History · Ch 7 — An Imperial Capital: Vijayanagara
Plotting Palaces, Temples and Bazaars
Plotting Palaces, Temples and Bazaars
The first step in studying Vijayanagara was not simply reading old texts — it was a massive, painstaking physical survey of the site itself. After the initial surveys by Colin Mackenzie in the early 1800s, information was pieced together from travellers’ accounts and inscriptions. Through the twentieth century, the site was preserved by the Archaeological Survey of India and the Karnataka Department of Archaeology and Museums. In 1976, Hampi was recognised as a site of national importance. Then, in the early 1980s, an important project was launched to document the material remains at Vijayanagara in detail, through extensive and intensive surveys using a variety of recording techniques. Over nearly twenty years, dozens of scholars from all over the world worked to compile and preserve this information.
The Mapping Exercise
One part of this enormous exercise — mapping — shows how detailed the work was. The first step was to divide the entire area into a set of 25 squares, each designated by a letter of the alphabet. Then, each of those squares was subdivided into a set of even smaller squares. But this was not all: each of these smaller squares was further subdivided into yet smaller units. These detailed surveys have been extremely painstaking, and have recovered and documented traces of thousands of structures — from tiny shrines and residences to elaborate temples. They have also led to the recovery of traces of roads, paths, bazaars, and so on. The latter have been located through finds of pillar bases and platforms — all that remain of thriving markets.
The maps in the textbook (Fig. 7.27, 7.28, 7.29, 7.30) show this grid system. For example, Square N of Fig. 7.27 is shown in detail in Fig. 7.28, and Square NM of Fig. 7.28 is shown in Fig. 7.29. The plan of a temple in Fig. 7.29 is given in Fig. 7.30.
What Has Been Lost
It is worth remembering something that John M. Fritz, George Michell and M.S. Nagaraja Rao, who worked for years at the site, wrote: “In our study of these monuments of Vijayanagara we have to imagine a whole series of vanished wooden elements – columns, brackets, beams, ceilings, overhanging eaves, and towers – decorated with plaster and painted, perhaps brightly.” Although wooden structures are lost, and only stone structures survive, the descriptions left by travellers allow us to reconstruct some aspects of the vibrant life of the times.
The Bazaar: A Traveller’s View
The Portuguese traveller Paes gives a vivid description of the bazaar:
Going forward, you have a broad and beautiful street … In this street live many merchants, and there you will find all sorts of rubies, and diamonds, and emeralds, and pearls, and seed-pearls, and cloths, and every other sort of thing there is on earth and that you may wish to buy. Then you have there every evening a fair where they sell many common horses and nags, and also many citrons, and limes, and oranges, and grapes, and every other kind of garden stuff, and wood; you have all in this street.
More generally, Paes described the city as being “the best-provided city in the world” with the markets “stocked with provisions such as rice, wheat, grains, India corn and a certain amount of barley and beans, moong, pulses and horse-gram” — all of which were cheaply and abundantly available. …
Source 4 — The bazaar. Paes gives a vivid description of the bazaar:
Going forward, you have a broad and beautiful street … In this street live many merchants, and there you will find all sorts of rubies, and diamonds, and emeralds, and pearls, and seed-pearls, and cloths, and every other sort of thing there is on earth … Then you have there every evening a fair where they sell many common horses and nags, and also many citrons, and limes, and oranges, and grapes, and every other kind of garden stuff, and wood; you have all in this street.
Paes called the city "the best-provided city in the world", and Fernao Nuniz described its markets as "overflowing with abundance of fruits, grapes and oranges, limes, pomegranates, jackfruit and mangoes and all very cheap". …
Figure 7.26 is a photograph of a towering gopuram (the monumental, ornate gateway tower typical of South Indian temples) that was built by the nayakas of Madurai. The nayakas were military governors who, after the decline of the Vijayanagara Empire, became independent rulers in the Madurai region. They continued and elaborated the temple-building traditions that had flourished under the Vijayanagara rulers.
The photograph shows a single, tall gopuram rising above a flat landscape. Its surface is densely covered with hundreds of stucco figures — gods, goddesses, mythical creatures, and decorative motifs — stacked in horizontal bands. This is a hallmark of late Vijayanagara and post-Vijayanagara temple architecture: the gopuram becomes the dominant visual element, far taller and more ornate than the main shrine inside the temple complex.
What this figure teaches is that the architectural style of Vijayanagara did not end with the empire's fall. The nayakas of Madurai, who were originally Vijayanagara officers, adopted and amplified the empire's temple-building conventions. They built gopurams that were even larger and more elaborately sculpted than those of the imperial period. So the photograph is evidence of the continuity and transformation of Vijayanagara traditions in the centuries after the empire's collapse. …
Figure 7.27 is the final product of the massive mapping project described in the text. It is a detailed survey map of the entire Vijayanagara site, produced from the 1980s documentation effort. The map shows the whole area divided into a grid of 25 large squares, each labelled with a letter of the alphabet (A through Z, but one letter is missing — the textbook asks which one). Each of these lettered squares is further subdivided into smaller squares, and those are subdivided again into even smaller units. This nested grid system allowed scholars to precisely locate and record thousands of individual structures across the sprawling site.
The map itself is not a simple outline — it is dense with information. Within each square, you can see the outlines of temples, shrines, residences, and other buildings, drawn to scale. Roads, paths, and bazaar areas are traced as lines and shaded zones. The map also includes a scale bar, which the textbook asks you to use to measure the length of one small square. The scale is given in metres (or possibly feet, depending on the original), and you can calculate the actual ground distance represented by each grid unit.
What this map teaches is the sheer scale and systematic nature of the archaeological work at Hampi. It shows that the site was not just a collection of famous monuments but a vast, interconnected urban landscape. The grid system allowed researchers to document everything — from the grandest temple complex to the smallest residential hut — and to understand how streets, markets, and water channels linked them. The map also reveals the layout of the bazaars mentioned by travellers like Paes and Nuniz: long, straight streets lined with pillar bases and platforms, all that remains of the wooden shops and stalls that once sold everything from rubies to horse-gram. …
Figure 7.28 is a close-up of one of the 25 lettered squares — square N — from the larger survey map of the Vijayanagara site (Figure 7.27). The textbook explains that the entire site was first divided into 25 large squares, each labelled with a letter of the alphabet. Then each of those squares was subdivided into smaller squares, and those were further subdivided into even smaller units. Figure 7.28 shows exactly this: square N, broken down into a grid of smaller squares, each of which is itself subdivided into tiny units.
What you see in the figure is a dense, systematic grid. The larger square (N) is divided into perhaps 4 or 6 smaller squares along each side, and within each of those, there are even finer subdivisions. The purpose of this layered grid was to allow surveyors to record the location of every structure — no matter how small — with precision. The figure does not show any specific temple, palace, or bazaar; it is a purely cartographic tool. The only labels are the letter "N" (identifying the parent square) and the grid lines that mark the subdivisions. There are no arrows, no panels, no relationships drawn between features — just the grid itself. …
Figure 7.29 is a close-up of one of the smallest survey squares from the Vijayanagara mapping project. The entire site was first divided into 25 large squares, each labelled with a letter (A to Z, skipping one). One of those squares, labelled N, was then subdivided into smaller squares, each given a two-letter code — and NM is one of those tiny subdivisions. At this scale, individual structures become visible.
The square NM contains the plan of a temple complex. You can see the outline of the outer walls, which enclose the entire sacred area. Inside, the central shrine (the garbhagriha) is clearly marked — it is the innermost, most compact rectangle. Leading up to it are halls and colonnades (covered pillared walkways). At the front of the complex, on the outer wall, there is a gopuram — the monumental entrance tower typical of South Indian temple architecture. Traces of paths or processional routes are also visible, connecting the gopuram to the halls and finally to the central shrine.
The figure teaches two important things about the Vijayanagara mapping project. First, it shows the extraordinary level of detail the surveyors achieved: they did not stop at mapping entire squares or even neighbourhoods — they zoomed in until they could record the footprint of a single temple, including its walls, pillars, and pathways. Second, it demonstrates how the survey was organised hierarchically: the whole site → 25 lettered squares → smaller two-letter squares → individual structures. This systematic method allowed scholars to document thousands of structures — from tiny shrines to elaborate temples — and to recover traces of roads, bazaars, and other features that had long vanished above ground. …
Figure 7.30 is a ground plan of the temple visible in the preceding photograph (Fig. 7.29). It was produced as part of the detailed mapping project that divided the Vijayanagara site into a grid of squares labelled with letters of the alphabet. The plan shows the layout of a stone temple recovered through survey, with its key architectural features drawn to scale.
The plan includes the following labelled elements:
- Outer walls – the thick boundary lines that enclose the temple complex.
- Gopuram – the entrance gateway, typically a tall tower, shown at the outer edge of the plan.
- Halls – covered pillared spaces (mandapas) that lie between the entrance and the inner shrine.
- Colonnades – rows of pillars that line paths or corridors within the temple.
- Central shrine – the innermost sanctum (garbhagriha), usually the smallest and most sacred chamber, located at the heart of the plan.
The plan also shows traces of paths leading from the outer entrance toward the central shrine. To reach the central shrine from the outer entrance, a visitor would pass through the gopuram, then through one or more halls and colonnades, finally arriving at the central shrine. …