The Marathas, Part 2 - The Last Shields

The Shield in the South

Vijayanagara, and a civilisation's second wind

Out of that wreckage rose the answer. In 1336, on the southern bank of the Tungabhadra, Harihara and Bukka founded the city of Vijayanagara — the City of Victory — under the guidance of the sage Vidyāraṇya of Sringeri, whose name the capital's earliest quarter still bears. The tradition holds that the brothers had been taken and pressed to convert, and returned to their dharma at the sage's hand; whatever the precise history, the founding purpose was never in doubt. The Vijayanagara rulers styled themselves Hindurāya-suratrāṇa — "Sultan among Hindu kings" — a title that took the conqueror's own vocabulary and turned it back on him.

The founding is worth telling exactly, because it is the first great precedent for everything Shivaji Maharaj would later do. Harihara and Bukka were brothers of the Saṅgama family, officers first of the Kākatīyas and then of the small state of Kampili. When Kampili was overrun by Muhammad bin Tughlaq they were taken prisoner, carried to Delhi, and forced to convert to Islam; they were then sent back south as the Sultan's agents to hold the country for him. Instead, on reaching the Tungabhadrā they went to Vidyāraṇya of Sringeri — the Advaita ācārya and brother of Sāyaṇa, the great commentator on the Vedas — who performed their śuddhi, received them back into their own dharma, and gave them a charge: to re-establish Hindu sovereignty in the south. Contested They renounced their commission, declared independence, and founded a city on the south bank of the river which they named for their guru and for their purpose.

Two things in that account deserve attention. First, the śuddhi: the tradition's own highest authorities held in the fourteenth century that men converted by force could be brought home — three hundred years before Shivaji Maharaj would do the same for Bajaji Nimbalkar and Netaji Palkar over the objections of the timid. Second, the immediate resort to a monastic seat for legitimacy. The Vijayanagara enterprise was, from its first day, a joint undertaking of arms and of the ācāryas. Vidyāraṇya and Sāyaṇa produced under this patronage the commentaries on the Vedas that remain standard, and the empire adopted the varāha, the boar of Viṣṇu and old emblem of the Chālukyas, as its seal.

Kumāra Kampaṇa and the recovery of Madurai

The new empire then did what no power had done since the Khalji invasions: it reconquered lost ground and restored what had been broken. Around 1370, Kumāra Kampaṇa, son of Bukka I, marched into the Tamil country, destroyed the Madurai Sultanate, and killed its last Sultan. He restored the worship at the Mīnākṣī temple — the walled-up sanctum was opened after some four decades and the true image found intact — rebuilt the Raṅganātha temple at Śrīraṅgam, and re-established the endowments and rites across the south. Settled

And that campaign has one of the most remarkable literary memorials in Indian history. Kampaṇa's own queen, Gaṅgādevī, wrote the Madhurāvijayam — the Conquest of Madurai — a Sanskrit mahākāvya in which a Hindu queen narrates her husband's liberation of a temple city, describing in the eighth canto the state in which they found it: the streets grown over, the temples in ruin, the Kāverī choked, the coconut groves cut down, the halls where the Vedas had been recited now silent. She has a goddess appear to Kampaṇa and hand him a sword with which to accomplish it. A woman of the fourteenth century wrote a Sanskrit epic about the reconquest of a desecrated city by her own husband, and it survives. Settled

For two centuries Vijayanagara was the wall behind which the south survived. Under Kṛṣṇadevarāya (1509–1529) it reached a magnificence that astonished every foreigner who saw it. The Portuguese traveller Domingo Paes judged the city as large as Rome and the best-provided in the world; Abdur Razzak of Herat wrote that the pupil of the eye had never seen a place like it. Its bazaars sold diamonds by the measure. Its irrigation works watered a countryside; its temples — Vitthala, Virupaksha, Hazara Rama — were built at a scale that presumed permanence. Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada and Tamil letters flourished together; Kṛṣṇadevarāya himself wrote the Telugu Āmuktamālyada. Here was proof that Hindu sovereignty could still produce not merely armies but civilisation.

Talikota, 23 January 1565

The immediate cause was the policy of Aliya Rāma Rāya, the aged regent who had ruled in the Tuluva kings' name since the 1540s. He was an able man and a ruthless one, and his method was to keep the five Sultanates divided by allying with each in turn against the others — marching a Vijayanagara army into their quarrels, extracting concessions, and humiliating the defeated. It worked for twenty years and it made him personally hated across the Deccan. The chroniclers of the Sultanates dwell on insults offered to their courts and their faith during those interventions; whether exaggerated or not, the resentment was real, and it was the material out of which the coalition was built. When Husain Nizām Shāh of Ahmadnagar, Alī Ādil Shāh of Bijapur, Ibrāhīm Quṭb Shāh of Golconda, and the rulers of Bidar and Berar composed their differences and sealed them with marriages, they were doing something they had not managed in a century.

It ended in a single day. The five Deccan Sultanates — Bijapur, Ahmadnagar, Golconda, Bidar and Berar — which had spent decades at one another's throats while the aged regent Aliya Rāma Rāya played them against each other, composed their quarrels and combined. The armies met on the plain near the villages of Rakkasagi and Tangadagi, north of the Krishna.

The armies were enormous. Vijayanagara's is put by the sources at several hundred thousand with a great artillery train; the Sultanates' at perhaps half that but with better guns and, critically, with Turkish and Persian gunners and a corps of foreign musketeers. Rāma Rāya was by then well over seventy — some accounts say ninety — and commanded from a litter, with his brothers Tirumala and Venkatadri holding the wings.

The Vijayanagara army was winning. Kulke and Rothermund state it plainly, and the sources agree: the imperial forces had the better of the early fighting. Then two Muslim commanders of Rāma Rāya's own army — the Gilani brothers, among his most trusted officers — turned, seized the regent in the press of battle, and delivered him. He was beheaded on the spot and his head raised on a pike. Settled The army, seeing it, dissolved. Rāma Rāya's brothers fled. What had been a contested field became a rout in the space of an hour.

What followed was worse than the battle. The victorious armies entered Vijayanagara and set about its destruction with an application that has few parallels. For five to six months they burned, smashed and quarried the greatest city in India — temples thrown down, sculpture defaced, halls fired, the population scattered or killed. The ruins at Hampi, scattered over twenty-six square kilometres, are what was left when they had finished. It was not a sack for plunder alone; a city that could not be held was made certain never to rise again.

The scale of what was lost is hard to convey in summary, so let the numbers stand. The city had a circumference of some sixty kilometres within seven lines of fortification. Its population is estimated at around half a million, making it in the sixteenth century one of the largest cities on earth — larger than Paris, larger than London. Paes counted the bazaars where rubies, diamonds, emeralds and pearls were sold openly in the street by weight. The Vitthala temple's stone chariot and its musical pillars, the Hazāra Rāma temple with the entire Rāmāyaṇa carved along its walls, the Virūpākṣa gopuram, the Lotus Mahal, the elephant stables, the great tanks and the aqueducts — these were the works of a civilisation that expected to continue.

What the coalition did to it over those five or six months was not the ordinary sack of a captured city. Armies loot and move on; this was demolition undertaken as a policy, with fire, crowbars and elephants, sustained for half a year after all resistance had ended. Images were not merely thrown down but systematically defaced, faces and limbs struck off. The Vitthala complex was burned. Sculpture was smashed where it stood. What is standing at Hampi today is what proved too heavy to destroy in the time available. Settled

The successor Aravidu line held on from Penukonda and Chandragiri for another century, and the Nayaka houses of Madurai, Tanjore, Keladi and Mysore preserved fragments of the old order — Vijayanagara's afterlife is real and should not be dismissed. But as a pan-southern sovereign Hindu power, capable of fielding an imperial army and protecting a civilisation, it was finished on that January afternoon.

Hemacandra Vikramāditya

The last Hindu to rule from Delhi, and the arrow that ended it

While the Deccan was being broken and the south was preparing for Talikota, the north settled its own fate on a plain sixty miles from Delhi that has been the graveyard of Indian empires three times over.

At the First Battle of Panipat, on 21 April 1526, Bābur destroyed the far larger army of Ibrāhīm Lodī with field artillery, matchlocks and the tulughma flanking manoeuvre, and founded the Mughal dynasty. Thirty years later, on the same ground, came the battle that matters more for this history — and the man who fought it deserves far more than the footnote he is usually given.

The rise of a merchant's son

Hemacandra — Hemu — was born about 1501 at Alwar in a Bhārgava merchant family, and began as a supplier: a dealer in saltpetre and provisions to the armies of the Sur dynasty. There is no royal blood in this story and no jāgīr. He rose entirely on competence, first as a supplier of cannon and gunpowder in Sher Shāh Sūrī's time, then as an administrator, then as a commander, until under Ādil Shāh Sūrī he was made Wazīr and commander-in-chief of the armies of the Sur empire — a Hindu at the head of an Afghan state's entire military and civil administration in the middle of the sixteenth century.

Between 1553 and 1556 he fought twenty-two battles and won every one of them. He crushed the Afghan claimants who rose against Ādil Shāh — Ibrāhīm Sūrī near Kalpi and Khanwa, Sikandar Sūrī in the Punjab. He marched east and defeated Muhammad Shāh of Bengal, killing him in the field. He beat back Mughal incursions. From Bengal to the Punjab, over three years, an army led by a merchant's son from Alwar did not lose an engagement. Settled

Delhi, 7 October 1556

Humāyūn died in January 1556 and left a thirteen-year-old Akbar on an unconsolidated throne. Hemu, then in Bengal, understood exactly what the moment was, and told his commanders so. He marched west, took Etawah, Kalpi and Gwalior, recruiting as he went — and the recruiting is significant, because he drew heavily on Hindu soldiery who understood what was being attempted. At Agra the Mughal governor abandoned the city without a fight. At Tughlaqabad, outside Delhi, he met Tardī Beg Khān's army on 6 October, was pushed back at first, then committed his elephants and led the charge himself. The Mughal line broke; some three thousand were killed; Tardī Beg fled. Delhi fell.

What he did next is the reason he belongs in this series. He did not proclaim the victory in his nominal master's name. On 7 October 1556, at the Purāṇā Qilā in Delhi, in the presence of Afghan sardars, Rajput chiefs, Hindu senāpatis, paṇḍits and scholars, he had himself crowned by rājyābhiṣeka — the washing, the umbrella held over his head — and took the regnal name Vikramāditya, the title of the ancient sovereigns of Ujjayinī. The festivities ran three or four days. He struck coin. He appointed his officers. He is recorded to have modelled the ordering of his state on Vijayanagara in the south. Settled

After three hundred and fifty years, a Hindu again ruled from Delhi.

Panipat, 5 November 1556

The Mughal council at Kalanaur was for retreat to Kabul; Abul Fazl records that many of Akbar's generals judged Hemu's strength, and the new confidence among Hindus that his rise had produced, too dangerous to face. Bairam Khan overruled them and marched.

The armies met at Panipat on 5 November. Hemu had the numbers and the elephants, and he handled them well: V. A. Smith's account in the Oxford History of India states plainly that he was successful on both wings and would probably have been the victor. His centre was driving the Mughal line. Then an arrow — a chance shot, from a body of archers firing into the press — struck him in the eye and he fell unconscious in his howdah.

An army that cannot see its commander does not fight. His force, in Smith's phrase, was deprived of the sole reason for its existence and dispersed at once. Hemu was found unconscious among the elephants and carried to the Mughal camp. Bairam Khan invited the thirteen-year-old Akbar to earn the title of ghāzī by striking the captive; Akbar did so, and Hemu was beheaded. His head was sent to Kabul for display and his body hung at a gate in Delhi. A tower of skulls was raised from his dead, in the manner Bābur had used at the first Panipat. Settled

He is remembered now, if at all, as a curiosity in the story of Akbar's rise. He should be remembered as what he was: proof, offered thirty years before Shivaji Maharaj's grandfather was born, that the thing could be done — that a man of no rank could raise an army, beat every commander sent against him, take Delhi and be consecrated in his own name and his own tradition. Twenty-nine days is not a reign. But it was a demonstration, and it was not forgotten.

The pattern

Set the three catastrophes side by side and something becomes visible.

At Devagiri, a rich and settled kingdom destroyed by a raid it never saw coming, because its army was elsewhere and it had made no provision for surprise.

At Talikota, an empire winning a battle and losing it in an hour to the defection of two officers and the capture of one man — and then losing its capital because the state had no second seat, no fallback, nothing behind the city.

At Panipat, an army winning a battle and dissolving because a single arrow found a single eye — because the entire enterprise was one man on one elephant, with no institution behind him to survive his fall.

In none of these was Hindu arms outmatched in courage, in numbers, or in the field. In every one of them the failure was structural: no depth, no succession, no institution, no second line. Everything depended on a person, and persons can be betrayed, beheaded, or hit by an arrow. Contested

That is the specific problem which the subject of the next six parts of this series solved — and it is why the coronation at Raigad, the Aṣṭapradhān, the non-hereditary offices, the three hundred and seventy forts, the cash-paid army and the fortress of Jinji prepared eleven hundred kilometres away for a catastrophe not yet imagined, matter as much as any battle he ever fought.

"Dharma protects those who protect it." The century between Talikota and Shivneri is the period in which that protection had, across almost the whole of Bharata, no army behind it.

The Condition of Bharata

What the seventeenth century actually looked like from the ground

By 1630, the year Shivaji Maharaj was born, the position was this. The Mughal empire held the north from Kabul to Bengal and was pressing south. The Deccan Sultanates — Bijapur and Golconda chiefly, Ahmadnagar in its death-throes — held the centre. The Portuguese held the western seaboard from Bassein to Goa, with the Inquisition established at Goa since 1560. The Siddis of Janjira, in Mughal service, held the Konkan coast and its shipping. Not one sovereign Hindu power of the first rank existed anywhere between the Himalaya and the Kaveri. The Rajput houses, whatever their individual valour, had been brought into the Mughal system as mansabdars — fighting Mughal wars, giving daughters to the imperial harem, and administering provinces for Agra. Mewar alone had held out longest and had signed in 1615.

What this meant on the ground was not abstract. The jizya, when enforced, taxed a man for his religion. Temple destruction was policy, not accident — and it was recorded by the destroyers themselves in their own chronicles, with pride. Pilgrimage taxes were levied at tīrthas. Peasants in the Deccan were squeezed between the revenue-farming of Bijapur and the campaigns of Delhi, their villages burned by whichever army passed through. The deshmukhs and deshpandes of Maharashtra — the hereditary Marathi gentry — served as subordinate officers of one sultanate or another, their loyalties bought and their sons hostage. Marathi men fought and died in large numbers, but they fought in other men's armies, for other men's causes, under other men's flags.

The saints who kept the fire

And yet the tradition did not die, because it had gone into a form that could not be garrisoned out of existence. The Vārkarī movement — the pilgrim tradition of Pandharpur — carried the Dharma in Marathi, in song, on foot, in the bodies of ordinary people, and no sultan's army could besiege it. Jñāneśvar had given Maharashtra the Gītā in its own tongue in 1290. Nāmdev carried it further. Eknāth (1533–1599) wrote the Bhāvārtha Rāmāyaṇa and defended Marathi against those who held that only Sanskrit could carry the sacred. Tukārām (c.1608–1650), a Kunbi grocer of Dehu, composed the abhaṅgas that are still sung by millions and that made devotion the possession of every caste and every village. And Samartha Rāmdās (1608–1681) — whose Dāsbodh preached not withdrawal but strength, organisation and action, and who founded hundreds of Hanumān and maṭha centres across Maharashtra — gave the coming revival its spine.

The mechanism deserves to be spelled out, because it is the least understood cause of the Maratha rising. A conquering power can garrison a fort, tax a district, appoint a governor and burn a temple. It cannot garrison a song. The abhaṅga was memorised, not written; it travelled on foot with the vārī, the pilgrimage that walked from Alandi and Dehu to Pandharpur twice a year and still does, hundreds of thousands strong; it was sung by cultivators, potters, gardeners, tailors and grocers, in Marathi, about a god who stood on a brick with his hands on his hips waiting for them. There was no institution to capture, no endowment to confiscate, no priesthood to intimidate, and no building whose destruction would end it.

And what it carried was not quietism. Tukārām's abhaṅgas are full of a fierce moral independence — contempt for the powerful, insistence on the dignity of the poor, refusal to accept that birth or wealth determined a man's worth before God. Eknāth defended the writing of sacred literature in Marathi against those who held that only Sanskrit would serve, and in doing so made the tradition the possession of everyone who spoke the language. And Samartha Rāmdās made the connection explicit. His Dāsbodh is a manual not of withdrawal but of organisation, energy and worldly competence; he founded some eleven hundred maṭhas and Hanumān temples across Maharashtra, deliberately choosing Hanumān — strength placed at the service of dharma — as the emblem of the revival. His lines on the condition of the country under occupation, and on what a man of resolve owes it, are the closest thing the movement had to a political programme.

This is the essential point, and it is missed by histories that treat Shivaji Maharaj as a sudden military accident. He did not raise Svarājya from nothing. He raised it from a countryside that had been prepared — by two centuries of saints who had kept Marathi sacred literature alive, kept the Vārkarī pilgrimage walking, kept the villages conscious of themselves as a people with a dharma, and had made that consciousness independent of any court. When the call came, the Maval peasantry knew who they were. The saints laid the floor on which the state was built.

That is the night into which the next part of this series opens. Three hundred and twelve years separate the flaying of Harapāladeva from the birth at Shivneri. In all that time no Hindu had been crowned sovereign in the Deccan; no Hindu army had held a capital of its own; no Hindu king had sat under a chatra and struck coin in his own name. What follows is the story of the man who ended that, and of the house and the people who carried what he began to the gates of Attock and the walls of Delhi.