35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

228
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
trade. When the empire finally collapsed in 1565, the prosperity
and influence of Portugal’s base in Goa declined with it, never again
to achieve the heights it had before the middle of the sixteenth
century. Abdur Razzak, a Persian envoy writing a century earlier,
informs us that then the king of Vijayanagar reigned as absolute
ruler of the South, from the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal, and
from the Deccan down to the Indian Ocean: ‘from the frontier of
Serendib [now Sri Lanka],’ he adds, ‘His troops amount in number
to 1,100,000.’ Even as far back as 1378, in the opinion of Firishta, ‘in
power wealth and extent of land’ the raja of Vijayanagar appeared to
be vastly superior to his contemporary, the Muslim Bahmani Sultan,
who ruled the Deccan. History is written by the victors, and Islamic
historians have played down the two and a half centuries of
Vijayanagar military humiliation the Moghul invaders suffered –
in the same way that the 1857 War of Independence was called the
Indian Mutiny by British imperialists.
When I finally visited the Hampi ruins of the City of Victory
nearly fifteen years later, I came across Portuguese chronicles
describing the forgotten empire in detail. In 1977 even those whose
ancestors had once been part of it knew only the most cursory facts.
I inquired in Cuddapah – little more than fifty miles south-east of
what remained of Vijayanagar – about the Venkatagiri bus, only to
learn that there was no bus to Venkatagirì. In fact, it seemed there
was no transport of any kind to take a traveller there. Looking at the
address scrawled on a card the rajkumar had given me, I began to
wonder if his palace was in Nellore District or a district called Vellore.
Both existed, but Vellore was a hundred miles southeast of Nellore,
and Cuddapah, thirty odd miles from Nellore, was presumably in
that district.
Eventually I gleaned that I was some twenty miles north-east of
Venkatagiri, the bus having been the wrong one, or there being no
other possible route to take. Used to such vagaries by now, I asked
more forcefully how a traveller who really wanted to reach
Venkatagiri, who absolutely insisted, might achieve this. People
twirled upturned palms with outstretched fingers in a typically
South Indian gesture of hopelessness. I could have been asking