ABSTRACT
Today Vijayanagara, the City of Victory, on the southern banks of the Tungabhadra river in Karnataka, lies in ruin, its fallen roofs and empty courtyards overgrown with weeds and unruly shrubs. The Vijayanagara kingship of the Tungabhadra river core region was like the Chola kingship around the Kaveri river: in both cases locality units of the political system were not merely self-governing linked to imperial centres neither by resource flows nor command but were reduced images of the centres, as Burton Stein observed. The origin story presented here is a composite of legends and memories, Hindu inscriptions and accounts written by Muslim historians. It includes the standard and popular tellings of the founding of the Vijayanagara empire. Muslim traders and mercenary soldiers became a common sight in South Indian landscape. Islamicate culture became a factor that shaped styles of prestige and matters of substance and power in clothing, in vocabulary and in methods of armouring horses for warfare, for example.
