Hampi and the History I Never Learnt
Had the chance to visit Hampi in a first somewhat long drive (well at least longer than driving my car to Mysore or Rishikesh and back). Had this on my bucket list for a long time, especially the couple of temples that I knew were there beforehand. However, having now visited the place, I was not really aware of how sprawling the city used to be. Have seen a lot of historical sites all over the country, some big, some small but I was woefully unprepared about this section of Indian history. It has left me wondering about the history I learnt in school, and the history I wish I had understood better.
I remember studying Phan Boi Chau and the Vietnamese nationalist movement and Salvador Allende and Pinochet in school. Some of it was particularly eye opening and painful to read about, like the coup d'etat in Chile. Yet my understanding of our own country's history had been lacking. For example, the Vijayanagara Empire, one of the most consequential powers in Indian history, came largely from reading an Amar Chitra Katha comic on Krishnadeva Raya and stories of Tenali Rama I must have read or seen in cartoons.
It was only when I stood among the ruins of great city of Vijaynagar that I began to appreciate the scale of the civilisation that had existed here. It was a major imperial capital, something comparable to Rome in its grandeur I feel, cause even though the city is long long gone, the massive stone walls really showed that it would have been a formidable place back in its heyday. And to hear about how it fell eventually left me really heartbroken, though I am glad that the ASI has been working on conserving the place.
Stone platform base and enclosure walls at Hampi. My guide identified this as what remains of Krishnadevaraya's private residence; only the foundations survive.
The stone chariot in the Vithala temple. Until this visit, I thought the 50 rupee note showed the Konark temple, not Hampi.
Its ultimate fate that it was never rebuilt into a modern metropolis. I found myself imagining an alternative history in which Vijayanagara survived as a political centre and evolved into a living city, its monumental past coexisting with modern streets and neighbourhoods.
Of course, this is speculative cause it does require a lot of things to happen along the way But it is difficult to stand at Hampi without wondering how differently the subcontinent might have developed had history taken another course.
