Vijayanagara: A Hindu Kingdom of Wonders
The kingdom of Vijayanagara in southern India is unique in the early modern period. A massive Hindu kingdom in a region where other Hindu states were small coastal kingdoms and the larger states were Muslim Sultanates, as in northern India, Vijayanagara successfully resisted Muslim incursions. Europeans had a history of contact with the kingdom and, from the sixteenth century, the Portuguese traded there regularly. The fact that Vijayanagara was a Hindu political society which was essentially defined in opposition to the religious domination of Islam is extremely important when considering the European tradition of confrontation with Islam. It was a crucial point of agreement with the western monarchies and kingdoms. 
Joan-Pau Rubies | The remains of the kingdom of Vijayanagara can still be seen in southern India today. This image is of Pampapati (i.e. Shiva) temple at Hampi. It was the site of many great rituals that were reported by travellers over the ages. "Outside the walls of the city, on the northern side, there are three very beautiful pagodas...another is called Aoperadianar, and this is the one which they hold in most veneration and to which they make great pilgramages...They make a pilgramage to this first gate; this gate has a very high tower all covered with rows of men and women and hunting scenes and many other stories, and as the tower goes narrowing towards the top, so the images diminish in size." From Sewell A Forgotten Empire, corrected from Lopes, Chronica. |
Visitors to Vijayanagara have left a vivid record of their impressions. Rituals are described in great detail, and we have a comprehensive picture of the political system. In many senses, the model of kingship displayed at Vijayanagara appears unique to these early modern writers: the Brahminical system is alien, its rituals wonderful and fantastical. Even though these travellers are totally unversed in the Brahminical tradition of kingship, they are, however, able to interpret such rituals as symbolic of power and royalty. This ability to read the rituals and visuals of kingship raises an important question: perhaps kingship in the kingdom of Vijayanagara was not totally different to the model of kingship in western Europe. The kingdom of Vijayanagara
The first base of operations for the Portuguese was southern India and their first point of contact was Calicut where Vasco da Gama landed. This small kingdom was just one of a number along the coast of the Malabar, governed by kinglets ruling over small areas with underdeveloped state systems. However, in the interior of southern India there was Vijayanagara, a vast polity whose strange name (to European ears) means "the City of Victory" in Sanskrit. It was an amazing city and Europeans had been writing about it since the fiftteenth century. One of the earliest travellers before the arrival of the Portuguese, Niccolo Conti, had previously described Vijayanagara for Europeans. His work was edited by Poggio Bracciolini, a humanist working for the pope, and was already having an influence in Europe. maximum splendour in the early sixteenth century when the Portuguese were settling in Goa on the coast of India. The Portuguese soon established diplomatic relations with this kingdom, which basically occupied the space of three modern states in India: Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. It was a "Dravidian" Hindu kingdom. This is very important because most of India was ruled by Muslim sultans backed by military aristocracies of Turkish or Afghan descent. The majority of the people in India however, were Hindus, but in very few places (mainly in the South) could you find significant states which were Hindu. For the Europeans Vijayanagara was the experience of a kingdom which was a gentile rather than a Muslim civilisation ("gentile" was used to mean non-Christian, non-Jewish, non-Muslim--outside the biblical tradition.) This gentile civilisation had a capital city which was absolutely impressive, where Europeans went to trade and to negotiate. They negotiated and consulted about their common political enemies, the Muslim sultans of the Deccan. The Portuguese wanted a monopoly on providing horses for the wars of the kings of Vijayanagara against the Sultans. In exchange they offered support against the sultans. The Portuguese wrote some extremely interesting descriptions of Vijayanagara. They emphasise the power of the king. Hindu royalty was quite different from any other royalty that Europeans had come across. Although there are a number of theoretical and prescriptive texts in Sanskrit, we do not have many descriptions of the functioning dynamics of a large state like Vijayanagara. The Portuguese accounts give us a glimpse of how this very different kind of kingship functioned. Vijayanagara and the West: similarities and differences Sacral kingship
The main difference was that the Vijayanagara monarchy could be described as a sacred monarchy. There was a lot of religious resonance to the idea of kingship: the king performed a role that was sacred, and in some ways he was seen as an incarnation of God (Rama, in particular). The Europeans' idea of divine kingship was different, meaning that what their rulers did was by the grace of God. The kings themselves were not the source of spiritual authority: that role was reserved for the church. In some ways the distinctions between religion and the state in Europe were sharper. In addition, the Europeans had this republican tradition which didn't exist in India. What you find in Vijayanagara is a sacred monarchy in which the king is very closely connected with Brahmins who regulate his ritual life in order to make him sacred. The whole political structure is very much mediated by this Brahminical consent and support: there is little state structure independent from the Brahmins. The structure of Vijayanagara seemed to consist of the military system, the Brahminical system and then the king--there was little else. There certainly was no independent bureaucracy or an independent idea of the state. The king was the military commander who upheld justice according to dharma, the idea of sacred duty and law in the Hindu tradition. 
Joan-Pau Rubies | Stone reliefs from the side of the Hazara Rama (Ramachandra) temple at Vijayanagara, believed to have been the "state chapel" within the royal chapel. The reliefs depict episodes from the Hindu epic the Ramayana, which was of central importance to Vijayanagaran culture and representations. The king of Vijayanagara, Krishna Deva Raya, was metaphorically associated with the epic hero-god of the Ramayana. A king like Krishna Deva Raya was by virtue of this metaphorical association with Rama, more sacred than King Manuel of Portugal, indeed King Philip of Spain, could ever be as a national sovereign acting with the grace of God in a world of sin. Simply acting as part of the sacred landscape made kingship sacred--the ritual and not the law made the king. |
Divine kingship: dharma
The concept of dharma, which is the basis of the Hindu tradition, integrates the human with the divine very closely. It is cosmic, divine and human at the same time. It confers duties on the individual as a member of a caste, as a member of a wider ethnic or religious group and it is also (or at least aspires to be) a reflection of some kind of universal law. It is something that is sacred, according to an understanding of religion that doesn't separate religion from real life. In Europe the Christian tradition separates the secular from the spiritual in a much more pronounced manner. The whole political system in Europe at that time, although it had a religious legitimacy, also had a separate secular legitimacy, and the Reformation made it even more difficult to keep the links between religious and secular law. As a result, although Elizabeth and Philip are performing royal rituals which have religious undertones, and although they are still upholding the churches and are pious people in their own way, they are able to operate with much more freedom from religion. Secular and sacred law
A European king would have had to negotiate with political elites either through parliamentary systems--which could be regional or national--or it would negotiate with elites at the court through court factions. There was a court at Vijayanagara, but there was no parliamentary or judicial system other than the Brahminical system. The law is sacred law. This was very different from Europe where you had a Roman-based secular law and a religious-based, ecclesiastical law.
Joan-Pau Rubies | The Mahanavami platform in the royal enclosure of Vijayanagara. The Mahavanami festival was held annually at Vijayanagara. It was one of the most important political-religious rituals in Vijayanagara. When describing the festival Domingos Paes, the Portuguese horse trader who wrote extensively about the kingdom said: " You should know that among these gentiles there are days when they celebrate their feasts as we do, and they have their days of fasting, when all day they eat nothing, and eat only at midnight." During this festival, which lasted nine days, all the important people of the kingdom as well as others such as prostitutes congregated at the royal enclosure and participated making this festival a "meeting at the centre." |
The ritual system and the administrative system
The caste system organised society according to the Brahminical tradition. In some ways that meant that the government had much less to say and do about social order because it was already strictly regulated. Although the caste system is a very flexible system, it is a system that the king will merely uphold. Basically, other than war and diplomacy, giving money to the temples and brahmins, and participating in royal and religious festivals, the king of Vijayanagara had very few duties in terms of the everyday life of his subjects. A king of Vijayanagara, a contemporary of Charles V or Philip II, would not have had to spend hours and hours writing documents. He would rely more on rituals than on administrative control. The rituals were crucial to upholding the idea of kingship in Vijayanagara. The most important event of the year was the celebration of the Mahanavami royal festival, which lasted for nine days and was the most extraordinary religious ritual. The language of ritual
The accounts given by some Portuguese horse traders and soldiers who went to Vijayanagara are very graphic, describing in great detail the rituals of kingship. During the reign of Krishna Deva Raya, the most famous of the kings of Vijayanagara, one particular traveller--Domingo Paes--wrote a fascinating account of a royal ritual. He couldn't understand much of it because he didn't know the Brahminical traditions but graphically, just by looking at it, he had a sense of the symbolic language. That is a fascinating aspect of his account. Without understanding the mythology and doctrine of the Brahmins he perceives nevertheless that it is a royal ritual, which expresses some kind of power. Through the descriptions you can feel his sense of wonder and amazement, but also a perception of some kind of symbolic message being sent to the audience. People were much more trained in that kind of symbolic ritual language than we are today. We still have it--it happens all the time--but I think we rely more on other things such as written rules and publications, and on what is made explicit. In the early modern period people understood that a lot of political life was about gesture, about positioning yourself and sending symbolic messages. Although the two were very different traditions, there were analogies that allowed the European in the sixteenth century to get some kind of subliminal message that we would perhaps find more difficult to appreciate today. Vijayanagara: oriental despots
 | |
| Thinking Point | | | Do you think the concept of "oriental despotism" was a European construction or a political reality? | | |
The political system in Vijayanagara was not stable. They did not have a clear law of succession (although, interestingly, they did have a concept of tyranny). The Portuguese sometimes transmit to us the existence of a political opposition in Vijayanagara, especially during the reign of Achyuta Deva Raya, the successor to Krishna Deva Raya. He seemed to have favoured a few relatives over others so there were factional politics and a difficult dynastic succession that created many weaknesses. There was a tendency for generals to create puppet kings of children and then dispose of them brutally. The European secular law of succession would have made such situations unlikely, and so these came to be seen as defining oriental despotism. Thus in later writings the king of Vijayanagara slowly becomes an oriental despot in European accounts and imagination, and moves further away from native definitions of kingship and majesty.
|
|
Vijayanagara: a vast Hindu state deep inside India.
