Hampi, Vijayanagara: City of Victory

Programme

October 2024

In 1980, Dr John M. Fritz and Dr George Michell undertook what became a 40-year research project meticulously documenting the city capital of the Vijayanagar empire, the last great Hindu kingdom of the Deccan. The late Dr Fritz was the first American archaeologist to survey the 14th-16th-century ruins of this imperial Hindu city in India’s Deccan plateau. Trained at the University of Chicago as an anthropologist with a special interest in prehistoric, Native American sites in New Mexico and Arizona, Fritz brought an entirely new perspective to South Asian urban studies. He proposed that the Hindu god Rama dominated the urban plan of Vijayanagara’s Royal Centre by acting as the divine mediator between the everyday activities and ceremonial life of the Vijayanagara rulers. It is this innovative approach that Michell will discuss in this illustrated lecture. The more than twenty years of fieldwork conducted at Hampi during the 1980s and 1990s became a highly prized opportunity for architectural and archaeological students across India, many of whom have gone on to eminent careers of their own in related fields.

The importance of this research has been recognized by the British Library which recently accepted the Vijayanagara archive and secured funding for its cataloguing and digitization, so that it will, in due course, be accessible on-line, a boon especially to students and researchers based in India.