A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c16.20

c16.20

The movement for the liberation of the Deccan from the Muslims may be said to have begun immediately after the sultan left for Northern India in 1329. The people had never willingly accepted Muslim rule. At this time, moreover, they and their leaders were under the influence of a strong revival of Śaivism and in no mood to submit passively to the profanation and destruction of their temples and to the corruption and overthrow of their long-established usages. In its single-minded devotion to Śiva, its fanatical intolerance of the followers of any other creed, whom it stigmatized as bhāvis (infidels), and in its ideal of perfect equality among the bhaktas, the new Śaivism was a worthy rival of Islam, and the impetus it gave to politics had not a little to do with the failure of Tughlak rule to take root in many parts of the Deccan. The abrogation of religious and charitable endowments, and the extortions to which the farmers and artisans were subjected by the sultan and his provincial governors, added the stimulus of material interest and strengthened the movement for liberation. Prominent among its leaders were Prolaya Nāyaka and his cousin Kāpaya Nāyaka, the Kanhaya Nāyaka of Muslim historians. Tradition affirms that no fewer than seventy-five lesser Nāyakas heartily assisted them in their enterprise, the celebrated Prolaya Vema, founder of the Reddi kingdom of Addanki and Kondavīdu, among them. By 1331, or a little later, the entire coastal region from the Mahanadi to the Gundlakamma in Nellore district had been freed from the Muslims, and Hindu chieftains had entered upon the task of restoring and reconstructing the civic life of the people on its old lines. At the same time, Somadeva, who claimed descent from the ancient line of the Chālukyas and became the progenitor of the later Aravīdu kings of Vijayanagar, led the Hindus of the western Telugu country in revolt against their Muslim overlord Malik Muhammad, governor of Kampili. With the centre of his power in the neighbourhood of Kurnool, he seized the forts of Anegondi, Raichur and Mudgal. As the Hoysala Ballāla III also threw off his allegiance to the sultan and invaded the province of Kampili, Malik Muhammad was helpless. He told the sultan (as Nuniz records) that ‘the land was risen against him’, ‘everyone was lord of what he pleased, and no one was on his side’; the people came to ‘besiege him in the fortress, allowing no provisions to go in to him, nor paying him the taxes that had been forced on them’. On the advice of his councillors that order could only be restored by someone connected with the late Rāja of Kampili, the sultan sent Harihara and his brother Bukka to govern the province of Kampili after taking oaths and pledges of loyalty from them.