IV - Vijayanagara c. 1350-1564

Summary

The division of this discussion of south India in the middle of the fourteenth century would seem to imply that political periodization and economic periodization are the same, that the political fact of a new great overlordship in the southern peninsula – the Vijayanagara state – had significant and necessary implications for the economic order. There is no reason for this to be true, and it is not true in any simple sense. However, this temporal division can be justified in several ways. Firstly, the warriors who ruled from the city of Vijayanagara on the very northern edge of the macro-region gradually converted Tamil country to a region of exploitation. The major sense in which the term ‘empire’ applies to the new Vijayanagara state is that the previous heartland of the macro-region was transformed into a subordinate base of support for numerous Telugu and Kannada-speaking warriors from the northern part of the macro-region. Secondly, the new state was ‘the nearest approach to a war-state ever made by a Hindu kingdom’ in the words of Nilakanta Sastri. As perhaps never before, resources of the macro-region were devoted to military purposes. Finally, changes in certain forms of local organization in Tamil country at least were quickened during the fifteenth century in response to political changes. For these reasons, it is useful to divide the discussion as has been done while yet insisting that economic features of south India are neither necessarily subordinate to, nor necessarily included under, political developments.