Introduction
Historians have long struggled with the task of interpreting narratives that although written in the past tense are yet hard, if not impossible to reconcile with each other or indeed, the modern historical sense of there having been a singular past. The usual response has been to ‘mine’ them for historical knowledge as ‘such consciousness is not always visible and has to be prised from sources which tend to conceal it’.Footnote 2 Alternatively, we can treat historical texts as literary ones and allow them all to benefit from the suspension of disbelief available to the literary understanding. Thus Hayden White proposed in 1966Footnote 3 to treat historical explanation as something that ‘can be judged solely in terms of the richness of the metaphors which govern its sequence of articulation’ because, after all, ‘there is no such thing as a single correct view of any object’.Footnote 4
Gabrielle Spiegel, an important scholar of pre-modern narrative has sought a middle ground between these opposed positions arguing that the ‘alternative between seeing language as either perfectly transparent or completely opaque is simply too rigidly framed’. She then pointed out a vital difference between the way that historians and literary scholars needed to approach texts.
But historical contexts do not exist in themselves; they must be defined, and in that sense constructed, by the historian before the interpretive work of producing meaning, of interpreting the past, can begin. . . .Footnote 5
This can be done by seeking to answer the questions ‘when?’ and ‘why?’ Once this is achieved, there is an immense deepening of both our historical and literary understanding as is, for example, achieved by Sheldon Pollock when he draws out the historical research embodied in Chalukya inscriptions that even such an accomplished scholar as Nilakanta Shastri had rejected as ‘of no value for factual history’.Footnote 6 The positive processes by which memories have been generated have often been discussed–the accompanying processes of forgetting less so. But, as Prachi Deshpande recently pointed out, ‘memory as a category of cultural history is more useful if employed to investigate the many contexts within which some representations become part of popular memory and others do not’.Footnote 7 This paper is concerned with those that do not achieve perpetuation. Finally, it shows how knowledge could be irrevocably lost as a consequence of that social choice.
In his pathbreaking Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past, Eviatar Zerubavel points out, ‘not everything that happens is preserved in our memory, as many past events are actually cast into oblivion. Acknowledgedly, historical events still form only that small part that we have come to preserve as public memory’. Nor is the creation of this mnemonic archive a purely random process. Zerubavel shows also that groups consolidate themselves around the memories of a common past and that ‘acquiring a group's memories and thereby identifying with its collective past is part of the process of acquiring any social identity. . ..’Footnote 8 This, of course, becomes especially important when the bearers of one social identity supplant those of another. Over a half-century ago, Maurice Halbwachs analysed how ‘Christian collective memory could annex a part of the Jewish collective memory by appropriating part of the latter's local remembrance while at the same time transforming its entire perspective of historical space’.Footnote 9
Both these scholars were concerned with situations in which the boundaries of the relevant community were clearly defined. Zerubavel's units of analysis are mainly nation-states while the processes that Halbwachs' essay addressed occurred when the Christian church had effectively permeated the political structures of late Imperial Rome. Communities and identities in the South Asian setting are both more numerous and more fluid. This, in part, is what makes their study especially interesting. Twenty years ago, V. N. Rao made a major breakthrough in his consideration of the perceived veridical status of Telugu oral epics—narratives of a type that often cross to and through written text. Rao found that “[c]ommunities who tend to adopt a narrative as ‘their story’ give it a historical status, whereas communities who do not, regard it as fiction. . . . The mere presence of identifiable historical elements, therefore, does not cause a narrative to be accepted as a ‘true story’; it must also represent a world-view for a caste or a social group.”Footnote 10 Equally, we may see narrative texts as Sanjay Subrahmanyam proposed recently as being analysable ‘in relation to the process[es] of state-building’.Footnote 11 So if individual autobiographic memory is teleologically structured to a later context, so is the collective memory that helps constitute the community that transmits it.Footnote 12 But historical memory is created both by memory and forgetting—the omission of events that ‘would fit awkwardly, even seriously inconvenience, the neatly woven pattern’.Footnote 13 Indeed as Renan argued in 1882, forgetting—and even historical errors—were essential for the creation of a national consciousness, so much so that ‘advances in historical research constitute a hazard for the nation’.Footnote 14 More recently, Indrani Chatterjee has studied the Mizo re-appropriation of an 1872 attack on an encroaching tea plantation as the providential event that began the Christianization of the Mizos and their own constitution as a community, to the exclusion of other elements of the story.Footnote 15 The cost of such exclusion can be, as I will show later in this article, that memories once lost may become irrecoverable and be re-created in unrecognizable form. I will, therefore, essay to study the loss and re-invention of historical memory in the Marathi-speaking tradition.
Maratha power, as represented by the Bhosle dynasty, rose within the frame of the Sultanates of south India. It then came to an accommodation with the Mughal empire whose effective control it challenged on a sub-continental scale by the mid-eighteenth century. I will show how memory was constructed around the project of inheriting the legitimacy and power of that Islamicate empire. Vijayanagara was slighted. I will also lay out my understanding of why this was so. So, this paper will seek to establish what the Marathas remembered of Vijayanagara and then contextualize the nature of that memory in terms of the identity and world-view of the community that generated and transmitted it. It will try to establish that Vijayanagara had a peripheral place in their vision of the past through to the end of the nineteenth century before its re-discovery in the early twentieth century.
The great empire of Vijayanagara dominated the Southern half of peninsular India for over two centuries. Legends of about it bulked large in popular and scholarly memory for centuries after, leading to the careful construction of spurious narratives of its time, such as the Rayavacakamu so brilliantly analysed by Phillip Wagoner.Footnote 16 Wagoner convincingly shows that the far-away rulers of Madura were still enthralled by Vijayanagara fifty years after its fall and an elaborate narrative was generated to link them to that empire. But the memory of Vijayanagara was not merely current among courtly literati. It also entered folk memory and crops up in many of the village histories and local histories collected for Mackenzie and excerpted in the Sources of Vijayanagar History Footnote 17 and Further Sources of Vijayanagar History. So, for example, when the barbers of Utukuru in the district of Pottapinadu had to justify their tax exemption (to the East India Company?) they explained that:
Kondoju, the barber gave Ramaraja such a clean and comfortable shave at Vijayanagara that he won the royal approbation. Ramaraja granted him graciously a charter as mark of his approbation of Kondoju's workmanship. The pannu and kanike which the barbers had to pay . . . were made sarvamanya [tax-exempt]. . .Footnote 18
Vijayanagara was clearly a name to conjure within the lands south of the Tungabhadra.
This is in sharp contrast with Maratha memories of the same regime. They were scanty despite the fact that the Bhosle regime was to campaign in and govern large parts of the former Vijayanagara lands. Shahaji Bhosle, father of the Chatrapati Shivaji, was a prominent Maratha noble who had risen to the position of regent to the infant sultan of Ahmednagar in the last days before the kingdom was absorbed into the Mughal empire. In 1637, he was compelled by the joint pressure of the Mughals and the Adilshahi sultanate to accept the status of an Adilshahi jagirdar. He spent the last decades of his life in central Karnataka warring with local chiefs as well as Qutbshahi commanders.Footnote 19 If his panegyrist Jayaram Pindye is to be believed, one of those defeated by him was the Rayalu of Vidyanair (Vidyanagara—sixteenth century synonym of Vijayanagara). The poet claims that the Chatri-jata (warrior caste) of Vidyanair lost all shame and fled abandoning their strongholds.Footnote 20 By the early eighteenth century, Maratha rulers were established in or seeking to conquer a significant part of the former territory of that empire. A Bhosle dynasty ruled from the ancient city of Thanjavur, and the Chatrapati's warlords were striving to build appanages for themselves from the Krishna to Ramnad. In this they were reviving the example of Shahaji Bhosle who was forced out his ancestral lands in Ahmednagar sultanate by a pact between the Mughals and the Adilshahi sultans, and agreed to serve the latter as a warlord in the ruins of the former Vijayanagara empire. There can be little doubt that many of the same administrator Brahman families served both the Nayaka successors of Vijayanagara and their Maratha competitors (not to mention other local rulers).
But in contrast to the Telugu and Kannada countries, Maratha historical memory was largely impervious to the appeal of Vijayanagara as a repository of ancestral glory. Indeed, while Jayarama Pindye had at least been aware of the legend linking Vidyaranya with the founding of VijayanagaraFootnote 21 —hence his adoption of Vidyanagara as its name—the later generations of Marathi speakers even forgot that famous name and referred to the kingdom of ‘Anegondi’. Anegondi or Anigondi is still an extant town on the northern bank Tungabhadra, about five kilometre from the ruined city itself. A tradition reported by Nuniz in the early 16th century was that Deva Raya (Harihara?) lived in the fort there before moving up the river to found Vijayanagara. Etymologically meaning the ‘elephant pit’ or ‘elephant valley’, Anegondi was evidently a suburb of the great city in the days of its prosperity. In the eighteenth century, it was the seat of a local Rayalu or king claiming descent from the Aravidu dynasty of Vijayanagara.Footnote 22 This ruler was recognized as the heir to Vijayanagara in Maratha tradition, but few concrete memories of that empire survived.
This is evidenced in the following entries in Molesworth's early (1831, 1857) Dictionary of the Marathi language. Molesworth lived and worked in western India for several decades and was assisted by seven local panditas as well as John and Thomas Candy and the well-known orientalist John Wilson. The compilers began by employing Brahmans to collect words and phrases ‘in several quarters of the Maratha territory’. These were then scrutinized by a group of seven or eight other Brahmans and finally checked by other Indian scholars sitting with either Molesworth or one of the Candy brothers.Footnote 23 The entry for Anegondi in it is, therefore, a good indication of the state of Marathi historical memory in the early nineteenth century.
Anagondi a[djective] (From the name of a town of which, as the legend runs, the king or Raja used to call himself sarvabhauma or sovereign paramount, and divert himself with entering the revenues of the whole earth on the credit side of his ledger, expending them off again on the debit side.) Applied variously to as Anagondi karkhana-karbhar-kharch-baksis-bolnem & c. Disorderly business of proceedings; vast and foolish expenditures; lavish largesses or presents; wild extravagant speech & c. 2 A[nagondi]ce rajya n[oun] A name for any very confused and disorderly business or proceeding. A[nagondi]ca raja m. A term for a soft fellow ready to give whatever is asked from him.
Sic transit gloria mundi!
The decay of memory set in early. This is shown by a probably forged Sanskrit document produced by a learned Brahman family, the Padhyes of Golavalli about 1600 as evidence in a lawsuit. The Sanskrit text claimed to be a judicial verdict from Sake 1285 or 1362–3 and alluded to the rule of a Yadava Ramaraja—obviously an impossible echo of Ramacandradeva of the Yadava dynasty who had died in 1312 as a vassal of the Khalji sultans of Delhi. But the Marathi verdict rendered in 1600 seems to view it as a document originating from the much more recent Ramaraja of Vidyanagara or the Aliya Rama Raju, killed in 1565!Footnote 24 The Sardesai family who contested the Padhyes' claim also invoked the authority of Vidyanagara (Vijayanagara) but claimed their original grant came from its fourteenth-century ruler Vijayanagara ruler, Bukkanna who is said to have ruled the whole of south India north up to the Narmada river.Footnote 25 It is striking that both these literati lineages had little actual knowledge of the history and chronology of the empire.
These fading memories baffled the rare scholars who sought for some memory of that regime. This is evident in a compilation of Marathi verses in a manuscript belonging to Satipa Kondkar, a resident of Loni in Kadevala district. The manuscript was copied in 1738–9. It briefly narrates the story of Vidyanagara being founded under the patronage of Vidyaranya; mentions some of the successive rulers; and states that Sadasiva, son of Acyuta, moved the capital from Vidyanagara to Anagondi. His son was Rama, unskilled in war and given to dissipation. Dandu the Turk lord was stupid by nature and could not learn Kannada. He knew that the emperor used to go on fixed days to bathe in the Krishna-tirtha at Rakshat-gadhi (sic). He gathered three others and killed the Rau with their swords. The army had no leader and was overcome by the Adal, Kutubaraya and Nizamashaha in 1354 [1431–2] paradhavi abda, on the fifth day in the bright half of Magha. But the author then adds ‘the original manuscript is old and damaged; it does not match (other) evidence’. He then provides several Sanskrit chronograms and Marathi verses—presumably from other manuscripts, which give the following alternative dates:
Saka 1414 [1491–2] paradhavi samvatsara Magha bright half 5th day, Friday
Saka 1407 [1484–5] parabhava samvatsara magha bright half 5th day, Friday
Saka 1467 [1554–45] parabhava samvatsara Magha bright half 5th day, Friday
All of these are wrong and it is evident that the event was remembered only by its astrological conjunction, that is, by the month, day and year of the sixty-year cycle.Footnote 26 The present text represents a later attempt to work out the exact year. But the author evidently found few resources in Marathi or Sanskrit beyond a simple dynastic list and a tale of Muslim trickery. Likewise, in the later eighteenth century, the Marathi narrative of the rise of the Bhosles—the Shivadigvijaya—stated that Ramaraja left for the south, after nominating a (nameless) merchant (vaishya) to rule in his place. Six Yavana (Muslim) youths who had been raised by Ramaraja then decided to usurp the empire—they imprisoned the merchant and divided the empire among themselves, founding kingdoms at Anagondi, Bijapur, Bhaganagar (Hyderabad) Daulatabad, Amdabad (in Gujarat?) and Nagpur.Footnote 27 In this version, even the ruler of Anagondi was now classed as a Muslim usurper! The author clearly believed that the six Subahs, or governorships of the Dakhan in late Mughal times represented the original six parts into which the empire was divided but did not have an accurate list of these as they had existed under Aurangzeb. So he extemporized by inserting the names of prominent cities of his own time.
A similar disregard was shown by the successors of Vijayanagara even in lands that had been important parts of that empire. In 1803, the last Bhosle Maratha ruler of Thanjavur had his personal secretary Baburaya compose a long Marathi family history that was then inscribed on the wall of the Brihadishvara temple in that city where Vijayanagara-era frescoes still survive.Footnote 28 Yet even this southern ruler with a multilingual court slighted Vijayanagara in his origin myth.Footnote 29 It begins by stating that Bhosle family's original ancestor was the Lord Narayana. In his line was Suryanarayana, then Manu, then the King Iksvaku—and from him many kings renowned through the first three epochs (yuga). In the fourth epoch, kaliyuga, there descended the lord of Maharashtra, king Sambhu. In his line came Sarabharaje who pleased Somaskanda who appeared in a dream and gave him a powerful mantra. With this mantra, he so pleased the (nameless) padshaha (emperor) of the south who bestowed the jahagira of Bidalarhi. The family's rise to prominence then commenced.Footnote 30 Vijayanagara as point of origin—so important for many rulers of the same region—is here spurned in favour of an origin in Maharashtra and consequent affiliation to the anonymous padshaha. This choice was made despite the evident Sanskritization (Hinduization?) of Sharifji (Sarfoji) into Sharabha—in evident denial of the legend that Maloji's sons were named Shahaji and Sharifji after a Muslim pir, Shah Sharif.Footnote 31 In sum, therefore, the Maratha imperium invented little and knew less about their predecessors in the southern peninsula. Vijayanagara as point of origin does appear in an exceptionally contrarian narrative: the anonymous late-eighteenth-century More yanci choti bakhar, glorifying Shivaji's enemy, Chandrarao More of Javli. It is probably a part of this contrarian stance that causes it to state that all the noble Maratha lineages were originally in the service of Krishnadevaraya at Vidyanagara. So also were those who were later to become Sultans—Ibrahim and Ali Yedilshaha and Bahirinizam. Ibrahim (Qutbshaha) was appointed governor of Telangana and, when out hunting on the banks of the Musi river, encountered a hare that attacked his hunting dogs. He then founded Golkunda.Footnote 32 Vijayanagara finds no further mention in this narrative.
But even when we turn to district hereditary officials (variously titled qanungo, deshpande, nadkarni, etc.)—the appointed custodians of popular memory all over the sub-continent—we find that precious little of the great empire had passed into Maratha historical memory. Thus in 1823–4, the officials of Anjanvel subdivision in the southern Konkan were required to compile a detailed memorandum of the past revenue administration of their district. The memorandum shows considerable knowledge of past tax rates and practices and was clearly based on both memory and written records going back several centuries. They certainly had some hazy recollection of the Anagondi raja as being the first ruler of their region. I translate the opening paragraphs of the document they produced.
Administration of taluka Anjanvela Suru san 1214Footnote 33—a true account of the previous kings' government[In the beginning there was] Kanada Ramaraja Chatrapati by caste (jati) Lingayat Vani—in his time there were no fortresses in the taluka. But then one Pawar, Maratha by caste built a small fort in the village of Gudhe, subdivision Valambe and created a province called Gudhe and established a market-town and governed from there. That was about 600 years ago. Under that government much of the land was uncultivated, and there was new settlement. The land tax was not assessed on the basis of area measurement but levied after an annual estimate in agreement with the peasants in accordance with the taka bandi system. In Pawar's time the following small forts existed in the subdivision:
1 Manikdurg in the village of Madki, subdivision Savarde
1 In the village of Sir, subdivision Valambe, a fort named Kasardurg.
2 (total)
Affairs were conducted thus for about 275 years and then came the rule of the Padshahs.
Ali Idalshah and Bahiri Nizyamshah these two brothers killed the Kanada Ramaraja in the camp of Anagondi and seated Ali Idalsha on the throne of Vijyapur san salas [3] tisa [9?] maya [100] Shake 1424 [1501–2 CE] samvatsara Dundubhi [current year should be 1502–3 so this is evidently elapsed year reckoning]
Account of that government (follows)
Ali Idalshah was himself present from Shake 1424 San salas miya to San saman arbain va tisa maya Shake 1469 [1546–7 CE] samvatsara named Kilaka. . ..Footnote 34
As must be evident, little information had been transmitted through the centuries. The dates are wrong and the indeed beyond the simple name “Ramaraja”. It is clear that the authors knew nothing of the great empire beyond its existence at some point in the hazy past. This despite the fact that its rule had extended north to the borders of the Konkani–Marathi speaking Phonda region of Goa where a Marathi inscription of 1412–13 (Sake 1335) recorded the grants of certain incomes to a temple at Bandivada.Footnote 35 This profound indifference was found even among the most learned. It is reflected in an entry in the list of Sanskrit law books known to the Pandits of Pune as prepared by Vamana Sastri Satya ‘and corrected by reference to the Hindoo College and other Brahmuns who attended the distribution of the Dukshuna in 1825’. It lists the ‘Madhwu’, said to have been written by Sayunacharya or Widyaruneswamee [Vidyaranya svami], a Sunyasee Brahmun of Anagoondy about 1000 years ago, and ‘Nundurajakrit’, by Nunduraja of Anagoondy, of the Kshutryu caste.Footnote 36 The reader should know that I have not selected these narratives as against better-informed ones: these are among the very few Marathi historical sources that mention Vijayanagara at all. The deeply learned Datto Vamana Potdar was forced to end his survey of the Marathi sources with an expression of chagrin at the confused and obscure state of their knowledge of Vijayanagara. ‘In today's light this can only be a source of astonishment and regret. . . . It is our duty now to remedy the errors of the past’Footnote 37.
To sum up, then, Maratha power as represented by the Bhosle dynasty rose within the frame of the Sultanates of south India. It then came to an accommodation with the Mughal empire whose effective control it challenged on a subcontinental scale by the mid-eighteenth century. Memory was constructed around the project of inheriting the legitimacy and power of that Islamicate empire. Vijayanagara was slighted. Historical memory of it was lost and proved irrecoverable even when actively sought. This is evident in the scantiness of the information available in a Marathi text produced at the end of the eighteenth century. This was copied into a set of Modi manuscripts bound together and transported to the India Office. There is no author name or colophon to this portion of the text. It is titled simply ‘Anego[n]dici kefiyat’ and occupies five folios in a neat scribal hand, unfortunately written on both sides of the paper. Phillip Wagoner has suggested in a personal communication that it might have been written at the instance of, or by Colin Mackenzie's assistant, Narain Rao who was in the Bellari region in 1806–7. I will present a free translation here:
Kisandevraya (sic) ruled Vijayanagara, and the entire country to the south of the Narmada river was under him. He had an army of many lakhs, and Anegondi was a part of his dominion and a place where animals were stabled. Vijayanagara was densely peopled and thirty lakhs lived there. The King was very religious and—after having risen, bathed and refreshed himself—he used to meet distinguished ascetics and ask each of them of the secret of the magic marble.Footnote 38 Many days passed, lakhs of rupees were expended but the marble could not be produced. Finally, a great ascetic and his disciple came. The emperor entertained them and raised the issue of the marble. The holy man promised to make one for him if given six months and all the equipment that he needed. The king was highly pleased, built a separate house for him, walled it around and visited him regularly for the six months needed to produce it. The magic pebble was prepared in a garden allotted by the king. When it was ready, the ascetic lay down for a nap before the king's visit that evening. His disciple took the marble in his mouth and using its power, flew off to see the world. When the gosavi woke, he found the marble and his disciple both missing and was deeply concerned. The king came in the evening, found that the magic marble had vanished and flew into a rage. He had the gosavi's eyes plucked out. Helpless, the ascetic remained in the garden. Fifteen days later, the disciple returned and the ascetic's eyes were restored by the marble being waved around his head. The gardener told the king that the ascetic he had had blinded had recovered his sight. The king was astonished and came to see for himself. The gosavi cursed him, saying there would never be more than one son born in his lineage and the two ascetics flew away into the sky. ‘And to this day we never have more than one son among our children’.
The king made many more efforts to secure the magic marble but never succeeded. Then Ramdevarayala was born in Kisandevraya's family. He used to be called Ramaraja. He reserved the water in the city tank in the morning hours. At that time, Ali Adalshah, Kutubshahaji and Nijyamshah—who were cousins—were personal attendants of Ramaraja. Except for these three, there was no Muslim raja anywhere near. The king was very fond of these three and trusted them. He made Ali Adalshah steward of the law court,Footnote 39 Nijyamshah steward of the gift menagerie and Kutubshah of the beverages.Footnote 40 They appointed deputies for their tasks and stayed constantly in attendance on the raja. So they became great favourites. Even though the king would not look at any Muslim in the morning, he gave them high appointments with the command of thousands of soldiers.
Then a fakir who had wandered down from Hindustan came to Vijayanagara. He wandered through the whole city and found no Muslim. Tired and thirsty, he went to a lake to drink and dived into it. The watchmen seized him, beat him and brought him to the king. Enraged, the king ordered him beheaded. Then Ali Adalshah and the others stood before the king with their hands bound and pleaded that the fakir was not one of their Muslims but had come from Hindustan. He did not know the rules. Let him be freed on our account. Then the fakir had one hand cut off and was released. The Muslims tended him for a few days and then let him go. He went to Delhi where he told the padshah that if he failed to cut off the Vijayanagara king's head, he was no Muslim but a kufar (sic) [infidel]. Then the emperor prepared for a campaign. This news was transmitted to Vijayanagar by the Raya's envoy. Ramaraja ordered lakhs of soldiers to assemble and hold the fords of the Narmada river. The (Delhi) emperor hearing this was perplexed and began to make enquiries. Then he wrote treasonous letters to Ali Adilshah, Nijyamshah and Kutubshah telling them if they would return to the faith (din) and send Ramaraja's head to him he would gift them the whole of the South. But the king still regarded them as trustworthy.
So it happened. The king had risen at dawn and, having washed himself, was sitting alone when the three went to salute him in the second hour. Adilshah came from behind and cut off his head and sent it off to the emperor. Then they gathered their soldiers and opened fire on the royal camp. The soldiers there then fled. Then they gathered soldiers up to sixty or seventy thousand and subdued the country, making a sort of taluqdari [tax-farming] settlement of taxes. Some chieftains fought them and were subdued, others submitted and received a share of the territory. They shared out the country: Ali Adilshah received Bijyapur kingdom and Kutubashah got Bedar and all its forts. So the three became kings by the favour of chance.
At that time, Vijayanagara was deserted, and the descendants of Ramaraja came and settled at Anegondi. In our fathers' time, the account papers for the entire realm of the South used to be regularly prepared. This was the situation when Ramaraja's descendant, Yenkatapati Rayal left Anegondi because of Tipu's harassment and came to Kharapur.
A few points are evident: this manuscript was produced by a Maratha clerk associated with the Rayal's household and is written in the first person. The audience is clearly the British government: perhaps the object was to make a case for some claim in the aftermath of the fall of Tipu. It is also likely that the story of the ascetic's curse is introduced in order to discredit rival claimants to the family name. In these circumstances, one would expect every historical resource to be deployed. Yet the writer had no information at his disposal beyond two legendary names and essentially produced a rather thin pastiche of folklore and wonder tale. Molesworth's legend about the tax revenues of the earth being accounted for by the Anagondi Raja is clearly echoed in the closing paragraph.
By the late 19th century, and especially after the publication of Sewell's A Forgotten Empire (1900), some Maratha historians were seeking ‘Hindu’ rather than Mughalesque roots for Maratha imperial formation. This was the path also taken by some of the earliest Tamil historians of the Vijayanagara empire.Footnote 41 At the same time, they were engaged in finding ‘indigenous’ sources of history to refute both the contemporary colonial as well as the medieval Persian sources of the Dakhani history. The next narrative that I will discuss came to light as a part of both these efforts. The incomplete Marathi text of this narrative was first published by G. K. Chandorkar in the second annual volume of the Proceedings of the Bharata Itihasa Samshodhaka Mandala in 1914. He lacked the first few pages, and they have never been found. In the 1990s, neither the Nagari press copy nor the original manuscript used by Chandorkar could be located. Therefore, the Nagari printed text of 1914 is the only available copy of the Marathi version as it appeared in the early 20th century.Footnote 42 Then various Kannada versions of what seemed to be the same story began to be located.
S. Krishnaswamy Iyengar located a Kannada manuscript titled Ramrajana Bakhairu in the Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras. The Kannada text was printed in 1922. Iyengar suggested that Chandorkar's Marathi work was an abridged translation of the Kannada original, which itself was written within a year of the great battle itself. He published a summary in the Proceedings of the Indian Historical Records Commission in 1925.Footnote 43 An English translation from Kannada had been made for Colin Mackenzie, but lay unpublished in the India Office collection. In 1946, a Kannada text and English translation appeared in Further Sources of Vijayanagara History. Footnote 44 Meanwhile, the 1922 Kannada text had been studied by N. S. Rajpurohit as a guide to the location of the battlefield. He translated several passages into Marathi and paraphrased the rest. This appeared in the BIS Traimasika in 1929.Footnote 45 I have compared this with the English and Marathi versions. This work titles itself ‘Ramarayana bakhairu’ (the bakhar of Ramaraya). I will not enter into the necessary minute comparisons here, but it appears evident that several Kannada versions going back to at least the late eighteenth century were extant. Internal evidence and major inconsistencies show that none of these texts were even remotely contemporary to the battle. The late 17th century seems the earliest likely period for their composition. They differed in some details from each other and from the Marathi version. Given this distribution of manuscript sources, it is most probable that, as Iyengar suggested, the original was written in Kannada and a single Marathi recension was produced later—perhaps as a result of Mackenzie's enquiries around 1800, perhaps even to satisfy Chandorkar after 1900!Footnote 46 The Marathi language of Chandorkar's version shows a style and vocabulary that clearly do not date before the 1670s or 1680s at the earliest.Footnote 47 Its Kannada moorings are suggested by the list of worthies that it mentions and more especially by the list of fortresses to which commanders are dispatched concluding the combat of the fatal battle itself. But there are suggestions that it was compiled after Maratha power began to be felt in the region. So, for example, the ‘Rayegad’ listed here may be a reference to the fortress capital built by Shivaji. On the other hand, if these officers are being projected as the founders of Nayaka kingdoms, then the list implicitly placed the ruler of Anegondi as a Nayaka rather than the heir to Vijayanagara that the Marathi language traditions were to identify him as. This once again suggests a southern and non-Marathi origin for this narrative.
In short, this is an example of the genre of historical pastiche to which the Rayavacakamu also belongs. But it is better informed than other Marathi tradition in that the three rulers are not depicted in the entirely absurd light of household servants of Ramaraja. Its southern origins are also evident in that ‘Akbar Jalaluddin Mughal emperor’ was located at what was perhaps an important Mughal position in the early seventeenth century, the town of Jalna (central Maharashtra, near Aurangabad). Maratha traditions, even the most fantastic ones—invariably place the Mughals as ruling from Delhi. Finally, of course, if this narrative was indeed composed in Marathi, it is strange that almost none of the elements of the story are found in the Marathi traditions, which, as we saw, floated away entirely even from the limited geographical and historical knowledge found in this work. All this suggests that Chandorkar's text is a late translation into Marathi of a fragmentary Kannada manuscript—perhaps even a translation generated by his own search in the early twentieth century.
Nonetheless, such was the hunger for authentically indigenous accounts of Vijayanagara that several historians accepted Chandorkar's text as both authentic and contemporary to the battle. In 1952 Gramopadhye produced a small volume of selections from different bakhars, including this one.Footnote 48 It was probably intended for the use of university students of Marathi literature. In editing his selection, Gramopadhye largely omitted what he must have viewed as the ‘non-historical’ or perhaps ‘fanciful’ parts of the texts. This led to the omission of portions such as the lengthy descriptions of the emperor's visits to the palaces of his three principal queens and the highly imaginative list of the fruits that he distributed. Perhaps for the sake of brevity, he also omitted the names of nobles who were killed and wounded on both sides and the list of nobles dispatched to different fortresses before the battle. The evidently embroidered list of military equipment is included as Gramopadhye evidently assumed it to be accurate. This presumption is reflected in his comment on the statement that there were oxen each carrying twenty-eight projectiles (bana) so that there were about 80,000 such projectiles. As later allusions to their being lighted clearly indicate, these were obviously supposed to be the simple rockets widely used in South Indian warfare during the eighteenth century (but not recorded for the sixteenth). If so, then 28 per bullock would be a reasonable load. But Gramopadhye interprets bana as arrow and believes all these numbers to be factual. This is evident from his footnote ‘Why would each ox carry only 28 bana? Each ox would easily carry one or two hundred bana’.Footnote 49
Gramopadhye follows an earlier editorial tradition that, as Wagoner describes, mined texts ‘for whatever veins of historical data it might contain embedded among more legendary and fanciful strata’. But, as Wagoner goes on to point out, such sifting (by the editors of the 1919 volume of Sources and the 1946 volumes Further Sources of Vijayanagara history) eliminated ‘the very passages that would have provided the keys to understanding the Rayavacakamu's unique vision of the past. . .’ In his anxiety to find an authentic source from the Vijayanagara side, he also chose to ignore the various inconsistencies that simply make it unlikely that it dates from 1565. In his edition, he largely excised these elements of the narrative. He thereby also eliminated the internal clues that would have enabled an accurate dating of the work. Overall, these omitted portions would have enabled a proper understanding of the text as an account from a much later time, mediated through the sensibilities of its own setting.Footnote 50 Spiegel has called for the placing of texts in context: and no context can be more important for historians than the chronological one.
Gramopadhye himself dates the text to 1613–14. This latter date is based on a statement in the concluding pages of the text that attributes the first copying to Venkaji Narayana Kulkarni in Anandanama Samvatsara, Phalgun, 2nd day of the bright half. But this is merely the name of a year in the sixty-year astronomical cycleFootnote 51 and could, therefore, refer not only to 1613–14 but also to 1673–4, 1733–4, and so on. Gramopadhye's abbreviated text also omits the concluding scribe's notation that the copying was completed on 11th Jamadilakher Hijri year 1095 (or 26 May 1684).Footnote 52 It is, therefore, quite possible that the Ananda samvatsara of the copyist was, in fact 1673–4, a year of great importance in the Marathi- and Kannada-speaking world because preparations for the coronation of Shivaji were underway that year. It might have been seen as a fitting time to produce a text warning against reliance on the fealty of Muslim dependants and allies. In fact the later portions of the text essentially present Adilshaha as the successor to Vijayanagara. He is shown as deeply ambivalent about his part in the defeat of Rama Raya, and the latter refers to him as being like his son.
The emperor Ramraj fell into the hands of Ali Yedalshah of the Kannadas, and said to him: ‘You had called yourself my son. Then you suddenly seized me by treachery. Now what can I do? My whole army is slain.’ He dressed himself in fresh clothes, a Portuguese daiv (?), placed a rose formed of gems and pearls in his cap and wrapped on a mavishala (?). Then having invoked his personal deity, he sent a message to Ali Yedalshaha saying: ‘come alone and sword in hand; no one else is to lay a hand on me.’ He made him promise this. Then Ali Yedalshaha came alone and cut off his head.
The effort is, therefore, clearly to present the Adilshahi regime as the least illegitimate successor to Vijayanagara. Could this reflect the role that Shahaji Bhosle, Shivaji's father had played in the southward extension of Adilshahi power and the fact that Shivaji's own home territory up to the 1650s was notionally an Adilshahi domain?
Gramopadhye was heir to an ambitious effort to connect Vijayanagara to the Marathi historical imagination made in the 1930s, as the sexcentenary of its foundation came up. This is why Chandorkar's bakhar was enthusiastically adopted as the authentic Marathi record of the great southern empire. The Commemoration committee contacted the Bharata Itihasa Samshodhaka Mandala and sought its cooperation in preparing a complete Marathi translation of the English volume being prepared for that occasion.Footnote 53 The Mandala made a considerable effort and complied; in addition it commissioned several additional chapters and a chronological table that were added to the Marathi volume. Texts were also edited so as to be more accessible to the Marathi-reading public.Footnote 54 In a short preface titled ‘The debt owed to Vijayanagara’, delivered as an address on 26 December 1936 the noted historian T. S. Shejwalkar, began by arguing that while great civilizations like the Egyptian, Assyrian, Sumerian and Iranian had disappeared from the earth, Indian civilization still lived. In medieval times, it had been forced to take shelter in the South before being taken into the hands of the Marathas and brought further north. ‘The protection of Vijayanagara gave this civilization its recent but crucial foothold, and it is the memory of this that we celebrate at this gathering today’. He paid Vijayanagara the highest compliment available to him by declaring that its founding six centuries earlier had the same historic significance as the birth of Shivaji three centuries later.Footnote 55 His full-length essay in the same volume made an explicit effort to connect the two arguing that Shivaji's object in his southern campaigns was to lay the foundation for a new empire like Vijayanagara, one that would be capable of confronting Aurangzeb. But he goes back to Shivaji's father, Shahaji. ‘From one point of view Shahaji was grinding one Hindu empire into dust; from another point of view, he was laying the foundation of another Hindu empire’Footnote 56.
But this effort was an artefact of the religious politics of the 1930s. The Maratha Svaraj (imperial domain) of the eighteenth century never constructed such a genealogy for itself. And so Vijayanagara, so important an origin in the southern half of the peninsula, was largely lost to Maratha historical memory until the new historical projects of the twentieth century brought it to mind once again. To return, then, to the issues raised at the beginning of this paper: for historians, narrative texts can only be understood in historical contexts and the context includes not merely what is remembered but—more crucially—what is forgotten. The historical approach to narratives of the past must historicize memory itself].
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at a conference in honour of John Richards, Duke University, September 29–30, 2006. I am indebted to the participants for many valuable comments and suggestions, and to Phillip Wagoner for a close reading and valuable information on Mackenzie and his collaborators. I have also benefited from the comments of an anonymous referee and the critical scrutiny by Indrani Chatterjee. Any remaining errors must, of course, be credited to me.
