A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c6.16

c6.16

Starting on its career a decade earlier than the Bāhmani kingdom, that of Vijayanagar became the focus of resurgent Hindu culture which offered a more successful resistance to Islam in this part of the country than anywhere else. But it was a long military vigil; the polity had to be organized on a warlike footing, and there was no room for weak or incompetent monarchs on the throne; whenever the hereditary claimants were found wanting, they were displaced by the ablest among their lieutenants. The empire is best looked upon as a military confederacy of many chieftains co-operating under the leadership of the biggest among them. Even so, the exigencies of the struggle compelled the rulers of Vijayanagar to resort to the employment of foreigners and even Muslims in the artillery and cavalry sections of their armies to make them adequate for the defence of their country and religion. This course had its obvious disadvantages. The fact, however, remains that Vijayanagar kept up the fight, with not inconspicuous success, for the best part of three centuries before it succumbed to the forces it had struggled against so long; but, by then, other and in the long run more decisive factors had put in their appearance in the form of European trading companies, and a new epoch begins. The Portuguese indeed had built up their short-lived and predatory maritime empire much earlier—from the first half of the sixteenth century; but their activities never counted as a serious menace to the Hindu empire with which they took care to be on friendly terms though they quarrelled often enough with its feudatories on the coast, especially in the west. Their attempts to plunder rich Hindu temples, and the conversions to Christianity procured by the Jesuits and other orders of monks in the ‘pearl fishery coast’ and elsewhere, constituted a threat to Hinduism from another side; but it was soon controlled and checked by the monarchs of Vijayanagar and their agents.