History · Ch 7 — An Imperial Capital: Vijayanagara
The Discovery of Hampi
The Discovery of Hampi
The story of Hampi begins not with its glory, but with its rediscovery. For centuries after the fall of the Vijayanagara empire, its capital lay in ruins, buried under vegetation and the dust of time. It took the work of a British engineer in 1800 to bring these magnificent remains back into the light of history.
The First Survey
The ruins at Hampi were first brought to scholarly attention in 1800 by Colonel Colin Mackenzie, an engineer and antiquarian working for the English East India Company. Mackenzie was not an archaeologist in the modern sense; he was a surveyor and cartographer whose job was to map and understand the territories the Company was coming to control.
Mackenzie prepared the first survey map of the Hampi site. To do this, he relied heavily on local knowledge. Much of his initial information came from the memories of the priests of the Virupaksha temple and the shrine of Pampadevi. These priests were the living custodians of the site's traditions and history, and their oral accounts were crucial for identifying structures and understanding their original functions.
New Tools of Study: Photography and Epigraphy
After Mackenzie's initial survey, the study of Hampi advanced through two key developments in the mid-19th century.
- Photography (from 1856): Photographers began to systematically record the monuments. This was a revolutionary step. For the first time, scholars who could not travel to Hampi could study the detailed architecture, sculptures, and inscriptions from clear images. It made the site accessible to a wider academic audience.
- Epigraphy (from 1836): Epigraphists — scholars who study inscriptions — began collecting the dozens of inscriptions found at Hampi's temples. These stone and copper-plate records were primary sources, containing information about grants, donations, royal orders, and temple administration.
Reconstructing the Past
Historians did not rely on a single source. To reconstruct the history of the city and the Vijayanagara empire, they used a method of cross-referencing. They collated information from:
- The inscriptions collected by epigraphists.
- The accounts of foreign travellers who had visited the empire (such as the Portuguese traders Domingo Paes and Fernão Nuniz).
- Other literature written in the local languages of the region: Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and Sanskrit.
By comparing these different types of evidence, historians could build a more reliable and detailed picture of life in the Vijayanagara capital.
Who was Colin Mackenzie?
Born in 1754, Colin Mackenzie was a famous engineer, surveyor, and cartographer. In 1815, he was appointed the first Surveyor General of India, a post he held until his death in 1821. His work was not purely academic. He collected local histories and surveyed historic sites to better understand India's past, which he believed would make the governance of the colony easier. He wrote that the region "struggled long under the miseries of bad management … before the South came under the benign influence of the British government." Mackenzie believed that by studying Vijayanagara, the East India Company could gain "much useful information on many of these institutions, laws and customs whose influence still prevails among the various Tribes of Natives forming the general mass of the population to this day." This reveals that the early study of India's past was closely tied to the colonial project of understanding and controlling its people.
Colin Mackenzie. Born in 1754, Colin Mackenzie became famous as an engineer, surveyor and cartographer. In 1815 he was appointed the first Surveyor General of India, a post he held till his death in 1821. He embarked on collecting local histories and surveying historic sites in order to better understand India's past and make governance of the colony easier. He wrote that the region "struggled long under the miseries of bad management … before the South came under the benign influence of the British government", and believed that by studying Vijayanagara the East India Company could gain "much useful information on many of these institutions, laws and customs whose influence still prevails among the various Tribes of Natives … to this day".
The photograph in Figure 7.1 shows a section of the enormous stone wall that once enclosed the city of Vijayanagara. What strikes you first is the sheer scale: the wall is built from massive, irregularly shaped boulders, stacked without any mortar. This is dry-stone masonry, a technique that relies entirely on the weight and interlocking of the stones for stability. The wall stretches across the landscape, following the natural contours of the rocky terrain. In the foreground, you can see the base of the wall, where the largest boulders are placed, and as your eye moves upward, the stones get slightly smaller but remain formidable. The wall is not a single straight line; it curves and bends, adapting to the hills and valleys around Hampi.
This wall was not just a decorative boundary. It was a defensive fortification that ringed not only the core urban area but also the agricultural hinterland and the surrounding hills. The fact that it was built without mortar tells you something important about Vijayanagara’s military engineering: it was designed to be earthquake-resistant and incredibly durable. The gaps between the stones allowed for drainage and also made it difficult for enemy forces to scale or breach the wall using conventional siege tactics. The photograph captures the wall in a state of partial ruin — some sections have collapsed, and vegetation has grown over parts of it — but the original line of the fortification is still clearly visible.
What the figure teaches you is that Vijayanagara was a heavily fortified city, not an open, unprotected settlement. The wall’s presence implies a constant concern for security, especially given the empire’s frequent conflicts with the Deccan Sultanates. It also shows the scale of labour and organisation required: quarrying, transporting, and lifting these enormous stones without modern machinery was a massive undertaking. The wall is a physical reminder of the empire’s wealth, its ability to mobilise thousands of workers, and its sophisticated understanding of defensive architecture. When you look at this photograph, you are seeing the literal boundary that defined the imperial capital — a line between the ordered world of the city and the uncertain world beyond.