Fortifications, roads and the urban core

Detail

The seven rings of walls

• Abdur Razzaq, the Persian ambassador sent by the ruler of Herat in the fifteenth century, counted seven lines of forts around the city.
• These rings did not just guard buildings. They enclosed the city, its farmland and the forests around it.
• The outermost wall ran along the hills and joined one hill to the next. The hard granite hills of the area were used as part of the defence itself.
• A second wall went around the urban core (the crowded living-and-trading part of the city).
• A third wall went around the royal centre. Inside that, each major group of buildings had its own wall as well.
• The whole walled landscape is huge. The Hampi World Heritage site covers about 42 sq km and was put on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986 [2]. Over 1,600 monuments survive, on the south bank of the Tungabhadra river in Karnataka [3].

How the walls were built — no mortar at all

• The masonry is massive and tapered — thick at the bottom, thinner at the top.
• No mortar anywhere. Nothing sticky held the stones together.
• The stones are wedge-shaped blocks. Their shape locks them in place, so the wall holds by weight and fit alone.
• The inside of the wall is filled with a core of earth and rubble (loose stone and soil).
• Bastions (rounded or square towers) stick out from the wall face, so defenders could shoot at anyone attacking the wall from the side.
• The official description of Hampi says the same thing in other words: the fort walls use irregular cut stones with "paper joints" (joints so tight they look as thin as paper), the core filled with rubble masonry and no binding material; the gopuras (temple gateway towers) over entrances used stone and brick [2].

Farms inside the walls — a costly but clever plan

• Abdur Razzaq saw cultivated fields, gardens and houses in the space between the first and third walls.
• Domingo Paes, the Portuguese traveller, also saw rice fields and gardens inside.
• Archaeology backs this up. A canal-fed farming tract has been traced between the sacred centre and the urban core. Britannica's description of the city also lists canals and wells among its works [3].
• Why this mattered — the logic of a siege:
• In medieval war, an attacker usually did not smash the wall. He sat outside and waited. The plan was to starve the defenders out.
• The normal answer was to store food in granaries inside the fort.
• Vijayanagara chose a "more expensive and elaborate strategy" — it protected the farmland itself, with its water channels, inside the fortified ring.
• Result: the city could keep growing food during a siege, not merely eat stored grain until it ran out.

Gateways and the Indo-Islamic style

• The gateways carry arches over the opening and domes above.
• This is the Indo-Islamic style — the building style brought into India by the Turkish Sultans (Delhi Sultanate rulers).
• It was not simply copied. It grew through contact between that style and local building practice in the Deccan.
• Exam point: a Hindu kingdom using Islamic architectural forms in its forts shows that art styles moved across political and religious lines.

Roads

• Roads wound through the valleys. They bent around the rock outcrops instead of cutting through them — cheap and practical in a granite landscape.
• The most important roads ran out from the gateways of temples.
• These roads were lined with bazaars (market streets) on both sides. So temple, road and market formed one unit: pilgrims arriving at a temple gate walked straight into trade.

The urban core — how ordinary people lived

• Ordinary houses left almost no trace for archaeologists. They were made of mud, wood and thatch, which rot away, unlike stone temples.
• Duarte Barbosa, the Portuguese writer, described them as thatched but well built, and "arranged according to occupations, in long streets" — that is, weavers in one street, potters in another.
• Chinese porcelain has been found in the north-eastern corner of the urban core. Costly imported pottery points to rich traders living there.
• That same quarter was the Muslim residential quarter.
• Its tombs and mosques are striking: their architecture resembles the mandapas (pillared halls) of temples found at Hampi. Again, shared building craft across communities.
• Field surveys found many small shrines across the urban core. This shows a variety of cults — many different gods and local worship traditions, not one single official religion for everybody.
• Water for ordinary people came from wells, rainwater tanks and temple tanks.

What happened to it

• The city was defeated by the Deccan Sultanates' confederacy in 1565, then plundered for about six months and abandoned [2]. Even seven walls could not save a city once its field army was beaten.

Note: Britannica dates the empire to 1336 to about 1614 [3], while the NCERT-based period used here is 1336–1646. Keep 1336–1646 for the exam; the later date counts the rump rule of the Aravidu line.

Prelims Hooks

• Abdur Razzaq, envoy from the ruler of Herat, recorded seven lines of forts at Vijayanagara.
• The fort walls used wedge-shaped blocks with no mortar, an earth-and-rubble core, and projecting bastions.
• Domingo Paes (Portuguese) noted rice fields and gardens inside the walls; Duarte Barbosa described houses "arranged according to occupations, in long streets".
• Farming land lay between the first and third walls; a canal-fed agricultural tract sat between the sacred centre and the urban core.
• Instead of storing grain in granaries, Vijayanagara fortified the agricultural belt itself.
• Gateway arches and domes show the Indo-Islamic style introduced by the Turkish Sultans.
• Chief roads ran from temple gateways and were lined with bazaars.
• Chinese porcelain found in the north-eastern part of the urban core marks a rich trading and Muslim residential quarter; its tombs and mosques look like temple mandapas.
• Hampi was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1986, covering about 42 sq km [2]; the site has over 1,600 surviving monuments on the south bank of the Tungabhadra [3].
• Hampi's walls are officially described as irregular cut stones with "paper joints" and a rubble core with no binding material [2].
• The city was sacked in 1565 and looted for about six months before being abandoned [2].

Mains Points

• Defence design reveals economic thinking. Enclosing farmland and canals, not just buildings, shows the state understood that siege warfare is won by food supply. This was costly in wall length and manpower, so it also tells us about the resources the rayas could command.
• Architecture as evidence of cultural mixing. Arched and domed gateways in a Hindu capital, and Muslim tombs built like temple mandapas, argue against seeing the Deccan as two sealed religious worlds. Useful in GS-I answers on syncretism and on Vijayanagara–Bahmani relations.
• Temple–bazaar–road as one economic unit. Roads starting at temple gateways and lined with markets link religion, urban planning and trade, and connect to the temple's role as landholder, banker and employer.
• Limits of the archaeological record. Stone temples survive; mud-and-thatch houses do not. So our picture of ordinary life leans heavily on foreign travellers' accounts (Razzaq, Paes, Barbosa, Nuniz) and on surface survey, which must be used with care about their bias and exaggeration.