The Vijayanagara empire, which dominated peninsular India for over two centuries from its founding in the fourteenth century, has occupied an oddly modest place in the standard narratives of Indian history. The reasons for the modesty are not, on inspection, properties of the empire itself, which was prosperous, militarily formidable, and culturally productive on a scale that would, in any other historiographical tradition, have placed it at the centre of the period's account. The reasons lie elsewhere — in how the period has been organised by historians whose own concerns shaped what they emphasised.
For much of the modern study of the period, the organising frame has been the rise and fall of north-Indian polities — the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughal empire — within which Vijayanagara appears, when it appears, as a southern context or a footnote. The reasons for this framing are several. The available sources on the northern polities are, in many cases, in better-known languages and have been more thoroughly catalogued; the modern historians who established the period's standard outlines were themselves working from those sources and continued, in the next generation, to work from them. Vijayanagara, which left abundant material remains but a different mix of textual sources, did not fit cleanly into the established narrative.
A second factor concerns the very category through which Vijayanagara has often been read. The category of 'a Hindu kingdom resisting Muslim expansion,' fashionable in some twentieth-century writing, has tended to flatten the empire into a moral position rather than describe what it actually was — a complex polity that included, in its administration, Muslim officers, Persian conventions, and considerable cultural exchange with the very polities it sometimes fought. To read the empire principally as a resistance is to take a frame that suited later political purposes and impose it on a past that was busier and more entangled than the frame allows.
The corrective is not to reverse the simplification into a different simplification — to insist, for instance, that Vijayanagara was indifferent to religion, or that no conflict with northern polities ever existed. It is to study the empire on its own terms, with attention to the actual operations of the administration, the religious and cultural traditions it patronised, and the diplomatic and military choices it made over its long history. That work has, of late, begun to be done; it has yet to displace the older shapes in which the period continues to be taught.
The primary purpose of the passage is to: