Place · Vijayanagara temple complex · India

Hampi Vitthala complex

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

15.342, 76.475

Connections (6)

• Architectural modelMadurai Meenakshi

  The Vijayanagara temple-city plan — concentric prakaras, gopurams growing taller as they go outward, processional streets laid out as a mandala, a thousand-pillar hall — was carried on by the Nayakas who inherited the empire's southern provinces. Madurai's fourteen gopurams and its street grid are that plan executed at full scale a century after Hampi was abandoned, which is why the Nayaka temple cities look imperial although the empire had gone.

• PatronageRaichur

  The Vitthala complex with its stone chariot and its ringing pillars was built out in the same years as the Raichur campaign of 1520 — the high-water mark of Krishnadevaraya's reign. Imperial building and imperial campaigning are the same budget: the doab's revenue paid for the temple, and the temple asserted the claim. Forty-five years later the complex was sacked and the city abandoned.

• Image migrationPandharpūr

  Vijayanagara's Vitthala temple was built for the Pandharpūr deity, and tradition holds the image was brought south — by some accounts for safety, by others as a prize. It was later returned. The Hampi complex remains the grandest building ever raised for Vitthal, standing empty of him. Krishnadevarāya's masons gave it the stone chariot and the musical pillars that are now Hampi's emblem, so the empire's most photographed building was raised for a Maharashtrian village deity.

• PatronageHampi / Vijayanagara

  The Vitthala complex at Hampi, with its stone chariot and musical pillars, was built for the Pandharpūr deity and is the most elaborate thing Vijayanagara raised. The temple stands empty of the god it was built for, the image having gone back to Maharashtra, so the empire's grandest religious building is an unfilled container — sacked in 1565 and never reoccupied since.

• Traditional linkPandharpūr

  The Vitthala-Rukmini murti of Pandharpur — the central deity of the Varkari bhakti tradition — was moved to the newly-built Vitthala temple at Hampi during the 14th-16th-century Deccan Sultanate campaigns against the Yadava heartland. Vijayanagara chronicles and Varkari tradition name Krishnadevaraya (ruled 1509-29) as the king who formally invited the Vitthala from Pandharpur into his Vitthala complex at Hampi, both to protect the image from sultanate iconoclasm and to associate the Vijayanagara crown with the preeminent bhakti deity of the Deccan. After the sack of Hampi in 1565 the image was moved back to Pandharpur, where it has since remained; the empty Vitthala garbhagriha at Hampi is one of the most visited sites of the ruined capital.

• PatronageKrishnadevaraya

  Krishnadevaraya expanded the earlier Vitthala Temple at Hampi into its final imperial form in the 1510s-20s, adding the Rangamandapa with the 56 monolithic composite musical pillars (each a bundle of smaller granite columns that produce a solfege svara when struck) and the free-standing stone chariot in front of it. The musical pillars are an engineered feature of the pavilion itself — the granite acts as a tuned percussion family, each column tuned by its mass and length to one of the sixteen svara-sthanas of Carnatic music.

On these journeys

• Vijayanagara patronage
• The Deccan and Vijayanagara
• Domingo Paes — a Portuguese eye on Vijayanagara (c. 1520)

Sources

Group of Monuments at Hampi — UNESCO

• Wikipedia