Vijaynagar

This happened en route to Vijaynagar. The time: sometime during my last semester at the institute. Didi was in town. So was her entire lab. In fact, it seemed like all the theoretical physics people I knew from Calcutta were all over the department. So al those random and not so random people from my batch onwards and maybe upto three years my senior were around. There was this school on Statmech, you see, at the department. Now what do we ‘umble spectroscopists have to do with things like renormalization group theory? Answer: nothing. However, all those theorists do, and having an elder sister amongst them makes things interesting.


So someone in the Calcutta gang decided to organize a trip to Vijaynagar. The last trip that I had been on with this gang, or its equivalent about a year ago was during StatPhys 22 when I ditched a lab meeting to go to Nandi Hills and was duly punished by the rain gods for doing so (somewhere in my blog…). So, Vijaynagar. I may have talked about this place earlier in my blog. But just in case I haven’t please bear with me for a couple of sentences.

1336. The small states of the South like Warangal unified under the banner of the principality of Anegundi. The relentless Muslim onslaught was arrested and brought to a complete halt by the newly founded city-state of Vijaynagar (literally, ‘city of victory’). At its peak, Vijaynagar ruled the vast majority of South India, collected levies from perhaps two hundred ports. It started as the rallying point and banner of Hindu resistance and became an empire so powerful and rich as had never been seen.

In 1556, the five Muslim kingdoms of the south formed a grand alliance and marched against Vijaynagar. These kingdoms were Ahmednagar, Berar, Bijapur, Bidar and Golconda. They faced the armies of Vijaynagar near the banks of the Krishna, in what is modern Karnataka. Descriptions of the battle that remain are inevitably from the perspective of the victors. The king of Vijaynagar, Rama Raya was captured and beheaded. His army was routed. The nobles of Vijaynagar fled. For three days, the citizens of Vijaynagar waited, sure that the invaders could be bought off with gifts from the treasury. Then the Muslim armies arrived. The sacking that ensued was again one, the likes of which had scarcely been seen before. The armies carried out their task of utter destruction with such hideous precision that when they were ‘finished’, all that remained of the greatest civilization of South India were pathetic ruins.

The city was never resettled, never repopulated. Ironically, the Dakhan Sultanates, which had defeated Vijaynagar fell to the Mughal Empire in a few short generations.

Oops, that was more than a couple of sentences.. I will probably have to finish this one later.

Ok, later is now. Now is a week or so after I started writing this blog. The reason that I started writing this blog was not quite Vijaynagar, more like a song. To be specific, ‘Aadorer Nouko’ by ‘Chandrabindoo’. This was part of the album that someone on the trip played ad-nauseum on the trip. So much so, that the song wrote itself in my head. I was listening to the song some afternoon, and suddenly it all came back in a rush.

The Sumo was crowded and were packed like tinned fish. And we had this bloke singing. There are people who cannot sing, those who really should be prevented from making a nuisance of themselves and then there are those for whom singing should be made a capital punishment. And I was nodding off, each time, being woken up by this completely unsonorous bastard howling in my ear. And he was Didi’s batchmate, so by virtue of sheer seniority, I could not tell him to shut up. The others seemed content to just roll their eyes and not do anything else. I decided to take matters into my own hands. When we stopped for a midnight snack at a Dhaba a couple of hundred kilometers from Bangalore, I took this guy aside. I made sure that Didi was not in earshot. And then I told him, in all absolute seriousness that any further singing would have me shoving my unwashed socks down his throat. I don’t know what got to him, the threat or the fact that a junior was doing the threatening. Well, he stopped singing.


We got to Vijaynagar in the wee hours, had enuf time for a brief nap and then went prowling the ruins. The first day, we stayed near the living temples in and around the Hampi bazaar. The last time I had been here was with Toton and her folks. That trip, I had made a rather interesting observation: while lining up for ‘Charanamrito’ from one of the temples, I noted that the ‘ghee’ for lighting the lamps was kept in a pint sized bottle of Old Monk rum! This time, unfortunately, I saw no such thing. In one of the temples, Dipanjan making good use of the optical zoom on his digicam found something interesting. Tucked away amongst the sculptures on the huge walls, some twenty feet up, almost hidden between two figures of chariots and elephants, was s sculpture depicting a man and a VERY well endowed woman, well, doing the good job. This was a distinctly Khajuraho thing. Vijaynagar is not at all known for such sculptures/paintings.

The next day was spent prowling all over the ruins, getting lost amidst the rocks about fifty times. Each. And of course, doing the leetil boat trip. These were the same kind of round bottomed boats which I had encountered at Hogenakkal. Apparently these are quite the rage in South India. So, boats, a few wild scares… put five theoretical physicists in a boat and they actually calculate the centre of mass for optimal balance!!! I have seen it done, people!!

The trip home was somewhat anticlimactic. Music, thankfully from the car stereo and not the passionately unmusical idiot of dubious parentage. Fun.