Who ruled Hampi?

Hampi lies on the south bank of the Tungabhadra River in east-central Karnataka, India, among hills of granite boulders. Long a Hindu pilgrimage place, it became the site of Vijayanagara, capital of the Vijayanagara Empire from 1336 to 1565, which by 1500 may have been one of the largest and richest cities in the world. Sacked after a decisive defeat in 1565 and then abandoned, its ruins of some 1,600 monuments are now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

The name comes from Pampa, an old name of the river and of the goddess Parvati. According to local religious tradition, Parvati performed austerities on Hemakuta Hill to win the god Shiva, who is worshipped here as Pampapati, her husband. The area is also identified by regional tradition with Kishkindha, the monkey kingdom in the Ramayana where Rama meets Hanuman, an association that has drawn pilgrims for centuries.

The region's recorded history begins much earlier. Rock edicts of the emperor Ashoka found elsewhere in Bellary district suggest it was part of the Maurya Empire in the third century BCE, and a Brahmi inscription and terracotta seal of about the second century CE have been found at the site. Inscriptions of the Badami Chalukyas from the sixth to eighth centuries mention a town called Pampapura. By the tenth century, under the Kalyana Chalukyas, it was a centre of religion and learning, and the kings endowed the Virupaksha temple. The Hoysala kings built temples here between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries and used Hampi as a second royal residence.

In the early fourteenth century armies of the Delhi Sultanate under Alauddin Khalji and Muhammad bin Tughlaq raided the south, destroying the Hoysala capital and ending the short-lived Kampili kingdom nearby. From the ruins of Kampili, the Vijayanagara Empire arose in 1336, founded by the brothers Harihara I and Bukka I. Their origins are disputed: some historians see them as Hoysala commanders posted on the Tungabhadra, others as Telugu chiefs, while later traditional texts say they had served the Kakatiya king and were set on the throne by the sage Vidyaranya.

The new rulers built their capital around the old temple town and called it Vijayanagara. Over two centuries they invested in roads, waterworks, farming, temples, markets and fortifications, while fighting frequent wars with the sultanates to the north and east. Some scholars estimate that by 1500 it was the second-largest city in the world after Beijing. Visitors were impressed: the Italian merchant Niccolò de' Conti, around 1420, estimated its circuit at sixty miles, the Persian envoy Abdul Razzaq described seven rings of walls in 1442, and the Portuguese traveller Domingo Paes in 1520 compared it in size to Rome. Traders came from the Deccan, Persia and Portuguese Goa. Hindu and Jain temples stood side by side, and while most buildings followed the South Indian Dravidian style, a few, such as the Queen's bath and the elephant stables, adopted an Indo-Islamic style.

In 1565 a coalition of the Deccan sultanates defeated the Vijayanagara army at the Battle of Talikota. The Vijayanagara leader Aliya Rama Raya was captured and beheaded. The victorious armies then plundered and burned the capital for some six months, and archaeologists have found charcoal, heat-cracked foundations and burnt stonework as evidence. The city was abandoned and never rebuilt.

Through the eighteenth century the surrounding region was fought over by local chiefs, the Nizams of Hyderabad, the Marathas, and the Mysore rulers Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan. After Tipu's defeat and death in 1799 the area came under British influence.

Colonel Colin Mackenzie, later the first Surveyor General of India, surveyed the ruins in 1800 and found them deserted. Alexander Greenlaw photographed the monuments in 1856, and his sixty pictures remain an important record of their condition at the time. Alexander Rea published a survey in 1885, and Robert Sewell's book A Forgotten Empire, in 1900, brought the site to wide scholarly attention, after which Rea and his successor Longhurst cleared and repaired many buildings.

The ruins cover about 41 square kilometres, divided by scholars into a sacred centre by the river, with temples older than the empire, and a royal centre and urban core. UNESCO inscribed the Group of Monuments at Hampi in 1986, and it was on the list of World Heritage in Danger from 1999 to 2006. The Virupaksha temple remains in active worship, and the Archaeological Survey of India continues excavations.