History · India · Long read · 18 min read

Hampi: The Rise and Fall of Vijayanagara, the City of Victory

Hills of giant boulders, the ruins of a capital that travellers compared to Rome, and a city looted for five months after a single battle in 1565. The story of Hampi through the eyes of medieval travellers and the first photographs taken there in 1856, with our own assessments.

By GK Global, Adimali, Munnar · Trails & Tales by GK

On the south bank of the Tungabhadra river in northern Karnataka lies a landscape unlike any other in India: hills of giant granite boulders, piled as if by giants, and among them the ruins of a vast city. This was Vijayanagara, "the City of Victory", capital of the last great Hindu empire of the south. In the early 16th century it was one of the largest and richest cities in the world. In 1565 it was sacked after a single battle and never lived in again. The village at its heart, Hampi, has given its name to the whole site.

This article tells Hampi's story through the eyes of the foreign travellers who saw it at its height, and through the earliest photographs of its ruins, taken by Alexander Greenlaw in 1856. As always, our own assessments are clearly marked.

Before the empire: Pampa and Kishkindha

The name Hampi comes from Pampa, the old name of the Tungabhadra and of the goddess Pampa, consort of Shiva as Virupaksha, who has been worshipped here since long before the empire. Local tradition identifies the area with Kishkindha, the monkey kingdom of the Ramayana: Anjanadri hill across the river is revered as the birthplace of Hanuman, and Matanga hill, Rishyamuka and Pampa Sarovar all carry names from the epic. The Virupaksha temple was already an important shrine centuries before the city was built around it.

The rise of Vijayanagara

In the early 14th century the armies of the Delhi Sultanate swept through the Deccan, destroying the old kingdoms. Out of this chaos, around 1336, two brothers, Harihara and Bukka, sons of Sangama, founded a new kingdom on the Tungabhadra. Tradition says they were guided by the sage Vidyaranya of Sringeri. Their capital grew into Vijayanagara, and their Sangama dynasty was followed by the Saluva, Tuluva and Aravidu dynasties. For two centuries the empire held the south against the Bahmani sultanate and, after its break-up, the five Deccan sultanates to the north.

Its golden age came under Krishnadevaraya of the Tuluva dynasty (1509–1529), a successful general, a poet in Telugu and Sanskrit, and a great builder. He added the Krishna temple, the Hazara Rama reliefs and much of the Vitthala temple, and in 1528 commissioned the giant monolithic Narasimha. Bronze portraits of him and his two queens, which he gave to the Tirumala temple in 1518, show how he wished to be remembered: as a devotee standing with joined hands before his god.

The city through foreign eyes

Because no Vijayanagara chronicle of the city survives in such detail, much of what we know of daily life comes from foreign visitors:

• The Italian Niccolò de' Conti (about 1420) described a city sixty miles in circumference, enclosed by walls running up into the hills.
• The Persian ambassador Abdur Razzaq (1443) wrote that the eye had never seen a place like it, describing seven concentric lines of fortification, bazaars full of jewels and the king's great festival.
• The Portuguese horse-trader Domingo Paes (around 1520) thought the city as large as Rome and very beautiful, and described the Mahanavami festival, the king's palace, the army and the markets in remarkable detail.
• His countryman Fernão Nunes (around 1535) wrote a chronicle of the kings, including Krishnadevaraya's wars.

The accounts of Paes and Nunes lay forgotten in Lisbon until the British historian Robert Sewell translated them in A Forgotten Empire (1900), the book that introduced Vijayanagara to the modern world.

Temples of the sacred centre

The Virupaksha temple, near the river, is the only great temple still in worship. Its eastern gopura, about 50 metres high, was rebuilt and enlarged in the Vijayanagara period. Every year the temple chariot is drawn along the long colonnaded Hampi bazaar in front of it.

The Vitthala temple, dedicated to Vishnu as Vitthala, is the finest of all. Its pillared halls are carved in astonishing detail; some of its slender granite columns ring with musical notes when tapped (the "musical pillars", which visitors are no longer allowed to touch). In its courtyard stands the famous stone chariot, in fact a shrine to Garuda, Vishnu's eagle, built in the form of a temple car, with wheels that once turned. It is printed on India's fifty-rupee note.

The royal centre

The kings lived in a separate walled enclosure to the south. Here are the great stepped platform of the Mahanavami Dibba, from which the king watched the nine-day festival; the Hazara Rama temple, the royal chapel, whose walls are covered with reliefs of the Ramayana and of processions of horses, elephants and dancers; the stepped tank; the Queen's Bath; and, in the women's enclosure (the zenana), the Lotus Mahal, a graceful pavilion whose arches mix Hindu and Islamic styles. Nearby are the Elephant Stables, a row of eleven domed chambers for the royal elephants.

The river

The Tungabhadra made the city possible. Canals and aqueducts, some still in use, carried its water to fields and tanks. Along its banks stand shrines, bathing ghats and the King's Balance (tula), a stone gateway from which, on festival days, the king was weighed against gold, grain or jewels that were then given away. Ruins of an old stone bridge still stand in the river near the Vitthala temple.

Talikota and the sack of the city

After Krishnadevaraya's death, real power passed to the regent Rama Raya, who played the Deccan sultanates off against one another. In the end they united against him. On 23 January 1565, at a battle usually named after Talikota (fought near the villages of Rakkasagi and Tangadagi, on the Krishna river), the combined armies of Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda and Bidar defeated the Vijayanagara army. Rama Raya, then about eighty, was captured and beheaded. The army broke and fled.

The capital was left almost undefended. For about five months it was plundered and burned. The court withdrew to Penukonda, and the empire survived for several more decades under the Aravidu dynasty, but Vijayanagara itself was never lived in again.

Rediscovery

For two centuries the ruins were left to villagers, pilgrims and the boulders. In about 1800 Colin Mackenzie, later the first Surveyor General of India, surveyed them and had drawings made. In 1856 Alexander Greenlaw, an officer of the Madras Army, made a series of large paper-negative photographs of the site, among the first ever taken there; prints are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum and other collections. Because they show the monuments before restoration and modern building, they are an invaluable record. Hampi was declared a World Heritage Site in 1986. It was placed on the list of World Heritage in Danger from 1999 to 2006, mainly because of road bridges being built across the protected landscape.

Read also: Bekal Fort and the Keladi Nayakas (heirs of Vijayanagara on the coast) · Kozhikode and the Zamorins · Padmanabhaswamy and Thiruvananthapuram

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