Three Recent Books on Vijayanagara History

Vijayanagara History has now become an important area of historical investigation in India. It is difficult to speculate on the reasons for the sudden spurt of interest on the last imperial power in peninsular India. Perhaps a mixture of nostalgia and pride in what most historians perceive as the "last hindu empire" accounts for interest historians have been taking on Vijayanagara, of late. I do not for one believe that the sartorial preferences of the rayas of Vijayanagara is any indication of a syncretic "Hindu-Islamic" culture that was evoloving in the region. The kabayi could well have been just a peaked cap and nothing more. The tendency on the part of historians to read contemporary trends in the medieval past is a kind of distortion and leads to an anachonistic understanding of the past.
A recent book which is a remarkable addition to the spate of works on Vijayanagara is Vijayanagara Visions by William Jackson. Jackson is a familiar name in Vijanagara studies due to his path breaking study on Tyagaraja, the early 19th century sait composer of Tanjavur, then under the rule of the Maharattas. Jackson displays a mastery over the historical literature of the period and his work is a must read for all those interested in the history of late medieval South India. His earlier work, Vijayanagara Voices published by Routledge, London is also an excellent work and need to be reprinted here in India as this book is not available here.
The third book I have in mind does nbot deal exclusively with Vijayanagara, but is a study of the relationship between the classical language, Sanskrit, and the regional languages. The advent of caste and strong regional identities in India has led to a fundamental error in the reconstruction of the medieval past that is substantially rectified by Sheldon Pollock's Language of the Gods in the World of Men, a book of breathtaking intellectual effort. The concept of the Sanskrit Cosmopolis, a cultural space in which the language of kavya in Sanskrit became the vehicle for the transmission of concepts relating to society and polity. It is an empirical fact that all majoe South Indian states, the Chalukyas of Badami, the Rashtrakutas of Malkhed, the Pallavas of Kanchipuram and of course the Cholas of Tanjavur all deployed Sanskrit in their public and monumental epigraphy and the regional language was essentially the language of record keeping.
Sheldon Pollock has completely changed the understanding of the relationship between power and polity through this great and magnificent work. Some time in the not too distant future I will take up the specific details of Vijayanagara Empire as a part of this "Sanskrit cosmopolis"

These three biiks must be read by every one interested in Vijayanagara.