As the great Hampi specialists, John Fritz and George Michell, wrote, the extraordinary landscape in which that ruined city lies is the first thing the visitor notices. The heaps and tumbles of vast granite boulders, the beautiful Tungabhadra river running through valleys and gorges, are a phenomenon to see quie regardless of human additions to the view and of course this ancient land must be the abode of gods and especially Kishkindha, the domain of the monkeys, the birthplace of the warrior Hanuman and indelibly tied to the legendary Ramayana.
Humankind came here long ago but the greatest civilisation arrived well within the scope of our chronicled story and understanding, lasting a mere two centuries from the mid-14th to 16th centuries and leaving the remarkable legacy we see today of the ruins of the staggering city of Vijayanagara, City of Victory, where all the world came to trade and to gaze at its wonders. From around 1377CE, under its Hindu rulers, the Vijayanagara kingdom grew to extend from the Bay of Bengal in the east to the Arabian sea on the west coast of Southern India and all the wealth of this vast region poured into the great capital city of the short lived but glittering empire. It fell finally when the regent, Ramaraya, who had assumed power antagonised the various Deccan sultans who had always been the kingdom's uneasy neighbours and who now formed a powerful alliance to destroy the Vijayanagara kingdom.When the city was abandoned to the enemy, it took months for them to destroy it to the level of much of what we can see today after its rediscovery and ongoing excavation.
The site is huge and the disappearance of its more destructible structures leaves the viewer today more with the sense of a great ruined ancient temple town than the remains of a thriving mercantile centre of far lesser antiquity. The huge walls give some idea of the sheer scale of the building and the wealth that supported it as the city became a market for pearls and precious stones, silks and brocades from Turkey, Persia and China, lavish supplies of more local foodstuffs and fabrics and Chinese porcelain of the Ming period. The temple remains stand out but the visitor gets some understanding of the sheer scale of commerce in the city when she realises those avenues of skeletal stone arcades were once shops, some of them 2 storeys high, many of them refurbished and still used until recent years when the declaration of much of Hampi as a UNESCO World Heritage Site brought in the sometimes deadening hand of additional heritage organisations to clear life out of the ruins for the sake of preservation. I am never sure how I feel about preservation above all - everything after all cannot be preserved and the Virupaksha temple at Hampi, with far earlier foundations than the Vijanagara empire gains something for its continuing existence as a living place of worship and not simply another frozen monument to the past.
All the same, those frozen monuments at Hampi, peopled now by tourists and the sharp eyed, quick handed monkeys who have always been there are not only a glorious mixture of styles, influences - the elephant stables are a splendid mix of Islamic domes and arches, and the products of affiliation to different religions, there are Jain temples, and to various sects within Hinduism, the veneration of Narasimha, the man lion avatar of Vishnu for instance and then Krishna as well as more local heroes made saints or demi-gods by their living deeds - they are also joyously and irresistibly enlivened by the surviving riot of carvings by many hands, possibly from and of the inhabitants of many lands, in friezes and on pillars of an unparalleled freedom of expression and individuality,
They deserve more careful study and enjoyment than any organised tour or guide will think necessary - this a place to take time and to return again to find more treasures in views and natural surroundings and in built and sculpted splendour. Avoid the typical such as the 'sunset points' that seem to have become the staple end of day for all tour guides and are always an overpopulated anti-climax.
Take time too to wander the contemporary village of Hampi, in spite of its university and museum buildings, still a taste of rural India, as is and more so, the village of Anegundi, under the Anjanadri Hill where 575 steps take you to the temple marking the birthplace of Hanuman - that possibly is a place with a good enough view to be worth the climb, for sunset or any other time of day. In Anegundi you can also stay in one of several charming guest houses run by the Kishkinda Trust, the brainchild of the artist, conservationist and brilliant craft innovator, Shama Pawar. There is construction going on in the village as new pipes are laid but hopefully the sense of an old fashioned rural community, where the wall of the musalla opposite the mosque is ornamented with a poster of a Hindu saint on his tiger vehicle, and religious festivals are shared celebrations, will continue. The Kishkinda Trust meanwhile has workshop space and an art centre where local crafts and arts provide employment and incomes and are continually renewed and reinvented in weaved and stitched pieces of practical use as well as great beauty.
I stayed, organised through marvellous Rainbow Travels, who I have known for decades, in the rather unlikely surroundings for me of 2 successive and enormous suites in the Hotel Evolve Back Kamalpura Palace. The hotel was reputedly fully booked but it is amazing what a top travel agent can achieve for the same price as one of those fully booked more ordinary rooms. The first suite had a mere marble jacuzzi behind my bed - the second had a swimming pool set into another larger pool in a garden and could easily have housed 6.
I returned to Hubli for a flight to Delhi via a night in town in one of the Lemon Tree group's small business hotels and a day seeing the temples of the much earlier Chalukyan Empire at Aihole, Pattadakal and Badami. Probably better to see these on your way to Hampi to make better sense of the chronology of architectural styles. Badami was capital of the Chalukyan kindodm in 543 CE, the temples at Aihole built between the 5th and 12th centuries and Pattadakal built mainly in 7th and 8th centuries. There are a sprinkle of Jain temples in all three sites and the influence of the earlier Chalukyan architecture can easily be seen among the mixtures of styles in the temples in Hampi. The carved cave temples at Badami are particularly spectacular as are always those carved out of teh living rock and the site, round a large tank with a low lying temple at one end is particularly picturesque once you have regained your breath from clambering up the remarkably unevenly spaced steps - coming down is worse than going up.
