ABSTRACT
The pious Achyutaraya, who, as the people have seen, had already been consecrated at Tirupati with water from Vishnu's conch shell, arrived in Vijayanagara to see colourful banners hanging from homes, flapping festively, greeting him and giving shade, and streets decked with ornaments. The ministers knowing Achyutaraya had great confidence in his inborn ability to govern. The ministers prepared for Achyutaraya's coronation rite, to complete the transformation already begun, so that he would fully become a nayaka or hero, of the nayika or heroine who was none other than the earth. Since the coronation ceremony expresses the integral religio-legal or sacral-political assumption of authority it is a highly complex ritual with symbols representing all the levels of existence celestial and metaphysical, terrestrial and social involved in the reordering under new leadership, the official taking charge, which it enacts. This ritual action was the transforming rite by which existence could be shaped and sovereignty established.
