Spring and fall: Mridula Ramesh on how water shaped the Vijayanagara empire
How did a dry, rocky region become one of the grandest cities of the medieval world, in a time of climate change? The foresight, funding and tech it took to build Hampi hold lessons for today.
The temple celebrating a river’s love story predates the empire.
On the windy, rocky Hemakuta Hill, a leafless tree holds court before a tiny one-roomed shrine beside a green spring-fed pond.
This is Moola Virupaksha, a 7th-century structure that marks the spot, the story goes, where Shiva tried to come to terms with the loss of his beloved Sati. Her body had been cut to shreds, but his memories of her remained, and so he meditated.
In time, his beloved was reborn as Pampa (another name for the river Tungabhadra). As she sought him, Manmatha, the god of love, fired his arrow to help matters along. Shiva’s meditation was broken. In anger, he opened his third eye (virupa aksha; Sanskrit for eye without form) and did the inadvisable: he killed the archer.
But, Manmatha’s arrow had found its mark, and the lovers reunited. Today, the giant temple tank is dedicated to the slain catalyst of their romance. Over time, Pampa became Hampi, the seat of one of the grandest cities in the medieval world.
Our story begins in the 14th century, a time when, the world over, empires were under attack from the elements. In Europe, unusually heavy rainfall in the spring of 1315 caused crops to rot in the fields, while strangely cool weather and a lack of sunshine hurt subsequent harvests. A terrible famine followed. Starving and weakened masses migrated to cities, where the ensuing squalor welcomed the plague with open arms.
In Cambodia, by the mid-1300s, the Khmer empire was grappling with years of drought that alternated with floods. In China, the Yuan dynasty was trying to provide disaster relief even as crucial rice harvests were undercut by massive floods along the Yellow River and devastating typhoons.
The climate was changing. The Medieval Warm Period was transitioning into the Little Ice Age. This was the interregnum; a volatile time, then as now.
In India, sultanates fell like skittles. In Delhi, Mamluk ceded to Khilji, and Khilji to Tughluq. The eccentric Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq then conquered the Deccan. In the chaos after his withdrawal, new kingdoms erupted and emerged.
One of these, led by the brothers Harihara and Bukka Raya, was established at Hampi in present-day Karnataka. The brothers chose their capital with care, placing the Tungabhadra river between themselves and their hostile northern neighbours, with craggy hills acting as a barrier to the south.
This made them secure, but how to grow? This is a dry, rocky place. Standing on the boulders, looking down at the river (which has been made drier by the present-day dam), “so near, yet so far” becomes a lived reality. This land, as it stood, would not feed an army.
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On a recent visit, my local guide, Arjun Bhat, told me that the brothers decided to grow their food on an island in the river, to secure it from attack. Then, at a place with a higher elevation than the island, they built small check dams to divert river water into canals and lakes.
The water flowed from these reservoirs, through an aqueduct that cunningly hugged the contours of the land, snaking slowly but surely to the island. Maintaining a flow of water over 19 km was a “spectacular feat of technology”, as Dominic J Davison-Jenkins, author of The Irrigation and Water Supply Systems of Vijayanagara, puts it. In previous centuries, rulers such as the Chalukya had built canals, but this was irrigation on steroids.
To complicate matters, there were places where the land dipped en route to the island. So, a granite bridge to carry the aqueduct was built, similar to those along the Roman aqueducts. There is no inscriptional evidence to date this structure, but locally it is called Bukka’s Bridge and experts, including D Devakunjari of the Archaeological Survey of India, date it to the latter half of the 14th century.
Originally, the bridge-aqueduct section was likely 200 metres long, 2 metres wide and 10 metres tall, supporting the channels that carried water to grow a kingdom. Such an investment would have been an expensive undertaking for what was, at that time, a minor principality. This was a calculated risk. For, in a time of famine, he who controls water, holds the advantage.
The gamble paid off spectacularly.
A local epigraph, dated to 1378, compares Bukka to Virupaksha seated on Hemakuta Hill, with the Tungabhadra as his footstool.
By 1420, Vijayanagara was attracting global travellers. An Italian merchant, Nicolo Conti, wrote: “The circumference of the city is sixty miles; its walls are carried up to the mountains and enclose the valleys at their foot, … In this city there are estimated to be ninety thousand men fit to bear arms.”
Here, now, was a war machine, able to hold its own and support trade.
In the 14th and 15th centuries, there were at least six major famines in South India, two of which lasted for a decade each. Anything that provided a reliable water supply that enabled a king to feed his people constituted military and economic power. The Vijayanagara kings had understood this, and set about building.
One particularly meaningful venture was the Kamalapuram lake. Likely built in the early 1400s, it captured rainwater and was fed river water via a canal. It was one of many such water bodies that fed armies, citizenry, crops and the royal enclosure.
Domingo Paes, a Portuguese visitor circa 1520, speaks of the lake in his Chronicle of the Kings of Bisnaga (the region was referred to among Europeans as Bizenegalia / Bisnaga): “Inside the walls, there are lakes fed by springs and channels and rice fields and mango orchards… I climbed a hill whence I could see a great part of it…What I saw from thence seemed to me as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight; there are many groves of trees within it, in the gardens of the houses, and many conduits of water which flow into the midst of it, and in places there are lakes and the king has close to his palace a palm-grove and other rich-bearing fruit-trees.”
Krishna Deva Raya, the best-known ruler of the Vijayanagara Empire, vastly expanded the irrigation infrastructure. A stone channel leveraging a 20-ft height difference between the lake and the royal enclosure delivered water to a large tank, bigger than an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Given the positioning of its twin outlets, Davison-Jenkins postulates that the tank was used to settle silt, thus providing clear water for the royal enclosure.
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There is a stark beauty to what remains of the giant aqueduct, shaped by ingenuity and geography, and driven by ambition and will. Both ends broken, it lies abandoned, far away from the most visited parts of Vijayanagara.
Here, in the royal enclosure, the frivolity of the Queen’s Bath disguises the serious intent of arousing the king’s desire. The women “bathe daily in many tanks. The king goes to see them bathing, and she who pleases him most is asked to come to his chamber,” the Portuguese traveller Duarte Barbosa wrote in 1510.
Elsewhere, a stunning stepwell, different in style and material from its environs, contains marks that suggest it was made elsewhere and reassembled on site, like a giant, medieval Lego set.
Water had gone from protection and sustenance to ostentatious display. Indeed, the skill bought by the wealth wrought by water saw stone made fluid in glorious sculptures that still make stolid granite sing.
There was a macabre side too. When the Kamalapuram tank breached its bunds a few times, the king consulted his oracles, who advised a human sacrifice. Paes writes that 60 people were sacrificed. Bones and an intact skull were found, centuries later, in a chamber beneath the large tank.
Water was life for many, death for a few, and wealth and power for the king.
The wealth eventually drew envious eyes. Within decades of Krishna Deva Raya’s death in 1529, the city was attacked, pillaged, decimated.
And, in time, forgotten. Along with the lesson that climate change has global consequences. Usually unpleasant. And those who understand and prepare, win.
PS: The temple still stands, overlooking a river that has dwindled after it was dammed. The dam has submerged ancient irrigation infrastructure, and other ruins.
(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watershed. She can be reached on tradeoffs@climaction.net)
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