Hampi

Sometime in the twentieth century, archaeologists digging in the royal enclosure at Hampi hit worked stone under the dirt. What they uncovered was a tank: a square pit of black schist, each side descending inward in tiers of small steps, like an inverted pyramid you could walk down. It had been packed solid with earth for roughly four hundred years, and nobody had known it was there.

The stones carry mason's marks. The tank was cut somewhere else, numbered, carted in and assembled on site — prefabricated, in the sixteenth century. It is now one of the images people recognise Hampi by, and until recently it was a field.

A Capital Built Inside A Boulder Field

Hampi sits on the Tungabhadra river in a landscape that looks like a mistake: enormous granite boulders piled on each other, the result of millions of years of weathering. The people who built the city did not clear them. They built into them. Walls run between boulders and use them as bastions; temples sit on top of rock masses; in places you cannot tell where the masonry stops and the hill starts.

The Vijayanagara empire was founded in the first half of the fourteenth century and made Hampi its capital. Its high point came under Krishnadevaraya in the early sixteenth century, and the foreigners who saw the city then all seem to reach for the same move in their accounts: they compare it to the largest place they know. The Portuguese traveller Domingo Paes wrote that it was as big as Rome and described precious stones being sold in the open in its markets. The Persian envoy Abdur Razzaq, decades earlier, described concentric fortifications and crowds he could not count.

What paid for it was trade — horses imported through the west coast ports, cotton, spices — and what made it possible was water engineering. The region is dry. The city ran on canals, aqueducts and reservoirs.

Six Months Of Burning

In January 1565 the Vijayanagara army was defeated in the field by an alliance of neighbouring sultanates. The battle happened well away from the capital. The consequence happened in it.

The armies that entered Hampi afterwards did not sack it in a day. Accounts describe months of it, close to half a year: markets burned, the timber parts of palaces collapsed, sculpture was broken off temple walls. When it was over the population dispersed to the surrounding villages, the royal quarter went under grass, and stone began to be carried away for other buildings.

That is the unusual part. Plenty of great cities have been sacked. Most were rebuilt. This one was not. What stands at Hampi is not a ruined city so much as a city that was simply never reoccupied.

The Chariot That Was Never Going Anywhere

In the courtyard of the Vittala temple there is a chariot made of stone — a full-size copy of the wooden processional chariots temples use, complete with wheels, axle and cabin. The wheels are said to have turned once. They are fixed now, deliberately, because visitors kept trying.

The hall of the same temple has slender stone columns that ring at different pitches when struck, which is why they are called the musical pillars. Centuries of people tapping them wore the stone down, and touching them is no longer allowed. The instrument works and cannot be played.

Now

Hampi became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986. The site is enormous, spread over many square kilometres, with working villages still inside it. Between 1999 and 2006 it sat on the List of World Heritage in Danger because of a bridge being built across the river nearby; the bridge was halted and the site came off the list.

One thing at Hampi never stopped. The Virupaksha temple, at the end of the old bazaar street, has been in continuous use as a place of worship — through the sack, through the abandonment, through the centuries when everything around it was rubble and scrub. Walking the site, the surprise is not the ruins. It is that the one building still doing its original job is not a monument to anyone. It is just open, every morning, as usual.