Administration and Social Life under Vijayanagar c8.100

c8.100

Though the reference to the existence of wizards appears to be ridiculous at first sight it is not impossible that the kings might have consulted a class of people who by their knowledge of magic professed to know the whereabouts of lost things and the persons who had stolen them. When even to-day we see a few men, who, with the help of some magic power, are able to trace lost things, it is not difficult to believe Nuniz. In dealing with political offences, real or suspected, the king at times combined in himself the duties of the complainant, the policeman and the magistrate. It was so when Kṛṣṇa Rāya blinded and put in prison his trusted minister Sāḷuva Timma and his sons on the suspicion of their having murdered his young son Tirumala. If the decision of this grave crime (if it is a fact that Sāḷuva Timma had any share in it) had been left to an impartial tribunal with which the king should have had nothing to do, then perhaps the charge of murder would have had to be proved before they were committed to the prison; and if it had not been proved, the king's desire to have the minister and his sons imprisoned could not have been achieved. Thus this system according to which the king was not only the accuser but also the judge and the executor of the laws does not throw any favourable light on the system of the administration of criminal justice, in the Vijayanagar empire.