These Old Stones
I was in Hampi over the weekend, taking in the heat of a blaze that hadn’t been tempered even when the fires that destroyed that glorious place died centuries ago.
It felt like the heat of that blaze had never left.
It was past 3 PM when we set foot on the long, dusty road leading to the Virupaksha Temple. The heat seemed to build as we approached the towering Raja Gopuram.
Inside the temple compound, it seemed to sear into every surface. My hands and feet were burning. Distracted by the sheer scale and beauty of the temple and its carvings, I chalked it up to the famous Hospet heat.
After darshan, we headed towards the temple reservoir. I had a small water bottle sticking out of my bag. One of the temple monkeys decided it was fair game, took it before I could say “Hey!” and made off with it.
It was hot. Monkeys need water too.
From there, we climbed up the Hemakuta Hill, desperately looking for shade even as we gawked at the sheer scale of the landscape.
I was struck by the towering gopuram, dwarfing everything around it. A guide I overheard told someone that the pillars of the Virupaksha Temple depict Lord Varaha, the boar, which was considered unclean by the invading forces and therefore left untouched.
And looking at the temple from a distance, lit up by the scorching sun, I suddenly felt that this untouched place had retained something of what had happened all around it, even after all these centuries.
As the oranges and reds of twilight lit up the skies, leaving the ruins and entering the town felt jarring. Streetlights. Traffic. The usual humdrum. It was like stepping back in from another time. Another age.
The next day, we wandered through more of Hampi. That strange feeling… as if the lives of the people who once inhabited this place were somehow still present in the landscape. I couldn’t shake it.
I felt like a time traveller who had stepped into a beautiful, glorious, and dangerous time. A time of stunning art and architecture that took centuries—not years—to build. That passion, that dedication, that love, and that powerful drive to create something that will last. All destroyed in one determined move to erase. Months of burning and looting, months of infernos stretching across hundreds of acres. A whole sprawling, humungous city of vibrant people full of life. A rich, abundant city that was once the hub for traders from all across the world. Burnt until all that was left was these old stones.
On our way back to Bangalore, we saw huge clouds of dark grey smoke churning into the sky.
A shop was burning. Orange and red flames engulfed the building.
If this raging inferno is what a small burning shop looks like, what must it have been like all those centuries ago, when the royal palaces and elite residential structures, built with rich woodwork including fragrant sandalwood, each a work of art in themselves, burned… for months across thousands of acres?
A rage of fire that burnt everything leaving one silent witness in the heart of the conflagration untouched.
If the Virupaksha temple is anything to go by, the kind of art and architecture that was decimated in that attack is a loss that we have not been able to recover from. Yet.
Unfortunately, Hampi was just one of many devastations. The carnage at Nalanda, the Martand Sun Temple in Kashmir, the looting and destruction at Warangal, the fort of Chittorgarh – all aimed at destroying a wealth of carefully built and preserved knowledge, history, art, culture – everything that defines a people.
The futility of creating something that majestic and beautiful in a nation that worshipped art, reducing art strictly to a hobby today. The futility of power grabbing. Of wars.
People change in ways that are difficult to come back from.
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Factually, references (listed below) lay bare something that is hard to even acknowledge, leave alone come to terms with:
The scale of destruction at Hampi following the Battle of Talikota in 1565 is considered one of the most catastrophic and absolute sackings of a metropolis in medieval world history.
At its peak around 1500, Hampi was among the largest cities in the world, housing an estimated 500,000 people. The sheer magnitude of its ruin can be understood through several stark historical and archaeological facts:
1. Duration and Method of Ruin
Six Months of Systematic Sacking: This was not a quick raid. A unified coalition of the four Deccan Sultanates occupied the defenseless capital and spent nearly six months systematically dismantling it. Destroying completely.
Industrial-Scale Demolition: The invading armies used crowbars, axes, heavy ropes, and gunpowder to intentionally topple massive stone structures.
The Fire that Scorched Stone: To clear out the city and uncover hidden gold, the armies set massive, coordinated fires across a radius of several miles. Archaeological excavations today still reveal thick layers of charcoal, ash, and heat-cracked granite basements across the royal center.
2. Physical and Cultural Losses
Smashed Devotional Art: Because the conquerors sought to permanently break the sovereign and religious authority of the empire, almost every major temple was targeted. Royal statues were decapitated, intricately carved temple pillars were smashed, and the noses, limbs, and faces of thousands of deities on rock reliefs were chipped away to deface them.
The Looting of Global Wealth: Hampi's famous and well documented open-air markets, where international traders once bartered in rubies, diamonds, and pearls, were completely plundered. Soldiers dug up temple floors, royal foundations, and private homes looking for buried treasure.
Complete Depopulation: Thousands of citizens were massacred or taken into slavery. The remaining population fled, and the city went from a bustling global trade hub to an entirely abandoned ghost town overrun by wildlife in a matter of months.
3. Survivors of the Carnage
A few structures survived the apocalypse due to specific circumstances:
The Virupaksha Temple: As Hampi's oldest and most sacred site, it escaped total destruction (though its outer structures suffered) and is the only major temple that has maintained continuous worship from antiquity to the modern day.
Secular Indo-Islamic Architecture: Structures like the Lotus Mahal and the Elephant Stables survived largely intact, likely because their architectural style blended Islamic arches and domes, which the invading sultanate armies seemed to have spared out of cultural familiarity.
Ultimately, the destruction was so complete that the capital could never be resettled. The surviving royal family fled south with hundreds of treasure-laden elephants to establish smaller regional capitals, leaving Hampi frozen in time as a 10,000-acre open-air museum of ruins.
References:
UNESCO:
WIKIPEDIA:
OTHERS:
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