4 - Political economy and society: the sixteenth century

Summary

The dharmic ideological impetus attributed to the formation of Vijayanagara in the fourteenth century was spent by 1450 when the reign of Devaraya II ended. Then, and thereafter, Vijayanagara was itself a successful conquest state, with much of Tamil country, Karnataka, and Andhra under Telugu and Kannadiga chiefs whose ruling authority was based upon military service to Vijayanagara kings. By the late fifteenth century, too, earlier, medieval political, social and economic institutions in the older settled, coastal parts of the southern peninsula had been weakened and no longer were the model of society that the Vijayanagara state had ostensibly been created to defend. Another system of politics, society, and economy had become ascendent, one that developed in the interior upland, on the dry and high Deccan plateau. The beneficiaries and major propagators of this new system were not only military servants of Vijayanagara kings, but local-level chieftains of Karnataka and Andhra who found new opportunities under the kingdom of Vijayanagara, which was now a conquest state.

In the previous chapter it was argued that while Vijayanagara military domination over the southern peninsula was established with surprising ease, the fiscal and political reach of the Rayas was both short and erratic. This loose suzerainty may account for part of the ease of the Vijayanagara conquest. What the sixteenth-century city on the Tungabhadra could command of the resources ostensibly available to its kings is neither precisely known nor knowable. There is not even the very generalized inventory of resources claimed as the political fruit of hegemony, such as that available for the Mughals in the Ain i Akbari, and surely, Vijayanagara claims to revenue came nowhere near what some scholars assume was available to the Mughals, that is, about 50 per cent of gross agrarian production.