Step out from the cool embrace of your villa, and the heat is the first thing that strikes you — the same sharp, dry warmth, with its distant hint of spice, that the rulers of Vijayanagara felt five hundred years ago. Around you, the undulating granite hills, the glittering ribbon of the Tungabhadra, and the precise lines of ancient canals tell a story: of how an empire mastered nature, sought to dominate and unify much of southern India—and, in doing so, created one of the most spectacular cities in the world.

Evolve Back sits within this story. The Hampi you explore today — World Heritage Site, romantic ruin, archaeologist’s dream — was once a living metropolis of perhaps half a million souls. In its heyday it awed Portuguese mercenaries, Gulf merchants, and Iranian envoys. Hampi’s monuments are the ruins of Vijayanagara’s beating heart.

A Capital for a Fractured Deccan
In the 1330s, the Tungabhadra valley lay between two worlds: the Delhi Sultanate pressing from the north, and the brittle patchwork of post Kakatiya and post Hoysala powers to the south. The founders of Vijayanagara chose a defensible granite basin, ringed by boulder hills and anchored by shrine of Virupaksha, a form of Shiva believed to have married the much more ancient goddess Pampa. The chaos of the 14th century also brought with it opportunities: political vacuums, peoples and technologies on the move.

Vijayanagara’s armies included Telugu military clans displaced by the Kakatiya collapse, Kannada chiefs from the Western Ghats, and Central Asian horse-archers. Its revenues came from the rolling plains of the Kaveri delta and the bustling ports of the Konkan. And its royal authority was exerted by concentrating resources on hitherto-minor temples such as that of Venkateshvara at Tirumala-Tirupati, which has since become one of the world’s wealthiest religious institutions.

Such a diverse coalition had to be maintained by constant redistribution and the generation of new sources of revenue. Newly conquered Tamil districts came to be ruled by Telugu Nayakas or leaders, who were initially resented by their new subjects before setting up their own thriving mini-kingdoms by the 17th century. Major military campaigns against the Deccan Sultanates financed structures such as the Vitthala temple and the Queen’s Bath, which in reality was an entertainment pavilion for the king and his men. And, through royal investments in irrigation, the Vijayanagara metropolitan region saw unprecedented agrarian expansion. The great reservoir at Kamalapura is a Vijayanagara construction, you can even spot the town’s medieval gateway as you drive through it today. Some Vijayanagara-period canals were also integrated into the modern damns on the Tungabhadra.

Architecture as Historical Argument
To rule such a diverse territory, the kings of Vijayanagara had to be many things to many peoples. The inscriptional record from Andhra to Tamil Nadu shows how deliberately the state embedded itself in local sacred landscapes, presenting themselves as the devout successors of earlier kings by making gifts to prominent shrines.

But for those trained to see it, Vijayanagara also made extraordinary innovations. Take, for example, the Hemakuta hill on the banks of the Tungabhadra. Its earliest temples predate Vijayanagara; they are elegant little funerary shrines with ‘layer-cake’ spires, as the architectural historian George Michell describes them. In contrast, the temple of Virupaksha and Pampa—considered the tutelary deities of the city’s founders—is a vast complex studded with towering gopuram gateways. Vijayanagara engineers adapted these iconic structures from the architecture of present-day Tamil Nadu, rather than from local Karnataka temples. The Achyutaraya and Vitthala shrines also have gopurams well worth your attention. They are not just religious structures: once they were living expressions of the city’s cosmopolitanism.

Vijayanagara kings also associated themselves with the Hindu god-king Rama. Local traditions linked this land with Kishkinda, legendary kingdom of the monkey-like Vanaras, Rama’s allies. This may have derived from cultural memories of the Iron Age necropolis at Hire Benekal, a few hours’ drive from Evolve Back. The Hazara Rama shrine, at Vijayanagara’s Royal Centre, made this association more concrete by directly linking the king’s right to rule with his devotion to Rama. While the linkage between royalty and divinity was not new in South India, the temple’s compound wall was also covered in friezes depicting the city’s annual Mahanavami procession—a public celebration of the king’s martial prowess. There was no historical precedent for such sculptures: they are a Vijayanagara-period PR experiment, displaying the city’s remarkable ability to blend apparent continuity with brilliant innovation.

Gods and Architects in Motion
Hampi’s monuments are studded with deities who came from elsewhere to be integrated into the imperial fabric. Take, for example, the great statue of Narasimha in the Sacred Centre. Narasimha, the man-lion, was popular with the Chenchu hill-peoples of the Eastern Ghats, with whom Vijayanagara had a turbulent relationship.

Krishna Deva Raya, the famous 16th century emperor, complained about them in his epic Amukta-Malyada: “Trying to clean up the forest folk is like trying to wash a mud wall. There’s no end to it. No point in getting angry. Make promises that you can keep and win them over. They’ll be useful for invasions, or plundering an enemy land. It’s irrational for a ruler to punish a thousand when a hundred are at fault.” Narasimha proved a powerful way to integrate these troublesome subjects. Vijayanagara kings promoted a legend about Narasimha’s marriage to a beautiful Chenchu goddess, to the point where some Chenchus even today consider Narasimha a son-in-law. The god’s worship in the capital, then, assured the Chenchus that they had interests in common with this distant city.

As with Narasimha, so with Venkateshvara. His great shrine at Tirumala-Tirupati straddled the Telugu and Tamil-speaking regions. As pointed out earlier, in Vijayanagara’s turbulent early decades, Telugu-speaking warriors called Nayakas had been appointed to rule over Tamil-speaking cultivators and merchants. What better way to integrate these groups than through a shared devotion? From 1510–1570, Vijayanagara’s aristocracy lavished the god Venkateshvara with 8,05,653 gold coins, hundreds of acres of land, and herds of cows and bulls.

One sign of the empire’s successful integration of diverse peoples lies in the aforementioned Krishna Deva Raya, perhaps the most important patron of Tirumala-Tirupati. He was a man of Tulu descent from India’s West Coast, who wrote extensively in classical Telugu, ruled a city in the Kannada-speaking region, and made gifts to a temple between the Tamil and Telugu regions. It was perhaps because of the god’s importance to Vijayanagara’s ruling coalition that the spectacular temple of Tiruvengalanatha—better known today as the Achyutaraya shrine—was built in the capital later in the 16th century.

The importance of Hindu deities and mythology at Vijayanagara has often led to it being described as the “last Hindu empire”, but it was rather more complicated than that. As we can see, religion and politics went hand-in-hand at Vijayanagara. Yet archaeological excavations have found multiple mosques within the city’s precincts, and many Muslim cavalry officers served its kings. Muslim dancers and entertainers are also depicted on the Mahanavami Dibba in the Royal Centre. But perhaps the clearest indications of Vijayanagara’s Muslim populations comes from its architecture, specifically the Lotus Mahal and the Elephant Stables, which feature multi-cusped arches, stucco decorations, and domes that have clear parallels in the Deccan Sultanates. Historian Dominic J. Davison-Jenkins has also pointed out that the hydraulic techniques of the Queen’s Bath resemble those of the Bijapur Sultanate’s palaces. Vijayanagara’s world, like ours, was full of peoples and talents in motion.

The Fall of a Medieval Metropolis
In the early 16th century, under Krishna Deva Raya, Vijayanagara seemed unassailable. Krishna Deva’s military successes, relying on cavalry against the Sultanates’ gunpowder, paid for massive renovations in the Royal Centre, including a layer of elegant green schist on the Mahanavami Dibba; he was also responsible for the Krishna temple in the Sacred Centre, and, of course, the spectacular Vijaya Vitthala temple. However, victory encouraged complacency.

Over the next century, Vijayanagara’s military stagnated, even as its population, temples, and irrigation networks continued to grow. Meanwhile, the Sultanates, at each other’s throats, developed matchlock guns, lighter and more maneuvrable cannon, and trace italienne inspired bastions; foreign gunners and experts became fixtures in their camps. Increasingly threatened by Vijayanagara dominantion, they briefly set their differences aside and confronted the emperor Rama Raya at the Battle of Talikota in 1565. There the imperial army’s over-reliance on cavalry and infantry was brutally exposed, as they proved unable to break the Sultanate’s centre, an Ottoman-style wagon-fort studded with field artillery. The imperial army’s collapse on the field, and Rama Raya’s beheading soon after, opened the road to Vijayanagara. The Sultans targeted the temples of the ruling dynasty, especially the Vitthala and Achyutaraya shrines with their layers of political meaning. The Mahanavami Dibba, which once had a wooden superstructure, was set aflame. Yet archaeologists have found that the most important non-royal temples were left untouched, such as that of Virupaksha. The Muslim scholar Rafi al-din Shirazi, who accompanied the Sultan of Bijapur on this expedition, had admired the city’s temples and was greatly disturbed by the looting. “May God the exalted and transcendent forgive the Sultan with the light of his compassion,” he wrote, “for after the conquest of Vijayanagar, he with his own blessed hand … ruined many of the idol temples.”

Temples, keep in mind, were also economic and political centres. With the destruction of the ruling dynasty’s shrines, the fragile coalitions and investment networks that held together the city’s peoples and irrigation systems could no longer be maintained. And so what was once the world’s second-largest urban centre disappeared practically overnight. Yet political authority endured: Vijayanagara’s rulers regrouped at Penukonda, and spectacular temples such as Lepakshi continued to be built after. The last king of Vijayanagara was a contemporary of the 17th century Mughal ruler Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal. Meanwhile, the Telugu nayakas, posted in the Tamil region by Vijayanagara emperors, went on to construct spectacular structures such as the gopurams of the Madurai Meenakshi temple. The architectural, cultural and linguistic innovations of Vijayanagara long outlived the great city.

Anirudh Kanisetti

Anirudh Kanisetti is an award-winning author, historian, and storyteller with a passion for uncovering forgotten histories. Born on 29 October 1994 in Vishakhapatnam, he pursued a Bachelor's degree in Electronics and Instrumentation at BITS Pilani, but his true passion led him to history. Writing primarily in English, Anirudh’s work spans the realms of both fiction and non-fiction, combining scholarly research with engaging narratives. His debut book Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas explores 500 years of medieval South Indian history, using art, architecture, literature, and epigraphy to reveal the stories of the region's lost dynasties. The book has garnered widespread acclaim, winning the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar (2023) and the Tata Literature Best Nonfiction Book of the Year award (2022), and was featured as a Book of the Year by The Wire and The Hindu.

Water, Stone, and Empire: Reading Vijayanagara in the Evolve Back Kamalapura Palace

Anirudh Kanisetti