Quote:Vijayanagara: the empire remains

Richard Orange



Last Updated: August 20. 2010 1:17PM UAE / August 20. 2010 9:17AM GMT



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A woman walks past the Mahanavami platform in the royal enclosure at Hampi, which was used by Vijayanagara kings for viewing parades and public events. Chris Caldicott / Getty Images



In the last few moments before the sun drops behind one of its hills of giant boulders, something happens in the backpacker haven of Hampi. Silence descends on the top of Matanga Hill, where a handful of dreadlocked travellers and ordinary tourists have come to see out the day.



They gaze out over the colonnades of a ruined bazaar below, over the pillars from a long-fallen bridge, over the remains of temples on nearby hilltops, and down onto the high tower of the Virupaksha temple, all of it surrounded by rice paddies and banana plantations and bathed in a gentle light.



This is the ruined city of Vijayanagara: the city whose greatest ruler, Krishna Deva Raya, conquered all south India from the Bay of Bengal to the tip of Tamil Nadu; a city perhaps three times the size, in its heyday, of Paris, then Europe’s largest, its central section alone covering 25 square kilometres; a city which the Portuguese trader Domingo Paes described as “the best provided city in the world”, and of which Abdul Razaak, a Persian envoy, said: “The city is such that the pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it, and ear of intelligence has never been informed that existed anything to equal it in the World.”



It is also a city that, after its final defeat and sacking by the Deccan Sultanates in 1565, was set alight, demolished and deserted forever, taking its place alongside Angkor Wat and Machu Picchu among the world’s great dead cities.



Or so I believe, until I meet my guide Virupaksha the next morning for his tour of the village of Anegundi. “They’re there, they’re living there now, ” Virupaksha explains casually, dabbing at a plate of rice and dal in his house.



“There’s a Krishna Deva Raya in Hospet, who’s the head of the family. As for Anegundi, there’s around 60 royal family members living here. The rest of Hampi may be dead, but here it is still alive.”



Viru, as energetic as he is small and wiry, has gained a modicum of local fame – and a mention in the Lonely Planet guide – for giving tours that start where others finish, ignoring the main Vijayanagara sites, and instead providing a mix of wildlife, prehistoric paintings, living Hinduism and awesome views.



He’s based in Anegundi, the fortified village across the river in the far north-eastern corner of the Vijayanagara site that was the the home of the city’s founding brothers Hakka and Bukka, and is where, if they are to be believed, Krishna Deva Raya’s descendents returned some time in the 17th century.



But Viru is wary of introducing Rama Raya, the most senior descendent of Krishna Deva Raya in the village. “If we see him, you must say that you are very short of time,” he warns, looking worried. “Otherwise it can take two hours. If you ask one question, he answers 10.”



The Royal Palace sits in the centre of Anegundi, its roofs long collapsed, and its walls crumbling. “It’s not exactly going to have the tourists flocking,” says my friend Oliver. Just one corner courtyard, entered through a collapsed arch, remains inhabited. And there, his straggly hair and beard as blazing white as his light kurta pajama, Rama Raya sits waiting.



“This family is the Anegundi royal family,” he explains once we sit down. “Long before the establishment of Vijayanagara we were here, and we are here now. Our family is living heritage.”



Rama then starts to tell the story of his forefathers after Tirumala Raya, the last ruler, fled the onset of the Deccan sultans, his vast riches piled onto the backs of 550 elephants. They established new a capital in Penukonda, then Chandragiri, and finally in Vellore, from where, after the empire’s final defeat, the family drifted back to Anegundi and where, becoming the local gentry, they remained up until Indian independence.



No one disputes this. Back in 1824, the British even awarded the family a 500 rupee-a-year pension to compensate them for Britain’s possession of Hampi and the surrounding lands. Rama’s brother Achutya only forfeited this as recently as 1984.



“I say now that I’m a citizen of independent India, but people still sometimes address us as Raja,” Rama says. “Many people come to me also, families and individuals, they come to me to answer their quarrels.”



I ask about the collapsed arch. “It happened very recently, baba,” he says sadly. “In October, there was a monsoon flood and it collapsed. In 1799, this was a whole complex, it was almost half of the village. But it is ruins and rubble now.”



It’s a fascinating story, but by the time we get ready to leave I’m starting to understand Virupaksha’s warning. It’s been one and a half hours on the porch, and Rama’s story-telling has become a kind of hypnotic chant.



Even when we’re walking away, he continues to call after us: “And who fought a war with the Ahmednagar Sultan? That was Krishna Deva Raya. And who fought a war with the Kangani empire? That also was Krishna Deva ...”



There are many more ancient remains to see in Anegundi. On a hilltop outside Anegundi, Viru shows us the family tombs. Achyuta Deva Raya, the previous head of the family was buried here in 2008.



The family still owns the old flag and silver seals of the Vijayanagara empire, old swords, and manuscripts going back hundreds of years. It has given its silver throne and its diamond and ruby encrusted crown, which they believe comes from Vijayanagara times, to the head swami of Hampi’s Virupaksha Temple.



To hear about such ornaments, I need to talk to Krishna Deva Raya, the 38-year-old son of Rama’s elder brother Achutya, who in 2008 became the new head of the family, after a six-year stint working for a building firm in Washington DC.



I go to meet Krishna in a hotel in nearby Hospet, where he’s attending a meeting of academics celebrating the 500th anniversary of the coronation of his famous namesake. An unassuming, softly-spoken man dressed in a patterned kurta, jeans and flip flops, Krishna says he wasn’t brought up with any airs and graces.



“I’ve had a normal upbringing. I was never told, ‘you are royal’. But since I belong to this family, I feel I have a duty to protect the site, to educate the people here.”



As part of this, he wants to channel some of the proceeds from his family’s iron ore mining business into renovating the family house in Anegundi, turning it into a museum where some of the family artifacts can be displayed.



“Right now, it looks in a pretty bad shape,” he says. “But we have still got the original wooden columns, I have an architect working on it. “I want to restore it. I don’t want to renovate it, I want to use lime and mortar, even if it’s more expensive.”



He thinks Hampi has been badly maintained. “I personally feel that the government could have done a better job, “ he says. “You are not supposed to build anything in Hampi, but those are just rules. Because of corruption, a lot of structures are built. At the very least we need to keep it clean. There’s garbage everywhere.”



For now, though, he can’t even afford to start work on the crumbling Royal Palace where Rama has his quarters, he says, let alone put money into the rest of Hampi. “I would love to do something for the restoration and preservation of Hampi, but I want to start with my own village.”



His son, he says, is more interested in European royalty and the Roman Empire. Krishna, too, is perhaps under-playing the present-day resonance of his royal past. In January, to mark the coronation, he was crowned with a golden turban in front of a crowd of thousands in the Virupaksha Temple, which was lit with strobes and coloured lights.



In October, Hampi is also one of the best places to celebrate Diwali, with fireworks, ceremonies and an elephant parade; November sees the giant Hampi Festival, a huge pageant of music, dance and puppet shows.



In March, like his father before him, Krishna takes centre place at the temple’s “car festival”, which draws in a crowd of tens of thousands of devotees. There could be few more vivid demonstrations of how the traditions of Vijayanagara remain alive. “There’s an ancient crown which dates back to the Vijayanagara times. It’s made out of gold and it has diamonds and rubies in it. I then put the crown on the swami’s head.



“As far as I know, my grandfather used to do it, then my father,” he says. “I remember going as a kid to Hampi, just to enjoy myself. Now my son comes. He loves to sit on the elephants.”



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Quote:Remains of 1300 years old ancient temples found near Bhopal

By Ram Chand Sahu, Bhopal, Oct.16 : Scientists of the Archaeological Department have found out the remains of 1300 year old ancient temples at Ashapuri village near Bhopal.





Ashapuri village is located around 36 kilometers off Bhopal.



The debris of the temple seems to be massive in which the Bhoothnath temple was the biggest.



The archaeologists have named this excavation project as 'Bhootnath Temple' series.



"We have found ruins of temples dating back to 1300 years, even before the Parmar Dynasty. Before the Parmar dynasty there were Pratihar dynasty rulers in this area. After them the Parmar dynasty came. Pratihar dynasty rulers constructed temples with steeple shaped structure. These temples were large and beautiful," said Ashok Das, Commissioner, Madhya Pradesh Archaeological Survey of India.



"The 21 temples you can see here were made during the Pratihar rule. The largest temple whose cleanliness is yet to be done might have been made by the Parmar dynasty," he added.

The excavators have found over 400 remains of idols of Hindu gods and goddesses made during the regime of the Pratihar and the Parmar dynasty rulers.



The State government has taken the responsibility to preserve these relics of Indian history.



"It is the responsibility of the Archaeology Department to find things of historical importance and preserve them. That is why the State government is doing this work," said Laxmikant Sharma, Minister of Culture of Madhya Pradesh.



According to the archaeologists, the temples were built by the Parmar and Pratihar dynasties and certain locals contended that the Mughal rulers razed down these temples.

Quote:AGENDA | Sunday, November 28, 2010 |



The great divide

November 30, 2010 2:39:18 AM





Meenakshi Jain's book explains the leitmotif for Hindu-Muslim relations for over a millennium and demolishes the ‘harmony' theory, writes A SURYA PRAKASH



Parallel Pathways: Essays on Hindu-Muslim Relations (1707-1857)

Author: Meenakshi Jain

Publisher: Konark

Price: 600



Hindus and Muslims lived amicably in undivided India until Britain colonised the country, promoted conflict between the two communities, pursued a policy of divide and rule and eventually presided over the division of the country before exiting from the subcontinent. This is the standard narrative of many Left-leaning historians who shut their eyes to historical truths and moulded history to suit their ideological predilections.



Much of this, however, is false because it seeks to hide the facts regarding the cruelty and despotism of many Muslim rulers, the destruction of thousands of Hindu temples, the religious persecution of Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains and the sustained efforts of these rulers to dismantle the cultural edifice of the Indic civilisation — all of which created a Hindu-Muslim divide that existed when the British arrived on the scene and remained thereafter, resulting in the country’s tragic partition.



The producers of this counterfeit history have just one objective in mind — to denounce indigenous religions and culture, to eulogise religions imported into this land and to expurgate from history books all facts that show the latter in poor light. A logical extension of this spurious enterprise is to imagine Hindu-Muslim harmony before the advent of the British and blame the coloniser for the discord that emerged between the two communities in the 19th and 20th centuries leading to Partition and much else.



For example, historians who carry this ideological baggage have tried — and continue to try — to paint even a despotic ruler like Aurangzeb in ‘secular’ colours. Aurangzeb persecuted Hindus, imposed a tax on them and destroyed hundreds of Hindu temples including the Krishna Temple in Mathura and the Vishwanath Temple in Benaras. He heaped indignities on Hindus and Sikhs and some eminent historians like Jadunath Sarkar, RC Mazumdar and Will Durant, who have remained true to their calling, have chronicled the many facets of his oppressive regime.



However, in recent years, historians belonging to the pseudo-secular school have been working overtime to bury these truths and give Aurangzeb a more acceptable face. This is the common thread that runs through these narratives, however laughable it may seem, in the light of the chronicles left behind by Aurangzeb’s official historians, including the Akhbarats, which were reports on the orders passed by the emperor and other accounts like Mirat-i-Alam and Alamgir-Nama written by Mughal court officials. This is just a sample of the monumental disservice that historians of this ilk have done to our understanding of medieval history and thereafter, the historical background of Partition.



However, the enterprise of this school is not confined to just manufacturing the past. It extends to management of the present as well, with members of this school entrenching themselves in academia and institutions owing allegiance to those who are the prime beneficiaries of their spurious output and denying opportunities to those who oppose this disjunction between truth and history.



Given this background, Meenakshi Jain’s Parallel Pathways is a path-breaking work, seeking to blast the myths vis-à-vis Hindu-Muslim relations from 1707 to the Great Uprising of 1857.



As Jain points out, a school of historians believes that the revolt of 1857 “was the last notable manifestation of Hindu-Muslim unity”. That thereafter, this unity was undermined by the policies of the British leading eventually to Partition. In other words, Hindu-Muslim unity was “an accomplished fact” in the centuries preceding the great revolt. The reality, she says, is “considerably more complex” and can be traced to some precepts that are central to Islam and which have influenced Muslim rulers since the Arab conquest of Sind in 712 AD. For example, Church and state were intertwined in Islam and Muslims believed that “Islam could be Islam properly only in conjunction with political power”. As a result, “secularisation of the polity and society were incompatible with Islam”. Islam, she says, divided the world into believers and non-believers and “designated all Indians as kafirs”. As these concepts were at the core of Islamic belief, there was little scope for harmony between Hindus and Muslims. These concepts also had a great bearing on how a succession of Muslim kings ran their kingdoms and the attitude of the Muslim elite in India.



Jain says Islam and the civilisation that it confronted in India espoused “markedly differing ideals”. While Islam gave primacy to universal Muslim brotherhood and promoted a centralised autocratic polity, “the civilisation as it evolved in the subcontinent was... secular (in that the religious identity was not paramount), decentralised and democratic and exalted patriotism (love of the land) above other loyalties. The subsequent history of India was to a considerable degree shaped by the contest between these two varying perspectives”. This single paragraph in Jain’s book explains the leitmotif for Hindu-Muslim relations for over a millennium and effectively demolishes the ‘harmony’ theory.



This conflict between Islam and the Indian civilisation has been recorded by many travellers, court historians, writers and poets, and Jain packs her book with valuable quotes from the most authentic chroniclers to clinch the argument that the disjunction was too deep and fundamental for any kind of concord to emerge between the two civilisations. Further, the attitude of Islam towards the Indic religions resulted in the sustained and barbaric campaign against the adherents of these religions and their places of worship, besides the imposition of jizya (tax) on Hindus and the plethora of discriminatory practices by Muslim rulers.



This onslaught, however, was not just confined to matters of religion. It extended to the wider canvass of culture, including architecture and language. For example, Akbar made Persian the language of administration and the Mughal empire was “closely connected with the cultivation of Persian culture in all its aspects”. Further, Jain says no native language of India received any meaningful patronage from the ‘great’ Mughals, “who were widely perceived in the regions as unsympathetic to indigenous languages”.



Following the decline of the Mughals, it became imperative to replace Persian and Hindi/Hindavi seemed the natural choice, but for the Muslim elite “its (Hindi/Hindavi) principle drawback was its profusion of tatsama and tadbhava Sanskrit words”. So, a solution was found by purging Sanskit-origin words and replacing them with Arabic and Persian words — “a process that culminated in the birth of Urdu”. In other words, the assault on Indian civilisation was comprehensive and nothing was left out. Chapter VI on “Language: A Calculated Rupture” offers a wide-ranging analysis on the language issue as it deals with the expurgation of Sanskrit, the origins of Hindi/Hindavi and Urdu.



The Hindu-Muslim cleavage, largely fuelled by the bigotry of Muslim rulers, remained apparent during the revolt of 1857 and persisted thereafter. In the final chapter, the author explains the impact of this cultural dissonance on the subcontinental politics in the latter half of the 19th century. Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s thesis that promoted Muslim separatism and the eventual Partition seems an inevitable corollary when one sees and acknowledges this dissonance. In short, this is a book that is worthy of recommendation, especially for those who wish to shift history from mythology.