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Religious Traditions at Vijayanagara: As Revealed through its Monuments. By ANILA VERGHESE. Vijayanagara Research Project Monograph Series, vol. 4. New Delhi: Manohar, 1995. xii, 285 pp. Rs 750 (cloth).
The primacy of religion in ancient and medieval Indian state and society is a fait accompli. There are even many instances in which religion has determined the trajectory of state policy. So, religion in India has always been a fascinating area of study for both historians and cultural anthropologists. Given the nature of the relationship between state and religion, profane and sacred in India, regarding the nature and polity of a state sometimes becomes a historian's mere guesswork or conjecture at best, unless religion and its interfacing with that state is interrogated. The Hindu Vijayanagara empire that came into existence in south India in the midfourteenth century out of a chain of revolts against Delhi's Tughluq rule was not only politically important but also religiously significant for its predominantly Hindu nature. Although there is still a debate going on over the religious policy of the empire, historians by and large agree that the empire protected Hindu faith and culture and helped preserve ancient Hindu ideals and kingship, law and justice. Thus, the importance of religion in the Vijayanagara empire cannot be ignored or superficially studied.
Anila Verghese's Religious Traditions at Vijayanagara: As Revealed through its Monuments is an important addition to the vast corpus of existing historiography on the Vijayanagara empire in the sense that it is a monograph exclusively devoted to the study of different religious traditions that flourished or existed during the period and is based primarily on archaeological sources (extant...