by John Keay
Happily, the much more stylish monuments of Sher Shah have fared better. In Delhi he added to the complex begun by Humayun on the supposed site of Indraprastha, the capital of the Pandavas in the Mahabharata and now known as Purana Qila. He also built there a mosque. Only parts of this Qila-i-Kuhna survive, but ‘no sanctum and façade in India possesses quite such measured dignity allied to perfect taste in the rich but restrained decoration.’ Making comparison with Brunelleschi, the master-builder of fifteenth-century Florence, J.C. Harle in the Pelican History of Art series finds here ‘a strength, beauty and richness beyond anything achieved by the Mughals’.14
Still more arresting, although rarely visited, is the magnificent five-storey tomb at Sasaram (Sahasaram), midway between Varanasi and Gaya, to which Sher Shah’s charred remains were carried from Kalinjar for interment. Octagonal like many of the Lodi tombs, and set upon a stepped plinth in the middle of a lake like that of Ghiyas-ud-din Tughluq, Sher Shah’s mausoleum is yet wholly original. At the angles of three of its storeys, chattris (pillared and cupola-ed pavilions) of diminishing size recall the amlakas of a temple tower and contribute to a pyramidal profile of stunning beauty. The overall impression is as much of a palace as of a tomb and may owe something to Man Singh’s great façade at Gwalior which Babur had much admired and where Sher Shah had stayed.
Nearly fifty metres high, the massive scale of Sher Shah’s tomb is also remarkable. Dwarfing all previous Muslim tombs in India, it set another standard to which the greatest Mughal builders, Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, would dutifully strive. Nor was it their only challenge. The most ambitious structure of the seventeenth century would in fact be located neither in Agra nor Delhi but deep in the Deccan at Bijapur. Not far away, the sprawling stone metropolis of Vijayanagar, India’s Angkor, offered further convincing proof that in the peninsula worthy rivals of Mughal and Sur yet flourished.
THE RISE AND FALL OF VIJAYANAGAR
When listing the native powers of what he called ‘Hindustan’, Babur had placed first ‘the Raja of Bijanagar’, that is Vijayanagar. From the great city beside the Tungabhadra river in northern Karnataka an erratic succession of Hindu kings had been extending its sway throughout the fifteenth century. With territories that now included much of Andhra Pradesh and Kerala and most of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, the king of Vijayanagar, according to the Babur-nama, controlled the most extensive kingdom in the subcontinent. His forces were also the most numerous, although Babur knew nothing else worth recording of such a distant potentate.
He was better informed as to the plight of the Bahmanid sultans, Vijayanagar’s one-time rivals in the Deccan. ‘At the present time no independent authority is left them; their great begs have laid hands on the whole country, and must be asked for whatever is needed.’15 In fact the great begs, or nobles, were in the process of carving up the Bahmanid kingdom. While Mahmud Shah, the last Bahmanid, yet reigned (1482–1518), four major power-centres, each with its own Muslim dynasty, laid claim to the Bahmanid dominions. One, based on the city of Ahmadnagar (two hundred kilometres east of Bombay in Maharashtra), occupied the north-western corner of the erstwhile sultanate and, adjacent to Malwa, would soon be of consuming interest to Babur’s successors; another retained Bidar, the Bahmanid capital; to the south-east, the third was based on Golconda, the future Hyderabad; and the fourth, based on Bijapur, inherited the southern, or Karnataka, part of the Bahmanid sultanate and, along with it, front-line status in respect of the Vijayanagar kings.
For Vijayanagar this gradual fragmentation of its ancient rival was timely. Following the death in 1446 of Deva Raya II, the last effective ruler of the Sangama dynasty, Vijayanagar too had been rent by internal strife. But territory lost in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu had been largely reclaimed by Narasimha, a general who eventually assumed the kingship and founded the Saluva dynasty. His death in 1491 led to another succession crisis from which emerged a second Narasimha who founded the Tuluva dynasty. It was this Narasimha Tuluva who in 1509 was gloriously succeeded by his half-brother, and Babur’s contemporary, the great Krishna-deva-raya.
During the latter’s twenty-year reign Vijayanagar soared to its spectacular zenith. Krishna-deva-raya’s armies overran the strategic Raichur Doab, menaced the new Deccan sultanates, worsted even the Gajapati kings of Orissa and claimed extensive new territories in Andhra Pradesh. Tribute and plunder poured into Vijayanagar, there to be lavished on royal rituals, academic patronage and architectural extravaganzas. For his support of scholars Krishna-deva-raya was hailed as another King Bhoj. The city itself, covering thirty square kilometres, occasioned the sort of superlatives which a hundred years later would be showered on the Mughal capitals of Agra and Delhi. It ‘seemed to me as large as Rome, and very beautiful’, wrote Domingo Paes, a Portuguese visitor in the 1520s. Paes refrained from guessing at its population lest the improbable figure be taken to impugn the rest of his account, but from a check on its markets he was convinced that it was also ‘the best provided city in the world’. Likewise the kingdom’s resources, about which Paes was less reticent: ‘the king has continually a million fighting troops [under arms].’ And likewise Krishna-deva-raya himself, of whom Paes provides a thumbnail sketch as convincing as any in Mughal literature.
This king is of medium height, and of fair complexion and good figure, rather fat than thin; he has on his face signs of small-pox. He is the most feared and perfect king that could possibly be, cheerful of disposition and very merry; he is one that seeks to honour foreigners, and receives them kindly, asking about all their affairs, whatever their condition may be. He is a great ruler and a man of much justice, but subject to sudden fits of rage, and this is his title ‘Crisnarao Macacao, king of kings, lord of the greater lords of India, lord of the three seas and of the land’. He has this title because by rank he is a greater lord than any by reason of what he possesses … but it seems that (in fact) he has nothing compared to what a man like him ought to have, so gallant and perfect is he in all things.16
Thanks to this paragon of kingly virtues, to the magnificence of his metropolis as evidenced by its still staggering ruins, and to the abrupt and imminent eclipse of both, Vijayanagar has attracted much scholarly attention. Typically the kingdom has been seen as the epitome of traditional Indian kingship and a spectacular finale to two thousand years of Hindu empire. ‘It stood for the older religion and culture of the country and saved these from being engulfed by the rush of new ideas and forces.’17 It was also ‘the last bastion of Hinduism’; and when it fell, ‘the South died’. All the city’s monuments, its bazaars and streets, its temples and palaces, are constructed of massive stone blocks which have been hewn, dressed and sculpted from the rock-scape of monumental boulders amongst which they stand. Even the intervening hills are composed of these boulders, and so daringly are they stacked and balanced on top of one another that they too could be architecture and the city’s monuments but an inspired elaboration of what nature has already ordained. Just so the kingdom has often been seen as a natural and climactic reordering of the ideals and achievements of all those earlier stone-whittling, elephant-trumpeting Deccan dynasties – Shatavahanas and Vakatakas, Chalukyas and Rashtrakutas. In particular the earliest Chalukyas seem to have inspired the kings of Vijayanagar, who modelled some of their temples on those of Badami and Aihole.
More recently, however, the Vijayanagar kingdom has been reinterpreted as very far from traditional and in fact a radical experiment in political and military organisation during a time of social and economic upheaval. The evidence, culled from accounts like that of Paes, from literary sources and from a painstaking analysis of thousands of inscriptions, suggests that by the sixteenth century the defence of Hindu dharma was not uppermost in the minds of the Vijayanagar kings (if it ever had been). Nor did they rely on the support of satellite kings or the impact of intoxicated elephants. Instead they looked to often Muslim cavalry and to a variety of new military structures including ‘a system of royal fortresses under b
rahman commanders … Portuguese and Muslim mercenary gunners … foot-soldiers recruited from non-peasant, or forest, people … and a new strata of lesser chiefs totally dependent on military service [the so-called ‘Poligars’]’.18
At the apex of this organisation the Vijayanagar kings, dispensing with the traditional notion of paramountcy implicit in the ‘society of kings’, had adopted a semi-feudal system of powerful military subordinates. It was amongst these subordinates, known as ‘Nayaks’ and numbering several hundred, that most of the kingdom was parcelled out. They were appointed by the sovereign and were responsible both for maintaining large military contingents at the service of the sovereign and for organising the collection and remission of revenue to the sovereign. In other words they performed somewhat the expected role of the mainly Afghan feudatories in the north. But whilst the latter, from a position of semi-independence, were coming under increasing pressure to submit to Mughal or Sur overlords, the Nayaks in the south, from a position of dependent commanders, were becoming king-makers whose standing with local religious and commercial institutions often eclipsed that of their sovereign.
Other factors beyond the control of Krishna-deva-raya and his successors also contributed to the growing instability of the kingdom. Amongst them was the new Portuguese presence on the peninsular seaboard. According to one authority, ‘the Portuguese have the dubious distinction of introducing politics into the [Indian] ocean.’19 Maritime trade had hitherto been considered as open to all and subject only to competitive pressures and local incentives. That Muslim traders and Islamic shipping interests had gained a near monopoly of the sea-routes to the west and to the east had not therefore been cause for alarm. But as of the early sixteenth century the freedom of the seas and of the monsoon winds was called in question. Thanks to developments in navigation and naval gunnery, oceanic trade was suddenly revealed as susceptible to state direction and subject to military control. By demonstrating that maritime empire was a paying and practical proposition, the Portuguese had indeed politicised the Indian Ocean. Land-based empires which in any way depended on overseas trade would have to come to terms with it.
Vasco da Gama’s appearance at Calicut on the Kerala coast in 1498 had climaxed a century of Portuguese attempts to find a sea-route round Africa to the spice-producing Indies. He returned to Lisbon with a cargo of Indian pepper and his route was immediately followed by an annual armada of Portuguese shipping, much of it manned and armed for combat. In 1503 the first Portuguese fort was built at Cochin, whose raja then became something of a Portuguese puppet. Two years later the appointment of a viceroy for something which Lisbon now called its Estado da India, or ‘State of India’, betrayed the true nature of Portuguese ambition. Goa was taken in 1510, not from Vijayanagar but from the Bijapur sultanate, and was soon fortified as the hub of Portuguese maritime empire in Indian waters.
Stiffer resistance was offered to the Portuguese by the sultan of Gujarat and his distant allies, the Mameluke rulers of Egypt with whom Gujarati merchants traditionally traded. But in the 1530s the ports of Bassein (near Bombay) and Diu (in Saurastra) were incorporated into the Estado da India and effectively controlled access to Gujarat’s outlets of Cambay, Surat and Broach. Portuguese ships and guns were demonstrably superior to those of either Indian or Arab, and Lisbon’s claim to control the shipping of the entire west coast thus became effective.
To what extent the rulers of Vijayanagar had benefited from overseas trade is disputed. But the land-routes from the west coast ports up to Vijayanagar were evidently a high priority, and the city was a conspicuous consumer of foreign imports as well as a major market for their onward distribution. Crucially these imports included the desiderata of every Indian army, namely horses, mostly from the Persian Gulf, and some fire-arms. To encourage the supply of horses it was said that the Vijayanagar rulers would pay even for dead ones. The new Portuguese monopoly of the horse trade looks both to have deprived the kingdom of important revenues and to have prejudiced the supply of remounts when, as under Krishna-deva-raya’s successor, Vijayanagar was at war with the Portuguese.
The war in question did not last long. Of far greater consequence was the rivalry between Achyuta-deva-raya, the brother and nominated successor of the great Krishna-deva-raya, and Rama Raja, Krishna’s powerful son-in-law. Failing to secure the succession in 1529, Rama Raja tried again when Achyuta died in 1542. To advance his chances, he also sought the aid of the sultan of Bijapur. There were ample precedents for the involvement of the sultanates in the Vijayanagar succession (and vice versa). Rama Raja, a consummate intriguer, was merely taking advantage of the Deccan’s fluid and opportunist rivalries. When, thanks to this alliance, he was safely ensconced as regent, he continued to pursue a tortuous policy of advancing Vijayanagar’s frontiers by exploiting the rivalries between Bijapur, Golconda and the other Bahmanid successors.
In this Rama Raja succeeded, if anything, too well. During twenty years of complex intrigue he so provoked the sultanates that they came to fear for their very survival. It is possible that he also outraged their Islamic sensibilities. Ferishta makes this accusation so often that it smacks of pious convention; on the other hand religious sensitivity and sectarian solidarity may well have been heightened at a time when the neighbouring Portuguese were combining the anti-Muslim spirit of the Crusades with the excesses of the Inquisition.
Certainly, and fatally, Rama Raja also overstretched those frayed loyalties on which Vijayanagar’s cohesion depended. This became apparent when in 1564 the four sultans at last patched up their differences and turned on him in concert. To meet this threat he summoned his Nayaks even from as far south as Madurai. Most did respond, but in January 1565 the Vijayanagar forces were catastrophically routed in the battle of Talikota. Rama Raja himself was beheaded, and casualties were colossal. Yet the great city of Vijayanagar, with its seven massive walls and its ingeniously designed gatehouses, might still have been defended. In the event, it was just deserted; Nayaks and Poligars withdrew to their individual territories. The 550 elephant-loads of treasure which they hastily ‘rescued’ from the city could just as well have been pillaged.
The battle had taken place on the banks of the Kistna river, about 120 kilometres north of Vijayanagar. But the victors did not immediately swoop on the city; local scavengers seem to have been the first to gain access. Nor is it self-evident that the Muslims’ intention was to obliterate the place. Despite colourful descriptions of a five-month sack, wholesale slaughter, savage iconoclasm and such remorseless demolition that ‘nothing now remains but a heap of ruins’,20 the impression these ‘ruins’ convey is less of wilful destruction and more of neglect, plus some random treasure-hunting and much casual pillage of building materials. Temples, the bigot’s prime target, prove to be the least damaged structures; and in many of them the statuary, so invitingly vulnerable, remains miraculously intact. In short the city, like the kingdom, looks to have suffered less from conquering fanatics and more from that deepening internal crisis of authority.
Rid of Vijayanagar’s supervision, Nayaks would continue to rule in many parts of the south just as would the quarrelsome sultans in the Deccan. In the extreme south the Nayaks of Madurai would evade even Mughal rule. Not so the others. Just when ‘Vijaya-nagar’ (‘City of Victory’ in Sanskrit) was disappearing from the map, a ‘Fateh-pur’ (‘City of Victory’ in the Persian of the Mughal court) was being built at Sikri near Agra. Urban triumphalism was passing from the Deccan to the north. Vijayanagar’s collapse did indeed spell the end of the south as a separate political arena. As time would reveal, the real victors of Talikota were not Bijapur and Golconda but the Great Mughals.
ALLAHU-AKBAR
Twenty years earlier, in the summer of 1544 while Sher Shah Sur still ruled in northern India, the Mughal revival had begun near Sultaniyeh in north-western Iran. There Humayun, the fugitive from India, was entertained by Shah Tamasp. The two kings met in a tented city of silken pavilions dripping with pearls and lined w
ith gold-embroidered velvet. Unlike that other ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’ where Tudor and Valois had lately met, the encounter was beset with religious misgivings. They were resolved when Humayun briefly endorsed the Shi’ite teachings of his host. ‘Fraternal unanimity’ having been established, joint action was agreed and costly presents were exchanged, none more costly than that diamond, now said to be ‘worth the revenue of countries and climes’, which duly passed from Mughal to shah. Indeed its value was reckoned at four times the cost of the hospitality enjoyed by Humayun in Iran, and so may also have been sufficient to defray the military assistance which he now received. With twelve thousand Persian troops plus what remained of his own following, and with a train of Persian courtiers and artists whose influence at the Mughal court would be considerable, Humayun headed east to redeem his empire.
Again he was opposed by his brothers, one of whom still held Kandahar, the other Kabul. It took him eight years just to win back Afghanistan. The delay was not, however, disastrous. In India Sher Shah’s brief but remarkable reign came to an end in 1545 just as Humayun entered Afghanistan. Sher Shah’s less effective son, Islam Shah Sur, succeeded to the throne but himself died in 1553 whereupon the Sur dominions split into semi-independent provinces while famine and faction undid Sher Shah’s reforms. Like the Lodis on the eve of Babur’s invasion, the Surs on the eve of Humayun’s attack were in terminal confusion.
Additionally, eight years in Afghanistan meant that Humayun’s son, who had been born during the course of his father’s flight from India, was now emerging from the seclusion of the seraglio. Akbar, or ‘this nursling of Divine light’ as his biographer calls him, was now twelve years old, hyperactive, and endowed, we are told, with ‘a perfect understanding beyond computation’. Such judicious wording was designed to obscure the fact that the young ‘World-Conqueror’ had learned neither to read nor write. He never would; almost certainly he suffered from chronic dyslexia. But as a sportsman and a warrior he showed promise, and as a talisman of future Mughal rule he now accompanied his father on the march into India. In November 1554, continues Abu’l-Fazl, author of the imperial memoir known as the Akbar-nama, ‘His Majesty [Humayun] laid firm hold of the strong hand of divine favour, grasped the stout cable of heavenly tidings, and set off with few men – they did not amount to three thousand – but with large help from the armies of Providence, which could not be calculated by intellectual accountants.’21
