Paes & NunizPortuguese chroniclers

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

I explore the north side of Vijayanagar, scaling rocky hillocks, looking into the dusky recesses of small weed-strangled temples located far away - a world away - from the commotion of Hampi Bazaar. The ruins hug the south bank of the Tungabhadra River, a wide stretch of water that had formed a natural defence on the northern side of the old city. Half a mile outside the bazaar the riverside path twists through a steep-sided cove of rock harbouring beggars and saddhus and emerges at an area of open ground, scruffy with scrub and strewn with rock and toppled pillars.

There is something romantic about the sight of such monumental desolation, although it is perhaps a misplaced romanticism. The most glorious period in the city's history had come during the reign of Krishna Deva Raya, at the turn of the 16th century and mere decades before its downfall. It was at that time that the Portuguese were staking their first claims to territories on the Subcontinent under da Gama and Albuquerque, and it was Portuguese chroniclers - Domingo Paes, Fernao Nuniz - who, visiting the court of Krishna Deva Raya, left the most complete accounts of the city, its size and grandeur, the daily goings on.

A small bookstall at Hospet bus stand had had a modern translation of the Chronicles of Paes and Nuniz, and browsing through it while waiting for the bus I had read a passage which quashed my romantic notions even before they had begun to form - because the setting, rugged, forbidding, desolate, was little different now from how it had been during the city's prime. Paes had written of it thus:

Amongst these ranges there are no forests or patches of brushwood, nor anything that is green. For the hills are the strangest ever seen, they are of a white stone piled one block over another in manner most singular, so that it seems as if they stood in the air and were not connected one with another

Even when the city teemed with people, it had had something bleak and desperate about it.

The Vitthala Temple, at the southeasternmost end of the old city, is filled with Indian tourists bussed in from Bangalore. Scattered over such a large area, the ruins are largely deserted, with the wandering people spread thinly, adding a sense of abandonment to the natural desolation of the place. The presence of such a large group of people, in the remotest part of the city, is consequently a little disappointing. They are snap-happy, ugly with their curiosity. Their tour guide taps the granite pillars of the outer walls to make them sing and rhapsodizes about the broken figures of the crumbling red sandstone gopurams.

I climb toppled blocks of stone on the western side of the temple and look back over the derelict city. The ruins are so wild, passionately disarrayed. The skyline all around is formed of ragged crenellations of bare rock, the peaks of the hills which had made the site such a natural one at which to base a city for considerations of defence. It is barely possible to believe man had ever tamed this corner of the Deccan Plateau.

After a brief meal of idli, washed down with a tall glass of chai in a cafe in Hampi Bazaar, I climb the road out of the village and up to the top of Hemakuta Hill, from which I can see the far reaches of the old city, enwreathed in lush vegetation. The paddies down below are dotted with stone buildings in various stages of collapse. The state of abandonment is intense. The hills in the surrounding countryside are prodigious, making it easy to understand why the brothers Bukka and Harihara had founded their city here, although considerations of defence hadn't been their sole motivation. Former officers of the Hoysalas, they had been captured by the Muslim Tughluqs and taken to Delhi, converted to Islam, then released in order to quell civil unrest in this region. But they had abandoned Islam, re-embraced Hinduism, and come here, where Shiva, as Lord Virupaksha, is said to have done penance on Hemakuta Hill before marrying Parvati. It is also the mythical site of the monkey kingdom of the Ramayana, where Hanuman served as ambassador to King Sugriva. The precariously balanced rocks scattered through the city and the hill-sized piles of boulders are said to have been hurled down by the monkey armies in a show of strength. As much as anything else, the site is a stronghold for the Hindu faith, something that must had been of paramount importance to the founders of Vijayanagar as they prepared to do battle with the Muslim armies of the North.

I settle in the shade beneath an overhang of rock and finish reading the chronicle of Paes - it isn't very long. I like his dark, archaic sense of humour that peppers the prose.

To try to tell of all I saw is hopeless, for I went along with my head so often turned from one side to the other that I was almost falling backwards off my horse with my senses lost.

The city's name, Vijayanagar, means City of Victory in Sanskrit, and for most of the empire's brief two centuries in the ascendancy, as its rulers seized land throughout the Subcontinent, it must have seemed a wholly appropriate one. Paes had been in no doubt that it would dominate the affairs of India for many centuries to come.

The people of this city are countless in number, so that I do not wish to write it down for fear it should be thought fabulous; but I declare that no troops, horse or foot, could break their way through any street or lane, so great are the numbers of people and elephants.

But of course, he was wrong: they did break through, when the armies were occupied 100km away at Talikota. The wealth of the city was plundered in a succession of raids; most of its buildings were destroyed with the iconoclastic zeal that characterized Muslim victories in India. But how, I wondered, would the city have been today if it hadn't been for the brute destruction of the Muslim conquerors? The ruins that littered the landscape would doubtless have gone, as they had gone at Thanjavur and elsewhere, razed in the name of progress in later centuries and built upon.