ABSTRACT
The historical agency evident in the composition of Rāma poems and Rāmāyaṇa commentaries may help explain the motivations of agents involved in a parallel project at the same time and place: the construction of the first-ever royal Rāma temples in the imperial capital of the Vijayanagara Empire. Evidence for Śrīvaiṣṇava involvement in the development of Rāma worship challenges causal accounts of Rāma worship as a reaction to Islamic rule in South Asia, which are incompatible with the basic dynamics of the Śrīvaiṣṇava theological appropriation of the epic, as is evident for example in the treatment of Rāvaṇa at junctures in the basic narrative of greatest significance to Śrīvaiṣṇavas. In addition recent studies of the Islamicization of political culture at Vijayanagara erode the idea that Vijayanagara and the sultanates to the north represented oppositionally related civilizational spheres. While scholarly attention has focused almost exclusively on the Rāmacandra temple, the earliest and most well-known Rāma temple at Vijayanagara, less attention has been directed to the existence of at least three other monumental Rāma temples of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whose affiliation is clearly Śrīvaiṣṇava. Moreover it appears that Śrīvaiṣṇavas at some point took over the Rāmacandra temple itself. The Śrīvaiṣṇava association with the emerging Rāma cult coincided with their increasing influence at the Vijayanagara court during the empire’s second, third and fourth dynasties, including their service as royal preceptors (rājagurus) to Vijayanagara kings.
