Virupaksha Temple at Hampi - (Jean-Pierre Dalbéra)
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In the year 1890, well outside of my usual timeframe, a man named William Sproston Caine wrote of our destination in a book named Picturesque India. And if you’re wondering what a late 19th-century book about India is like, one written by a visitor, you should know first that this one starts with the following sentence. Quote:
“Queen Victoria is Empress of India; the object of this book has been to interest holiday people in our greatest dependency and its two hundred millions of our fellow subjects.”
His aim, he continued, was to touch on “no controversial matter, either political or religious. I only try,” he said, “to rouse superficial interest, by a plain statement of what may be seen by an ordinary traveller… .” But leaving aside the politics of such an attempted apolitical project, there is something else of interest to us here in this text.
“Forty-eight miles from Bellari, is Hampi or Vijayanagara, a ruined city of great interest, covering nine square miles. Hampi was founded by two adventurers in 1336, and for 230 years was the capital of the Vijayanagara dynasty, the last great Hindu power of the south, who built magnificent temples and palaces, of which many specimens still remain in a fair state of preservation.”
Hampi was only seven miles from the station; there was a dak bungalow there, the type of guesthouse that was free to the government worker and cheap to the passing traveller, and there were good country carts available to hire to take you on to Hampi.
Once there, you could see the 16th-century granite temple, carved, William reported, with “great boldness and power,” and beside its entrance, a “curious little building, cut out of a single block of concrete. This is the car of the god, but the wheels are the only movable part of it.” You can still see that temple now, still see that stone chariot of Garuda.
William describes visiting the palace buildings there, the baths and halls and other buildings, finding them scattered, detached, supposing them to have once been joined by wooden arcades that had long since vanished.
He includes a description of a temple nearby where both inner and outer walls were set with hunting scenes, its four central pillars of some kind of black marble, its floor long since torn up and broken in search of treasure thought to be buried there. There were other temples, statues, a building known as the elephant stables. What was great, while still great to look at, had fallen, and it had happened quickly.
An earlier 16th-century traveller had compared the city to Rome and marvelled at its beauty. A late 16th-century one had found the buildings empty, the place occupied only by tigers and other beasts, that latter visitor coming after the 1565 Battle of Talikota and the subsequent destruction of Vijayanagara. But that was all for the future, still not for slightly over a century when Abd-al-Razzāq arrived, and he would have his own experiences there. Let’s get into those.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that covers medieval history through the travellers who made those journeys. And the podcast does have a patreon. You can find it over at patreon.com/humancircus, and you can find early, ad-free, and extra listening there on a pay what you can/want basis, whether that’s $1 a month, or 3, or 5. And if you’re wondering, all of those options do make a big difference on my end, all the more so of course if everyone does it, but still pretty great if those of you are able to and who are enjoying the podcast do it.
That said, let’s get back to the story.
Today, we continue the story of Abd-al-Razzāq Samarqandi, he who was dispatched as an ambassador from Shah Rukh’s Herat, the one who dragged his feet through sickness and death to Qaliqut where, despite its adventurous sailors and attractive trade-friendly policies, he was not satisfied. He who was then rescued by a pleasant vision and an imperial messenger, calling him on to a new destination. Abd-al-Razzāq went from the city of spices in Qaliqut to the city of victory in the Vijayanagara Empire. And that’s where we’ll be going today. And where was that? What was that?
The Hindu empire Abd-al-Razzāq was now travelling in is traditionally dated to just over a century earlier than Abd-al-Razzāq’s visit, to the rule of its founding brothers in 1336, though this date has been called into question. By the time of that visit, it had spread from its initial core round a city said to have been mapped at the site of an encounter with a wise sage, not an uncommon origin story and one that has, again, since been called into question, said to have been founded by two brothers fleeing Kakatiya collapse. It had spread over the bulk of the Deccan Plateau region and dominated Southern India. It had started small but soon absorbed vast territory, by conquest and by the promise of being able to stand against powers such as the Bahmani Sultanate.
I’ve seen its northern limits described as the junction of the Tungabhadra and Krishna rivers, though that northern boundary was not exactly a clean latitudinal line and would of course vary. At the time we’re going to be getting there, it would still be ruled by the founding dynasty in the person of Deva Raya II. That was the ruler Abd-al-Razzāq would find at the end of April 1443, the ruler who would send out the welcoming committee and provide him a pleasant house for his stay in the city. Abd-al-Razzāq, for his part, was finally impressed.
He praised the empire for its sheer expanse, outlined in geographic boundaries and in leagues, for the “perfect rule” of its emperor, Deva Raya, and for the military he commanded: of men, more than a million, of elephants - their bodies like mountains, their forms like devils - more than a thousand.
He pronounced the city, “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.” Perhaps a little hyperbolic. And then for his Herat readership, he lays out the city for them in terms that they would be able to picture, mapping the unfamiliar over the familiar so that his readers could visualize its spaces.
This city’s fortifications, for example, extend “from the mountain of Mokhtar and … the Valley of Two Brothers as far as the banks of [such and such a river], situated east of [this town] and west of [that village].”
Obviously, he was more specific than this town and that village, but so it went, through the second line of fortifications, measured by the space between one bridge and another, the latter marked to the west of a particular garden.
“The third [fortification] comprises as much space as lies between the mausoleum of the Imam Fakhr-ud-Din-Razi and the dome-shaped monument of Mohammed Sultanshah,” the fourth, the space between the bridge Injil and yet another bridge, the fifth, that space between a particular garden and yes, another bridge, and the seventh, between two gates.
“The seventh fortress, which is placed in the centre of the others, occupies an area ten times larger than the market-place of the city of Herat. It is the palace which is used as the residence of the king.”
Lacking an intimate familiarity with early 15th-century Herat and its various landmarks, it loses some of its effect, and it is worth noting that there may well have been a certain amount of resorting to literary convention here. It’s not at all certain that this city actually had seven concentric walls.
But according to what Abd-al-Razzāq tells us, between the first and third fortifications were gardens, houses, and cultivated lands, between the third and seventh, an innumerable crowd of people along with shops and bazaars, the businesses of each profession gathered there together.
Abd-al-Razzāq noted the temple girls, figures who would also confuse later European travellers, and he mentioned the florists, how one saw a constant succession of shops selling sweet-smelling flowers, how the people there could not seem to do without them. He noted jewellers, with their diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, their “pearls of good water, and royal pearls which even the divers in the Ocean of Wisdom have not seen the equal of.” Those pearls were such, Abd-al-Razzāq wrote, “that the field of the moon of the fourteenth day caught fire simply by gazing on them.” When he was impressed by something, he did not hold back.
And it is worth noting that he did allow himself to be impressed, to admit and communicate as such in writing, to allow that these things which were foreign could compare to those of his imperial home. Likewise, when he describes something of the administration of the city, its organizing institutions and individual figures, it has been thought by historians Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, to communicate that this place in its practices was somehow comparable to the familiar Timurid world in ways that somewhere like Qaliqut seems not to have been. Its emperor certainly drew his attention in ways the samoothiri of that city had not, and when Abd-al-Razzāq was brought by messengers to his first official audience, he had much more to say than he had there.
He brought horses, five beautiful horses though no word on where exactly he’d produced them from, and some pieces of damask and satin. He found Deva Raya II encircled by crowds of men and signs of wealth, and he found that ruler himself most striking, tall, thin, and beardless, in his robe of green satin with its collar of pearls and gems. Three times Abd-al-Razzāq bowed, bringing forward the letter of his lord, which was collected from him.
Perhaps influencing Abd-al-Razzāq’s reaction as much as these first impressions was the interest shown in him by this unfamiliar ruler. And unlike the samoothiri, there actually was interest, or so Abd-al-Razzāq reported.
The emperor expresses his pleasure at seeing him there, and provides gifts of camphor, cash, and betel leaf, the leaves themselves celebrated in this text for the way they intoxicated like wine and brought pleasing colour to the countenance, the way they could both appease hunger and excite the appetite, both freshen the breath and strengthen the teeth, not to mention their powers as an aphrodisiac. Abd-al-Razzāq had quite a bit to say about betel leaves.
The emperor also expressed his empathy, seeing his visitor suffer there, sweating horribly beneath layers of robes, and offering him immediately, and very kindly, a fan.
“Your kings invite emissaries to banquets,” he said, “but since you and I do not eat each other’s food, let this package of gold be the emissary’s banquet.”
At every visit that followed, he would provide Abd-al-Razzāq with gifts of money, camphor, and betel leaves, and the Timurid embassy as a whole was granted a daily allowance of sheep and fowl, along with oil, rice, sugar and money. They would have been comfortable there in the housing they’d been provided. They could settle in and enjoy their daily meal and the occasional visit with an apparently most gracious emperor, and they could take in the festivals of this place so far from home, across desert and sea, and into the Indian interior.
In particular, he wrote of the Mahanavami, and of it, he had this to say:
“The idolaters, who exercise an imposing authority in this country, with a view of displaying their pride, their power, their tyranny, and their glory, prepare every year a royal feast, a banquet worthy of a sovereign. This solemnity bears the name of Mahanavami. The manner in which it is celebrated is as follows.”
This was his account.
All of Deva Raya’s most important people were there, his leadership from across the kingdom spanning three months’ journey, and they brought with them what seemed to Abd-al-Razzāq the clearest display of raw, glorious power. They brought elephants.
There were hundreds of them, a thousand perhaps, “boiling like the sea and thundering like clouds,” their gathering like the crowds of people on the day of resurrection. They were all in armour and adorned with castles, with jugglers, acrobats, and artificers perched there on the platforms on their backs. Their trunks and ears were decorated in dense designs of wonderful beauty.
In some editions, you can read Abd-al-Razzāq making reference to poet Amir Khusrau, writing, in a wonderful bit of imagery, quote:
“The elephants’ bodies bent the earth
and created quakes the world over.
All that monstrous ivory made
the face of the world into a chessboard.”
These elephants gathered at the palace for three consecutive days in November with all of the empire’s most prominent people. They were there among the pavilions that had been set up, the surfaces decorated in richly detailed drawings of people and creatures of all kinds, arranged so that an easy change could suddenly present a new path and new world of illustrations to the viewer.
There, in that place, with the emperor just a couple of pavilions over, Abd-al-Razzāq and his companions sat and took it all in. And there was a lot to take in.
There was music. There were jugglers. There were storytellers who sang and spoke tales. There were dancers, women in magnificent dresses who appeared and disappeared behind curtains that rose and fell before them. There were elephants, induced to balance on pillars scarcely larger than the soles of their feet, that waggled their trunks in the air to the music. There were others, raised in the air at one end of massive scales with giant rocks to counterbalance them, that did the same. There were fireworks, sports, and amusements, which were too much for our writer to explain with any brevity, and all who took part in performing the entertainments received gold and garments from the emperor. It was, as I said, a lot.
And after this quick break, we’ll have some more.
…
As you’ve perhaps gathered, Abd-al-Razzāq was a man who was unabashedly impressed with elephants. He clearly saw in them something a little bit special, a little exotic, and also somehow emblematic of this place he visited and the power of its rulers. And in his writing, he spent a little time on them.
He wrote of his host’s personal collection of the creatures, giving a special mention to the grey-spotted, white elephant that was led out before the emperor in the mornings as a good omen for the day ahead. He wrote of the large balls of pulses, rice, and butter that they consumed, seasoned in salt and sugar, of how these discerning eaters would become aggressive if an ingredient went missing and attack those responsible, how the unfortunates were then immediately punished for their shoddy work.
Of course, feeding the immense creatures was not really one’s first concern. Before that, there was the small matter of actually catching an elephant. Not an easy task, one would think, but then Abd-al-Razzāq wrote about that too, if in terms that would not exactly meet today’s standards around animal cruelty.
The thing to do was apparently to get between an elephant and its water source, to dig a trench and to cover it over well. So far, pretty unsurprising, classic even, but then came the more cunning part. When the elephant fell in, you actually waited up to three days before making an approach, let them get a little hungry, and that first approach was only to be made by an accomplice who’d repeatedly strike the poor elephant with a stick. That was when you would heroically rush in and drive off this assailant, throw away their stick, and give the trapped elephant a little food. And you weren’t done. You’d repeat the performances, the beatings, the rescue act, the food. You’d repeat them as often as necessary until you could approach the elephant as a friend, offer a little fruit, some rubs and scratches, and finally a chain.
So that took a bit of work, but if you allowed the elephant to escape it was going to take more than that. Abd-al-Razzāq wrote of a particular animal that having once escaped was extremely wary of being caught again. It knew the trick with the trench and the water, and was said to have used its trunk to scoop up a stick of its own, using the branch to poke and prod at the ground ahead of it and avoid the traps. Which it did. But it could do nothing to avoid the lone man dropping on its back as it passed by the foot of a tree, clutching at the rope still wrapped around its body and holding tight through all its efforts to get free. As much as the man’s grip, the elephant contended with the will of the emperor himself. He wanted that elephant recaptured and would not accept anything less.
It’s clear that Deva Raya II was passionate about his elephants, or in our source it’s perhaps more clear that its writer was, but this wasn’t all a product of this foreign observer’s interest. From an inscription at a temple of the time, you can read the emperor’s honourifics and among them the title, Gajabetegara, the hunter of elephants. It was not just Abd-al-Razzāq.
And Abd-al-Razzāq didn’t just write about festivals, or favourite animals. He reported, in a somewhat limited away, on the goings-on in the empire, on a great threat to its ruler and the hostilities that followed.
This story he reports is something that was said to have happened while he had been at Qaliqut, very recent history then by the time he arrived, but not actually something he witnessed himself. What he said had happened was this.
Deva Raya’s brother had recently had a house built for himself, not particularly suspicious, and he had invited the emperor and with him all the local leadership, again, perfectly normal in itself, but of course there was, beneath this harmless surface, a plot unfolding, and quite a bloody one.
The particulars here are a little unclear. Abd-al-Razzāq claims that it was traditional for these people not to eat with one another and so they were called away separately to eat. Whether or not that was the real justification, the guests were all assembled in a great hall and one by one fetched by messenger.
All the kettle drums and trumpets of the city cried out, creating a great uproar over which nothing could be heard. One by one, the invitees were called upon, and one by one they were cut down by waiting assassins, cut down and then cut up limb from limb, and the pieces of the body taken aside before the next guest was brought in.
The place must soon have been absolutely pungent with blood, pooling everywhere from the massacre, and to each new arrival was said, as the text puts it, the words of fate: “You shall not return any more. When you have taken your departure, it is forever.”
The murders were proceeding smoothly, the bodies swiftly reduced and cast aside, and none, save those few who had been made aware of the plot, were any the wiser, the crash of instruments easily covering any noise made either by killer or victim. The plan, evidently, was working perfectly, except for one small detail. Deva Raya was not there.
The treacherous brother behind this plot left the bloodbath at his house and he went to the palace. He spoke flattering words there among the guards, managed somehow to charm them off to the butchery going on in his home, and then he went in to see the emperor.
He found him in the throne room, approached him with a smile on his face, a dish of betel nuts in his hand, a concealed knife. Everything was ready, he told his brother. Everyone was waiting. All the festivities were lacking was him, Deva Raya. But the emperor did not wish to go. He felt unwell, he told his brother, a sign of divine inspiration our text says. He would not go, so that brother had to wield the knife himself.
He struck the emperor repeatedly with it, plunging it into his body until he was satisfied that he was dead. He stood there over the fallen emperor, the throne there beside him, and then he made a mistake, didn’t stay to see the job done himself but instead left a man there to cut off the emperor’s head. He went off to present himself to the people as their new emperor, and behind him, everything unravelled.
Deva Raya, who was not, in fact, dead at all, rose up from the ground. He struck his would-be beheader down with a chair and finished him off with the help of a terrified guard who’d thus far hidden himself away from it all. Then he went out in search of that brother of his, found him holding forth from the top of the steps as the people’s new ruler..
It must have been some shock to that brother, to have come so far in devising his plot and putting it into action, in killing so many of the city’s elite, in having Deva Raya at his mercy and leaving him there on the floor. In coming so very close to succeeding only to look up and see Deva Raya there, clothes torn and bloodied but very much alive, see him raise his finger and point accusingly, denouncing him to the gathered crowd. Deva Raya’s brother had almost pulled it off, but now he was promptly put to death.
In the aftermath, Abd-al-Razzāq wrote, many were killed for their involvement. The man who had initially delivered the deadly letters of invitation was tortured to death. Those who aided in the plot, or were suspected to have done so, had “their skins stripped, their bodies burned, and their families reduced to annihilation.” More expert observers than myself have considered our writer’s reaction to all of this to be unclear, perhaps leaning towards thinking that the response was a little excessive but that it was also an impressive display of power.
Abd-al-Razzāq was, as I said, not actually there for any of this, was at no risk of an invitation himself, but he was apparently there for a little of the consequences, both for the empire and for himself.
In the wake of all that death, and the unpleasantness with his brother, Deva Raya’s neighbours in the Bahmani Sultanate, with which he had repeatedly clashed, had looked to his empire and seen weakness. They’d seen opportunity.
The sultan had put his threat in terms of religion and in terms of money. Send me such and such a sum, he wrote, “or else I will march into your country a formidable army, and I will overturn from its foundations the empire of idolatry.”
For his part, the text tells us, Deva Raya was equal parts “troubled and irritated,” but he did not show it much in his response.
“Since I am alive,” he was to have said, “what cause of alarm can there be because certain of my servants are killed? Why should I fear though a thousand of my servants should die? In the space of a day or two I can bring together a hundred times as many.”
It was all pretty Napoleon. “You cannot stop me,” I can practically hear Deva Raya say. “I spend 30,000 lives a month.”
And he continued, with apparent equanimity.
"If my enemies flatter themselves that they will find in me weakness, negligence, idleness, or apathy, it goes for nothing. I am protected by a powerful and happy star. Fortune watches over me with affection. Meanwhile, whatever my enemies may find themselves able to take from my kingdom, will be in their eyes a booty for them to distribute among their Sayyids and their learned men. Whereas, for my part, whatever shall fall into my power out of the territories of my enemy, shall be given by me to the falconers and to the Brahmins."
War, when it came in the text, was fleeting, a mention of the ravaging of frontiers between the two kingdoms, an off-hand reference to death and misery for thousands. For Abd-al-Razzāq, it had more immediate consequences.
The thing was that while Deva Raya seems to have been a generous host who treated him well, who gave him, for example, a place of honour from which to witness that festival, there were those in this city whose view of the visitor was less generous. There is mention of mutterings earlier in the narrative, of malicious rumours on the part of certain envious men from Hormuz that Abd-al-Razzāq was not really an official representative of the illustrious Shah Rukh at all. Why, he was only a merchant who had somehow gotten his hands on the letters he carried, or else he forged them. The rumours spread, Abd-al-Razzāq wrote, until they reached the ears of the most senior of soldiers and administrators, until they reached those of Deva Raya himself. And then came that clash with the sultanate and with it, as I said, issues for Abd-al-Razzāq.
It seems that the ambassador’s ally in the city, his champion we might say, had been drawn away by the fighting. He’d been dispatched there in a position of leadership, and into his place on the council stepped another man, one decidedly less friendly to our Timurid friend. This new man was, Abd-al-Razzāq tells us, a Christian and a man who thought himself above his station. He was, quote, “a creature of small stature, malicious, ill-born, mean, and stern. All the most odious vices were united in him, without one finding in him any counterbalancing estimable quality.” And if being malicious and ill-born weren’t bad enough, he immediately moved to take from the Timurid ambassador what had been his, never a good way to make friends.
“This wretch,” Abd-al-Razzāq wrote, “as soon as he had defiled by his presence the seat of authority, suppressed, without any reason, the daily allowance which had been assigned to us.”
“This man” soon became a magnet for Abd-al-Razzāq’s enemies, those jealous men from Hormuz who flocked to him, repeating their accusations that this was not truly an ambassador from Timur’s son but only a merchant, a common trader carrying those letters about with him like a parcel for delivery. They spread falsehoods of this kind and others about our traveller, driving him ever further into doubt about what to do.
He had, he thought, the support of the emperor, and in his encounters with Deva Raya, it seemed that he did, but his text expressed uncertainty as to what would come next, perplexities which hung over him as he waited, untethered, and still so very far from home.
That’s where we’ll pick his story up again, next episode.
If you are curious about this place our traveller was visiting, and you aren’t already familiar with it, then I definitely encourage you to have a look online at photos from Hampi, which is still extremely striking and is definitely worth a look, or a visit, I imagine, if that’s an option.
If you are listening on the Patreon, then expect me back here shortly with some bonus listening, and whether or not you’re on the Patreon, I’ll be back soon with the conclusion to the Abd-al-Razzāq Samarqandī series, and I’ll talk to you then.