COURTLY ENCOUNTERS; VIJAYANAGAARA, THE PORTUGUESE AND THE SULTANATES

Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Harvard University Press, 2012

The nation state has become the unlamented victim of the linguistic turn in Historiography. The professional concerns of historians have to a substantial extent revolved around the ideological and political needs and demands of the national state and in parts of the "colonized" world, historical writing became the instrument by which societies inscribed themselves as political entities and therefore worthy of "self-rule" or "independence".  Post Independence historiography essentially added in detail to the sketches made during the colonial era and therefore colonial and post colonial historiographies mimic each other in more ways than is apparent to the uninitiated. In the study of the medieval history of Peninsular India in general and of the Vijayanagara Empire in particular the trend nis noticed by most recent historians of whom the late Professor Burton Stein was the most preeminent. The rise of the last imperial polity of Peninsular India is generally regarded as a direct consequence of the establishment of the Islamic-Turkish state in Delhi and its expansion across the Deccan is seen as the sine qua non for Vijayanagara and indeed its reason for existence Added to this is the imposition of the Hindu and Muslim communities as politically charges and self conscious societies to the medieval past, an anachronistic reading as pointed out by several recent historians. Against this background a new reading of Vijayanagara history is always welcome and Professor Sanjay  .Subrahmanyam has discussed the "encounter" between Vijayanagara and the expanding Portuguese empire in India in the book under review.

The present work divided into 3 substantial chapters with an Introduction and Conclusion is based on the Mary Flexner Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr College in 2009. In the course of the lectures Subrahmanyam analyses the historical events which form the important narrative strands in Vijayanagara history from two quite distinct perspectives. Following the trend of much of post colonial historiography, there is an attempt at problematizing language in an effort to grasp the shape of events and personalities. In most of the histories written on Vijayanagara and its successor states, the pride of place is given to inscriptions which are taken as the very embodiment of empirical reality. Other kinds of materials are usually brought is as supportive documents with the inscriptions forming the mainstay of the documentation.One might agree with Julian Barnes when he says in the Booker winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, "history is  that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation". Sanjay Subrahmanyam gets past this methodological problem by locating the events is a dense description from a variety of written sources of which he uses the Portuguese chronicles and texts with aplomb.

There has been an earlier work which traverses the same terrain: Jean-Pau Rubies', Travel and Ethnology in Renaissance South India. While Rubies is concerned with the mental images and categories of thought through which the late medieval travelers interpreted what   they saw or "encountered" in South India. Subrahmanyam is more concerned about the political and diplomatic language in which the polities of late medieval South India apprehended the changing military and economic equation with the Iberian world. And he is interested in a larger question: Are there similarities to this in other parts of Eurasia particularly Malacca and Ache where the "native"polities /courts encountered a similar situation. The cumulative result of the written and artistic representations of the encounter made possible the circulation of ideas about the "Orient" that subsequently shaped Western polcy and politics toward India and parts of the non-White world.

The book is an interesting addition to the ever increasing number of important studies on Vijayangara and like Zupanov's Missionary Tropics  will find an important place in the historiography of Peninsular India.

VITTHALA AND THE VIJAYANAGARA EMPIRE:FOLK DEITIES AND SOCIETY

The Rise of a Folk God: Vitthal of Pandarpur
Ramachandra Chintaman Dhere
New Delhi: Permanent Black 2012

The spread of the Vijayanagara Empire throughout Peninsular India brought in its wake social changes which are now being investigated by historians. The gradual transformation of forest dwellers and tribal social groups into social formations allied to or integrated within the Hindu conceptual universe remains the most prominent feature of the social landscape of the last precolonial polity/empire of South India. There are transcriptional evidence to demonstrate that in parts of South India when social groups were enumerated in inscriptions an implied hierarchy  was already in place and when we look back at the history of the communities we find that they were rather late entrants into peasant society. One area of research which has opened by in recent years is the study of society and social change as is reflected in songs, ballads, hymns and devotional compositions. The book under review analyses the  cult of Vitthal in its setting in the Warkari tradition of Maharashtra. A recent Ph D thesis entitled The Songs of Purandaradasa in the Social,Historical and Religious Context of the Vijayanagara Empire submitted to Pondicherry University by Divya Sandesh looks at the patronage extended to the cult of Vitthala by the Rayas of Vijayanagara as a strategy to integrate marginal social groups like the Dhangars within the framework of the Vijayanagara state.

The work attempts a reconstruction of the religious tradition and practices surrounding the emergence of Vitthala as Vaishanava deity during the early medieval period. Part of the work was undertaken earlier by the Jesuit priest and scholar Father G A Delury whose Cult of Vithoba still remains one of the most important studies on this theme. Dhere wrote this book in Marathi and it  has been ably translated by Dr Anne Feldhaus. He is at pains to uncover the "identity"of Vitthala about whom even Purandaradasa is said to have remarked in one of his songs: Show me who you really are or I will tell the world the truth about you. It is clear that the identity of Vitthala or Vitthoba was a contested one even during the medieval period. Though he is considered to be form of Vishnu, the fact is that Vitthala like Venkatesvara is not one of the avatars of Vishnu or is he even included in the list of 24 upaavataras. Dhere traces the Vaishnavisation of Vitthala to the Wakari movement, the quintessential pilgrimage and circulation of bhaktas in Maharashtra. This movement seems to have begun in the eleventh century when the Yadavas of Devagiri were the dominant political force in the Deccan region and got absorbed into the larger pan-Indian Bhakthi tradition as a consequence of the  interaction between the Deccan and the Tamil  tradition as ably shown by Dr Divya Sandesh in the thesis already cited.

The author has used a particular kind of religious text known as the Panduranga Mahatmya in order to explore the spiritual and religious aspects of the Vitthala cult. This genre of texts is particularly difficult for historians to accept as source material because of the difficulty we have in arriving at a date for their composition.

 The same difficulty is faced by those historians who use ephemeral sources like abhangs and kirtans of saint composers like Purandaradasa whose compositions were collected and collated only towards the end of the nineteenth century. During the four centuries when songs and hagiography circulated in an oral medium there would have been considerable contamination by the incorporation of later elements and of course certain fundamental changes in the text itself due to the sectarian or political interests of the redactor. However, most historians assume that the texts they are dealing with retain their pristime quality, an assumption which is challenged by the work of Lord and Father Walter Ong. During the Vijayanagara period we find the spread of the cult of Vitthala to parts of Peninsular India where Vitthala was virtually unknown. One argument which has been put forwards by the historian cited earlier Dr Divya Sandesh, is to link the spread of the cult to the political needs and compulsions of the Vijayanagara state itself. She has shown that saint singers like Purandaradasa who traveled extensively in the Empire from Pandarpur in the North to Srirangam in the South created a sacred landscape in which the Vijayangara Empire became more or less coeval with the sacrality of deities like Vitthala and Narasimha whose worship was very popular during the period.

A question which Chintamani Dhere does not ask but is worth asking is: Did Vijayanagara promote the worship of Vitthala at the fabulous temple constructed at Hampi in order to appropriate the sanctity of Pandarpur after it had been conquered by the Adil Shahis Sultanate. This is a historical issue and we cannot fault Dhere for not attempting an answer. All in all this is a serious book and addresses the issue of popular religious cult and practices centering around the worship of theis pastoral deity in a detailed manner.

SOUTH INDIA UNDER VIJAYANAGARA ED. ANILA VERGHESE AND ANNA DALLAPICCOLA

South India under Vijayanagara: Art and Archaeology
Ed Anila Verghese and Anna Dallapiccola
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011

In 1900, when Robert Sewell the ICS officer and historian published the Forgotten Empire Vijayangara had faded into oblivion with Lethe hanging heavy on the memoria of the last imperial power of Peninsular India. Since then Vijayanagara has emerged as a promising field of inquiry partly due to the onset of "identity politics" of the early twentieth century with its twin avatars in the form of caste and lanuage. Were the early founders of Vijayanagara from the Kannada region or the Telugu region. This question animated a great deal of the early historiography of Vijayanagara with scholars like Srikantaiya advocation the Hoysala origin of the Sangamas and Venkataramanyya advocating the Kakatiya origin. Shedon Pollock has quite rightly stated in his Language of the Gods in the World of Men that vernacularization of the Peninsualr polities began as early as the days of the Rashtrakutas and continued apace during the Vijayanagara period. In fact the titles bornes of the ealy Sangama rulers recognise the desh bhasha  when they proudly accord the primary status to regions like Karnat and Telnengu in their inscriptions. Historians have virtually fragmented the Vijayanagara Empire into linguistic zones, a trend that has distorted the study and research on Vijaynagara. Fortunately the volume which is being reviewed herein eschews this trend and looks at Vijayanagara in a more comprehensive manner.

Anila Verghese and Anna Dallapiccola are both well established scholars on Vijaynagara who have worked on the Vijyanagara Reseach Project constituted by Gerrge Michell and John Fritz. The past three decades have seen large sclae exploration and ecxavation in and around the Royal Center at Hampi which has led to a total reapprisal of historical knowledge regarding the urban form and morphology of Vijayaanagara. Unlike other capital cities of Peninsular India, Vijayanagara has had a large number of visitors who have left eyewitness accounts of their experience in Vijyanagara. The discovery and publication of the manuscripts of the Portuguese horse dealer Paes and Nuniz in the archives at Lisbon in the late nineteenth century opened up a vey interesting chapter in Vijayanagara research in that textual evidence could be tested against archeological material. One consequence of this method, though untended, was to view the many landscapes of Vijayangara through the "lens" of foreign visitors. Every building or piece of monumental architectre was identified using literary accounts. Thus the account of the nine day Mahanavami Festival formed the basis for identifying the Throne Platforms found in the royal core of Vijyanagara.

This book contains 24 articles each one of them exploring an interesting aspect of Vijaynagara material culture. Philip Wagoner's article on the "Stepped Well" found in the capital is a remarkable piece of historical scholarship. He demonstrates that the architectural marvel was brought from Kalyan, and it was moved to Vijayanagara during the 16th century when effort was made to link Vijaynagara with the past of the Chalukyas of Kalyan.AnilaVerghese in her contribution  looks at the "sacred topography" of Vijaynagara on the basis of inscriptions and the associated myhs of temples. The thene of the Ramayana looms large in the political imagination of Vijayangara and one sees a tendency to expoit mythic associations and popular memory in order to sacralise the landscape of Vijayanagara. This trend toward scaralizing the landscape was further reinforced by the dasakuta tradition represented by the haridasa singers of whom Purandaradasa was the most preeminent. A recent Ph D thesis submitted by a student of mine explores this theme is a substantial manner.

This volume is a excellent attempt at systhesising the  state of the art in so far as Vijaynagara studies is concerend and will be useful to students and researchers alike.

SOCIAL LIFE AS REFLECTED IN NAYAKA PAINTINGS; THE TIRUPPUDAIMARUDUR PAINTINGS

A Study of Nayaka-Period Social Life: Tiruppudaimarudur paintings
Institute Francais de Pondichery
Jean Deloche, 2012

Indian paintings have hardly attracted attention, except for the precocious Ajanta Cave murals. Even Sivaramamurthi chose to concentrate on paintings found on the walls of Tamil temples particularly the famous paintings found in the Brihadesvara Temple at Tanjavur. The reason why paintings have been a neglected area of study can easily be determined. India offers a very rich fare in Sculpture, Iconography, Architecture and the identification of sculptural representations with the agamic sources and texts formed the basis of art history ever since T A Gopinath Rao published his monumental Elements of Hindu Inconography. Indeed it may even be argued that the only enduring paradigm for studying south Indian art and architecture was legislated by Gopinath Rao nearly a century back. Obviously this method of inquiry previleged the works of art found in Saiva and Vaishanva temples with elaborate treatises being composed on arcane matters of textual reconstruction and identification. While Gopinath Rao made a good beginning, he certainly did not wish that his method of investigatiom would be the classic statement frozen in time and beyond critical scrutiny. The French Institute of Pondicherry has been at the forefront of new methods and perspectives in the study of south Indian art amnd architecture.

Jean Deloche is well known historian famous for his study on roads and networks of transport and communication in India prior to the advent of European colonialism. More recently he published an excellent monograph on the medieval fort of Senji located in South Arcot district. The books under review is his most recent publication. While his earlier work betrays the influence of the Annaliste group of historians, that shadow seems to be lifting in his later and more recent publications. Theoretical issues are barely referred to in this slim volume.

The murals which were discovered in the late Pandyan temple dedicated to a Saivite deity, covered the walls of the gopura which has 5 teirs. The murals are found all along the walls of the gopura. Deloche correctly dates them to the Vijayanagra period, though the term nayaka period seems to be ambiguous. Deloche seems to regard the presence of handguns in some of the murals to be evidence of a late date. It is well known that even Krishnadevaraya used firearms in the Battle of Raichur, AD 1520. Ma Huan's account found in the  Overall Survey of the Ocean Shores shows that firearms were used by Zheng-He during his foray into the Arabian Sea/Indian Ocean. Another piece of evidence that he uses for dating the paintings is the presence of curb bits which according to him were intoroduced only in the 17th century. The use of internal evidence for dating the murals is an interesting idea but may not be entirely reliable.

The paintings depict scence from the medieval text Tiruvilaiyatapuranam which has been found in innmerable manuscript versions all over the Tamil region. Deloche has identified the paintings using this text. Apart from the religious or sectarian themes, Deloche has made a fairly comprehensive study of the ships shown in the paintings. One of the vessels, a tall ship with a half deck clearly shows horses and the author argues that the ship could have been a Portuguese ship. From the term parasika which actually means Persian and a term which is found even in Chola inscriptions, Deloche wrongly deduces the reference to Portuguese. The murals clearly show Indian soldiers carrying firearms, though the main battle weapon seems to have been the pike and the sword. An interesting illustration shows Europeans carrying firearms (fig. 94).

This is a very interesting book and the methodology employed is critical and some of the conclusions drawn are nuanced. However given the highly naturalistic style and the absence of conventional elements, we may have to further investigate the origins of natualistic art in Peninsular India. The illustrations are excellent and on the whole this book is a worthwhile addition to the slender library of art of the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

ROYAL IMAGERY AND NETWORKS OF POWER AT VIJAYANAGARA; A REVIEW

Royal Imagery and Networks of Power at Vijayanagara: A study of Kingship in South India
Dr Nalini Rao
NEW DELHI, 2010.

Vijayanagara kingship, the conceptual universe within which the rayas of Vijayanagara lived and expressed their ideas of politics and statecraft, remains an enigmatic subject. There is one basic reason for this: there are no contemporary histories or documents which reveal the strnads that constituted the complex fabric of political ideologies glossed under the rubric, kingship. Skinner has argued that it is possible to use what he calls the "intentional method" in order to unpack the linguistic conventions and ideologies which animate political action. The contextual approach favored by medieval western historians on the theme of statecraft does not find favor among historians of medieval South India, priamrily because bgoth the State and the ideologies underpinning it come prefigured in the package known as "Divine Kingship".For a variety of reasons, partly due to the heavy cloud of orientalism hanging on Indic studies, India kings and the normative vocabulary available for describing the actions of kings,are assimilated to notions of divinity,devaraja, rajadharma etc all of which assume an element of sacerdotal power as the constituent element of Indian kingship. Indian kings and their courtly prasasti composers have also conspired to create the image of divine king so beloved of Indian historiography. The genealogies of medieval kings is replete with references to almost every known puranic god who contibute in some measure in gining an air of royal mytique to the king.

Vijayanagara Empire, the last major political formation of Peninsular India before the advent of western military and economic hegemony, left behind a rich set of copper plate records and nearly 3,500 stone inscriptions along with a veritable treasure trove of sculptures, monumental architecture, and a magnificent royal capital--the City of Victory--all of which can be interogated for clues on the ever elusive conundrum of kingship. Nalini Rao has attempted just this in her recent book which is reviewed here.

The book under review essentially deals with the third dynasty and more particularly it centers on the reign of Krishnadevaraya (1509-1529). She surveys the urban context of Vijayangara on the basis of extant secondary sources. The well known visitors in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are referred and an attempt is made to identify the public buildings mentioned by early visitors with the archeological evidence which has become available over the past three decades thanks in part to the pioneering work done by thehistorians like M S Najaraja Rao and the achitectural team of George Michell and John Fritz. A question which the author does not raise, but is relevant to the theme of her book is: Why was there a shift from an aggressive Saiva religious cult to Vaishnava religious traditions during the sixteenth century. The legend of Pampakshtra with the marriage of Goddess Pampa to the god Virupaksha which figured prominently both in the local legends and inscriptions attests to the importance of Saivite cultic affiliations in the early history of Vijayanagara. However there seems to have been a shift to Vittala cult and prominent patronage to the Haridasa saits like Purandaradasa in the sixteenth century. A historian working on Vijayanagara kingship must explore this questions. Fortunately there is an unpublished Ph D dissertation which has gone into this question in a thorough manner.

Nalini Rao has drawn attention to 'royal portraits". The well known examples of Krishnadevaraya and his queens in Tirupathi and of the emperor at Chidambaram, Srisailam and Kanchipuram are discussed by the author. However, her discussion of mahanavami as a ritual expression of Vijayangara kingship is almost entirely based on Burton Stein's reconstruction which was published more than 30 years ago and the present author has not broken any new ground. Again her attempt to see kingship in terms of discrete topic like ( 1 )Heroic kingship ( 2) Liberal Kingship ( 3 ) Dharmic Kingship ( 4 ) Religious Kingship and ( 6 ) Ritual  Kingship is not very convincing as the rays of Vijayanagara themselves did not distinguish between these different fascets of their kingship. This can easily be proved by an examination of Krishnadevaraya's campaign against the Gajapathis of Orissa in which the king performed all these roles simulataneously and indeed one can say that the Eastern Campaign was more like a pilgrimage than a military adventure.

This work apprently is a Ph D thesis submitted to an American University and from my reading of the text did not find anything substantially new in this work. The inscriptional sources have not been used and even the literary sources are cited rather spottily. However, the photographs are excellent.

HISTORICAL MEMORY AND VIJAYANAGARA STATECRAFT; KRISHNADEVARAYA'S CAMPAINGS AGAINST THE GAJAPATIS OF ORISSA

The role of historical memory is providing the basis for political action has not been adequately been explored by historians. Recently, Trautman in an article published in the latest issue of Comaprative Studies in History and Society has even suggested that Western historical consciousness was predicated upon the idea of the state as the context for political and historiographical understanding of the past. In India, particularly in the post-Indepeendence era, history has become the handmaiden of various  kinds of identity based issues of language, region and caste. Vijayanagara history is burdened with the responsiblity of providing the muscle for 3 robust historiographical trends: first, it must "prove" that it is a "hindu" empire relentlessly espousing the cause of hindu "resistance" against the Islamic states of the Deccan. Second, the language based appropriation of Vijayangara entails the eternal conflict between the Telugu and Kannada scholars who cannot decide whet er the legacy of Vijayanagara, particularly of Krishnadevaraya, belongs to their respective linguistic zones. Finally, the caste equations come into play as the Vijayangara rulers came form a pastoral or hunting society of the Deccan. The patronage extended to the Vittala cult which was patronised by then Danghars suggests that the rulers of the Third Dynasty had some connection with the pastoral societies of the Western Deccan.

Unfortunately instead of analysing the Inscriptions carefully and diligently historians working on the history of Peninsular India,s last experiment in empire have allowed parochial identity issues to clutter the debate. Fortunately, Herman Kulke has shown that sage Vidyaranya and the legend of Vidyaranya was created in the post Talikota period in order to provide a sliver of grandeur to the memory of an empire which was devastated on the battlefield. Other problems also persist in the field of Vijayanagara history. I am particularly interested in one perennial proble. How is the historian to account for Krishnadeva Raya's magnificent obsession with the Gajapati rumers of Orissa. Recently I presented a paper in the International Seminar on Krishadevaraya and his Times: Cultural Perspectives which was hosted by the K R Cama Oriental Research Institute, Mumbai. I showed in thsat paper that Krishadevaraya was concerend with the Gajapatis primarilty due to the fact that under Kapilendrda, the Gajapati usurper, the territories around Devikapurma in Tamil Nadu were devastated during the Oddiya kalabai as the period of Kapilenda's invasion is termed in the inscription of the time. Krishadevaraya prodly proclaimed the "defeat' of the Gajapatis in his very first coronation inscription found in the Virupaksha Temple at Hampi. We know from other historical sources that the emperor was inviolved with the affairs of the the Western coast during 1509-10 and he was nowhere near Orissa during then initial years of his reign. Only in 1513 do we find references to the campaign against the Gajapati and more frequently we find the tern "elephant hunt" in his inscription whci could mean rivalry with the Orissan rulers.

The caputre of Udayagiri and the transfer oof the image of Balakrihna from Udayagiri to the Krishna Temple constructed at Hampi suggets that Krishadevaraya was interested in creating a memorial for the campaign and ensured that the memory of the Camapign survived. Out of the 7 visits to Tirupathi Temple performed by the Vijayanagara emperor 4 were after the camapign agasinst thew Gajapti. It appears that even Vyasaraja mentions the removal of Balakrisna from Udayagiri and his arrival in Hampi.

Given the facts it is likely that all the 3 or 4 campaigns against the Gajapatis were motivated by the ambition to expunge the memory of the existential threat posed by the Gajapatis to the Vijayanagara state. Moreover, the Saluvas who faced the brunt of the Gajapati force had Narasa Nayaka the father of Krishnadevaraya as their general and it was around Devikapurma that much of the damge was donwe.