Vijayanagara: A Forgotten Empire of Potessess (sic)
Lidiya Dudyka, Krakow 2013
Vijayanagara remains a "Forgotten Empire" as Robert Sewell evocatively suggested more than a century and a quarter earlier. Though it existed as an Empire from the middle of the 14th century till the end of the 17th century, the cataclysmic defeat at Talikota not withstanding, its history largely disappeared from the consciousness of the people of Southern India. A distant echo of Vijayanagara Statecraft can be seen in the concept of Hindu Padshahi enunciated by Shivaji and later energetic Peshwas such as Balaji Vishvanath and Baji Rao I. Though Mark Wilks in his classic work Historical Sketches of South of India provided a reliable account of the Vijayanagara Empire ( Venkata Raghotham, "Soldier, Diplomat, Historian:Mark Wilks and the Representations of Empire in the early Nineteenth Century" Journal of Karnataka Studies 5-2, 2008, pp 135-158), this classic work like the Empire itself was forgotten and Robert Sewell relied on the Portuguese chroniclers to flesh out the history of Vijayanagara. Colin Mackenzie had discovered some inscriptions of Vijayanagara rulers in their Capital, Hampi, but these remained untapped.
The discovery of a paper manuscript of Madura Vijayam in Trivandrum provided the impetus for further exploration of indigenous sources for the reconstruction of the History of the last great political entity that had overarching legitimacy over South India. The present work under review is essentially based on the translated version published by Annamalai Univerity some 70 years back. Lidiya Sudyka, a Polish Indologist has examined this Mahakavya using tools of post colonial discourse analysis and Feminist theory.
Madura Vijayam does not claim to be a work of History. It is a poetic work that follows very closely the conventions of Classical Sanskrit eloquently examined by Sheldon Pollock in his Language of the Gods in the World of Men. However the formation of Vijayanagara as a political and military power took place in a context that was unprecedented in the History of India. The Turkish Invasions and the large scale destruction of Temples and slaughter of the indigenous people were events unknown to the history of India and certainly in South India. The attempt on the part of some "historians" to establish a moral equivalence between Indian wars of imperial expansion and Turkish invading hordes assault on the region is flawed as the scale of loot, plunder and destruction in the region in the aftermath of the Khilji expansion and later during the Tughlaq wars of conquest, as documented by Muslim chroniclers themselves evokes the miasma of an apocalyptic disaster. Language of Mahakavya is a poor instrument to document and memorialize the destruction wrought upon South India by the Turushka.
Ganga Devi who calls herself a "beloved" of Kumara Kampana has to use the tropes of magic realism (and Rushdie has caught the drift of this) to express her anguish and heartfelt despair at the violence unleashed by the invading Turushka. And one of the primary purposes of his expedition into the devastated regions of South India was to restore Worship in Temples that had been desecrated by the Turks and their hordes. The inscriptions of the region speak of forty years of anarchy in the region following the Turkish invasion (tulukkan kalabai). And Kumara Kampana visited the great Vaishnava Temple of Srirangam and made elaborate arrangement by instituting endowments and overseeing all ritual matters related to the Temple. Of course, these are political acts and were performed as consequence of the tragic consequences of the pillage plunder and rapine that followed in the wake of the Turkish armies. In order to fabricate a politically acceptable narrative, a Historian cannot ignore the overwhelming evidence that has survived. Another objective of his Southern Expedition was to eradicate the Madurai Sultanate so as not to allow even a toehold in the region for Islam to exist. Two centuries before the Reconquista changed the politics of the Iberian Peninsula, we find Ganga Devi articulating a similar strategy.
This book is an interesting contribution. It would have been prudent to leave the post colonial rhetoric aside and concentrate on the events and realities that existed in post Turkish Invasion South India.
