NCERT Book Class 12 History Chapter 7 An Imperial Captial Vijayanagara

170 THEMES IN INDIAN HISTORY – PART II

THEME An Imperial Capital
SEVEN Vijayanagara
( c . fourteenth to sixteenth century)

Vijayanagara or “city of victory” was the name of
both a city and an empire. The empire was founded
in the fourteenth century. In its heyday it stretched
from the river Krishna in the north to the extreme
south of the peninsula. In 1565 the city was sacked
and subsequently deserted. Although it fell into
ruin in the seventeenth-eighteenth centuries, it
lived on in the memories of people living in the
Krishna-Tungabhadra doab. They remembered it
as Hampi, a name derived from that of the local
mother goddess, Pampadevi. These oral traditions
combined with archaeological finds, monuments
and inscriptions and other records helped scholars
to rediscover the Vijayanagara Empire.

Fig. 7.1
A part of the stone wall that was
built around the city of Vijayanagara

1. The Discovery of Hampi
The ruins at Hampi were brought to light in 1800 by
an engineer and antiquarian named Colonel Colin
Mackenzie. An employee of the English East India
Company, he prepared the first survey map of the
site. Much of the initial information he received was
based on the memories of priests of the Virupaksha
temple and the shrine of Pampadevi. Subsequently,
from 1856, photographers began to record the
monuments which enabled scholars to study them.
As early as 1836 epigraphists began collecting
several dozen inscriptions found at this and other
temples at Hampi. In an effort to reconstruct the
history of the city and the empire, historians collated
information from these sources with accounts of
foreign travellers and other literature written in
Telugu, Kannada, Tamil and Sanskrit.