ON a sunny November day, throngs of tourists wait to be ferried to the Vijaya Vittala temple in Hampi, Karnataka. Electric carts carry tourists on a mud path, with the typical boulders of Hampi dominating the scenery, for a kilometre to the entrance. Guides seek out tourists admiring the magnificent facade and launch into their rehearsed spiels after perfunctory introductions.
“This is the best attraction in Hampi. Muslims destroyed this temple and most of Hampi when they attacked the city after the Battle of Talikota,” says one of the guides waving his hand around. Visitors take in this piece of information and walk towards the stone chariot where they pose for photographs. This story is about how Muslims beat the Hindus and plundered Hampi. This standard narrative of the Battle of Talikota, which was fought in late January 1565 between the combined forces of the Deccan sultanates and the Vijayanagara Empire, is repeated by several guides on a daily basis.
It is this narration that is challenged by Girish Karnad’s new play, Rakshasa Tangadi (Crossing to Hampi). It busts the myth that the battle was fought for religious reasons and challenges the reductive right-wing historiography that takes this line. The play has revived the debate about the battle and the most common interpretation of it as an epic showdown between the forces of Islam and Hinduism in which Muslims prevailed, leading to the cultural decline of Hinduism. Karnad, who excels in picking up historical themes and providing them with fresh and nuanced perspectives, has once again shown why he is still a popular playwright.
‘Aliya’ Ramaraya
The play’s central character is the aged “Aliya” Ramaraya (1485-1565), the regent of the Vijayanagara Empire and son-in-law (aliya in Kannada) of Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509-29). It depicts him as a complex character. He is a generous and competent leader, an aesthete even, but has a cruel, ambitious and arrogant streak that perhaps stems from the fact that he is not the emperor of Vijayanagara, even though he is ably suited to be, but remains an outsider. His hubris and his obsession with the city of Kalyana (modern-day Basavakalyan) sets him on a collision course with the Deccan Sultans. The battle, which was fought a few years after the second Battle of Panipat (1556) in north India, altered the map of the Deccan and southern India permanently and marked the beginning of a new epoch in Indian history.
The seeds of the 1565 epic encounter were sown more than 250 years earlier when the forces of the Sultans of Delhi—during the time of Alauddin Khilji (r. 1296-1316) and Mohammed Tughlaq (r. 1325-51)—swept through southern India in a ferocious expanding spree. For a few decades, these rulers had a tenuous hold on most of the subcontinent, including southern India. However, by the middle of the 14th century, faced with rebellions, Tughlaq withdrew to Delhi, leaving behind two vast empires: the Bahmani Empire (founded in 1347), which ruled the Deccan from Gulbarga (now Kalaburagi), and the Vijayanagara Empire (founded in 1336), which had most of southern India as part of its dominion with its capital in Hampi. The Raichur Doab, the fertile tract of land between the Krishna and Tungabhadra rivers, existed as a natural boundary between these two great kingdoms, with wars often breaking out over control of this territory.
Under the rule of Krishnadevaraya, the Vijayanagara Empire reached its zenith and was vast and powerful, touching the seas in three directions. Traveller accounts of the time attest to the richness of Hampi. Abdur Razzak, a Persian traveller who visited Vijayanagara in the 15th century, wrote: “This country is so populated that it is impossible in a responsible space to convey an idea of it. In the king’s treasury there are chambers, with excavations in them, filled with molten gold, forming one mass. All the inhabitants of the country, whether high or low, even down to the artificers of the bazaar, wear jewels and gilt ornaments in the their ears and around their necks, arms, wrists and fingers” (Vijayanagar, edited and introduced by Vasundhara Filliozat, 1977).
At the same time, fissiparous tendencies in the Bahmani Empire ensured that by the beginning of the 16th century it had broken up into the five separate sultanates—Bijapur, Golconda, Ahmednagar, Bidar and Berar. While these were rich and powerful kingdoms in their own right with large dominions, their Sultans would constantly squabble among themselves. Vijayanagara strategically allied itself with one or the other of the Sultans. When there was a direct confrontation between one of the sultanates and Vijayanagara, the latter prevailed, as in the case of the Battle of Raichur in 1520, when Krishnadevaraya defeated the Bijapur Sultan.
How then and, more importantly, why was the great empire of Vijayanagara was vanquished by a bunch of smaller kingdoms whose rulers fought among themselves constantly? This happened at the epochal battle in Talikota. On one side were the armies of the Deccan Sultanates (minus Berar) and on the other side was the vast army of the Vijayanagara Empire.
The battlefield
Travelling by car, it takes around three hours to get to the Krishna river from Hampi. This is where, on a cool winter day in 1565, the grand battle was fought close to the villages of Rakkasagi and Tangadagi. To get to the villages from Hampi, one has to pass through the fertile area of the Raichur Doab, which is still known as the “rice bowl of Karnataka”. The two villages now lie in the district of Vijayapura in northern Karnataka and, like many other villages in this part of the State, grow a lot of sugarcane.
While there is a minor disagreement between historians as to the exact location of the battle, the general consensus is that face-off between the armies happened on these plains. There was a flurry of movement up and down the banks as the two armies parried with one another. Even though it is called the Battle of “Talikota”, little action took place in that town, which is some 50 km from Rakkasagi. It was merely a gathering point for the sultanate armies.
There are no vestiges of this great battle now in Rakkasagi apart from a tiny decrepit mosque of some vintage by the riverside that villagers say was built by the encamped sultanate armies. The land around the mosque looks as if it has been excavated, and the former headman of the village, Shankar Gowda, confirmed this. “The original village of Rakkasagi existed around the mosque, but the village was shifted inland by around 300 metres some 30 years ago. I still remember that when we shifted our village and our huts were demolished, we found coins and armour in the earth,” he said.
Once one passes the mosque, the plains by the northern bank of the river provide an unending vista of flat land on either side. This is where the sultanate armies pitched their tents. The Vijayanagara army was encamped on the southern bank of the river, which can be seen on the horizon across the mighty Krishna. All is quiet on this day, with only a shepherd grazing his sheep, far removed in time from the scene of battle.
An eyewitness to the battle, Aftabi, who was in the service of Husain Nizam Shah I of Ahmednagar, wrote eloquently about this confrontation in his panegyric Tarif-i-Husain Shah Badshah Dakhan: “The two clouds from opposite sides thundered, And the two oceans of fire came to ebullition/ The sound and fury from both the armies was such, That even a demon would go mad with horror/...Horsemen shot the steel arrows through the day. They pierced the bodies of the brave, who were entrenched there./ The twang of the arm-breaking bows, made many men unconscious./ The line of furious and intoxicated elephants, Entered the lines of soldiers, like mountain after mountain/ Their eye lashes were like spears and the eyes red as ruby, From trunk to tail, they were covered with armour/...The clamour and noise of both the armies pierced the skies, It was so loud that the ears of angel became deaf” (Tarif-i-Husain Shah Badshah Dakhan, edited by G.T. Kulkarni and M.S. Mate and published by the Bharata Itihasa Samshodhaka Mandala, Pune, 1987).
Another historian, Mahomed Kasim Ferishta, who was employed by the Bijapur court a few decades after the battle wrote this: “The allies now drew up their army in order of battle. The right wing was intrusted to Ally [Ali] Adil Shah [of Bijapur], the left to Ally [Ali] Bereed Shah [of Bidar] and Ibrahim Kootb Shah [of Golconda], and the centre to Hoossein Nizam Shah [of Ahmednagar]. The artillery, fastened together by strong chains and ropes, was drawn up in front of the line, and the war elephants were placed in various positions, agreeable to custom. Each prince erected his particular standard in the centre of his own army, and the allies moved in close order against the enemy. “Ramraj [Ramaraya] intrusted his right wing to his brother Yeltumraj [Tirumala], to oppose Kootb Shah, and his left wing to his other brother Venkatadry, against Ally Adil Shah, while he himself commanded the centre. Two thousand war elephants and one thousand pieces of cannon were placed at different intervals of his line.” Ferishta also wrote that each of Ramaraya’s brothers had a large army consisting of “...twenty thousand cavalry, five hundred elephants, and one hundred thousand foot...” (History of the Rise of the Mahomedan Power in India, Mahomed Kasim Ferishta, Volume 3).
Military revolution
What decided the battle in favour of the sultanate armies was the wide gap that opened up in military technology between the northern and southern Deccan after the Battle of Raichur. The historians Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner argue that there was a “military revolution in the Deccan” by the 16th century. Both armies had begun using cannons and guns extensively by this time, but the sultanate armies just used this technology better. It is interesting to note that Portuguese gunners were by now commonly used as mercenaries in these battles.
Eaton and Wagoner write: “To be sure Rama Raya brought considerable firepower with him. Ferishta records that he fielded 70,000 cavalry and 90,000 infantry, the latter being mainly matchlock-men and archers.... In his front line he interspersed 1,000 cannons with 2,000 war elephants. Indeed the battle was initiated with his firing nearly 50,000 rockets, matchlocks and cannons at the allies. But the battle was decided by far more effective use of firepower by the allies. Husain Nizam Shah, who commanded the centres of the allies’ battle formation, brought up 600 cannons of different calibre, arranged in three rows and fastened together with strong chains and ropes so as to prevent Rama Raya’s cavalry from breaking through the allies’ lines. In the first row were placed 200 heavy cannons, in the second were intermediate cannons, and in the third row were the swivel cannons—smaller than the intermediate cannons but larger than matchlocks. All the artillery were under the command of Chalabi Rumi Khan, a Turk...” (Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600, Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner, 2014).
The sultans could muster only half of the numbers that the Vijayanagara army had, but they used what they had effectively. Rumi Khan’s expert manning of the cannons was what tilted the scales of the battle in their favour. Added to this were around 2,000 archers, who are supposed to have played a deadly role in the battle. As a result of this assault, 5,000 Vijayanagara soldiers lost their lives early on, leading to bedlam among their ranks. At this point, Ramaraya, who, at the age of 80, was personally commanding the main body of his army, descended from his elephant to exhort his soldiers. He is killed at this point although it is not clear how exactly this happens as there are five different versions of Ramaraya’s end. Karnad goes with the version that Ramaraya was captured and decapitated by Rumi Khan on the order of Nizam Shah. One version says that after his sworn enemy’s head was severed, Nizam Shah exulted: “Now I am avenged of thee! Let God do what he will to me!”
Because of the nature of the contending armies, the Battle of Talikota has easily lent itself to a religious binary: Muslims on one side and Hindus on the other. The Muslim sultans had internecine differences but agreed to a temporary truce to gang up on the Vijayanagara forces, which lent credence to this theory. It is clear that the confederation of sultans was carefully assembled by Nizam Shah of Ahmednagar. He had once been humiliated by Ramaraya, who had forced him to eat paan from his hands. There were also matrimonial ties that cemented the alliance between the sultans, but is this enough to interpret the battle as a clash of civilisations as a few historians have done?
Robert Sewell, who was employed in the Madras Presidency, was the British historian who propagated the idea that “Muslims” vanquished a great Hindu empire. There were historians before him such as Mark Wilks (History of Mysore, 1810) who wrote in the same vein, but Sewell’s A Forgotten Empire, Vijayanagar: A Contribution to the History of India (1900) provided this as the dominant trope to understand the swift demise of the Vijayanagara Empire. Sewell used the evocative phrase “a Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquest” to describe Vijayanagara, and his book argues this out in detail.
This argument was taken forward in the first half of the 20th century by Indian historians such as Nelaturi Venkataramanaiah, S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri and B.A. Saletore. G.T. Kulkarni, a historian who was associated with the Bharata Itihasa Samshodhaka Mandala, wrote that Maratha historians often took pride in Vijayanagara, tracing the rise of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj to the fact that he drew inspiration from the Vijayanagar kingdom (“The Battle of Talikota, 1565 AD: History, Literature and Reality—A Fresh Perspective”, undated paper by Kulkarni)
V.S. Naipaul also lent his influential support to this argument in his book India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977). He wrote: “It was at Vijayanagar this time, in that wide temple avenue... that I began to wonder about the intellectual depletion that must have come to India with the invasions and conquests of the last thousand years. What happened in Vijayanagar happened, in varying degrees in other parts of the country.... I wondered whether intellectually for a thousand years India hadn’t always retreated before its conquerors and whether, in its periods of apparent revival, India hadn’t only been making itself archaic again, intellectually smaller, always vulnerable.” The celebrated Kannada author S.L. Bhyrappa makes this point forcefully in his novel Aavarana (The Veil, 2007) wherein he blames the destruction of Hampi on the Muslim sultans who defeated Ramaraya. This trope has been picked up by the scores of right-wing websites that now litter the Internet. In the age of social media, this memory is frequently revived and works as a potent spirit to further the Hindutva agenda against Muslims.
The historical story of the Battle of Talikota is, as is common with most of medieval Indian history, much more nuanced than this portrayal of an epic showdown between the forces of Hinduism and Islam. In Karnad’s interpretation of events, he closely follows the line taken by historians such as Eaton, an American who has researched extensively on the Deccan, and Krishna Kolhar Kulkarni, a historian of Bijapur who has written two essays on the battle (which appear in the Kannada book Ramarajana Bakhairu, 2011) and recently headed a project to translate 21 volumes of medieval Persian texts into Kannada. In fact, Karnad’s play is dedicated to these two historians.
Eaton writes: “First, no party appears to have been motivated by religious concerns. And second, the Battle of Talikota, far from being a sudden, isolated event, possessed a very deep history. In fact, the battle grew out of several decades of conflict in which Rama Raya had chosen to ally himself with one or another of his neighbours.” Eaton says that the notion that there was any kind of “civilisational rupture” after the Battle of Talikota is flawed as “...during the two centuries prior to 1565, states on both sides of the Krishna river had assimilated so much Persian culture, and had experienced so much cultural interaction, that their mutual struggles were practically reduced to the usual rivalries over territory and forts, and not over matters of civilisation, whether Hindu or Islamic”. Ramaraya was also obsessed with Kalyana as he considered himself a descendant of the Chalukya dynasty of which Kalyana was capital. He ensured that he allied with whichever sultan controlled Kalyana.
Eaton delineates this argument by portraying the Deccan as a space of “elite mobility” where there was considerable intermingling among the higher nobles, all of whom operated in a Persianised ethos. Ramaraya himself had been in the service of the sultan of Golconda before he entered the service of his patron, Krishnadevaraya, in 1515. He becomes part of the family when he marries the daughter of the great king, soon after. Eaton writes: “That the son of a prominent Vijayanagar general could so readily take up service in the army of the sultan of Golkonda suggests that for elite soldiers, at least, the entire Deccan constituted a seamless arena of opportunity, and not, as many historians have imagined, a land divided into a ‘Muslim’ north and ‘Hindu’ south, with the Krishna river running between them.” Eaton renders Ramaraya as an ambitious generalissimo of Krishnadevaraya who succeeded, along with his two brothers, in gathering power around him after the death of Krishnadevaraya in 1529 (A Social History of the Deccan: 1300-1761, Richard Maxwell Eaton, 2005).
Kolhar Kulkarni added to this argument while talking with Frontline at the Dr P.G. Halakatti Research Centre in the sprawling campus of the Bijapur Lingayat District Educational Association in Vijayapura. He said that Ramaraya played the sultans against one another during the period of his regency, frustrating the sultans who realised that only an alliance could defeat him. “There was no religious angle to the battle. Even till the end, the sultan of Bijapur, Ali Adil Shah, who regarded Ramaraya as his father was very sorry about his death,” he said. About the plundering at Hampi, Kolhar Kulkarni explained: “Vijayanagara was destroyed by an internal feud between the Shaivites and Vaishnavites. Even if you go to Hampi today, you will see that only those monuments belonging to the Vaishnavites have been destroyed and are ‘dead’ now like the Vijaya Vittala temple, whereas the ones that venerate Siva like the Virupaksha temple are thriving.”
Gopala Krishna Rao, a historian of the Vijayanagara Empire based in Bengaluru, said: “...the soldiers of the sultanates were interested in looting and [so] they plundered Hampi, not because of any communal feeling. The Battle of Talikota took place as the sultans, who Ramaraya constantly took advantage of by playing one against the other, brought the sultans together in a temporary alliance.”
G.M. Kulkarni writes after careful perusal of a variety of sources: “From the above passages, it appears that the unity was forged first, not because all the four sultans basically belonged to the same religion, but because the same was based on a common factor, viz., the fear of the military might of Ramraj. Each one was more than sure that individually they were not capable of delivering the blow successfully to their common enemy....”
Other historians of Vijayanagar make the same argument. Burton Stein, for instance, writes: “That was the constant grasping about by great and small lords of the Deccan for advantage through coalitions and alliances, a strategy which recognised no frontiers between the Hindu kingdom and its supposed Muslim adversaries to the north” (Vijayanagara, Burton Stein, 1993). Vasundhara Filliozat, who relied a lot on epigraphical sources in her understanding of Vijayanagara history, also does not subscribe to the view that a religious element was responsible for the Battle of Talikota. About Sewell, she says: “But, still Sewell’s wrong remark that the capital was destroyed by Muslims has gone so deep in the minds of readers that it is difficult to uproot it even today.”
Cultural intermingling
The notion that there was some kind of rigid “line of control” that divided these two areas is belied when we see the immense cultural intermingling of influences between the Bahmanis and their legatee kingdoms and the Vijayanagara Empire. While this is evident in a number of areas, even a tourist will be able to discern this influence in the architecture at Hampi. No one can miss the Islamic influence in the buildings such as the Lotus Mahal or the Queen’s Bath in Hampi. The significant tombs in Kadirampura also attest to the presence of Muslim noblemen in Hampi. There is a mosque located in the “Mohammedan quarters” of Hampi apart from more obscure monuments such as the tomb of Ahmed Khan, a nobleman who built a travellers’ lodge dedicated to the reigning rule of Vijayanagara. There are even the graves of Muslim holy men beyond the tomb of Ahmed Khan (see Basav Biradar’s article titled “Why Hampi Has Surprises Up Its Sleeve”, National Geographic Traveller India, August 10, 2018).
C.S. Vasudevan, a professor at the Department of Ancient History and Archaeology, Kannada University, Hampi, said that several inscriptions found in Hampi attest to the existence of an elite corps of Muslims who dedicated monuments to the king. He translated the inscription on the plinth of the travellers’ lodge (some say that this is a mosque) built by Ahmed Khan: “For the merit of King Devaraya, Ahmed Khan got this choultry constructed.”
Similarly, in Bijapur (Vijayapura now), the largest sultanate, which became immensely powerful after the fall of Vijayanagara, one can see the influences of the Vijayanagara architects in majestic buildings such as the Gol Gumbaz and the Ibrahim Rauza. “The first major building to have been erected after the fall of Vijayanagara in Bijapur is the Jama Masjid whose pillars when looked at in isolation resemble those of temples. The brackets that jut out from the roof and even the majestic prayer niche of the mosque, the largest of its kind, has influences of the skilled artisans of Vijayanagara,” said Abdul Ghani Imaratwale, a historian and Persian scholar who teaches at the Anjuman Arts, Science and Commerce College in Vijayapura.
There was also no clear division between the faiths of the soldiers in the two armies. While the Vijayanagara army had a considerable number of Muslims soldiers within its ranks, particularly in the cavalry and the artillery, the sultanate armies relied on a number of Maratha chieftains to provide foot soldiers and cavalry.
Following the colonial mode The story that the Battle of Talikota was a religious war is perpetuated and conveniently feeds into reductive right-wing historical iterations that ensure that the othering of the Muslim in contemporary India is complete. This right-wing historical trajectory clearly follows the colonial model whose intention was to legitimise colonialism. Stein has written that the intention of such partisan histories was “...to make British rule a necessity and virtue”. The fragility of the “Muslim” alliance can be gauged from the fact that it lasted for only a year after the battle. The sultans fell out and another contentious era began. The Deccan kings would eventually be beaten by the last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, towards the end of the 17th century, which brought the sultanate era to an end.
After the fall of Hampi, the ruins were left to nature until they were discovered in the 19th century. Unfortunately, a modern-day visitor to Hampi will not find any sculpture or picture of Ramaraya. But, strangely, there is a sculpture supposedly of Ramaraya’s head in the Archaeological Museum in Vijayapura. It was discovered when a baoli (stepwell) was cleaned in the city in the 18th century. While no historian of repute will confirm that this is actually Ramaraya as the sign at the museum says, visitors cannot miss this evocative bust of a great man, whose haughtiness led to his downfall and to the end of the one of the greatest empires of India.
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