Vijayanagar—The City of Victory20
When the Portuguese first arrived in India, most of the northern and central parts of the subcontinent were ruled by Muslim rulers of Turkic, Afghan and Persian extract (although there remained several pockets of resistance such as the kingdom of Mewar). The southern half of the Indian peninsula, however, was home to a remarkable Hindu empire remembered today by the name of its capital—Vijayanagar. Built on the banks of the Tungabhadra River, it was then the largest city in the world. Both Calicut and Cochin were nominally the vassals of the kings who ruled from this city.
The city had been established in 1336 by two brothers Hukka (also called Harihara) and Bukka in the aftermath of the Delhi Sultan’s raids that destroyed the old kingdoms of southern India. It is said that Hukka and Bukka had been captured and forcibly converted to Islam but had later escaped and reverted to Hinduism. They now began to gather together and organize the shattered remains of the defeated armies. Very soon they were able to establish control over a sizeable kingdom.
According to the traditional founding myth of Vijayanagar, the two princes were out hunting near Hampi when their hunting dogs gave chase to a hare. Just when it seemed that the hare was cornered, it suddenly turned around and attacked the hounds who fled in disarray. When the brothers related this story to their spiritual guru, Vidyaranya, they were told that it was a sign that this was a favourable site for their capital city.21 While this legend may not be literally true, there were other good reasons for choosing the site. As anyone who has visited Hampi will know, it is a strange landscape of rocky outcrops and low hills. Hukka and Bukka would have realized that this terrain was their best defence against Turkic cavalry. Moreover, the area had a special place in the Hindu imagination. Just across the river is Kishkindha, home of the monkey kingdom mentioned in the epic Ramayana.
Many foreign visitors have left us eyewitness accounts of how the city looked in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Abdul Razzaq, an envoy from the Timurid ruler of Persia, wrote that the city had seven concentric walls that enclosed a vast area. The area between the first and third walls was semi-rural with cultivated fields and gardens. Between the third and the seventh were homes, grand temples, workshops and bustling bazaars. At the centre was the royal citadel that contained the palace and the grand assembly hall. Razzaq tells us that rock-cut aqueducts and canals brought water from the river to the palace complex. The remains of the city at Hampi are truly spectacular and are comparable to those at Angkor, except that the dense Cambodian jungle is replaced here by gigantic rock outcrops littered across the landscape. A fair amount of agriculture continues to be practised within the UNESCO World Heritage Site, in many cases using the medieval canal system. The visitor will have little difficulty recognizing many of the features described by Abdul Razzaq and other travellers.
Once the Portuguese established themselves on the Indian coast, a number of Europeans also visited Vijayanagar and have left us detailed accounts. These include horse traders Domingo Paes and Fernao Nuniz who wrote about Vijayanagar under Krishnadeva Raya, arguably the greatest of its rulers. They describe the grand feasts, dancing and ceremonies that accompanied the Mahanavami festival. They also describe life in the court. Interestingly, Nuniz tells us that women ran the show within the palace complex including:
women who wrestle, and others who are astrologers and soothsayers; and women who write all the accounts of expenses that occurred inside the gates, and others whose duty is to write all the affairs of the kingdom and compare their books with the writers outside; women also for music who play instruments and sing. Even the wives of the king are well versed in music.22
We also have a description of the larger-than-life personality of Krishnadeva Raya. Paes tells us that he was a fitness fanatic:
he takes in his arms great weights made of earthware, and then, taking a sword, he exercises himself with it till he has sweated out all the oil, and then he wrestles with one of his wrestlers. After his labour, he mounts a horse and gallops about the plain in one direction and another till dawn, for he does all this before daybreak.
Krishnadeva Raya was also a vigorous military leader and personally led several campaigns against the Deccan Sultans. The Portuguese horse traders were awed by the sheer size of the Vijayanagar army. Interestingly, we are told that the armies both of Vijayanagar and of the Deccan Sultans included significant numbers of European mercenaries who were valued as gunners and musketeers. Although not explicitly mentioned, we know that these armies would also have included units of African slave-soldiers. Muslim rulers had long used slave-soldiers but it appears that Vijayanagar and the Portuguese also adopted the practice. A few of them like the Ethiopian-born general Malik Ambar would rise to hold high office. The descendants of these Africans survive today as the tiny Siddi community in Karnataka, Hyderabad and also in Gujarat. They usually adopted the culture of the rulers they served—so, in the former territories of the Vijayanagar empire they are now mostly Hindus while further north they are mostly Muslims or Christians. Recent genetic tests have confirmed that Siddis are mostly derived from the Bantu-speaking people of East Africa.23
Unfortunately, the great city was sacked and abandoned just a few decades after Krishnadeva Raya’s death. In 1565, a grand alliance of all the Muslim sultans marched against Vijayanagar. After a closely fought battle at Talikota, 100 kms north of the city, the Vijayanagar army was forced to retreat. The generals decided to withdraw south rather than protect the capital and its formidable defences were not put to the test. The largest city in the world was savagely pillaged for six months and never recovered. A much-diminished kingdom survived for several decades after this catastrophe but the authority of the king steadily faded away.
In 1639, a later king called Sriranga Deva Raya would grant permission to Francis Day of the English East India Company to build a trading station on a small strip of land at a fishing village called Madraspatnam. The English would build a fort called Fort St George on this strip of land. The king ordered the new settlement to be named after himself as ‘Srirangarayalapatanam’ (or City of Sri Ranga Raya) but the local Nayak, chieftain, ignored declining royal authority and named it after his father as Chennapatanam or Chennai, the city that we know today.24 Who knows, if Vijayanagar had won the Battle of Talikota, we would be calling it Srirangarai! Of course, the wheels of history may have rolled in a completely different direction and the city may never have been built.
The Warrior Queens of Ullal
The Portuguese had had a hot-and-cold relationship with Vijayanagar but the empire’s decline opened up large sections of the Indian coast for exploitation without restraint. Even before the battle of Talikota, the Portuguese had been sniffing around for a base on the Kanara coast (this is the stretch between Goa and Kerala). Their efforts were thwarted, however, by the remarkable warrior queen of the tiny kingdom of Ullal near Mangalore. She belonged to the Chowtha dynasty that were of Gujarati Jain origin but had adopted the matrilineal customs of the region. Tradition decreed that a king’s successor was his sister’s son but Thirumala Raya did not have a nephew. So, he decided instead to train his niece Abbakka to succeed him. Although she married the ruler of nearby Mangalore, she stayed back in Ullal as its ruler.25
In 1555, the Portuguese sent a fleet under Don Alvaro da Silviera to subdue Mangalore and Ullal. Although Rani Abbakka and her husband may have had strained relations, they seem to have jointly fended off the attack. Both kingdoms were nominally feudatories of Vijayanagar and the Portuguese decided not to press the issue and agreed to a truce. However, they decided to try their luck once again after Vijayanagar was defeated at Talikota. A large fleet was dispatched from Goa in 1567 under the command of General Joao Peixoto. The city of Ullal and the palace were captured, but the queen managed to stay hidden in a mosque. She then gathered 200 of her men and organized a counter-attack in which scores of Portuguese, including Peixoto, were killed. Abbakka now chased the survivors back to their ships
where Admiral Mascarenhas was also killed.
Over the next fifteen years, Abbakka seems to have held the Kanara coast with the help of an alliance with the Samudrin of Kozhikode to the south and the Sultans of Bijapur to the north. It must have rankled the Portuguese that they had been beaten by a woman. They waited for their chance and returned in 1581 with the help of her husband’s nephew who had become the ruler of Mangalore. This time Ullal was sacked and Abbakka was killed in battle. However, her daughter and then her granddaughter would keep up the resistance for the next four decades using light coastal vessels to strike at the larger European ships. They were the last known users of fire arrows in naval warfare.
There is surprisingly little written by scholars about the three queens although their exploits are well remembered in the oral histories of the Kanara coast and are recounted in numerous folk songs and in dance-theatre. The problem is that the folk tales often fuse the exploits of the three queens into one character that makes it difficult to work out the actual chronology. The warrior-queens are also mentioned in a few European accounts such as those of Pietro Della Valle but again we have only scraps of information that have not quite been pieced together. So, a full history of the remarkable queens of Ullal is yet to be written.26
9
Nutmegs and Cloves
The sixteenth century had belonged to Spain and Portugal and, when their crowns merged, it would have seemed that the combined empire would be unassailable for a long time. However, their supremacy would be challenged before the century was over by two newcomers—the Dutch and the English. In 1580, Francis Drake returned to England after circumnavigating the world. He not only brought back a ship filled with Spanish booty and spices from the Indies but also information that the Portuguese hold on the Indian Ocean was not as secure as had been previously thought. A few years later, the English sank the Spanish Armada and with it the myth of Iberian maritime supremacy.
The English decided that it was time to stake a claim on the spice trade. A fleet of three ships was sent out under the command of James Lancaster in 1591.1 The ships bypassed India and made directly for the Straits of Malacca. The English did not even pretend to trade but simply plundered Portuguese and local ships before heading back. On the way home, however, disaster struck—two of the three ships were wrecked in a storm and all the ill-gotten cargo was lost. The smallest of the three ships somehow limped back with just twenty-five survivors, including Lancaster himself. Thus ended the first attempt by the English to insert themselves into the Indian Ocean.
Meanwhile, the Dutch also sent out a number of fleets and these consistently returned with valuable cargoes. English merchants watched this with envy and decided that it was worth another shot and Queen Elizabeth I was petitioned for a royal charter. It was granted on New Year’s Eve in 1600 and set up as ‘The Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies’; we know it now as the East India Company. The Dutch merchants similarly banded together to form the United East India Company (also known by its Dutch initials VOC). Both of these entities would grow to become among the largest and most powerful multinational companies ever seen.
The Dutch Hand
In February 1601, the English East India Company (EIC) sent its first fleet of four ships. Despite the disasters of the previous attempt, Lancaster was once more put in charge. He again bypassed India and headed directly for South East Asia but this time he landed in Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra. The English were received with great warmth by the Sultan. This should not be surprising given that the Portuguese, exhorted by the likes of Francis Xavier, had been making brutal raids on the Acehnese from their base in Malacca. The Sultan hoped that the English would provide a counterbalance to Portuguese naval power. Thus, Lancaster and his men were treated to buffalo fights, tiger fights, elephant fights and grand feasts. No doubt they also sampled the Acehnese aqua-party: the guests were seated on stools submerged in a river or lake with water up to their chests. Servants paddled between them serving spicy delicacies and fiery arrack. European visitors who attended these parties were known to die from ‘a surfeit taken by immeasurable drunkenness’.2
The English fleet now made its way down the Straits of Malacca pillaging Portuguese ships along the way to Java. The Dutch already had a settlement in Java—at a place called Bantam, where they could control the alternative route through the Sunda Strait. Much to their annoyance, the local ruler also allowed the English to set up a base at the same place. Soon, the English were using Bantam to send out ships for the spice-growing islands further east. In 1610, an English ship made its way to the nutmeg-growing Banda islands. When the ship arrived at the main island of Neira, it found that the VOC had already set up shop and had forcibly imposed a monopoly on the locals.
Faced with Dutch hostility, the English decided instead to trade with two tiny outlying islands—Pulau Ai and Pulau Run—where the locals had so far resisted Dutch pressure. Just to provide some perspective on scale, Pulau Run was a mere 700 acres of nutmeg plantations and did not even have enough water or rice to sustain its small population. The local chiefs were so afraid of the VOC that they threw themselves under English protection. Thus, Ai and Run became the first colonies of the English East India Company! It is a measure of the commercial importance attached to these islands that King James I would proudly proclaim himself ‘King of England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Puloway and Puloroon’.
The English soon discovered that their claims on the islands had to be actively defended against the VOC and its notoriously cruel Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen. Made Governor-General at the age of thirty, Coen would lay the foundation for Dutch power in the East and was strongly opposed to English presence in the Spice Islands. In 1616, the English sent out an equally young Captain Nathaniel Courthope with two ships to the Bandas in order to establish a permanent presence. He and his men landed a battery of brass cannons on Pulau Run and proceeded to build a small fort using exposed coral rock. The Cross of St George was proudly flown to make a point to the incensed VOC Governor who watched the proceedings from Dutch-held Neira and Lonthor.
Despite this act of defiance by the English, it soon became clear that the Dutch had the muscle to impose a blockade on Pulau Run. As the months rolled by, supplies began to run low for not just the English garrison but also for the locals. Using local traders, Courthope sent back increasingly desperate appeals for help to his superiors in Bantam but, unfortunately, the East India Company’s commanders were distracted by their own internal bickering and by a siege of the new VOC headquarters at Batavia (i.e. Jakarta). When the siege failed, most of the English fleet inexplicably sailed home without sending relief to Pulau Run. Thus, the blockade on Nathaniel Courthope and his men tightened. When a feeble attempt was eventually made to resupply them, the Dutch were easily able to block it. Matters became worse when rains failed in 1618. The island’s water reserve fell precariously low and was teeming with so many tropical parasites and worms that it had to be drunk through clenched teeth. In this way, three and a half years passed and the English garrison continued to be depleted by disease and poor nutrition. It is a testimony to the young captain’s leadership that his men and the locals stood by him despite the extremely strained situation. Indeed, the dwindling English garrison and its Bandanese allies were able to fend off repeated Dutch attempts to land troops on the island.3
Eventually, things became so desperate that Courthope decided to risk making a trip to a nearby Dutch-held island in order to secure food supplies from sympathetic islanders. Unfortunately, his small boat was discovered and he was killed. His men and local allies, however, continued to hold out till Coen arrived with a huge fleet in April 1621. His first targets were the Bandanese on the Dutch-held islands whom he accused of violating the VOC monopoly. What followed can only be described as genocide. Of the 15,000 islanders, barely a thousand survived death or deportation.4 Many of those deported to Batavia would be tortured and killed.
Coen now turned
his attention to Pulau Run where a dozen English soldiers were still holed up. Despite the willingness of the Bandanese to fight to the last man, the English had had enough and they surrendered when five hundred VOC soldiers landed on the island. This was the end of the EIC’s first colony. Coen would continue to systematically tighten his control over the East Indies by using brutal tactics to terrorize both European rivals and the native population. In 1624, fifteen Englishmen based in Ambon, in the Maluku islands, would be tortured and decapitated on trumped-up charges. Known as the Ambon Massacre, it would cause a furore in England. In 1641, the Dutch would evict the Portuguese from Malacca and thereby secure control over both the routes to the Spice Islands.
The heroic resistance of Nathaniel Courthope, nevertheless, had established a territorial claim that would have a curious unintended consequence. When England and Holland signed the Treaty of Brenda in 1667, they agreed to swap two islands—the Dutch got Pulau Run in the East Indies in exchange for the somewhat larger island of Manhattan in North America. This brings us to one of the most important findings of history—never invest in real estate based on past performance. I can visualize how seventeenth-century real estate consultants, armed with two hundred years of data on nutmeg production, would have made the case that the Dutch got the better deal!
The Ocean of Churn: How the Indian Ocean Shaped Human History Page 19