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asocial history of the deccan
1563 monsoon rains forced him to turn back to Vijayanagara. En route he
gratuitously plundered and seized several districts of Golkonda and even some
others belonging to his “ally,” Bijapur.
44
This perfidious behavior snapped
whatever tolerance the rulers of those kingdoms might still have had for their
powerful neighbor to the south. Meanwhile Sultan Husain of Ahmadnagar,
whom Rama Raya had repeatedly humiliated and hunted, burned with a desire
for revenge, which he would soon find.
Such was the background to the Battle of Talikota of 1565, in which four
kingdoms of the north – Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, Golkonda, and Bidar
45
–
combined to challenge the grand army of Vijayanagara. During the winter of
1563–64, leaders of the four states cemented their cause through more inter-
dynastic marital ties, resolving to merge forces a year later. Gathering in late
December 1564 at the town of Talikota, just north of the Krishna River, the
four armies forded that river and in late January 1565 engaged an immense
Vijayanagara army near its southern shores. It was Rama Raya’s last battle.
During the conflict the octogenarian suffered a spear wound and fell from his
horse. Captured by some Nizam Shahi troops, he was taken to Husain who,
confronting his bitter adversary for the last time, ordered him beheaded on the
spot, and his head stuffed with straw (see Plate 6).
46
Vijayanagara’s army now completely disintegrated. Rama Raya’s brother
Venkatadri was never heard from again. His other brother Tirumala, blinded in
one eye, hastened from the battlefield to the capital, where he released Sada
´
siva
from prison, picked up his family, and quit the city just before the arrival of the
advancing allies. While Sada
´
siva and Tirumala busied themselves reconstituting
the state and transferring the capital to the fort of Penukonda, some 120 miles
to the southeast, the victorious allies spent six months looting the Vijayanagara
metropolis. Two years later, the Venetian traveler Cesare Federici reported that
the great city, twenty-four miles in circumference, “is not altogether destroyed,
yet the houses stand still, but emptie, and there is dwelling in them nothing, as
is reported, but Tygres and other wild beasts.”
47
An era had ended. Rama Raya’s
44
Ibid., iii:74, 148–50, 243–44.
45
The sultan of Berar abstained from joining the expedition, owing to his bitterness over Husain
Nizam Shah’s execution of his general, Jahangir Khan.
46
Briggs, Rise, iii:248. The battle scene depicted in Plate 6 is one of twelve miniatures that illustrate
aPersian historical poem composed in the year of the battle by Aftabi, a Nizam Shahi court poet.
SeeG.T.Kulkarni and M. S. Mate, eds. and trans., Tarif-i-Husain Shah Badshah Dakhan (Pune,
1987), 199–205.
47
Cesare Federici, “Extracts of Master Caesar Frederike his Eighteene Yeeres Indian Observations,”
in Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes,bySamuel Purchas (1625; repr. Glasgow, 1905),
x:92–93, 97.
98