Bengaluru After Talikota: 1565-1569

[Sings in foreign language] [Music] Hello and welcome back to the history of Bangalore. I'm Ramji Chandran with Episode 78 and we're well into season 2. In the last episode we looked at the shattered landscape of the deck and after 1565, the Battle of Raka Sargitthanguri, Hothali Kota. And after that battle, the Arabidu dynasty tried to maintain a conversation with the vocabulary of empire from their seat in Pino Konda but the reality of political looseness. The Arabidus could only provide their vassals, the ones who ran things in the provinces with some sort of vague legitimacy but they could no longer fully control the ground. This untethered freedom without authority was unsettling for all. No one would have felt the shift more acutely than the man who had spent three decades building the new economic engine for the empire on the Mysore plateau, Kimpigoga. But before I settle into this episode first as always, a word of thanks to Mysponsa's the prestige group. This podcast is made possible because of their support. Building cities one landmark at a time they transform dreams into reality, you can be a part of the future, simply add prestige to your life. There is a stage between the existence of a strong empire like Vijayanagara and the Krishna Devaraya and then the progressive erosion of it under we come men that followed him. Krishna Devar was a builder, he understood the real politic. In many ways he wrote that book. Quite literally if you consider the Raya Vajakamu, a book that was written in his memory many many years later, consisting of all his words. Following Krishna Devarva with two kings, Achudha and Ali Arama, and we can begin to sense the decline of the empire. These were clearly men who lacked the vision of the empire and they were quite content to square their elbows and enjoy the perks of office and find someone to blame for their failures to justify their paranoia. That actually describes Ali Arama, the inheritance of thrown results in success, either improving upon or destroying the legacy of his predecessor. There is never a condition of a king maintaining status quo, in the same manner that we can't expect a plant to neither grow nor wither. When the center collapsed in the hands of Ali Rama, who first imprisoned the rightful king Sadashibaraya, ruled in his name and an upset equal agree that he managed to unite all the warring sultanates against him. In their mutual hate against him, he invited their wrath upon the kingdom, the capital, and their people to very disastrous consequences. There had been constant wars between Vijayanagara and the sultanates in the past, but through all of that, Krishna Devarva never once seemed to inspire anything short of respect from them to the extent that they were sometimes friends, even while being perpetual enemies. Now one can believe that Aliya's brother Tirumala had even less of a legitimacy to the throne of Vijayanagara than Aliya himself. Yet, after the battle, he looted the capital, made off with an estimated 100 million pounds worth of wealth, and then appointed himself king of what was left of Vijayanagara. Now he was the front runner of the new Arabidu dynasty, the fourth empire of Vijayanagara. But he was a man less meritorious of that exalted status of the position of the king of Vijayanagara than any before him. And the proof of that, one doesn't need to look beyond an incident that occurred after he had reestablished himself in Penukondar. After the battle, Tirumala faced an immediate and dangerous shortage of horses. The imperial cavalry had been decimated, and without horses, the truncated Vijayanagara state could not defend itself. The old lifeline, the Portuguese horse trade through Goa, had dried up after 1565, and there was really nowhere to turn to get a regular supply of horses. So Tirumala improvised. According to the accounts of Venetian traveller Cesare Federici, who spent years in Vijayanagara immediately after the battle, Tirumala made a grand announcement. Any merchant who brought horses to his court, even Vijayanagara horses captured and wore and branded with the Vijayanagara's own mark, would be paid whatever price he demanded. Now to make that offer stronger, Tirumala guaranteed the safe passage to him from Penukondar. The ploy worked. Portuguese horse traders arrived with large consignments of horses. Tirumala deceived them cordially, spoke generously, and waited until no more animals were forthcoming. Then suddenly his tone changed. The merchants were dismissed without payment. Federici records them leaving desperate and as it were mad with sorrow and grief to quote him. The consequences were lasting, word got round and trust collapsed. The Goa horse trade with Vijayanagara never recovered and Tirumala's reputation among Europeans at least was in the mud. In contrast, one would find it hard to imagine that Krishna Devaraya would behave so dishonestly. It however is not hard to imagine that such being the measure of the man, he would not have commanded the respect of his people, of his vassals, the lofty nircas of Mother Eit Tanjaur on the east coast and Eekeri on the west coast. It is not surprising that these nircas decided that they would not continue to remain vassals of the Arabi-do house. The first to go with the Mother Eit Nairkar, who had operated with considerable independence ever since 1559. But after Tali-Kota in 1565, they declared complete sovereignty. Yet, they continued to acknowledge the Arabi-dos in some sort of sparse manner. Toesley following them between 1565 and 1567, Tanjaur and Dany-Keri left the fold. The way we can piece together how much a strong king could command loyalty and by contrast how disrespected a weak king could be was illustrated by the Mother Eit Nairkar. When they began aging away from Vijayanagara, it wasn't because they believed that the empire had lost meaning, it's because they no longer trusted the people who ruled it. Even in the early 1550s, the Nairkar's of Mother Eit had commissioned the text, Raya Vachakamu, of a word of Krishna Devaraya. Now this was a work filled with reverence for Vijayanagara's past, especially for Krishna Devar. The Raya is presented as a mortal ruler, a source of order, a wise figure, and a figure worthy of loyalty. Mother Eit was already governing itself in practice, but it had not rejected the idea of the imperial authority of Vijayanagara. But it certainly rejected the leadership that followed Krishna Devaraya. So their decision to walk away was not ideological, it was administrative. Respect for Krishna Devaraya remained intact, even as confidence in his successes justifiably drained away. The last thing that the Mother Eit Nairkar's chose to record was not an act of defiance, it was memory, a tribute. The departure of the Nairkar's was significant, they were the cream of the feudal system, and they were next only to the empire itself. Their departure would have constituted body blows to any aspiring kingdom, but to one whose vision had been reduced fatalism, and its rulers only interested in surviving in the role of very rich men. It would amount pretty much to petty men plundering their own treasury, and demanding rather than commanding the loyalty of their vassals. They could only control what they own directly, they could not command the provinces, and they could not assert any more imperial authority. Bengaluru was the last jewel in the Arabidu crown. Kempigouda had neither the authority nor the disposition to claim independence, so he continued to hold the city for Vijaynagarah, even as the gold on that crown had started to lose its sheen. And now for a commercial break, and when I come back I will explain the difference between the Nairkar's and the Nara Prabhu's and how each operated, and also the end of an era, we're coming up to the last few years of Hira Kempigouda. I'll be back right after this. No. 9 of Visit prestige constructions.com to know more, a radar approved. Hi again. Sometimes the question is raised about why Kempigouda did not declare independence from the fractured Vijaynagarah kingdom in the hands of an Arabidu dynasty with a fading reputation just as the Nairkar's had done. Well, the answer lies in a status in the picking order of how an empire was run. The Nairkar's could declare independence because they held the land that the empire recognized as theirs to rule, the authority came with title, revenue rights, armies and jurisdiction. They were already standing on land that could be claimed as sovereign rights for themselves. Kempigouda stood on different ground. As a Nara Prabhu he governed a Naru, Nara Raja, his authority ran deep into Tang's roads, markets and villages, but it didn't run wide. He did not hold territory in his own name. He administered it on behalf of the empire, on behalf of someone above him. The difference is how Vijayanagara was divided. At the top of the hierarchy were the Rajyas. These were large provincial units entrusted to Nayakas. These Nayakas held grants that gave them revenue rights over vast territories, command over armies, and the right to govern almost like kings in practice. Now below the Rajyas were smaller divisions, the Mandalas, the Valanados, and the Nadus. Now these were all clusters of villages or clusters of clusters that were organized for administration, tax collation, and for common things like irrigation. Below them they were the sea mace of the Stalas, and at the bottom of it finally there was the Grama which was the village itself. Now each level had its own head who had some authority, but not everyone carried the title of empire. The higher one was in the hierarchy like the level of the Rajyas or the Nayaka, the more the authority. Below them were lower and wrong, either at the level of the Nadu or the village, and their authority was more marginal. It was more managerial. They had the part of the Rantings, not the part to claim ownership over them. So Kempigar's position sat firmly in that lower half of the ledger. As a Nadu Prabhu he controlled the Nadu of Yalahanka. He could repair tanks, mobilize labor, authorized markets, levied duties, and even get permission to build a fort, but he could not convert that administration into sovereignty without attracting the wrath of the empire and punishment, just as we were told that he did when he minted his own coins. However true that story was. Kempigar was answerable to a Mahamandaleswarah, and that was a provincial governor appointed by the empire, and it was a federal post. Usually there was a senior military commander who oversaw an entire Rajya. Order, permissions, and confirmations floed downward through this chain. So while a Nayaka owned the Rajya, it was the Mahamandaleswarah who had federal oversight on that province. It's much like the present day when you have a chief minister who actually runs the state, but you have a federal man above him called the governor who is there to oversee his actions. Now Kempigar's authority therefore was always mediated, and Bengaluru existed within that imperial accounting structure not outside it. In other words, Bengaluru belonged to Vijayanagara, and now it belonged to the Arabidu dynasty. But that is why post 1565, the break played out unevenly. The Nayaka's of Madurai, Tanja Uru, and Ikiri could walk away because they already held Rajya's in their own right. All they needed to do was to harden those titles into crowns. Now Kempigar could not do the same. He held the responsibility, but he held no sovereignty. Bengaluru in the hands of Vijayanagara needed Kempigar to remain loyal, and because Kempigar was that sort of man, he remained loyal. He didn't think that rebellion was unthinkable, but independence he realized was not legally his to claim, and it appears that he honored that commitment. Kallikota happened in 1565, and Kempigar died in 1569. In those four years, Kempigar's reign was more of withdrawing from expansion and politics and turning instead of consolidation and piety. These were not the years of a founder trying to build a city, but an older ruler anchoring it in the ritual. Sometime during his five years of imprisonment, Bayali Ramaraya, Kempigar has said to have taken a vow that after his release he would build a temple at Gavi Purā, and today that temple is known as the Gavi Gangadeśvarā temple. That temple was cut directly from the rock, and it stands apart from any of the earlier temples in the region, and its association with Kempigar as consistent across all historical accounts and all local traditions. Around the same period, Kempigar also sponsored the construction of a major Shiva landmark to the south of the city, and that was the Bhasavā temple at Bhasamguri. We know it today by the name Bull Temple. Now that Bull, the monumental Nandhi, carved from a single granite outcrop, was a declaration of permanence. Now by the late 1560s, Bengaluru was no longer being marked by walls and markets and just the payday, but by huge religious monuments that were intended to last centuries, and they did. In his final years, Kempigar also turned to matters of civic administration, and he oversaw the construction and improvement of the tanks that were serving the payday and the surrounding settlements. The Kempam Buddha Tanks and the Dharmam Buddha Tanks were too. While these were not again ornamental works, they were really functional infrastructure, extending the city's capacity because he realized that the city needed to grow and it needed to sustain a growing population and trade. By the time Kempigar died, and that was sometime around 1569, Bangalore could already boast of the marks of the last phase. The city was ringed, not only by a fort, not only by markets, but by temples, tanks and many ritual spaces that signaled the continuity of life there. His final legacy was not expansion. Kempigar's final legacy was endurance. Now by the time he died, Bengaluru was not a political capital in waiting. It had not been designated to compete with courts and dynasties in imperial centres, and that was not by omission, that was the choice. Right from the beginning, the city had been planned as a market down. It was orientated towards trade rather than proclamation of politics. The markets mattered more than its own lineage, the tanks mattered more than the titles that anybody could acquire for it, and the fort, it marked jurisdiction, it didn't mark ambition for growth. The Bangalore existed to channel goods and labour and people across the plateau and it didn't seek to politicise any of these things. Now that orientation did something very important in the years after 1565. As Vijayanagara weakened, and as the great Nair Khas had broken away, cities built around the air sovereign and he was forced to choose sides. Capitals had two different claims. Courts had to assert their legitimacy. Territories had to be renamed re-titled, re-fought over, but Bengaluru was spared much of that pressure precisely because it was not trying to become something else. It was a trade city and trade cities survived differently. They survived by staying useful, by remaining legible to merchants, cultivators, carriers, even when political authority had become uncertain. Now this goes towards centuries of practice that even as wars raged across the Deccan plateau, the one thing that never got touched was trade. So, Bengaluru's value lay not in who ruled it, but what passed through it. And that made it less attractive as a prize and more resilient as a place. It is very clear that Kempigaurar understood this truth even if he never articulated it as some kind of fallacy. And how we know any of this is because all this actions appear to be inward looking, not outward looking in the manner of acquisitive kingdoms. He built temples and temples were for the people who lived in that place. The tanks, expansion of them, stabilized water supply and markets, regularised exchange. These were investments in continuity. They were not investments in dominance. And this is why Bengaluru did not lurch when authority changed hands. It just merely adjusted. So Imrity Kempigaurar, or Kempigaurar II, inherited a settlement whose main logic was economic, it was not political. So Bengaluru did not have to be reimagined by anyone. It needed to be kept running and as long as trade continued to move through its streets without any kind of a grand spectacle, the city could continue to endure any kind of activities that happened above them. This was the alignment. That alignment would continue to influence this future far more decisively than any one single ruler could. And on this base that Kempigaurar built, series after series of people would build upon that city, improve on it, and here we are today. When Kempigaurar died, he left behind more than a city. He left behind a direction and Bengaluru almost by habit rather than design continues to follow it. In the next episode, I will look at the death of Kempigaurar, the discovery of his tomb in recent years and the theories surrounding his resting place. The last memories of the founder of the city we live in and that will come up in the next few days. I am Ramji Chandra and this is the history of Bangalore.