This episode goes all into the micro. Read these sources to get a better understanding of the macro forces behind the fall of Hampi and the Vijayanagara Empire

Manu Pillai’s book Rebel Sultans: the Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji will allow you to put Rama Raya and the Battle of Talikota in the larger context of Deccan politics from the 13th to 17th centuries.

Richard Eaton’s India in the Persianate Age provides a thorough exploration of the social and political history of the Deccan

Kathleen D Morrison and Mark T Lycett’s paper The Fall of Vijayanagara Reconsidered does exactly what you’d expect from its title and provided a key perspective for our episode.

Host & Producer: Niki Aggarwal

Research: Ranvijay Singh

Sound Engineering & Design: Hanisha Harjani

Factchecking: Abhishta Tantry

FEATURED MUSIC

Arun Ramamurthy | Conception

Drum ani Bass | King of Good Times

Sanjay Subrahmanyan | Carnatic Vocalizing

pelle | Lizard Lunch

Jayanthi Kumaresh | Carnatic Raga

Subh Saran | Slip

Dolorblind | QQ

Deccan

The Deccan plateau is one of the most fertile regions in South Asia and has produced many major empires including the Pallavas, Chalukyas, and, later, the Nizam of Hyderabad.

Sultanate

A state or kingdom governed by a sultan, i.e., a king

Paan

A treat made out of areca nut and betel leaf

View annotated transcript

[00:00:00] Niki: The eighty year old king had been on the battlefield for three days straight, but he still had boundless energy. His side was winning and he knew he just needed to strike one large blow and the would-be conquerors would disperse like ants running from vinegar. He saw an opening. He mounted an elephant chariot and drove right into the melee, which meant that he didn't notice the rogue elephant charging straight towards him. The elephant was moving at a speed that did not match its girth. The king’s charioteers saw the threat and survival instinct took over. They abandoned their posts, desperate to live another day without being trampled. The elephant came barreling towards the king, knocking him down like an inconvenience. By the time the king came to, he was surrounded.

[00:00:57] The opposing troops encuffed the king and carried their bounty over to their boss, the Sultan. The Sultan quietly assessed our king, making sure the king could plainly see his sword glistening. “Make sure he’s comfortable. Rama Raya, how’s your health? No final words? Well, they can’t say I didn’t give you an opportunity.” The Sultan raised the king’s bodiless head into the air. It was finally over—the last Hindu empire of the South had been vanquished.

[00:01:38] Hello! My name is Niki Aggarwal and you are listening to Misrepresented, a podcast where we unravel how the world misrepresented South Asia’s role in history.

[00:01:50] In December, 2019, I visited Hampi in the Indian state of Karnataka. Today Hampi is no longer a functioning city, just a site of ruins. But back in the day, Hampi was the capital of the Vijayanagara empire. This empire ruled over all of Southern India from the 1300s to the 1500s. Hampi was a world renowned city and a wealthy center of trade. Just hear what this Portuguese visitor had to say at the time.

[00:02:17] Portuguese Traveler: “In this city, you will find men belonging to every nation and people because of the great trade it has…The size of this city I do not write here, because it cannot all be seen from any one spot, but I climbed a hill whence I could see a great part of it. From thence seemed to me as large as Rome, and very beautiful to the sight.”[1]

[00:02:37] Niki: I didn’t truly understand the scale and scope until I visited the old Hampi bazaar. There were two parallel rows of stalls all made out of granite. Each stall had three walls each and they had open fronts to the large pedestrian path in the middle. These stalls were double deckers and they went on for so long that I couldn’t see both ends of the bazaar at the same time. So that means there were hundreds, if not thousands, of vendors selling at this marketplace at one time.[2]

[00:03:12] Beyond being a global center of trade, the Vijayanagara empire was also modern and innovative as a government. Let me tell you a little bit about their tax system. So, you know in the movie Lagaan, the key plot point was that there was no rain so the villagers couldn’t pay their taxes? In Vijayanagar, the rates levied were constantly assessed based on the conditions of the particular harvest.[3] A portion of those taxes were then used to build irrigation systems that maximized future harvest. So it was like a positive feedback loop! Plus, any land that received water from tanks built by the village itself were considered tax-free.[4] A lot of the art and culture we associate with South India today was developed through the Vijayanagara Empire’s patronage like Tamil literature and Carnatic music.[5] And their justice system had an institution where citizens could appeal its decisions.[6]

[00:04:07] I’m not trying to romanticize the past; not everything was epically good. Like the punishment for crimes were extremely harsh and involved a lot of mutilation and death.[7] But the point is that Hampi was the capital of a huge, wealthy, international, and modern empire. And then within the span of a week, in 1565, the city and the empire came to a crashing halt.

[00:04:34] Hampi fell in the battle that you heard in the beginning of the episode, when Rama Raya, the eighty year old leader of the empire, was beheaded. But why did that one incident lead to the abandonment of Hampi, and why did it mean the total end of the Vijayanagar empire? When I was in Hampi, my tour guide told me why.

The Vijayanagar empire was surrounded by Muslim kingdoms known as the Deccan Sultanates. These sultanates were originally all one state that was founded by conquerors from Persia, who had arrived in the 1300s.[8] But after a century, the Sultanate broke apart into five rival kingdoms, each ruled by a Muslim sultan.[9] The sultans were often at war with Vijayanagara, but no one sultan was strong enough to beat the Hindu empire. So in 1565, the Muslim sultans came together to destroy Vijayanagar and successfully kill the king. But they hated the king and the Hindu empire so much that they spent six months destroying the entire city of Hampi, razing and pillaging every building and murdering all of the villagers. And thus the metropolis disappeared overnight.

[00:05:45] I was kind of skeptical of this story: this idea of the big, bad Muslims banding together to conquer the last Hindu empire in an Islamic

takeover of the sub-continent. So I dug into it. What I found was that the history I heard from the tour guide was almost entirely factual. But I don’t think it was honest.

To explain what I mean, I’m going to tell you about the life and death of Rama Raya, the final leader of the Vijayanagara empire. Now, the whole great man trope is one that the history books are plagued by. But, in this case, I think talking about this one man will allow us to have a better context as to why this gorgeous, wealthy city that’s compared to Rome and Venice just disappeared.

[00:06:39] So, to start off, Rama Raya did not begin his life as a prince. He wasn’t a royal at all. He did have excellent pedigree though. His father was a general in the Vijayanagara court.[10] Another ancestor of his was supposed to have been so mighty on the battlefields that, after imprisoning a rival king, he forced his prisoner to name his son after him. So, it makes sense that the very first record of Rama Raya in the history books is from when he was in his late twenties, commanding his own army.[11] Except, he wasn’t serving the Vijayanagara military.

In 1512, one of the rival sultans came and conquered a region of the Vijayanagar empire.The Sultan needed someone to administer this new territory. He looked around, saw Rama Raya, and was like, “hey, you take care of this district for me.”[12] And Rama Raya, whose father and grandfather and great-grandfather had served in the Vijayanagara court, looked at the Sultan and said, “for sure, for sure.”[13]

While serving this sultan, the fort that he was in charge of got attacked itself. Instead of defending the fort, Rama Raya flees to the court of his sultan. The Sultan looks at him, says that he’s a coward, and dismisses the warrior. So, Rama Raya slinks back to Hampi in shame.[14] Luckily, his dad hooks him up with a new job in Vijayanagar because #nepotism.

[00:08:10] The fact that the son of a prominent Vijayanagar general could take up service in the army of an enemy state, and then without missing a beat, come back and serve in the Vijayanagara kingdom, suggests that, for elite soldiers at least, the entire territory was this seamless arena of opportunity and the boundaries of Muslim North or Hindu South didn’t really apply to them. But back to Rama Raya.

[00:08:36] So given the second chance, Rama Raya works hard to become a star in the Vijayanagara court. Within just a couple of years, he reaches his dad’s rank and has the ambitions to go even higher.[15] But, he wouldn’t be able to do it alone. Because, just like rich white men need people of color and the working class to make their money, Rama Raya needed women and children to accumulate power.

[00:09:00] Rama Raya needed to become a part of the royal family. He

sucked up to the king whenever he could and was eventually given the

opportunity to marry the Vijayanagar king’s daughter, Tirumalamba.[16] This marriage was crucial to Rama Raya’s upwards trajectory. In all future records and conversations, he was referred to as Aliya Rama Raya, which means son-in-law in Kannada.

[00:09:24] Now Rama Raya had to wait for his father-in-law to die, which he eventually did. Once the king died, chaos ensued in Hampi over who would succeed the great Vijayanagara king. Things were getting very messy, but luckily Rama Raya had spent time building relationships with the people who held covert power: the women of the court. After weeks of bloodshed and uncertainty, all of the women banded together to demand the noblemen support Rama Raya as effective king.[17] Rama Raya then pulls his last brilliant move. He acts very demure. He insists that, no, no, no, no, no, he shouldn’t be king. And then, he plucks out this lone boy prince, the former king’s nephew, and says, “this boy, this boy should be king! But I, I Rama Raya, can act as this boy’s regent until the boy is of age.”[18] Now everyone else trusted him even more. So, just like that, Rama Raya was crowned king de facto.

[00:10:25] But, of course, Rama Raya was just saying that thing about not wanting power. When the prince became of age and very reasonably asked for the reins of the empire, Rama Raya summarily locked him up. From then on, once a year, he trotted the king and name only out for an annual appearance. But the other 364 days of the year, Rama Raya was in charge.

Now Rama Raya truly had unbridled control of the empire. There was no more career progression for him. So, the only thing left to do was to expand the empire. He looked south, as his predecessors had done, but there wasn’t much left to conquer. The only way forward was up north towards the Deccan, where the sultanates ruled.

[00:11:14] Like we mentioned in the beginning, the Deccan Sultanate was originally one state, but then they had recently broken up into five rival kingdoms. That meant that they were constantly battling one another, viciously; they all wanted a bigger slice of that fertile Deccan Plateau. At the

same time, they were also often at war with Vijayanagar. However, the main border between the sultanates and Vijayanagara hadn’t shifted in a while. The border city just kept switching hands every few years, as opposed to either side making any substantial gains.[19] Rama Raya wanted to change that. But, he knew he would have to play the long game.

[00:11:53] The first step was he needed an ally. One of the four sultanates was in Golconda—that’s the sultanate that Rama Raya had served in as a young man. So, he still has some connections over there. When Golconda is in the throes of a succession struggle, Rama Raya invites a boy prince to take refuge in Hampi. For seven years, Rama Raya provides shelter for this boy prince and he teaches him; he grooms him in his image. Then, at the end of those seven years, he gives this boy thirty thousand troops to go take over the Golconda throne.[20] It took nearly a decade for Rama Raya, but he managed to create a loyal ally for himself. But, of course, he couldn’t turn all four sultans into allies. That would take 28 years. He didn’t have that time. So, he figured out a different way to maintain the balance of power.

[00:12:43] In 1557, he called all four of the rival sultans together and he sat them down and he said, “look, you guys keep on fighting each other. Sometimes it’s warranted, sometimes it’s not. I’m going to be the bigger man and help you out here. If one of you is the victim of an unjust attack, we are going to sign a treaty right now that says that all of the rest of us, myself included, will go attack the attacker on behalf of the victim.”[21] These sultans weren’t dumb. They knew that this was giving Rama Raya some extra power, but they decided it was worth it in order to protect themselves. So they all agreed to have Rama Raya be this kind of mediator-vigilante.

[00:13:24] From then on, Rama Raya acted like he was a contestant on Survivor, strategically helping underdogs to help take down the most powerful competitors, but then betraying those same underdogs when they threatened to become too powerful themselves. For example, there was a time where Sultan A and Sultan B decided to attack Sultan C. Rama Raya wanted to maintain the balance of power, but he didn’t want to have to sacrifice his own troops if he could help it. So he goes to Sultan B and says, “look, I know you think Sultan A is your ally right now, but he’s actually about to betray you and attack your fort.” So then, Sultan B goes, “whoa, thank you so much for having my back, Rama Raya,” and he abandons the campaign, which allows Sultan C to live another day and Rama Raya didn’t have to leave Hampi.

Rama Raya also had no qualms about creating alliances for short-term gain and then breaking those treaties whenever convenient. Sometimes, he would betray his allies with two degrees of separation, so that it wasn’t an outright breach. There were a few times where he would catch wind of a sultanate or a different kingdom going to attack an ally. He wouldn’t join in; he would arm those attackers behind the scenes.[22] Kind of like how in the 1970s, the US would funnel money to Pakistan, who would then pass it onto the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

[00:14:51] Rama Raya’s war games took a brief pause in 1557 when his son died. Rama Raya and his wife were distraught. Many noblemen and statesmen traveled to Hampi to pay their respects—including, most surprisingly, one of the Deccan’s sultans, Ali. Ali showed up to the funeral ceremonies because he wanted to curry favor with Rama Raya. Ali was hoping that the two of them could team up against one of the other sultans. Rama Raya’s wife was so touched that a former enemy could be so respectful that she ceremonially adopted him as her son. That’s right. Rama Raya, effective leader of the Vijayanagara Empire, was now, in name, the father of an Islamic Sultan. Ali spent three days in Hampi with his new adoptive parents.[23] I wonder if either he or Rama Raya predicted that, just eight years later, adoptive son would conspire to kill adoptive father.

[00:15:54] We are taking a twenty-five second hydrating break. There are two components to this break. Number one, go get some water! Your skin will love you for it. And then number two, rate! Rate Misrepresented! If you are listening on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you can give us some stars. Ideally five, but we’ll leave that up to you. Thank you!

[00:16:28] So we left off where Rama Raya had just adopted one of the sultans, Ali. Yet, just eight years later, that very same sultan would be conspiring to kill his symbolic father. To be honest, it might not have taken all of those years for the relationship to sour. In fact, it started going downhill just as Ali was leaving the palace and Hampi. According to Ali’s historian, Rama Raya neglected to see the sultan out the palace gates, which Ali took as an unforgivable affront. In isolation, that event wouldn’t have caused Ali to turn on Rama Raya. Remember, Ali was the one going to Rama Raya for help. But, it set a pattern for what was yet to come.

[00:17:13] Rama Raya never hid the fact that he thought himself superior to Ali and the rest of the sultans. He sometimes went out of his way to denigrate these kings. Like, there was a time when Rama Raya beat one of the other sultans in battle. During treaty negotiations, Rama Raya inserted an unusual request. The third tenet of the peace treaty was that the sultan eat paan of Rama Raya’s hand. Over the years, the sultans all had their egos bruised by Rama Raya in ways just like this. They continued to put up with it though, since they were all so busy fighting one another. But then Rama Raya got bolder.

[00:17:54] In 1563, Ali asked his symbolic father for help attacking another sultan.[24] Rama Raya was delighted to oblige. The two of them were victorious and both engaged in plundering their victim's territory. At the same time, Rama Raya went behind his ally’s back and ordered his troops to loot from Ali’s territories as well. That was likely the final straw for Ali. He decided Rama Raya needed to be stopped—permanently. The only way to do so would be to enlist a team of rivals.

Up until now, none of the sultanates were incentivized enough to take on Rama Raya’s empire. So he had to convince them one by one. First, he approached the sultan of Golconda. This is the guy who, as a boy, had been sheltered by Rama Raya. So perhaps because of that relationship, he was especially insulted by Rama Raya’s treachery and smug attitude. Plus, his kingdom had suffered the most recent losses so it wasn’t too difficult for Ali to convince him to join the suicide squad.[25]

[00:19:05] The other two sultans were persuaded after Ali leveraged their shared faith and background.[26] He reminded them that Rama Raya’s troops had destroyed mosques and that, should Vijayanagar continue to expand, all of their states may be wiped out. So that got all four sultans on board with the mission, but they still didn’t quite trust one another. To fortify this alliance, they used the traditional contract of marriage. Daughters and sisters were married to sons and brothers. Boom. Now they were family and family sticks together, right?

Oh, shoot. Ali was still technically Rama Raya's son! So he needed an excuse, however flimsy, to go to war with his dad. He sent an ambassador to Hampi with a ridiculous proposal. Rama Raya read it and immediately said no and dismissed the ambassador. But, that was exactly what Ali wanted. It allowed him to say, “oh wow, Rama Raya is being so unreasonable,” i.e. he now had a cover story for declaring war. The four merry sultans gathered their troops and marched towards the Krishna River, which was eighty miles north of Hampi. [27]

[00:20:20] To celebrate their conspiracy, the sultans threw a huge party. There was music. There was dance. There was entertainment. The camps smelled heavenly as they burned oudh 24/7.[28] Night after night, each would try to outdo the other. They did too good a job, though, of impressing each other. These parties were so freaking elaborate that word of the celebrations managed to reach Hampi.

Rama Raya quickly put the pieces together. After taking a moment, perhaps to mourn the permanent loss of his adopted son, he sprung into action. I don’t use that word lightly. At this point, Rama Raya was in his eighties. He sent word to his neighboring tributary states and within days, he had assembled an army of nearly one million men.[29] Rama Raya and his million began marching towards the Krishna River in the direction of the boisterous festivities. He managed to get all the way to the river before his would-be attackers realized what was happening. [30]Once they did, the sultans sobered up and sketched out a game plan.

[00:21:32] And so began the battle of Talikota. We started this story at the end so, it’s not a surprise that Rama Raya lost his life on the battlefield. As for why that spelled out the end for the Vijayanagara Empire, remember the very beginning in which Rama Raya was a mercenary fighting for one of the sultans? Well, he too employed mercenaries. Right before his death, you could catch him showering his army with gold coins as an incentive to continue fighting. So, once that they saw their employer was no more, they bounced. There officially was no benefit to be gained from risking their lives anymore. Not all were able to get out in time, nearly one hundred thousand of Vijayanagar’s troops died in battle.[31]

[00:22:19] Next in line to Rama Raya were his two brothers, who were also on the battlefield. As soon as they learned of his death, they retreated to Hampi, not to defend the city or its citizens, but instead to grab the imprisoned boy king and as much gold and jewels as they could carry and run off to a summer palace down south. They were accompanied by the soldiers that were still loyal to the crown and from there, they attempted to restore Vijayanagar rule.[32] But having lost a substantial amount of their army, trading revenue, and geographical advantage, their version of Vijayanagar held just a fraction of its prior strength and influence. Many of the tributary states that were once part of the empire just broke off and became separate kingdoms once again.[33]

[00:23:08] As for Hampi, the peasants were trapped there. All forms of transportation had been loaned out to the army, so they couldn’t even leave the city. According to one historian, nothing could be done but to bury all treasure, to arm the younger men, and wait.[34]

[00:23:27] In those days, when one kingdom conquered another, destruction and looting were just expected. But, this was something different. Temples, statues, and homes were all turned into rubble. Any Hampi resident that got within the army’s sight was killed. And because Hampi was so rich, it took the sultanates six months to fully drain the city of its splendor and wealth. When they left Hampi, the city was unrecognizable.[35] But, they did indeed leave. The sultans had no intention of taking over Hampi. It would have been too difficult to administer a kingdom so far away. Instead, they retreated back to their respective kingdoms. As soon as they were back home, the suicide squad disbanded.[36] They went right back to fighting one another, keeping one another weak enough so that they were all eventually subsumed by the Mughal empire in the north.[37]

[00:24:24] Hampi would slowly become rehabitated over the next few years. In fact, it would once again become a trading post, but it was irreparably tarnished. Over the next century, It would go further into decline, becoming permanently abandoned in the 17th century. Palms would grow over the temples and, without any maintenance, buildings would continue to decay. The city was almost completely submerged in greenery. Until a man by the name of Robert Sewell happened upon them. More on that after the break.

[00:24:58] Hanisha: Hey, it’s Hanisha, the sound designer for Misrepresented! I wanted to hop on here today, just to thank Arun Ramamurthy, pelle, and Dolorblind for graciously licensing their music to us for this today’s episode. We have gotten a lot of praise on the music we use in our show and that’s only possible because of amazing desi and diaspora artists who license their work to us for free, or extremely reduced rates! And we need those discounts, because we don’t make any money—yet. And this podcast costs a boatload to produce. So, if you wanna help us produce more episodes, please consider giving us five, or twenty, or eighty-three dollars, whatever your heart and wallet feels like. Just visit kahaani.io/misrepresented to give. Thanks so much, let’s get back to the show.

[00:25:51] Niki: So, the story of Rama Raya is definitely a complicated one, but the one thing that is clear is that the story that I had heard from my tour guide and that you had heard at the very beginning of this episode was a little too reductive. This idea that all Muslims sultans banned together to destroy the last Hindu empire of the south feels… incomplete. Like, yes, that is what happened, but not entirely for the reasons that sentence implies.

[00:26:17] But we can trace back the simplified version of this story to a hundred years ago, when the British needed this version to be told. The British empire was not an intentional project. Instead, it was largely the outcome of a series of independent short-sighted events. But when Queen Victoria crowned herself Empress of India, the British realized they needed to retcon a hero’s origin story ASAP. As historian Burton Stein puts it:

[00:26:45] Burton Stein: “These Britons sought to devise an historical past not for the sake of pure knowing, but for the purpose of controlling a subject people whose past was to be so constructed as to make British rule a necessity as well as a virtue.”[38]

[00:26:58] Niki: In other words, the British needed to portray South Asia’s past in a way that made the British Raj feel like an upgrade. A key player in this mission was Robert Sewell. In the late 1800s, Robert was named the keeper of the Madras Records Office, where he wrote about Roman coins, Buddhist symbolism, various Indian education systems, and at the turn of the twentieth century, he produced his most famous work, The Forgotten Empire.[39] In this book, he wrote his version of why the Vijayanagar Empire fell, leaving the once splendid city of Hampi, in ruins.

When it came to using this history to support the narrative of British saviorship, there were three key arguments underlying his story. First was that religious identity was the most important factor in medieval South Asia, and so, the fall of Rama Raya and his empire was due primarily to religious conflict. He wrote things like:

[00:27:55] Robert Sewell: “It seems certain that most if not all Southern India submitted to the Vijayanagar emperor’s rule, probably only too anxious to secure a continuance of Hindu domination in preference to the despotism of the hated followers of Islam.”

[00:28:08] Niki: And he referred to the ultimate battle as a holy war. The second argument that needed to be made was that Muslim rulers were especially barbaric and cruel. The destruction of Hampi provided the perfect opportunity for this. Robert shared a quote from a Portuguese traveler who arrived after the battle.

[00:28:27] Portuguese Traveler: “The city of Vijayanagar is not altogether destroyed, yet the houses stand still, but empty, and there is dwelling in them nothing, as is reported, but tigers and other wild beasts.”[40]

[00:28:39] Niki: That quote is pretty darn chilling. But, Robert conveniently chose to ignore the next paragraph of the Portuguese traveler’s writings, in which he mentions that Hampi is actually in even worse condition than when the sultans left it because of a subsequent battle that took place.[41] So he’s proven now that India is hopelessly divided by religion and that the foreign Muslims irreparably destroyed a historic Indian city.

[00:29:05] The last argument in the playbook was the trickiest: that the natives were also incompetent rulers. Because, remember, Hampi’s splendor was undeniable. Sewell himself called Hampi the Venice of India. But if native people were capable of creating their own Venice, why on Earth would they need Europeans to do it for them?

[00:29:25] Robert Sewell: “Rama Raya had despotically turned out of his estate an Abyssinian officer in his employ…The despotic ruler dismissed the men to return to Goa without payment…The public were not taken into confidence by their despotic rulers.”[42]

[00:29:38] Niki: Yes, Robert had to claim that the native rulers were unjust despots. But, I wonder if this was a reach for him because he just kept on using that same word over and over again. There’s not actually any record of Rama Raya being unusually oppressive. In fact, a writer who served in a rival sultanate at the time said that Rama Raya ruled with equity and justice. Rama Raya was also praised for not just being tolerant of Muslims and Christians, but welcoming them into his empire and shielding them from discrimination.

[00:30:08] Those were details that Robert didn’t want to emphasize, though, so that, in comparison to the natives, the enlightened, civilized British appeared to be an upgrade for the everyday people.[43] Sewell’s book, The Forgotten Empire, would go on to be used in classrooms and cited by historians for a century to come. And like we heard in the beginning, his book still influences the story of Hampi’s fall today.

[00:30:32] So Sewell’s version included many facts, but it was clearly skewed. I went into this research wanting to know, what is the true, honest story? I like things to be black and white. Like the story of the Ramayan: Ravaan, the demon, captures Sita so Ram, an incarnation of god, rallies an army to save her. Good triumphs over evil. So I wanted to know: Was Rama Raya a Ram, or a Ravaan? Was he a modern benevolent ruler who fended off foreign invaders, or was he an egomaniac who imprisoned a boy king and whose pride led to the demise of several hundred thousand people?

[00:31:15] It was only a few years ago that I learned even the story of Ram and Ravaan isn’t that clear cut. Because there are actually over one thousand different tellings of the Ramayan. In one of the earliest ones, Ram is not a deity, but instead a flawed man.[44] In others, Ravaan isn’t a demon.[45] He instead serves as a foil to Ram and he’s got admirable qualities too. He’s a scholar and a musician. In fact, some tellings emphasize the fact that Ravaan’s crime of kidnapping Sita was precipitated by Ram’s failings. What’s incredible to me is that there isn’t actually one true Ramayana. These tellings were allowed to coexist in harmony, each providing a slightly different perspective from which to view Rama, Ravaan, and the whole situation.

[00:32:06] When it came to our telling of Rama Raya and the fall of Hampi, there are so many other plot points we could have included —the involvement of the Persian Shah! The betrayal within the Vijayanagara army! Rama Raya’s dealings with the Portuguese! In fact, I worried that this episode could never air, because how would I know if we represented the full, complete TRUE story?

Luckily, I finally realized my mistake: the past is finite, it is a set of events and people from a contained space and time. But the number of perspectives—the histories—may actually be infinite. I will never be able to know the full, complete history of Rama Raya and the fall of Hampi. But it is possible to get closer and closer to the truth by exploring all of the tellings I come across, while also leaving room for the versions that haven’t been written yet.