The State in Ancient India: A Study in the Structure and Practical Working of Political Institutions in North India in Ancient Times c21.4

c21.4

South of the Kṛṣṇâ, the old Hindu life re-asserted itself soon after the first Muslim shock and resumed its cultural and political career under the ægis of the Vijayanagara Empire which lasted in vigour until the battle of Tâlikoṭa in 1565. There the old stream of Hindu political thought and institutions continued and developed into a new phase. The Vijayanagara empire was essentially a feudal-federal structure of the ancient Hindu type; the suzerains and feudatories used high-sounding titles as of old; the state regulated the economic life of the people; the courts patronised learning, poetry and art; the traditions of religious toleration were, as a rule, maintained.¹ Even after the fall of Vijayanagara, the Hindu system did not come to an end. Neither the Deccan Sulṭâns who had humbled Vijayanagara nor the great Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, before whom they went down in their turn in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, succeeded in establishing any stable Muslim administration in the south. Hindu principalities lingered on until they were engulfed in the currents and cross-currents of the Anglo-French struggle for supremacy in the south which terminated in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Certain features of their polity were adopted by the English East India Company whose dominion was established over nearly the whole of the present Madras Presidency by the close of the eighteenth century. Thus, as Krishnaswamy Aiyangar puts it, the administration of the great Choḷâs is, through the Vijayanagara Empire, the ancestor of the present Madras revenue and fiscal administration.