The Kingdom or Empire of Vijayanagara, takes its name ‘City of Victory’, from its capital on the

Tunghabhadra River1, near the center of the subcontinent. Its rulers over three centuries claimed
universal sovereignty –‘ to rule the vast world under a single umbrella and they subtly referred to
themselves as the rulers of Karnatak or the contemporary Karnataka. This reduction of scope from
the entire subcontinent to a portion is eccentric . Vijayanagara kings seemed to have had the sense
that the kingdom established in the fourteenth century revived an earlier universal sovereignty in
Karnataka, that of the Chalukyas of Badami (ancient Vatapi in Bijapur district of modern Karnataka).
Vijayanagara kings adopted the emblem of the Chalukyas, the boar, or varaha, and perhaps quite
consciously modelled their capital on the Chalukyan capitals of Vatapi and Aihole of the sixth to
eighth centuries, though Vijayanagara in 1500 was a great fortified place covering 10 square miles,
dwarfing the Chalukyan cities. Even so, the first temples which they built in the city were somewhat
enlarged replicas of those found at Chalukyan capitals. Also as with the Chalukyas, there were several
distinct lineages, or dynasties, of Vijayanagara rulers. The first of these was sometimes called
Yadavas, but was more often known as Sangamas, for the chief whose sons established the kingdom
around 1340. Descendants of one of the sons of Sangama, who ruled as Bukka I (reign, 1344-77),
expanded the city and realm until the late fifteenth century when a second, or Saluva, ruling line was
established briefly by a Vijayanagara generalissimo, Saluva Narasimha. In 1505, a third dynasty came
into being called Tuluvas, suggesting that they came from the coastal part of Karnataka called Tulu.
Under their four decades of rule, the realm reached its greatest extent and its rulers their greatest
power. The last Vijayanagara dynasty, of the Aravidu family, assumed authority in 1542; it was named
for another generalissimo, Aravidi Bukka, whose sons founded a line of rulers;members of this family
held diminished imperial authority until the late seventeenth century when, as a result of repeated
invasions from Muslim states to the North and civil wars within, Vijayanagara authority was
fragmented among a set of smaller, independent regional domains tracing their ruling credentials
from the kingdom. Among Indian kingdoms, a rule of three centuries is very long, and this together
with the large territory over which Vijayanagara kings reigned makes it one of the great states in
Indian history. The realm can be defined by the provenance of royal inscriptions over some 140,000
square miles, about the same area as the Madras Presidency2 in 1900, when the first histories of
Vijayanagara [Link] over by four successive dynasties of kings, the Vijayanagara polity
transformed itself from a small regional kingdom to the major political and military power in
southern India within the space of about two hundred years. The eponymous capital city of this
empire was largely abandoned following the defeat of the Tuluva dynasty's imperial army at Talikota
in 1565. Areas of the city were burned and looted and many of its monumen-tal temple complexes,
gateways, and images were left in ruins. However -and despite an historical tradition emphasizing the
total destruction of the city - the level and focus of destruction was strikingly variable. In this paper,
we draw on the material record to examine these patterns of differentially distributed violence as
experience, politics, and [Link] events of 1565 took place in an already extant, meaningful, and
contested landscape, and the city of Vijayanagara, as a social space, can be seen as a complex and
contingent product of both its prior and subsequent history of inhabitation and meaningful
associations. The settings of socialaction are themselves material forms of history that provide
repertoires for the continued construction and reworking of place, landscape, and social
geographies. Indeed, it is the continued salience of the city that provides the raw material for its
historical reconstitution in both material and symbolic forms. Enough standing architecture still exists

1
The Tungabhadra River is a river in India that starts and flows through the state of Karnataka during most of
its course.
2
The Madras Presidency or Madras Province, officially called the Presidency of Fort St. George until 1937, was
an administrative subdivision of British India and later the Dominion of India
to merit a UNESCO World Heritage designation and to draw thousands of tourists and pilgrims a year,
visitors mostly unaware of the vast size or even the existence of the unexcavated parts of the city.
Indeed, its UNESCO designation, "group of monuments at Hampi," erases the urban character of this
abandoned but remarkably well-preserved city almost as effectively

as its historical reputation as a place destroyed. The tiny modern village of Hampi, along with several
other villages, was at one time encompassed within the sprawling city, but both pre-and post-dates
the urban occupation. The name of this village, Hampi, is the most common name for the city as a
destination, especially among tourists, erasing even its historical place name as a location of
contemporary relevance. One of the earliest historical studies of Vijayanagara (Sewell 1900) famously
referred to it as a "forgotten empire," something that may have been true outside South Asia3

, but never within it, where the "fall" of the city is often employed as a historical watershed.
Vijayanagara here does exist as a toponym, one present only in its absence, a place relegated entirely
to the past. Narratives of continuity and loss; torches passed and sovereignties vanquished; new
orders and timeless essentials built on the (incompletely) scorched earth of Vijayanagara. In this
paper, we examine four closely interrelated aspects of the ongoing historical construction of
Vijayanagara about the fall of the city and its associated patterns of destruction: the contemporary
politics of sovereignty; destructive acts as social production and commemorative claim; the ongoing
experience of the inhabitants of the region; and finally, the construction of social memory as a
relationship between history and place Statements about rule, whether enshrined or erased, may be
understood within a broader politics of commemoration and claims on the authoritative
understanding of history. There is no doubt that the forms of violence visited on the temple districts
and elite precincts of the city in 1565 were designed to be symbolic as well as instrumental. The
choice of targets and their pattern of destruction were neither random nor indiscriminate, but
remarkably focused and strategic. The desecration of some temples followed a logic of the
displacement and reconstitution of elite authority consistent with the contemporary political milieu
of pre-colonial South Asia.3 Other politically important temples were left relatively intact. Even in
areas targeted for destruction, the devastation was remarkably selective, specific, and regular. This
specificity, along with the organization of labor, material, and time entailed in its enactment, suggests
that these material acts were themselves durable and transcendent attempts to invoke
understandings of history, society, and posterity (Lefebvre 1991:220-226). That is, patterns of
destruction are not simply reflections of realized power relations but claims about authority,
sovereignty, and the outcome of history. Even without subsequent construction or appropriation of
elements, these material claims have politics; they require active production and they enter into
networks of social and historical relationships as symbolically pregnant statements4.4 Such claims are
never totalizing, but always ambiguous and situational, open to contest and negotiation. At
Vijayanagara, these negotiations play out in both political and historiographic time scales In the

3
Here we are indexing aspects of the contemporary
politics of sovereignty in premodern South Asia wherein claims of legitimate rule and forms
of elite positioning consistently involved gift-giving and patronage, often (though not
solely) religious patronage. As its inverse, politics, and self-fashioning also involved destructive acts as forms of
both social and political statements and commemorative claim
44
Much of the thinking about political destruction in South Asia has centered on the topic
of temple destruction, with scholars such as Eaton (2000) cogently pointing to the political
processes at work when Muslim armies dismantled Hindu temples and reused parts of
them in subsequent constructions, (and see Asher 2006; Guha-Thakurta 2004) The appro-
priation and reuse of older structures is not, of course, limited to Muslim use of Hindu
architecture, but can be seen across time, as discussed by Morrison (2009) for the Vijayana-
gara region from the Neolithic onward.
historical imagination, the Vijayanagara state is closely identified with the capital city, so much so
that the eventual "fall" and abandonment of elite precincts of the city is taken as an index for the
demise of the polity - and all it came to stand for. The temporal framing of K.A. Nilankanta Sastri's
5
(1955) influential history of South India: "from prehistoric times to the fall of Vijayanagar" makes it
clear that the "fall" marks the end of an era, quite literally. Although most scholars take care to note
that the empire continued after 1565, historiographic traditions continue to employ the city as
synecdoche, with the elite abandonment and presumed destruction of the city a decisive event, (e.g.
Sastri 1955; Kulke and Rothermund 1986:193) Against this, one might argue that although the capital
was indeed abandoned by many of its elite residents, the realm did contain other cities and, in the
end, only a small chunk of imperial territory was lost. Closer to the ground, it is clear from
archaeological evidence that the great majority of the rural population continued to live and work in
the region, and even that the extensive irrigation features and lands watered by the Tungabhadra
River - land inside and near the city -continued to be maintained and used. (Morrison 2009, 2010;
Sinopoli and Morrison 2007) Despite the importance accorded to the sacking of Vijayanagara – in a
wrld in which conquest and plunder were not rare - there is almost nothing written about patterns of
abandonment and destruction in and around the city after 1565. Certainly, there are no systematic
discussions of damage outside either sweeping generalizations such as not a stone was left standing,'
or observations on individual structures or groups of structures.5 (e.g. Fritz, Micheli, and Nagaraja
Rao 1985; Dallapiccola, et al. 1992)

In this paper, we begin to address this lacuna by considering differential patterns of damage and their
implications, setting these within the larger context of the life histories of places, structures, and
regions Conventional understandings of the Vijayanagara state emphasize the "Hindu" nature of the
polity and its role in "holding back" the "tide" of Islam in the south, (e.g. Kulke and Rothermund 1
986: 188- 189; discussions of Vijayanagara historiography by Guha 2009 and Stein 1989) Indeed,
there are only a handful of similarly potent symbols of inter-religious conflicts, with both recent
historiographic tradition and popular imagination stressing the essential religious identity of both the
Vijayanagara polity and the Deccani Sultanates, the Muslim-ruled polities to the north who
eventually came together to defeat the imperial armies atTalikota in 1565. Although all of these
policies included diverse populations, Vijayanagara is consistently cast as the valiant last defender of
Hinduism against Islam, a southern refugium of this seemingly imperiled faith.6 (Krishnaswami
Aiyangar 1921; Sastri 1955:9-10) Indeed, the word almost universally selected -Vijayanagara as a
bulwark against Muslim invasions - evokes the language of walls and fortifications, seemingly
indexing the solid walls of the city itself. City and state are here interchangeable. If the state, itself
imagined as essentially Hindu, is a bulwark against aggressive Islam, then its materialization creates
an essentially Hindu urban space. By any measure, however, the actual physical city of Vijayanagara
was a multi-religious, multi-ethnic, and multi-linguistic place, containing Hindus of all persuasions,
Jains, Muslims, and even Christians. Idioms of elite, non-religious architecture and modes of royal
dress and comportment established claims and connections to the contemporaneous cosmopolitan
elite of South Asia, including the sultanates of the north. Despite energetic scholarly challenges to
the communal stereotype (Stein 1989; Verghese 1995; Wagoner 1996, 2007) and demonstrations of
the cosmopolitan nature of the city, the notion of the city's basic Hinduness has persisted, only
slightly modified in response to suggest that its cosmopolitanism represented a sort of island of
tolerance in a sea of (Muslim) bigotry and danger. (Narasimhaiah 1992:2-3;Suryanarain Row
1993[1908]:286-7)

5
Kallidaikurichi Aiyah Nilakanta Sastri was an Indian historian who wrote on South Indian history.
In discussing the "fair of the city, it is oddly difficult to avoid consideration of the city's initial
founding. Scholarly attention to urban origins vastly overshadows attention to the "fall," a rather
surprising situation given the latter's use, after Sastri, as a marker for the end of an era, the medieval
giving way to the early modern. Here, however, we need to understand both the persistent
characterization of Vijayanagara as a Hindu wall or dam blocking the "flow" of Muslim expansion and
also the easy conflation of polity and city. A breached dam allows water to flow through. One wall of
the city was breached (though this is purely metaphorical as there is no evidence of damage to
fortification walls), and dangerous floods spread across the land. A narrative structure emphasizing
closure - a basic and compelling narrative form in which the themes of the introduction recur in the
conclusion - thus requires that the end of the city be understood in terms of the conditions of its
founding. Said to be founded in the first place because of Muslim incursions, the city fell to Muslims
in the end (Venkata Ramanayya 2007 [1933]). Thus, narratives of destruction seem almost always
linked to accounts of founding. Where one might expect to read long accounts of what, precisely
happened in and after 1565, in fact much more energy has been placed on working out what
happened around 1336, the traditional founding date of the city.7 Although we resist this basic
symmetry - our concern is with the period during and after 1565 some account of the city and its
occupational history is necessary here

The capital city lay at the northern frontier of the empire, along the southern edge of the Raichur6
doab, a fertile tract of dry land that passed in and out of Vijayanagara control. In contrast to the rich
alluvial deltas with their intensive agriculture that supported other south Indian capitals, the
Vijayanagara region contains only the very limited alluvial soils of the Tungabhadra River. Outside this
narrow alluvial strip, the landscape is dominated by granitic outcrops with limited soil development
and agricultural potential. The landscape in which the city sits is defined by two sets of sacred
associations that predate the founding of the city: the cult of Pampa, and the identification of the
Hampi-Daroji hills with Kishkindha, the monkey kingdom of the Ramayana and birthplace of the hero
Hanuman. Although the Pampa tirtha, or sacred river-crossing, was a culturally important place in
the five or six hundred years before the founding of Vijayanagara, it was not a major locus of
settlement before 1300, with settlement concentrated instead both east and west of the eventual
location of the city. (Morrison 2009) Later Vijayanagara settlement would center on the Pampa tirtha
in an appropriation of an existing sacred place which was an important strategy of legitimation and
positioning vis-a-vis the past and the local sacred power

The Ramayana, the great epic of Rajadharma is, as Richman (1991) points out, a potent and varied
body of signifiers built on the scaffolding of a single narrative. Within the city, there is a parallel
deployment of authoritative versions of Ramayana tradition and popular or folk versions that create
a politics of particular readings and their points of emphasis. Several locations in and around the city
came to be associated with Ramayana scenes from at least the 11th century, with Ramayana
associations appearing in the local sthalapuranas7, and informal Ramayana carvings appearing on
boulders. By the 1 5th century, however, Rama came to figure centrally in royal patronage and ritual,
followed in the 15th and 16th centuries by the cults of Vitthala8, Krishna, and Tiruvengalanatha, all of
which figured prominently in the imperial politics of the Tuluva dynasty. (Dallapiccola 1994; Verghese
1995) Both Vijayanagara historiography and traditional founding stories often mention the de novo

6
The Raichur Doab is a Doab, in this case the triangular region of land in the southern Indian states of
Telangana and Karnataka lying between the Krishna River and its tributary, the Tungabhadra River.
7
Sthala Purana or a Sthalapurana or Sthala Puranam refers to a religious account that recounts the historical
significance of a Hindu temple, or the sacredness of the region in which it is situated.
8
a Hindu god predominantly worshipped in the Indian state of Maharashtra and Karnataka.
character of the city and the empire, a claim of novelty not entirely supported by the material
record. Archaeological research shows that the region that would become the Vijayanagara urban
landscape contained a long history of settlement and agriculture, a landscape already known,
named, and memorialized, with cleared fields, temples, and occupied places. But this historiographic
focus is correct in the sense that there was, in part and conjunction with a deliberate appropriation
of the past, including the Pampa tirtha, a deliberate divorce with the past, a statement of founding
and establishment of something new. (Morrison 2009) The city of Vijayanagara, along with the
empire bearing its name, did grow extraordinarily rapidly, assuming an unprecedented size and form.
This ambiguous relationship between continuity and change, rupture and residence is also true of
the "abandonment" of the city, in which historical imagination of destruction is at odds with the
material record of continued, albeit significantly restructured, occupation.

Both long-term connections and innovations of the Vijayanagara period can be discerned in the
regional landscape itself. As noted, the city grew up around an important pilgrimage spot on the
Tungabhadra River. The earliest architectural remains in this area are on and near Hemakuta Hill,
which contains several small pre-Vijayanagara and early Vijayanagara temples, the oldest perhaps
built in the ninth century. (Wagoner 1991) The core of the great Virupaksha temple9 of Hampi,
adjacent to Hemakuta, also dates back this far although most of the structure was built during the
Vijayanagara period itself. This area near the river is referred to by Fritz, Micheli, and Nagaraja Rao
(1985) as the Sacred Center, in recognition of the many massive temple complexes found here
Further south is what Fritz et al. term the Urban Core, a walled area of settlement some 20km2,
separated from the Sacred Center by a line of granite outcrops and by the irrigated valley, an
intensive agricultural zone watered by river-fed canals. The Urban Core contains both residential and
commercial areas. Here there is clear evidence of religious diversity, including Jain temples, both
Vaisnavite and Saivite temples, and the"Muslim Quarter," an area containing a mosque, dharmsala
(rest house), and a distinctive ceramic assemblage. (Micheli 1990; Nagaraja Rao 1983;Sinopoli 1993)

Within the Urban Core is the Royal Center, an area containing numerous walled enclosures
protecting monumental structures and areas of elite residence and work. Contained within the Royal
Center are the elephant stables, numerous audience halls and platforms, water tanks, "palaces,"
which can be both residential and administrative, temples (including the large Ramachandra temple
complex), and examples of the secular architecture that Micheli (1992) has named the Vijayanagara
"courtly style." This style, once known as "Indo-Saracenic10," was widely shared across the Deccan
and integrates design elements from temple architecture with forms from Islamic structures. These
structures index a shared courtly and cosmopolitan culture that transcended religious divisions. Here
we employ Fritz, Micheli, and Nagaraja Rao's (1985) numerical designations for the many internal
divisions of the Royal Center, when possible, also indicating the more popular names for these areas
(e.g. "the zenana" or "women's quarters' vs. Enclosure XIV). Survey work by the Vijayanagara
Metropolitan Survey (VMS) project shows that, in addition to these three zones, there is a densely
settled area beyond the Urban Core, inside the outer ring of the city walls. (Morrison 2005, 2010;
Sinopoli and Morrison 1995, 2007) Most of this appears to date to the sixteenth century. Further out
are named suburbs, many still inhabited. Although these categories do overstate the spatial

9
A temple dedicated to the consort of Pampa Devi, built during the reign of Deva Raya 2 ,the temple is a
UNESCO world heritage site
10
Indo Saracenic architecture is a distinctive style that emerged in the 19th century, embodying the synthesis of
Indian, Islamic, and Western architectural elements like the Neo-Classical, the Gothic, and the Victorian. It
became the hallmark of public buildings, government offices, educational institutions, and monuments during
British colonial rule in India. The word “Saracen” originates from the Medieval Latin term “Saracens,” referring
to the Arab Muslims and, more broadly, to the people of the desert
separation of the city (there are temples in the royal center, palaces in the urban core, residences,
and shops in the sacred center, and gardens throughout the city), they provide convenient labels for
discussing the layout of this large city and its hinterland

The sixteenth century witnessed well-documented shifts in the form scale and elaboration of temple
complexes within the city. This has been described as a shift from simpler and smaller scale
"Deccani" styles to larger more elaborate "Tamil" styles featuring walled complexes set off by
monumental gateway towers or gopura. (Verghese 2000, 201 1) While not all late Vijayanagara
temples are elaborated in these ways, the great temple complexes of the Tuluva period share a series
of architectural characteristics: formally enclosed complexes entered through massive gateways with
elaborate Gopura' standardized layouts leading from gateway to garbagriha (sanctuary); associated
subsidiary shrines and columned halls or mandapa' elaborate column forms with stereotypic images;
new iconographies associated with the foundation myths of important pilgrimage centers as well as
royal images and donor portraits; and associated bazaar streets extending as much as a kilometer
from the temple gates. In some cases (the Krishna, Tiruvengalanatha11, and Pattabhirama temples,
for example) these complexes were constructed in a single well-planned episode, while in others
(Virupaksha and Vitthala12), already important sacred centers were elaborated in a way that
conformed to this template. Either through accretional reworking or planned construction, a series
of large, elaborate, and heavily inscribed temple complexes came into being in the city during a
period of about 25 years. In each case, these temple complexes centered on or formed the kernel of
a substantial suburban settlement. Many had storerooms and vast kitchens and were referred to as
towns in their own right, supporting large populations of retainers and specialists. More than sites of
devotional practice, these temples constituted symbolic and economic powerful loci for the
consumption and distribution as well as, less directly, the production of foodstuffs. They were
intimately enmeshed in the emergent political economy of differentiated agricultural production and
inequality of the late Vijayanagara period. (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1976; Fil-liozat and Filliozat
1988; Morrison 2009; Stein 1960) The political ecology of the temple also made it an instrument of
elite domination of the Vijayanagara countryside.9 Temple donations were particularly important for
political legitimation, competition, and alliance building; agricultural investment was key to all of
these strategies. (Morrison 1995; Morrison and Lycett 1994, 1997; Stein 1960, 1980) The elaboration
of the temple, thus, has to be understood in the context of presentation and patronage and as both
an idiom of an arena for elite claims, status calculations, and practice. The close connection between
temple architecture and political ambition is no coincidence, as claims of authority were intimately
connected to the dharmic role of kings and other leaders. The mobilization of resources by temples
also made them attractive partners for aspiring elites. Kings, royal family members, royal officers, and
high-ranking elites are disproportionately represented in the establishment, elaboration, and
maintenance of these temple complexes. Being and becoming elite was tied to these practices. In a
striking pattern, temple donations within the city and its immediate environments peaked early in
the career of the two most prominent Tuluva kings, falling off as their reigns wore on. Overall, the
well-documented peak in the sixteenth-century inscriptions (Morrison 1995) was driven by the
politics of temple donation.

11
Achyutaraya Temple located between Gandhamadana and Matanga Hills. The temple was established in
1534 AD by Achyuta Deva Raya and was originally named Tiruvengalanatha, but gradually it became popular by
the King’s name. It is dedicated to Lord Venkateshwara
12
The Vittala Temple or Vitthala Temple in Hampi is an ancient monument that is well-known for its exceptional
architecture and unmatched craftsmanship. It is considered to be one of the largest and most famous
structures in Hampi. The temple is located in the northeastern part of Hampi, near the banks of the
Tungabhadra River
It is against the backdrop of this large and differentiated urban and rural landscape that the events of
1565 need to be understood. Historical accounts of the sacking of the city tend to be quite vague,
using terms such as "destruction," and "fall" rather than precise assessments of the degree of
damage. This imprecision reflects the rather limited historical sources - as Zubairi (Basu 2000:254)
claimed, "To a distance of twenty leagues round the city everything was burnt and reduced to
ashes." The notion of indiscriminate and total destruction has proven remarkably tenacious in both
scholarly and popular literature The notion of "ruins," is, of course, itself a critical ingredient in the
European romantic imaginary, and European scholars were instrumental in constructing the image of
Hampi Ruins (title of Longhurst influential 1914 guidebook), part of an ongoing justification for
colonial rule that construed the British as ending a brutal historical chapter - ending an era.

In addition to colonial connections, we must contend with perspectives histories, in which both
"sides" - Muslim and Hindu - stressed the annihilation of the city, but for different ends. Thus,
chroniclers such as Ferishta and Zubairi brag about the destruction of the city, aggrandizing their
sultanate patrons. Twentieth-century historians used these same historical sources for the most part
( Guha 2009), but turned triumph into tragedy, stressing what Krishnaswami Aiyangar (2000:23)
called, ". . . the sad tale of the end of Vijayanagar, the actual ending of which is marked by the
beginning of the Mahratta power in the South." Here the investment in understanding Vijayanagara
as keeper of the Hindu dharma makes destruction rather than a slow ebbing of power and influence
(more like the actual history of the post-Tuluva state) necessary to cleanly pass on this responsibility.
As noted above, the easy slippage between city and state makes it possible to see 1565 as the end,
despite the continued salience of the polity for more than a hundred years Following the battle of
Talikota13, much of the urban population fled, never to return. The king and court shifted further
south toward the center of the empire, and this northern border region was never again firmly under
Vijayanagara imperial control. Nevertheless, the city and its hinterland remained both habitable and
inhabited. The Venetian traveler,Cesare Federici14, who spent seven months in the city in 1567, noted
an unsuccessful attempt to restore the capital by the Arividu claimant to the throne. (Filliozat
1999:324) Successional disputes associated with this brief reoccupation may have led to further
deterioration of the elite residential districts.14 Many of the smaller rural settlements in the area,
however, were never abandoned. Vijayanagara reservoirs, canals, and roadways continued to define
the routes and rhythms of regional production and settlement, though the structure of production
and marketing must have shifted as the once-substantial urban demand for foodstuffs evaporated.
(Morrison 2009)

In addition to continued yet reorganized forms of settlement and land use, forms and structures of
worship were remade in a complex interplay of deliberate discontinuities and equally deliberate
continuities. It is striking that the great Vaishnavite temple complexes of imperial Vijayanagara stand
empty, absent any attempt at recovery, or even maintenance. Indeed it is this history of
abandonment that makes them "monuments' today, archaeological sites rather than ongoing
temples. Only Virupaksha, the single large Shaivite complex remained a living temple, probably more
or less continuously, following the fall of the city. Both literary and inscriptional sources indicate
continued elite, and eventually colonial, patronage from the 1570s onward. It remained an important
pilgrimage center, drawing crowds as large as 100,000 in the mid-19th century In the Urban Core,

13
The Battle of Talikota, also known as that of Rakkasagi–Tangadagi, was a watershed battle fought between
the Vijayanagara Empire and an alliance of the Deccan sultanates
14
Cesare Federici was an Italian merchant and traveler. Federici was born at Erbanno, in what is now the
province of Brescia, then under the rule of the Republic of Venice. In 1563, he visited India, and spent eighteen
years in commercial pursuits and travels on the southern coasts and islands of Asia
smaller temples now in worship fall into three broad categories; temples to goddesses such as
Yellamma15, Shaivite images such as Virabhadra, and Vaishnavite images with Ramayana associations.
In some cases, these temples may have been revived or reinvested. The community of worship at the
Malyavanta temple is relatively recent, for example. Indeed, many small sacred sites may have come
in and out of both institutional and informal forms of worship in the centuries after 1565. What is
remarkable about each of these categories is the lack of elite investment in the sacred spaces of the
erstwhile city Even within the symbolic set of Ramayana images, it is Kishkindha, not Ramachandra
that has been reconstituted. The elite Ramachandra temple, with its elaborate narrative panels and
critical place in state ceremony, stands undamaged but empty, while Ram-Sita-Lakshman images
carved on boulders and even unmodified natural features like "Sugrivas cave," "Sita Sarovar," and
Anjenadri (the birthplace of Hanuman) remain salient to a broad community of worshipers. The
social construction of Kishkindha remains profoundly open, not under the control of any one
constituency, but fluid, multi-centered, and associated with small shrines as well as unmodified
landscape feature

Outside the city, temples were also differentially abandoned, remade, and kept in use. For example,
in the Daroji Valley16, a large dry-farmed region that saw major settlement expansion in the early
sixteenth century, the majority of shrines with identifiable deities are dedicated either to some form
of Shiva or to goddesses - there is only one temple dedicated to Vishnu (Morrison 2009). The latter
sits near a gateway in a massive fortification wall that divides the valley and is arguably an "official"
installation. While a great many of the other Vijayanagara-period shrines in the valley are still in
worship, this lone Vaishnava shrine is completely abandoned, a pattern echoing that of the great
urban temple complexes elsewhere in the urban hinterland, we have documented a marked
preference for forms of Shiva, goddesses, and local heroes such as Hanuman,a reworking of older
temples and shrines no less significant in the long term than the events of 1565. Here, too, we see a
pattern in which temples were rededicated, sometimes in unorthodox ways, quietly but forcefully
"destroying" temples to Vishnu to create Shaivite and Goddess shrines. Regionally, patterns of
change are complex, with evidence for creative re-use and rededication - the formation of composite
shrines and even non-normative arrangements such as Nandi facing Rama and Sita, or a broken
Nandi head being set up as a [Link] legacy of Vijayanagara as a place is not simply an
understanding based on experience or event, but a socialized and historicized understanding of the
meanings encoded and embodied in its settings, pathways, and monuments. Its meaning is reflected
in both authoritative and popular frameworks and contexts for redeploying the past. To
contemporary observers,the material negation of royal authority, sovereignty, and power embodied
in the invasion of the city would have been evident. The intensive and the orchestrated pattern of
axial destruction to the Vitthala and [Link] temple complexes were political postures set
in granite. Despite the loss of most of its great temples, elite precincts, and urban populace,
Vijayanagara, as both empire and place, continued into the succeeding centuries.

Rural populations continued to thrive, irrigation systems continued to be maintained, and worship
continued to be practiced in both institutional and informal settings. Patterns of temple maintenance
and rededication suggest a loss of elite patronage and a reconfiguration of sacred landscapes in

15
Yellamma, is a Dravidian mother Goddess worshipped predominantly in the South Indian states of Karnataka,
Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and the western state of [Link]
16
, the Daroji Valley. Located in northern Karnataka, this valley served as a corridor of movement during the
Southern Neolothic, an iron-smelting locale in the Early Historic, and most dramatically, as an area of food
production for the imperial city of Vijayanagara, especially in the sixteenth century
terms of popular associations and traditions. The empire, forgotten or never-forgotten, may have
moved on, but the active constitution of social space as both experience and symbol never stopped.

The city has also entered into a succession of historiographies constructions, both popular and
scholarly. Narratives of indiscriminate and total destruction, "the fall," have worked their way
through a variety of historiographic designs, including those with essentialist, communalist,
nationalist, and colonial valences. Vijayanagara has come to stand for something outside of its own
experience - as a potent symbol of conflict, of identity, of essential tradition and resistance, or of
artistic and cultural achievement. Continuously reinvented, cities and empires live on in a variety of
guises from communal tropes to exemplars of heritage at a grand, even global scale.

Just as it's materiality and symbolic power retain their effective claim on history, in the centuries
after 1565, Vijayanagara hegemony continued to circulate as a powerful, but potentially dangerous
substance in narratives of South Indian sovereignty. (Branfoot 2008; Narayana Rao, Shulman,and
Subrahmanyam 1992; Wagoner 1993) At least part of this involves a concern for lineal relations. The
Marathas and the Mysore state, for example, are both mentioned by Sastri (1955:26) as 'inheritors'
of the empire and indeed later rulers often claimed such connections. Historiographie constructions
of Vijayanagara as an essentially religious polity formed in opposition to Muslim expansion lend
themselves to essentialism; from whom did the Vijayanagara polity inherit its "Hindu mantle" - and
to whom did this essence go? While claims on history as a strategic elements of political legitimation
is not novel - early Vijayanagara kings reached back to previous rulers in various ways - the reduction
of this city and empire to a religious, communal icon by twentieth-century historians falsely
simplified this complex polity, creating a cartoonish yet appealing and persistent story in which both
the "rise" and "fall" of Vijayanagara were linked to the threat of violent Islam. (Nilakanta Sastri 1955;
Venkata Ramanayya 2007 [1933]) Without its golden age associations, perhaps narratives of the
"fall" of Vijayanagara would not have had such tenacity and appeal both historical and material
evidence, however, suggest that the politics of destruction were considerably more complex, not
easily reduced to religion. Eaton's (2000:259) description of a post-Talikota conflict among the

Sultanates is germane here:

...in 1579, when Golcondas army, led by Muhari Rao, was campaigning south of

the Krishna River, Rao annexed the entire region of the Qutb Shahi domains and

sacked the popular Ahobilam temple, whose ruby-studded image he brought back

to Golconda and presented to the Sultan as a war trophy . . . Although the Ahobilam

temple had only local appeal, it had close associations with prior sovereign authority,

since it had been patronized and even visited by the powerful and most famous king

of Vijayanagara, Krishna Deva Raya.

Even after the abandonment of the city and in the context of a conflict between Muslim rulers, this
temple was an active site of political contestation. Verghese (2008:33, and see Verghese 2000:113)
reports that the nineteenth-century Mackenzie17 manuscripts make passing reference to further
destruction in the Vitthala complex by both the Marathas and Tipu Sultan as well as looting of the
Virupaksha by Tipu's armies. That these references are almost certainly apocryphal is beside the

17
C olonel Colin Mackenzie CB (1754–8 May 1821) was a Scottish army officer in the British East India Company
who later became the first Surveyor General of India.
point. The symbolic salience of Vijayanagara hegemony, as embodied especially the Vitthala temple,
played a sufficiently powerful role in the colonial imagination that it could be vulnerable more than a
century after its actual destruction and perhaps in perpetuity. The social memory of 1565 remains
contested, an open forum for the uses of the past, its representation, and its import for the present

Bibliography

New Cambridge History of India: Vijaynagar- Burton Stein

India Under Vijaynagar A Verghese and AL Dallapico

Sumit Guha Frontiers of Memory: What Marathas Remembered of Vijaynagar

Vijaynagar: Origin of the State and the Empire

Hampi Vijaynagar -John M fritz and George Michell

Social and political life in Vijaynagar Empire – B.A. Saletore