VijayanagarModern-day Hampi

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

The bus drops me at Hampi Bazaar, more thronging than I had expected for a village of its size. But there is a reason for it: Hampi's largest festival of the year, the Chariot Festival, is to take place at the weekend. This is Thursday. Tents are pitched on vacant spaces of ground. People have already been drawn into the village from outlying areas, adding to the swell of people in the bazaar.

A garlanded elephant, eyebrows painted with white paste and bearing arcane markings on its ears, is giving blessings outside the Virupaksha Temple at the far end of the bazaar. Vendors are selling kumkum from carts just outside the entrance, the red and yellow and vermillion powders combed into neat piles in silver dishes. The village sees a steady flow of pilgrims from all over South India, who come here to worship Shiva under his local form, Virupaksha. The temple, situated in the former city's northwesternmost corner and dominating the small modern-day village, is built on top of a shrine whose sanctity predates the Vijayanagar Empire by some seven centuries.

Though insignificant today, barely inhabited, the village of Hampi occupies the site of the former capital city of one of Southern India's greatest and latest flowering Hindu kingdoms, the Vijayanagar Empire. The ruins of its suburbs and outer reaches are scattered through the fields outside Hampi, offering constant glimpses of faded glory. There are columns emerging from banana plantations, listing temples becalmed in a sea of sugarcane, squat buildings on rocky shelves at the edge of paddies, all serving to give the cultivated countryside an air of noble desolation.

Founded in 1343 by two Hindu brothers, Bukka and Harihara, the city flourished for a mere two centuries, until the Battle of Talikota, when the last Vijayanagar king was defeated by Muslim kingdoms further north, including the Adil Shahs of Badami. The city, as large as contemporary Renaissance Rome, was sacked, its buildings destroyed, its half a million inhabitants forced to flee to outlying areas. Although the last embers of the kingdom weren't fully expunged for another three quarters of a century, it was a spent force in the historical arena, its later capitals paltry and insignificant. The dominions of the empire in its heyday were impressive, eclipsing those of earlier Hindu kingdoms and elevating it far above them: after successful wars against the Hoysalas and the Pandyas of Madurai, victory over whom made the Vijayanagars preeminent in the South, the territories under their control encompassed the whole of Southern India, from Cape Comorin in the south to Orissa far in the north.