the Islamic inspired kabayi,
a long-sleeved tunic derived from the arab models, and the
kullayi, a high conical cap of brocaded fabric , derived from
Perso-turkic headwear—all part, according to Wagoner, of
‘their symbolic participation in the more universal culture
of Islam’. It was this dress that abdur Razzak describes in
his account of his audience with Devaraya I—and which he
compared to the half-naked appearance of the king of Calicut.
there was a reason for this: the kings of Vijayanagara wanted
good relations with their Muslim neighbours, knowing the
benefits of being able to draw technology, military techniques
and commerce from them.
as scholars are now realising, far from being the final, stag-
nant, backward-looking bastion of hindu resistance imagined
by naipaul, Vijayanagara had in fact developed in all sorts of
unexpected ways, taking on much of the administrative, tax
collecting and military methods of the Muslim sultanates that
surrounded it—notably stirrups, horseshoes, horse armour
and a new type of saddle, all of which allowed Vijayanagara to
put into the field an army of fearsome horse archers who could
hold at bay those of the Delhi Sultanate, then the most power-
ful military force in India. Indeed Devaraya II is reputed to have
employed 10,000 Muslim horsemen. Only a short time before
the Deccani Sultanates turned on Vijayanagara, the hindu em-
pire had been a prominent part of a different alliance of Muslim
armies that had sacked the Sultanate of ahmadnagar, when
hindu and Muslim armies stabled their horses in the mosques
of the plundered city. Vijayanagara was in reality a victim of
shifting alliances in Deccani power politics, not a concerted
communal campaign by Muslim states intent on wiping out
hinduism from the face of India.
a comprehensive survey of Vijayanagara’s monuments
and archaeology conducted by historians George Michell and
John fritz over the last 25 years has confirmed the thrust of
Wagoner’s thesis. the survey has emphasised the degree to
which the buildings of sixteenth century Vijayanagara were
inspired by the architecture of nearby Muslim sultanates,
dropping the traditional trabeate architecture of the hindu
South in favour of the arch and dome of the Islamicate world
as well as borrowing such specifics as ground plans and vault-
ing, plaster-coated masonry and arabesques. Some of hampi’s
most beautiful monuments, such as the lotus Mahal, are built
in this hybrid style.
Moreover, this fruitful interaction between hindu and
Muslim ruled states was very much a two-way traffic. Just as
hindu Vijayanagara was absorbing Islamic influences, so a
similar process of hybridity and mutual influence was trans-
forming the nominally Islamic Sultanate of Bijapur. In both
imperial British and hindu nationalist historiography, Bijapur
has traditionally been seen as one of the violent and iconoclas-
tic Muslim sultanates which united to wipe out Vijayanagara.
the mediaeval reality, it seems, was again very different.
for Bijapur at this period was dominated by an atmosphere
of wild, heterodox sensuality, with its libraries swelling with
often heretical texts produced on the intellectual frontier be-
tween Islam and hinduism, much of which leaned heavily on
the esoteric scholarship of Vijayanagara. under the influence
of these texts, Bijapur’s ruler, Ibrahim adil Shahi II, gave up
wearing jewels and adopted instead the rudraksha rosary of the
hindu sadhu. he visited both Shaivite temples and the monas-
teries of the nath yogis, and knew Sanskrit better than Per-
sian. Ibrahim’s preferred Sanskrit title was Jagatguru, ‘Worldo pe n e s say