Vyasa Tirtha, the Vijayanagara Empire and contemporary India: The Destruction of the Brundavan at Hampi

Seldom does a Historian get to write about events that impact his personal life, beliefs and question the assumptions of his craft. In my life the destruction of the Brundavan of the great Madhava Saint and philosopher, Vyasa Tirtha by an act of calculated vandalism on the night of 15th July was just that moment. As a Madhva whose Ph D was on Vijayanagara History and most of whose reseach in some way has centered on Vijayanagara Empire, this bog among other things stand testement, I was deeply hurt by the images I saw. The vandalism of the Brundavan of Vyasa thirtha has been blamed on "treasure hunters". I do not think that this is a plausible hypothesis as everyone knows that a Brundavan does not contain any tresure except the mortal remains of the person whose smrithi is remembered by way of aradhana. which is performed every year inmemory of the Saint . This being the case blaming "tresasure hunters" seems to be an easy way to avoid raising valid questions. In Karnataka there is a lot of debate over the status of Lingayats. The Vokkaliga dominated H D Kumarawsamy Government is tottering and the state is in the grip of political uncertainity. This factor needs to be considered while dealing with the issue at hand. Identity politics has made it possible for every fractured identity group to become vocal and start demanding a peice of the electoral pie. The success of the BJP in the May 2019 General elections in which the BJP won 27 of 29 seats and the Vokkaliga leader, Deve Gowda himself losing the elections shows that there is a lot of political churning going on in Karnataka. I think that the politcal crisis in Karnataka has to be taken into consideration while addressing this issue.

The vadndalism of the Brundavan is shown in the photograph on the left. The Brundavan which is essentially granite slabs arranged is vertical slabs around the place where the mortal remains of the saint are interred. In the case of Vyasa thirtha he was interred in the island in the middle of the Tungabhadra River called, Nav Brundavan as nine such edifices are located there. The sanctity of the place is attedted by the songs of Purandara Dasa Knaka Dasa and others who spoke with bhakthi about the sacraltity of the place. Madhvas do not worship relics like the Roman Catholics venerate relics of saints. The brudavana is only a Site of Memory (lieu de Memoire).

The destruction of a sacred site suggets a calculated attempt at stirring up identity politics and humiliating a community that venerates saints like Vyasa, Jayatirta and Narahari Tirtha




The crime must have taken a good deal of the night and the criminalshad come equipped with elctrical torches and mechanized tools to pry open the stone slabs. When the site of the crime was examined the next day vital clues were found which enabled the Karnataka Police to apprehend 5 criminals from the neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh, Let us see if the state is able to prosecute the case successfully in the Courts.

Vyasa tiirtha (AD 1477-1539) is one of the most celebrared figures in Madhva Dvaita Philosophy. He was well connected to the court of Saluva Narashima when he was ruling over Chandragiri Rajyam, the area around the Tirupathi region. When Saluva Narashima seized the throne of Vijayanagara in 1485, Vyasatirtha moved to Vijayanagara and was close to the Saluvas during the critical period of the Saluva Usurpation. After the death of Immadi Narashima the son of the Saluva king, the general Narasa Nayaka seized the throne or as the Inscriptions of the period put it gaciously accepted the Lion Throne. Narasa Nayaka was succeeded by his son, Krishnadeva raya (AD 1509-1529) and it was during the reign of the Tuluvas that Vyasatirtha became a very powerful personality. The dominance of Sri Vaishnavism in general and the Madhava faith, in particular during the Tuluva period needs to be examined in some detail. Both the Mutts of Uttaradi and Vyasa have Copper Plate Inscrioption dating to this period and unfortunately no attempt has been made to make these valuable records available to the Historians working on Vijayanagara.

Vyasatirtha was the clebrated author of the Tatparya Chandhrika and Taraka tandava. Being a scholar of Sanskrit and one with a fierce grasp over the textual tradition or Sampradaya, Vyasa tirtha had no problem in defeating the importatant exponents of advaita as shown by Somannatha in his Vyasa Yoga Carita. The closeness or proximity to the throne is also expalined by the fact that during the famous Conjunction of Nine Planets that took place in 1524 Vyasa tirtha occupied the throne thereby averting danger, as per the hagiographical tradition, to the Vijayanagara throne. It must be said that excessive partonage give to the Sri Vaishnava Religion led ultimately to the collapse of the empire.

The destruction of the Brundavan is a despicable act and must be condemend.

"The Empire of Apostles" A review of Empire Jesuit Evagalism and Imperialism

The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Accommodario and the Imagination of Empire
in Early Modern Brazil and India
Ananya Chakravati
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019.

Post colonial litereary theory informed approaches to History make interesting reading and the imaginative leap from one corner of the world to another is breathtaking in its audacity as it is misinformed by its methodological and theoretical principles. The Empire of Apostles falls squarely in this category. It is essentailly an intellectual history of two Jesuit missions to India and Brazil: St. Francis Xavier in the case of India and Manuel de No'brega in the case of Brazil. What the author fails to understand that the expansion of the Roman Catholic Chrurch and other manifestations of Chruch based religiosities was accompanied by a horrendous display, theratrical at times, viciously exemplary on most ocassions, of violence against the indigenous people who had no real means of defending theselves against white imperialism. In his recent book, Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition, Fitzhugh Brundage has taken up precisely this issue and has provided an excellent method to pry open the suppressed histories of Rape, Genocide, Violence and Oppression that white impreialism brought in its wake. Perhaps there is no academic market for honest History anynore and we are left with the work I am reviewing because I paid my hard earned money to buy this book.

The Pope facilitated the division of the world between the Spanish and the Portuguese thrones and the Crown of Portugal was given the right of paodradoa to appont priests in both the Portuguese territories of Brazil and India. The Jesuits right from the time of St. Ignitius Loyola advocated a strong and mutually benefitting alliance with the Throne and this enables St Francis Xavier to come to India from where he went to the Spice Islands and Japan. Manuel de No'brega was sent to Brazil. In South America the Catholic Church along with the Spanish and Portuguese settlers unleashed a genocidal war against the First Citizens and the ideological justification for such horrendous dipplays of brutality was provided by the Churuch which said that it aims at Converting the people of the land so that their souls are saved. Church and State marched hand in had destroying the indigenous culture of South America. The Jesuits on a few ocassions tried to blunt the violent sword but their very presence in the theatres of war legitimised the venture. The process by which the Jesuits negotiated with the local indigenpous culture is termed as Accommodatio, cultural undersytanding tolerance or even compromise. In India Jesuits pioneered this art and Robert de Nobili and Beschi even appeared in Native garb to make people beleive that they have assimilated local culture. It goes without saying that such shenanigans did hoodwink the people.

In India, St Francis Xavier was the one responsible for bringing the dreeaded papal Instrument of Inquisition to Goa and until 1807 when the auto da faye was ended under English East India Company pressure, the Inqusition had claimed around 35,000 lives: People burnt at the stake for possessing Hindu icons or practicing the forbidden faith or keeping prayer books.  The Goa Archives contain a small fraction of the Inquisition records. Even Vijayanagara Empire did not interfere with the Portuguese cultural practices in their relic state.

The book is certainly not a contribution either to the history of India, Brazil or of the Poertuguese empire. 

Flight of Deities and the Rebirth of Temples:Episodes for Indian History

Flight of Deities and Rebirth of Temples: Episodes in Indian History
Meenakshi Jain
New Delhi Aryan Books International, 2019

One of the most tragic and neglected aspects of medieval historiography of India is the fate of Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina Temples. Sita Ram Goel several years back addressed this issue and indicted the medieval rulers for following a political strategy of destroying Hindu places of worship and the systematic destruction od Hindu, Buddhist and Jaina centres of worship and pilgrimage, he argues was party of the political and imperial ideology stemming from Islamic ideas of conquest and conversion of Darul Harb into Dar ul Islam, from Land of War to Land of Islam. Hence the destruction of Indian religious institutions cannot be view in isolation of the ideological underpinning of the Turkish, Afghan and Mughal rule over India. This interpretation was, of course, attacked by a whole host of historians from Alighr Muslim University, Delhi University and of course, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Is this interpretation a "communal" one or, even if not politically correct have the weight of historical evidence behind it.


The deliberate underplaying of Moslem vandalism in parts of India which were conquered may have been a political necessity in the years after Partition when Hindu Moslem tension were high and it was prudent to avoid contentious and identity laden issues. However, 70 years after Independence if the same platitudes are trotted out, it becomes necessary to re investigate the issue and assess the question on the basis of evidence. In short, the time for political correctness is past and it is time to seize the historical moment even as it disintegrates before our very eyes. Meenakshi Jain has produced a scholarly and eminently well researched work on this question. She starts where Sita Ram Goel left and her work is a fitting riposte to all those historians who live in a state of denial about the tragedy the befell India. After reading the work under review it will not be possible for anyone either to deny the political underpinning of the reign of vandalism unleashed against Hindu and other Indian religious structures or belittle the cultural and civilizational chaos it engendered.

One argument that white scholars like Richard Davis and Richard Eaton are quick to advance is that the Turks, Afghans and Mughals did not indulge in any sort of vandalism and destruction which Indian rulers had not done in the past. This line of argument is absolutely incorrect as there is not a single instance in which a ruler of India be he Jain, Buddhist as Harsha or Hindu/Shiva like Rajendra subjected the images captured for religious sites and appropriated for relocation in their own imperial repertoire ever showed an attitude of anything less than reverence. Thus when Krishnadevaraya captured Udayagiri and acquired the green granite Balarama image, he had a Krishna temple constructed in his capital, Vijayanagara, and had the image installed with reverence. Similarly, when Rajendra Chola brought back the image of Durga from the territories of the Western Chalukyas he had it enshrined in his new capital, Gangaikonda cholapuram. Such example can be multiplied. However after the Islamic conquest, temples were detroyed and the sanctity of the temple violated by the shedding of blood and was usually accompanied, as was the case with the Vaishnava Temple of Srirangam, a whole sale massacre of the temple priests. To deny the cold facts of history, recorded in the medieval Chronicles is to deny the very validity of History as a field of study.

Meenakshi Jain has produced a fine piece of historical research. It is true that the academic climate for a free investigation of India's tangled and tortured past has opened up only recently and I fervently hope that historians of India cease to function as servitors of political parties, start researching the past without fear or favour.

The Coinage and History of Vijayanagara A Review

The Coinage and History of Vijayanagara Empire
M Girirajapathi
Bangalore, 2009

The monetary history of the Vijayanagara Empire is still rather obscure. Indian Archaeology A Review records the discovery of more than 307 coin hoards between 1954 and 2001. While certainly not an numerous both in provenance and distribution as Sultanate or Mughal coin hoards, Vijayanagara monetary history does present interesting questions of its own. One aspect that has come to the fore is the interlinking between Bahamani coinage and currency system with the Vijayanagara currency. Partly this is reflected in  majority of the coin deposits which are found mixed with sultante minted coins. Phillip Wagoner has studied this feature in a recent article published in the

Coinage and History of Vijayanagara

Indian Economic and Social History Review vol 51, 4 (2014) pp 457-480.

The book under review is a catalog of a few private numismatic collections. It makes no attempt at analysis and even the basic numismatic data is given in a rather loose manner. The provenance of the coins is not documented and the relative chronology between various coin types is not addressed. On the whole this is a very disappointing work.

The Bahamani historian Firishta has given a great deal of information about the relative value of different currencies circulating in  the region. In spite of efforts undertaken by Sultan Muhammad Shah I (1358-75) to discourage the circulation and exchange of Vijayanagara gold coins in Bahamani territories, little change was felt on the ground. The value of the Pratap and Hon need to be worked out. The reasons for the complete absence of silver coins in Vijayanagara need to be investigated. The metrology of Vijayanagara coinage needs to be determined.

This work is printed on expensive art paper but it avoids discussing any issue of importance.

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.

Inscriptions of the Vijayanagara Rulers ed. Shrinivas Ritti

Vijayanagara Inscriptions

The rulers of the last great Empire of Peninsular India, the Vijayanagara Raya, issued a large number of inscriptions both on Copper Plates as well as on lithic surfaces. It has been estimated that between 1336 and 1565 when the Empire virtually collapsed following the cataclysmic defeat at Talikota, the Empire issued nearly 25,000 inscriptions. A large number of the Vijayanagara inscriptions are in the vernacular languages leading to the suspicion that Vijayanagara presented itself as a "local" ruler in distant localities by propagating Inscriptions in the local languages. The conflict between Tamil and Sanskrit, a product of the identity battles of the twentieth century was virtually unknown during the Vijayanagara period. The volume under review contains the texts of 241 inscriptions issued in the period under discussion by all four dynasties of Vijayanagara.

The Southern Regional Centre of the Indian Council of Historical Research, Bangalore, has embarked upon this ambitious project of compiling all the known Vijayanagara Inscriptions. So far VI volumes have been published making Vijayanagara more accessible to historians. An interesting feature of Vijayanagara Epigraphy which has not received the attention it deserves is the frequent use of local scripts for inscribing Sanskrit inscriptions and simultaneously using Nandinagari script for incising inscriptions in regional/local/vernacular languages.  This fact suggests that the Empires of medieval India had a more inclusive attitude towards languages compared to the identity infused bedlam that we notice today. Another interesting feature is that sanskrit was not projected during the late medieval period as the language of the "elite". All this suggests that modern Indian approaches to medieval history in particular and history in general are marinated in identity controversies that have their roots only in the twentieth century.  Vijayanagara provides us a fascinating glimpse into a complex realm in which languages coexisted in an atmosphere of mutual respect and interaction.

This book like the others in the series has collected all the published inscriptions and has provided a short summary of each inscription along with other details. It will be useful to historians working on Vijayanagara history. 

Tamils A Biography By David Shulman

Tamil A Biography
David Shulman
Harvard University Press, 2016

Tamil Biography

 The book under review is an account of the Tamil language situated in its historical and linguistic context. It is one of the unfortunate intellectual legacies of the colonial era that many of the discredited theories pertaining to racial origin, evolution of language, scriptal literacy, religion are all wrapped up in the dense fog of ideology that it is today impossible to deal with some of these issues dispassionately. It takes a peace activist from Israel, the well known Indologist and historian, David Shulman to write about these and other issues with integrity and deep commitment to scholarship. 

I have not come across a book that captures the complexity of Tamil literary and political history as eloquently and with scholastic depth as the present book. It is quite obvious that the present breed of Tamil "intellectuals" will rail against the account given by Shulman as he completely destroys the self serving myth, perpetuated over two centuries that Tamil has an origin independent of Sanskrit. Until Cauldwell made "Dravidian" into both a linguistic and racial characteristic, the term Dravida was used in Tamil literary works only as a geographical expression.

 The nineteenth century which saw the crystallization of racially charged theories, bequeathed to India a toxic legacy in the form of the Aryan/Dravidian Dichotomy, the Aryan Invasion Myth, the conflict between the oldest Tamil language and the upstart Sanskrit language. All these theories, though discredited have traction due to the purchase of identity politics in India. Hence, it is essential to read Shulman very carefully as he has argued effectively that throughout the medieval period, the Age of the Cholas, Sanskrit enjoyed a privileged status in the royal court and that status was neither resented nor did it lead to the sort of shadow boxing we find in the last century when the "Pure Tamil " movement sought to expurgate Sanskrit from the Tamil language altogether.

David Shulman, unlike Asko Parpola and others is a recognized authority on Sanskrit Language and Literature and knows nearly 24 languages including Telugu, Kanada and a host of European and Asian Languages. His own early foray into Tamil history when he wrote Tamil Temple Myths marked him as one who uses literary texts in new and novel ways. The tallapuramam of medieval Tamil region were studies against the general background of history and iconography in this work which was followed by King and Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry a path breaking work on the textual construction of South Indian kingship. More recently, Whitney Cox has added to the thin corpus of historical investigation in his Politics, Kingship and Poetry in Medieval South India (Cambridge University Press, 2016). This line of investigation, a new historicist perspective that melds the fluid poetry of medieval Tamil compositions to the firm foundation of historiography.

Tamil A Biography demolishes three fundamental myths of the dominant political ideology prevalent in Tamil Nadu today and pervades the entire gamut of academic studies on early Tamil Language and Literature. As he says, "In modern South India Tamil has become a major criterion for collective identity, often seen now as forged in opposition to Sanskrit and an invasive north Indian culture and ideology". Shulman goes on to show that the Chola royal court was bilingual with Sanskrit enjoying the same status as Tamil and there is no sign of any conflict, real or imagined during the four centuries of Chola rule. The advent of the anti brahmin movent meant that the South Indian brahmins were represented as agents of the alien culture and that was used as a justification for excluding them form public and cultural life altogether. The scholarship of David Shulman goes a long way in correcting the distortions of the past. His discussion of the enduring presence of the Agasthya Myth, a north Indian therefore a putative Aryan as the founder of Tamil Grammar is both convincing and sound.

The date of the so called Cankam literary works and the presence of the enigmatic Kalabrahs are two vexed issues in early Tamil literary history. Following Tieken, Shulman also argues for a late date for the Cankam works, There is little evidence to show that the puram and akam varieties of poems were contemporaneous with the Roman presence in South India and the graffiti marks found on pot shrds from sites like Arikamedu, Porunthal, Kodumanal and other places do not help in tading the Cankam literary works. There seems to be a close association between Bhakti literature and the redacted bardic poetry of early Tamil region. His disdussion of the Sangam tradition based on the Velvikkudi Copper plate Inscription is interesting.

The work under review is a classic and will remain a reliable introduction to Tamil language and literary history.