Abraham Eraly - The Age of Wrath - A History of the Delhi Sultanate

Around this time several chieftains of Vijayanagar threw off their allegiance to the raja and set up their own petty kingdoms. Some of these new states — Madurai under Nayaks, for instance — grew into powerful and enduring kingdoms, but most regions of Vijayanagar simply collapsed into anarchy. And many of the palayagars , who were responsible for maintaining law and order in the districts of the kingdom, now reversed their role and took to banditry. Vijayanagar thus began to implode. Tirumala did not have the resources — or the energy: he was an old man now — to bring the rebels to submission, but he had the wisdom to adopt a realistic policy, of acknowledging the virtual independence of the rebel chieftains in return for their symbolic recognition of the overlordship of the raja and of his own de facto authority. Vijayanagar thus became an agglomeration of semi-independent principalities with Tirumala as its head. And it survived in that loose, withered and crumbling state for nearly another century.

Tirumala did the best that anyone could possibly have done to preserve the truncated kingdom in the given circumstances. And this, he felt, entitled him to be the de jure as well as the de facto king. So in 1570, five years after the battle of Talikota, he crowned himself at Penugonda as the king of Vijayanagar, and founded the Aravidu dynasty, the last dynasty of Vijayanagar. He then divided the kingdom into three roughly linguistic provinces, and assigned these to each of his three sons: the Telugu region to his eldest son Sriranga; the Karnataka region to his second son Rama, and the Tamil country to his third son Venkatapathi. Soon after making this division Tirumala abdicated the throne in favour of his son Sriranga, and thereafter devoted himself to scholarly and religious pursuits. It is not clear what happened to Sadashiva, the phantom king, but it is likely that he was assassinated.

Vijayanagar continued to fragment under Sriranga and his four successors, though it had also a few brief periods of revival. The last phase of the history of Vijayanagar is mostly a story of pathetic, feckless rajas, and of usurpations, rebellions, civil wars, and recurrent invasions by the Deccan sultans. During the reign of the last of these kings, Sriranga III, the Deccan sultans swept into Vijayanagar in a coordinated attack and divided the kingdom among themselves. Sriranga thus became a king without a kingdom, and in 1649 he fled to Mysore to take refuge with the raja there, and died there a couple of years later. Thus ended the three century long history of Vijayanagar. All that remained of this once great kingdom were a few small principalities here and there, but even these were presently mopped up by the expanding Maratha kingdom, which had emerged as the dominant power in India after the decline of the Mughals.

VIJAYANAGAR IS OFTEN portrayed as the champion of the revival of Hindu political power, religion and culture, and as an inveterate antagonist of Muslim kingdoms. But this is not borne out by facts. Though Vijayanagar was the most powerful Hindu kingdom that existed in the entire Indian subcontinent during the nearly half a millennium period from the conquest of India by Turks at the close of the twelfth century to the establishment of the Maratha state by Shivaji in the mid-seventeenth century, and though its rajas were all devout Hindus, and several of them were keen and knowledgeable patrons of Hindu religion and culture, the primary motive of the rajas was to gain and expand their political power, and not to resuscitate Hindu religion and culture. In fact, Harihara and Bukka, the founders of the Vijayanagar kingdom, had at the outset of their political career embraced Islam, because it suited them then, but later reverted to Hinduism, because it suited them then.

Being a Hindu kingdom was incidental to the political history of Vijayanagar. It is significant that the initial territorial expansion of Vijayanagar was not into any Muslim kingdom, but into the Hindu kingdom of Hoysalas, and that too when Hoysalas were engaged in a conflict with the Muslim kingdom of Madurai. Indeed, the expansion of Vijayanagar in its entire history was mostly into Hindu kingdoms, and not into Muslim kingdoms. And throughout its history Vijayanagar was as much engaged in battles with Hindu kingdoms as with Muslim kingdoms. Nor did Vijayanagar kings have any hesitation to ally with sultans against Hindu kings. But then, nor did sultans have any hesitation to ally with Hindu kings against Muslim rulers. The wars of these kings hardly ever had anything to do with religion, but were fought primarily to defend or conquer territory. Though a religious colouration was often given to these campaigns, this was done primarily to gain military advantage by igniting the martial fervour of their soldiers.

In the case of both Bahmani and Vijayanagar, religion subserved politics. Vijayanagar was not an anti-Muslim state. It in fact had a large number of Muslim officers and soldiers in its army, that too in the critically important divisions of cavalrymen, archers, cannoneers and musketeers. Devaraya II in particular took care to show various special favours to his Muslim soldiers; he built a mosque for them, and even placed a copy of Koran on a desk in front of his throne. As for the Deccan sultanates, they all had a large number of Hindu contingents in their army, and their rulers sometimes entrusted the defence of key forts to Hindu officers, as Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar is recorded to have done.

The Vijayanagar rajas were generally quite liberal in their religious attitudes. ‘The king allows such freedom that every man may come and go and live according to his own creed without suffering any annoyance … whether he is a Christian, Jew, Moor or Heathen,’ notes Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese chronicler in India in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. ‘Great equity and justice is shown to all, not only by the ruler but by the people to one another.’ There were several instances of acts of liberalism by sultans also. Thus when Sultan Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur heard of a tragedy in the family of King Ramaraya of Vijayanagar — the death of a son of Ramaraya — he personally went to Vijayanagar to console him. And Ramaraya in turn received the sultan with utmost courtesy; Ramaraya’s wife even nominally adopted the young sultan as her son. But on the whole the rajas, being polytheists, were far more tolerant in religious matters than the sultans, who were monotheists.

This liberality and religious tolerance of the rajas however generally applied only in their treatment of their own subjects. In the enemy territory they often acted as vandals, destroying mosques or using them as stables, and enslaving or slaughtering Muslims, and violating their women. This was the common practice of all invading armies during medieval times. In fact, the excesses of Hindu armies in this were not usually as excessive as those of Muslim armies.

On the whole the Vijayanagar rajas provided as good a government as was possible in that age and place. They cleared forests and brought new lands under cultivation, built dams and tanks and irrigation canals. Trade was encouraged. They also systematised revenue administration, rationalised the tax system and abolished vexatious minor taxes. All this contributed to the prosperity and contentment of the people — as well as, of course, to the power of the raja. ‘In power, wealth, and extent of the country’ Vijayanagar was much superior to the Bahmani Sultanate, concedes Ferishta. Exclaims Razzak: ‘The city of Vijayanagar is such that the pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it, and the ear of intelligence has never been informed that there existed anything to equal it in the world.’ Vijayanagar, according to Paes, was ‘the best provided city in the world.’

There was however a dark side to this effulgent picture. The kingdom was ever riven by internal dissensions and conflicts, and was engaged in incessant wars with other kingdoms. Its political history, like the history of most early medieval Indian kingdoms, is a sordid story, though it also had a few periods of impressive material prosperity and cultural efflorescence.