History · Ch 7 — An Imperial Capital: Vijayanagara
The urban core
The urban core
The urban core of Vijayanagara was the heart of the city, but what we know about it comes mostly from indirect evidence. Unlike the grand temples and royal structures, the houses of ordinary people have not survived. This forces historians and archaeologists to rely on other clues — scattered objects, foreign accounts, and the layout of surviving buildings — to reconstruct what life was like here.
What the archaeology tells us
Moving along the roads that lead into the urban core, archaeologists have found very little direct evidence of ordinary houses. The structures of common people were built of perishable materials like thatch and wood, and have simply decayed over time.
However, some areas have yielded fine Chinese porcelain, especially in the north-eastern corner of the urban core. This suggests that rich traders lived in those neighbourhoods — only wealthy merchants could afford imported Chinese ceramics.
This north-eastern area was also the Muslim residential quarter. Tombs and mosques are located here, and they have a distinctive feature: their architecture closely resembles the mandapas (pillared halls) found in the temples of Hampi. This is a clear example of the blending of architectural styles in Vijayanagara — Islamic structures borrowing forms from Hindu temple architecture, and vice versa.
What a Portuguese traveller saw
The sixteenth-century Portuguese traveller Barbosa described the houses of ordinary people, which have since disappeared. He wrote:
“The other houses of the people are thatched, but nonetheless well built and arranged according to occupations, in long streets with many open places.”
This tells us two important things:
- Houses were thatched, not built of stone or brick — which explains why they did not survive.
- The city was organised by occupation. People of the same trade lived together in long streets, with open spaces (perhaps market squares or gathering areas) interspersed.
Shrines, cults, and water supply …
Figure 7.8 shows a photograph of an excavated stone pavement — a section of what was once a road in the heart of Vijayanagara’s urban core. The image captures a neatly laid surface of large, flat stone slabs, fitted closely together to form a durable street. This is not a grand ceremonial avenue or a temple pathway; it is a practical, everyday road, worn by centuries of foot traffic and cart wheels.
What makes this photograph significant is what it represents for archaeologists. Because the ordinary houses of Vijayanagara were built of perishable materials like thatch and wood, they have almost entirely vanished. The stone-paved roads, however, survived underground. By carefully tracing these pavements across the site, archaeologists have been able to reconstruct the city’s street network — a map of how people moved through the urban core. The excavated pavement in Figure 7.8 is a direct, physical clue to that lost layout. …
Figure 7.9 shows a collection of broken pieces — shards — of Chinese porcelain. These are not whole pots or plates; they are small, glazed fragments, often blue-and-white, that were dug up by archaeologists in the north-eastern part of Hampi's urban core. The caption tells you exactly what they are: "Shards of Chinese porcelain."
The image itself is a straightforward archaeological photograph. There are no labels, arrows, or diagrams on the shards. What matters is what the shards mean in context. The textbook explains that these fragments were found in a specific area — the north-eastern corner of the urban core — and that this same area also contains tombs and mosques. Archaeologists therefore connect the porcelain to the presence of rich traders, and they identify this quarter as the Muslim residential area of Vijayanagara. …
Figure 7.10 is a photograph of a mosque located in the Muslim residential quarter of Vijayanagara’s urban core. The image shows a building whose overall form — a rectangular prayer hall with a flat roof supported by rows of pillars — closely resembles the mandapas (pillared halls) found in the city’s Hindu temples. The mosque does not have a typical dome or minaret; instead, its pillars are carved in the same local granite style used for temple mandapas, with decorative brackets and corbels. The caption draws attention to this architectural borrowing: the mosque’s builders used the same construction techniques and decorative vocabulary that were common across the city, regardless of religion.
What the figure teaches is that Vijayanagara’s architecture was not rigidly divided by faith. The Muslim quarter, with its tombs and mosques, was part of the same urban fabric as the temple complexes. The shared building style — flat roofs, pillared halls, granite masonry — shows that craftsmen and patrons from different communities worked within a common visual language. This is a concrete example of the cultural synthesis that the chapter discusses: the rulers of Vijayanagara adopted elements of Indo-Islamic architecture (like arches and domes in some royal structures), but here we see the reverse — a mosque built using the local temple idiom.
The photograph does not show any labels, arrows, or annotations. It is simply a direct shot of the mosque’s exterior, likely taken from a courtyard or street level, so that the resemblance to a temple mandapa is immediately visible. The caption is the only textual clue. …