The Age of Wrath: A History of the Delhi Sultanate by Abraham Eraly

Author:Abraham Eraly [Eraly, Abraham]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Historical
ISBN: 9789351186588
Google: vyEoAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin UK
Published: 2014-04-14T18:30:00+00:00

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The City of Victory

The entire medieval history of India, stretching over a period of about thousand years, from the eighth to the eighteenth century, was dominated by Muslim invaders and rulers. During this period there were only two Hindu kingdoms of subcontinental prominence, that of Vijayanagar and of Marathas. No one would have foreseen this destiny for either of these kingdoms at the beginning of their history, for they were both then obscure mountain kingdoms. This was particularly so in the case of Vijayanagar, which within just a few decades of its founding rose to become one of the two dominant kingdoms of peninsular India, rivalling the Bahmani Sultanate, the other dominant peninsular kingdom.

The early history of Vijayanagar is obscure, shrouded in diverse legends. The kingdom apparently evolved out of Kampili, a chiefdom in the rocky highlands on the northern bank of Tungabhadra. Two related developments facilitated its ascendancy—the subjugation of the long established Hindu kingdoms of South India by Muhammad Tughluq in the first half of his reign, followed soon after, in the second half of his reign, by the collapse of his power in South India. It was out of the political debris left by these developments that Vijayanagar rose to prominence.

According to a plausible and widely held tradition, Vijayanagar was founded by two adventurous brothers, Harihara and Bukka, sons of Sangama, the chieftain of Kampili. But the founding of a Hindu kingdom was not the destiny that their early political career had portended, for it was as minions of the Delhi Sultanate, and not as champions of Hindu political revival, that they first appeared in history. The story is that the brothers were captured by Muhammad Tughluq during his peninsular campaign, and were taken to Delhi, where they were converted to Islam, and then sent back to Kampili to administer it as imperial officers. But about a decade later, when the Delhi Sultanate’s power in the peninsula crumbled, the brothers lost their power base. However, they then rehabilitated themselves by opportunistically reverting to Hinduism and founding a Hindu principality on the southern bank of Tungabhadra. In this venture they were crucially helped by the blessing and support of Vidyaranya, a revered Hindu sage of the region. Vidyaranya, it is said, advised Harihara, the older brother, to adopt Virupaksha, a Shaivite deity, as his patron god, and rule the kingdom as a surrogate of the god, so as to overcome the persisting public misgivings about the legitimacy of he taking on the role of a Hindu raja, because of his former conversion to Islam.

Harihara’s Shaivite affiliation of was a factor in he choosing a site on the southern bank of Tungabhadra for his capital, for it was close to the temple of Virupaksha. Fortuitously—though Harihara would not have known anything about it—the region where the capital was founded had ancient historical associations going back to the period of the third century BCE Mauryan emperor Asoka, whose rock inscriptions have been found along Tungabhadra nearly fifty kilometres from the site chosen by the raja for his capital.

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