THE VICTORY OF the Deccani army was decisive. According to Ferishta, so great was the slaughter in the battle—some 100,000 soldiers are said to have perished in the Vijayanagar army alone—that the waters of a stream flowing alongside the battlefield turned red with blood. The flight of the Vijayanagar army was so pell-mell that they left behind in their camp large quantities of equipments and a good amount of treasure, for the victors to pillage. ‘The plunder,’ notes Ferishta, ‘was so great that every private man in the allied army became rich in gold, jewels, effects, tents, arms, horses, and slaves.’ The sultans reserved for themselves only the captured elephants.
After the battle the allied army took a break for a few days, to rest and to reorganise themselves. Then they set out for Vijayanagar city. The people of the city had initially no sense of the peril they faced, as no Muslim army had ever entered the strongly fortified city, even when, victorious in battle, it had ravaged the environs of the city. But the gravity of the situation dawned on the people when the princes and nobles scurrying back from the battlefield gathered their treasures, loaded those on elephants, and fled from the city for safe refuges far away. They also carried with them Sadashiva, the phantom king.
‘Then a panic seized the city,’ writes Sewell. ‘The truth became at last apparent. This was not merely a military defeat; it was a cataclysm. All hope was gone … Nothing could be done but to bury all treasures, to arm the younger men, and to wait. Next day the place became a prey to the robber tribes and jungle people of the neighbourhood. Hordes of … [them] pounced down on the hapless city and looted the stores and shops, carrying off great quantities of riches.’ According to Couto, this went on day after day, for six days.
Then the allied forces entered the city. ‘The enemy had come to destroy, and they carried out their object relentlessly,’ continues Sewell. ‘With fire and sword, with crowbars and axes, they carried on day after day their work of destruction. Never perhaps in the history of the world has such havoc been wrought, and wrought so suddenly, on so splendid a city, teeming with a wealthy and industrious population in the full plenitude of prosperity one day, and on the next, seized, pillaged and reduced to ruins, amid scenes of savage massacre and horrors beggaring description.’ Caesar Frederick, who visited the city two years after the battle, noted: ‘The houses still stand, but [are] empty, and there is dwelling in them nothing but tigers and other wild beasts.’
THE DESPOLIATION AND devastation of the city went on for five months without respite. Meanwhile, with Ramaraya dead, his brother Tirumala took charge of the titular raja and set up his government at Penugonda, about 190 kilometres south-east of Vijayanagar, in a defensible, rugged hilly region in the Anantapur district of the modern state of Andhra Pradesh. But Tirumala was immediately challenged by Ramaraya’s son Timma, who had no hesitation even to seek the help of the sultan of Bijapur against his uncle. This move was countered by Tirumala by seeking the help of the sultan of Ahmadnagar. Soon the Vijayanagar chieftains and the Deccan sultans got once again embroiled in several shifting alliances and counter-alliances.
Around this time several chieftains of Vijayanagar threw off their allegiance to the raja and set up their own petty kingdoms. Some of these new states—Madurai under Nayaks, for instance—grew into powerful and enduring kingdoms, but most regions of Vijayanagar simply collapsed into anarchy. And many of the palayagars, who were responsible for maintaining law and order in the districts of the kingdom, now reversed their role and took to banditry. Vijayanagar thus began to implode. Tirumala did not have the resources—or the energy: he was an old man now—to bring the rebels to submission, but he had the wisdom to adopt a realistic policy, of acknowledging the virtual independence of the rebel chieftains in return for their symbolic recognition of the overlordship of the raja and of his own de facto authority. Vijayanagar thus became an agglomeration of semi-independent principalities with Tirumala as its head. And it survived in that loose, withered and crumbling state for nearly another century.
Tirumala did the best that anyone could possibly have done to preserve the truncated kingdom in the given circumstances. And this, he felt, entitled him to be the de jure as well as the de facto king. So in 1570, five years after the battle of Talikota, he crowned himself at Penugonda as the king of Vijayanagar, and founded the Aravidu dynasty, the last dynasty of Vijayanagar. He then divided the kingdom into three roughly linguistic provinces, and assigned these to each of his three sons: the Telugu region to his eldest son Sriranga; the Karnataka region to his second son Rama, and the Tamil country to his third son Venkatapathi. Soon after making this division Tirumala abdicated the throne in favour of his son Sriranga, and thereafter devoted himself to scholarly and religious pursuits. It is not clear what happened to Sadashiva, the phantom king, but it is likely that he was assassinated.
Vijayanagar continued to fragment under Sriranga and his four successors, though it had also a few brief periods of revival. The last phase of the history of Vijayanagar is mostly a story of pathetic, feckless rajas, and of usurpations, rebellions, civil wars, and recurrent invasions by the Deccan sultans. During the reign of the last of these kings, Sriranga III, the Deccan sultans swept into Vijayanagar in a coordinated attack and divided the kingdom among themselves. Sriranga thus became a king without a kingdom, and in 1649 he fled to Mysore to take refuge with the raja there, and died there a couple of years later. Thus ended the three century long history of Vijayanagar. All that remained of this once great kingdom were a few small principalities here and there, but even these were presently mopped up by the expanding Maratha kingdom, which had emerged as the dominant power in India after the decline of the Mughals.
VIJAYANAGAR IS OFTEN portrayed as the champion of the revival of Hindu political power, religion and culture, and as an inveterate antagonist of Muslim kingdoms. But this is not borne out by facts. Though Vijayanagar was the most powerful Hindu kingdom that existed in the entire Indian subcontinent during the nearly half a millennium period from the conquest of India by Turks at the close of the twelfth century to the establishment of the Maratha state by Shivaji in the mid-seventeenth century, and though its rajas were all devout Hindus, and several of them were keen and knowledgeable patrons of Hindu religion and culture, the primary motive of the rajas was to gain and expand their political power, and not to resuscitate Hindu religion and culture. In fact, Harihara and Bukka, the founders of the Vijayanagar kingdom, had at the outset of their political career embraced Islam, because it suited them then, but later reverted to Hinduism, because it suited them then.
Being a Hindu kingdom was incidental to the political history of Vijayanagar. It is significant that the initial territorial expansion of Vijayanagar was not into any Muslim kingdom, but into the Hindu kingdom of Hoysalas, and that too when Hoysalas were engaged in a conflict with the Muslim kingdom of Madurai. Indeed, the expansion of Vijayanagar in its entire history was mostly into Hindu kingdoms, and not into Muslim kingdoms. And throughout its history Vijayanagar was as much engaged in battles with Hindu kingdoms as with Muslim kingdoms. Nor did Vijayanagar kings have any hesitation to ally with sultans against Hindu kings. But then, nor did sultans have any hesitation to ally with Hindu kings against Muslim rulers. The wars of these kings hardly ever had anything to do with religion, but were fought primarily to defend or conquer territory. Though a religious colouration was often given to these campaigns, this was done primarily to gain military advantage by igniting the martial fervour of their soldiers.
In the case of both Bahmani and Vijayanagar, religion subserved politics. Vijayanagar was not an anti-Muslim state. It in fact had a large number of Muslim officers and soldiers in its army, that too in the critically important divisions of cavalrymen, archers, cannoneers and musketeers. Devaraya II in particular took care to show various special favours to his Muslim soldiers; he built a mosque for them, and even placed a copy of Koran on a desk in front of his throne. As for the Deccan sultanates, they all had a large number of Hindu contingent
s in their army, and their rulers sometimes entrusted the defence of key forts to Hindu officers, as Nizam Shah of Ahmadnagar is recorded to have done.
The Vijayanagar rajas were generally quite liberal in their religious attitudes. ‘The king allows such freedom that every man may come and go and live according to his own creed without suffering any annoyance … whether he is a Christian, Jew, Moor or Heathen,’ notes Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese chronicler in India in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. ‘Great equity and justice is shown to all, not only by the ruler but by the people to one another.’ There were several instances of acts of liberalism by sultans also. Thus when Sultan Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur heard of a tragedy in the family of King Ramaraya of Vijayanagar—the death of a son of Ramaraya—he personally went to Vijayanagar to console him. And Ramaraya in turn received the sultan with utmost courtesy; Ramaraya’s wife even nominally adopted the young sultan as her son. But on the whole the rajas, being polytheists, were far more tolerant in religious matters than the sultans, who were monotheists.
This liberality and religious tolerance of the rajas however generally applied only in their treatment of their own subjects. In the enemy territory they often acted as vandals, destroying mosques or using them as stables, and enslaving or slaughtering Muslims, and violating their women. This was the common practice of all invading armies during medieval times. In fact, the excesses of Hindu armies in this were not usually as excessive as those of Muslim armies.
On the whole the Vijayanagar rajas provided as good a government as was possible in that age and place. They cleared forests and brought new lands under cultivation, built dams and tanks and irrigation canals. Trade was encouraged. They also systematised revenue administration, rationalised the tax system and abolished vexatious minor taxes. All this contributed to the prosperity and contentment of the people—as well as, of course, to the power of the raja. ‘In power, wealth, and extent of the country’ Vijayanagar was much superior to the Bahmani Sultanate, concedes Ferishta. Exclaims Razzak: ‘The city of Vijayanagar is such that the pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it, and the ear of intelligence has never been informed that there existed anything to equal it in the world.’ Vijayanagar, according to Paes, was ‘the best provided city in the world.’
There was however a dark side to this effulgent picture. The kingdom was ever riven by internal dissensions and conflicts, and was engaged in incessant wars with other kingdoms. Its political history, like the history of most early medieval Indian kingdoms, is a sordid story, though it also had a few periods of impressive material prosperity and cultural efflorescence.
Part VII
POLITY
If a holy man eats half his loaf,
he will give the other half to a beggar.
But if a king conquers all the world,
he will still seek another world to conquer.
—SAADI, PERSIAN POET
{1}
Ram-Ravan Syndrome
The history of early medieval India was like a roller-coaster ride—there were spectacular highs and lows in it, but hardly any progress. This was true of nearly all the kingdoms of the age, those of rajas as well as of sultans. It is on the whole a sordid tale of treachery, rebellions, usurpations, murders, fiendish punishments, and barbaric mass slaughter.
The dominant Indian kingdom of the age was the Delhi Sultanate. This was essentially an alien military dictatorship—it was established by conquest, and was preserved by ceaseless military campaigns throughout its over three-century-long history. Except in a few rare cases, mostly in the peninsula, the Turco-Afghans, unlike the Mughals who succeeded them as the dominant rulers of India, did not sink their roots into the Indian soil, but remained aliens throughout their history. Though theirs was not a foreign rule in the sense that their home base was outside India, theirs was essentially a rule by foreigners.
The Turco-Afghans were a miniscule community in India, ever struggling for survival in the vast and churning sea of native Indians and their subjugated but not pacified rajas. That vulnerability put the sultans in a state of perpetual insecurity, which in turn disposed them, for self-preservation, to be brutal oppressors of the natives.
The survival anxiety of the sultans was further intensified by the fact that the Turco-Afghans even among themselves lacked unity, and were riven into various factions. The Delhi Sultanate was ever seething with conspiracies and rebellions. The law that prevailed in it all through its history was the law of the jungle. Its provincial governors often assumed postures of rivalry with their sultan, and they tended to rebel and establish independent kingdoms whenever the central authority in Delhi weakened. And when one uprising was suppressed by the sultan, another uprising broke out elsewhere in the empire. And the rebel governors and chieftains chastised by the sultan often turned rebels again when the royal forces withdrew. Sometimes the officer sent to suppress a rebellion himself turned rebel. This went on and on.
In Delhi itself the sultan was ever under the threat of being overthrown or assassinated, and of having his throne usurped by one of his top nobles or close relatives, particularly by his brothers, as it did indeed happen on several occasions. Even the reign of the ruthlessly efficient Ala-ud-din Khalji was beset with rebellions; there were, as the fourteenth-century chronicler Barani notes, several successive insurrections at one stage during his reign; there was even an attempted assassination of the sultan by one of his nephews seeking to usurp the throne.
This roiling state of affairs went on all through the history of the Delhi Sultanate. There was hardly a year, perhaps even hardly a month, free of internal military clashes somewhere in the empire. Scarcely anyone had any enduring loyalty to anyone. Those who plotted to betray their sultan often had betrayers against them in their own group. And those who bowed before a sultan one day unhesitatingly bowed before his assassin the next day.
All this gave the Delhi Sultanate a disquieting appearance of transience. Yet, amazingly, the Sultanate endured for over three centuries. There were, however, as many as five dynasties in the history of the Delhi Sultanate—Slave, Khalji, Tughluq, Sayyid and Lodi—and within each of these dynasties too there were several internal upheavals and usurpations. The Delhi Sultanate had, in all, 33 sultans in its 320-year-long history, their reigns averaging less than ten years. In contrast, during the entire history of the Mughal Empire, which was of about the same length as the history of the Delhi Sultanate, there was only one ruling dynasty, and during the 181-year-long high period of its history, from the invasion of Babur to the death of Aurangzeb, it had just six emperors, and the average length of their reign was over thirty years, which was more than three times the length of the average reign of the Delhi sultans. There were hardly any enduring periods of internal peace during the history of the Sultanate, except perhaps for a while during the reigns of Ala-ud-din Khalji and Firuz Tughluq. Though there were some attempts to consolidate and systematise the administration of the empire by some sultans, these had no lasting results.
A CURIOUS ASPECT OF the history of the Delhi Sultanate was the opportunistic collaboration of rajas with sultans. The rajas, if they had acted in concert, could have probably obliterated the Sultanate. Fortunately for the Sultanate, there was no prospect of any such alliance among the rajas, as there was absolutely no national spirit in that age, no awareness of India as a distinct nation, or of Indians as a distinct people. The rajas were solely concerned with preserving or augmenting their personal power and fortune. And to gain that objective they were often willing to collaborate with the sultans against their own compatriots.
The attitudes of the Muslim political class were also equally opportunistic. Just as there were many instances of rajas allying with sultans against fellow Hindu rulers, there were also many instances of sultans allying with rajas or using Hindu military contingents, against fellow Muslim rulers. Even Mahmud Ghazni, despite his reputation as a ruthless exterminator of Hindu kingdoms, had a large Hindu contingent in his army, and s
o had his son Masud. Masud in fact treated his Hindu officers in every way as equals to his Muslim officers, and employed them in the same high offices in which he employed his Muslim officers. Indeed, he valued their services so highly that he sternly warned his Muslim officers against offending the religious sensibilities of their fellow Hindu officers in any way.
Similarly, a Muslim governor of Gujarat under the Delhi Sultanate at one time ‘encouraged the Hindu religion … and promoted … the worship of idols,’ in order to gain the support of Hindus for his planned rebellion against the Delhi sultan, states Ferishta, a late sixteenth century Mughal chronicler. And, in a similar development in Hindu polity, king Devaraya of Vijayanagar took care to place a copy Koran on a desk in front of his throne, so that his Muslim officers could perform obeisance before him, without violating their religious injunctions.
It was all a power game. And in that game religion invariably subserved the political and military goals of kings. So sultans often collaborated with rajas in their battles, even in their battles against Muslim kingdoms; conversely, rajas often collaborated with sultans in their battles, even in their battles against Hindu kingdoms. For nobles and common people too religion usually subserved their temporal interests. And just as Hindu soldiers and officers freely served under sultans, so also Muslim soldiers and officers freely served under rajas.
And there is at least one instance of a Hindu being the ruler of a Muslim kingdom. This was Ganesa, a zamindar in Bengal in the early fifteenth century, who, according to Ferishta, ‘attained great power and predominance during Shihab-ud-din’s reign, and became the de-facto master of the treasury and kingdom.’ And on the death (or assassination) of the sultan, Ganesa usurped the royal power and ruled Bengal for about seven years, though he probably did not physically occupy the throne. But on Ganesa’s death, his son, who had become a Muslim, ascended the throne and ruled the state for sixteen years; and he, though outwardly a Muslim, appointed Brahmins as his ministers, and even had a Brahmin as his court priest.
The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate Page 35