Hampi Excavations; New Information

Hampi: Report on the Excavations 1011-2010
Dr C S Vasudevan
Department of Archaeology, Museum and Heritage
Government of Karnataka
Mysore

Hampi Excavation Report

The capital of the last great Empire of medieval South India, Vijayanagara, the City of Victory, has been the target of numerous efforts at interpretation, reconstruction, conservation and of course, Heritage Management. The inscription of Hampi, the site on which Vijayanagara stands as a World Heritage Site is partly responsible for the flood of interest generated by Vijaynagara. From a Chalukyan temple town located on the banks of the Tungabhadra, VIjaynagara was home to the God Virupaksha and the Goddess Pampa and therefore Pampakshetra was one of several names given to the medieval city. A fortified city, about which we have several written descriptios from the mid fifteenth century, we can expaect Vijayanagara to make a text book case for Archeological study based on written sources, corroborated or refuted by the evidence on the ground. In other others, the best strategy to approach the City of Vijayanagara from a historical-Archeological standpoint would be to ask a series of questions which are generated from the written documentation of which we have, fortunately a fairly large corpus.

The shadow of Robert Sewell has fallen heavily on this City, His Forgotten Empire was based on records. perhaps collected by the LIsbon based Historian Barros that had fortunately survived the Great Fire of 1778. Paes and Nuniz were both traders from Portugal and as Renaissance figures were keen observers of the customs and mores of Asaian peoples. However, the framework within which they asssimilated their information was as Jean Pu Rubies points out was both Christian and more specifically Portuguese. They refer to "Great Captains" who assisted the Emperor (Raya) both in war and in revenue collection. Are they the Noblemen whose Quarters form the subject of this Excavation Report.

For nearly a decade the area near the Royal Centre close to the Throne Platforms were being excavated by the Government of Karnataka and the results of that decade long excavation are published in these volumes. One question I would like to raise is: To what extent does the material and archaeological remains dug up from the Nobleman's Quarters reinforce the interpretation long current that the site was occupied by the elite. From the material catalogued in the Reports, there is little evidence of elite occupation. We do not find luxury goods and except for inferior Celadon and Porcelain ware we have no evidence of long distance trade goods or ceramics. We do not find any evidence of large scale monumental architecture in this site leading one to suspect that Sewell was perhaps carried away by the standardized description found in the Portuguese texts. Glass bangles have been found in huge numbers. Do they signify the presence of women in the area. The disturbed nature of the stones makes any systematic study of the site difficult.

The two volumes have catalogued all the artifacts found dring the course of the excavations. But sadly they lack historical and stategraphic specificity.

A Cartographic Profile of the Deccan: A review

A Cartographic Profile of the Deccan
by Salma Ahmed Farooqui and A Subash
A K Sherwani Centre for Deccan Studies
Hyderabad: Maulana Azad National Urdu University


The history of map making, cartography and two dimensional representations of space is still in its infancy in India. Except for a few maps made in the Mughal court and the maps of military campaigns made by the Maharata chieftains in the eighteenth century we hardly have any indigenous examples of maps.  The last great medieval empire of South India, the VIjyanagara empire seems to have made absolutely no attempt at either mastering the art of artillery casting or map making and in the changing military scenario of the sixteenth century had little, if any chance of succeeding against a better equipped and disciplined army, the Deccan army of the Sultanates. The book under review is an attempt at bringing together both the printed and the manuscript maps in different repositories around the world which illustrate the Deccan and is a laudable attempt at documenting a neglected aspect of Indian history.

Indian historiography has a long way to go before it can analyze the contribution of Indian traders and explorers to the development of western knowledge about the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.We know that a sailor Majid had provided assistance to Vasco da Gama on his maiden attempt to sail across the Arabian Sea. The nautical tradition behind his venture has not yet been studies. Similarly the sailors of the Cholas who effortlessly sailed from Nagapattinam to Guangzhou have not left traces of their craft behind. It would be well worth our while to investigate the nautical and navigational knowledge behind such sea borne ventures. B Arunachalam began his research which culminated in a monograph published by the Bombay Maritime History Society, but this line of inquiry has not been pursued. In the light of the context outlined above, the book discussed in this essay makes a valuable beginning. Of course Susan Gole published her monumental work in the 1970s and there has been little since. The Atlas of the Mughal Empire and more recently the Atlas of Ancient India are valuable contributions to Historical Geography.

J B Harley in his monumental work History of Cartography which was published in five volumes by the University of Chicago Press has exactly 2 chapters on Indian cartography even though India and Ireland were the earliest countries to be surveyed using the Trigonometrical techniques. Mathew Edney has an extremely interesting book on this. Harley has frequently drawn attention to the political and ideological use of cartographic representations. The maps in this book contain a wealth of details which  reveal the intellectual and cultural presumptions on which the mappe mundi  were constructed. The authors have documented maps belonging to all the important powers which controlled parts of the Indian coastline from the early seventeenth century. By carefully studying the maps illustrated in this book we get a fairly accurate idea of the evolution of Indian geography. The dominant powers controlling the cost are carefully marked and the capital city depiction on the maps. We also get some idea of the fortification walls from the maps, like the example of Ginjee located near Pondicherry.  The coastline of the Deccan received particular attention as the Portuguese were interested in acquiring ports and facilities for their ecclesiastical and trading pursuits.

The book contains nearly   150 maps from different parts of the world. The section on Arabic maps and Chinese maps are particularly interesting. This book makes interesting reading and is a valuable contribution to the thin self of serious books on the history of cartography.

 

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.