SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH, Vol.17, No.

2, Autumn 1997

AGREEING TO DISAGREE:
BURTON STEIN ON VIJAYANAGARA

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

published in his very productive,

monograph entitled quite simply
post-retirement, period London,
Vijayanagara, for The New Cambridge History of India, Vol. 1.2 (Cambridge
University Press, 1989), under the general editorship of Gordon Johnson, C. A.
Bayly and J. F. Richards. The monograph, which I presume was commissioned in
the early to mid 1980s, had a broadly favourable reception, for example in the
Times Literary Supplement (where it was reviewed by K. N. Chaudhuri), although
a few somewhat critical reviews, notably one rather severe one by R.
Champakalakshmi in the Delhi journal Studies in History, also appeared. In this
brief essay, I shall attempt to place the work of Stein on Vijayanagara in a double
context: first, the evolution of his own views on the subject, which as we shall see
by no means followed a linear pattern; and second, the rather more complex
question of the changing historiographical constellation within which these views
should be placed.
I am tempted, however, to begin with a somewhat anecdotal reflection. I first
met Burton Stein, as I recall it, in London in early 1985, when I was doing

Among

the

numerous

works that Burton Stein

in

was a

research at the India Office

short

Library for my doctoral thesis

at

the Delhi School of

by a rather meagre Indian Council of Social Science Research

at
and
staying a somewhat curious Polish 6migr6-owned hotel off Barons
grant,
Court, Steins was one of the few telephone numbers I had in London, besides that
of K. N. Chaudhuri. I had just been in the Netherlands, working at the Hague
Economics. Funded

archives, and Frank Perlin

at

that time still

teaching in Rotterdam,

and resident

way about Stein. The facts I knew

included that Stein did not own a suit, and that he had had to borrow a tie for
Perlins formal thesis defence at the Erasmus University. The image I had was
in Leiden

had briefed

me

in his

own

rather odd one, between the studied casualness this anecdote suggested,
warnings concerning Steins intellectual hypnotism that I had received from my
elders and betters at Delhi, and my own impressions from reading Peasant state and
thus

society in

South India,

book which had been

greeted with a huge

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hullabaloo

as

128

soon as

it

reviled

by

written in

came

others
a

(mostly

in

India).

myself to penetrate;
fleshed out

fully
historiographical
as

1980, being acclaimed by

convoluted and hermetic

economist like

there,

out in

as

some

(mostly

outside

India), and
hard going,

The book itself I found very

style that was extremely difficult for

but the

it would

segmentary

ever

state model

was

an

finally

be after the bare bones of the

essays that had preceded it. In any case, it took me a very long
time to reconcile myself to the fact that the same person who had written this book

(in somewhat rebarbative social science language), was the very humorous,
denim-jacketed, character who showed up on appointment at the India Office
Library, looking like a sort of ageing Clark Gable playing the White Hunter in
Mocambo (a fairly awful film I had just seen two days before on TV, in the seedy
lounge of my Polish hotel).
Now, as is well-known, Peasant state and society is mostly about the Chola
dynasty, even though there is a long, last chapter on later times. In contrast, the
Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I, which appeared just as I was
beginning my research, included several chapters by Stein on precisely this later
Vijayanagara period, that coincided with the focus of my own dissertation (which
was on South India between 1550 and 1650). Besides, since my main interest was
trade, there was also the paper that Stein had written, titled Coromandel Trade in
Medieval India, in a volume edited by John Parker of the James Ford Bell Library,

managed to obtain a xerox copy of this

and
read
with interest its theory concerning
with
in
Delhi
great difficulty,
paper
how the so-called merchant guilds in South India had been smashed by the
entitled Merchants and scholars (1965). I

expansion of the Vijayanagara polity into south-eastern India.

Let us recall where matters stood in Vijayanagara studies in the mid-1950s,
when Stein began his own thesis work on the Tirumala-Tirupati temple at the
University of Chicago, even if this means partly rehearsing ground touched on by
him in the introduction to Vijayanagara. The classic work was that of the British
administrator Robert Sewell, and its title, A forgotten empire (1900), tells its own
tale. Sewell had begun by doing research on epigraphy and numismatics, to
establish clear lists of south Indian dynasties; in some sense, this was a
continuation of Colin Mackenzies unfinished project to the same end, although
Mackenzie had had a rather different set of materials in mind. Sewells enterprise
was completely altered though, by the chance re-discovery by the Portuguese
Arabist David Lopes of some detailed accounts by Portuguese of Vijayanagara (or
Bisnaga, as they prefer to call it), in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. Lopes
published the texts, anonymously authored, but attributed by him to Domingos

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(c. 1518) and Fernao Nunes (c. 1535), in his book Chr6nica dos Reis de
Bisnaga (Chronicle of the Vijayanagara kings) in 1897, as part of the publication
Paes

programme for the fourth centenary of Vasco da Gamas voyage; his edition also
carries a long eighty-one page introduction, including references to Sewells Lists

of inscriptions, and sketch of the dynasties of Southern India ( 1884). Sewell seized
upon this Portuguese publication and used it extensively in his own work published
three years later, as he also did the early seventeenth-century text authored by the
Portuguese Jesuit Manuel Barradas, concerning the Vijayanagara Civil War of
the 1610s. Since Sewell published complete translations of these texts, the names
of Paes and Nuniz (as Nunes came to be spelt), entered Vijayanagara
historiography in a definitive fashion; the less fortunate Barradas for his part was
largely consigned to the dust-heap.
The next two generations of work then extended the documentary basis of
Vijayanagara studies considerably. S. Krishnaswami Ayyangar (for some of
whose other writings Stein had a particular fondness), published excerpts from
literary texts relating to Vijayanagara in Sources of Vijayanagar history (1919),
following it up some years later with an extensive work on the Tirupati temple;
then, two historians, B. A. Saletore and N. Venkataramanayya, began the process
of reintegrating Sewells view with the inscriptional record, which had in the
meantime been published in fits and starts, in the Archaeological Surveys annual
summaries, as well as in some cases with the entire texts. The Portuguese, Italian
and Latin materials continued to be exploited by the Bombay-based Spanish Jesuit,
H. Heras, and thus by the mid-1930s, a substantial body of work existed on
Vijayanagara. Yet this work remained curiously shorn of a framework, often
reflecting no more than dull quarrels between regions (thus, the Karnataka lobby
versus the Andhra lobby, each vying for the pride of having founded
Vijayanagara). Venkataramanayyas Studies in the history of the third dynasty of
Vijayanagara (1935), which I myself consider the best work of that generation
(though Stein did not share my view), faithfully reflects the strengths and
weaknesses of the approach in vogue. The book is repetitive, often organised
almost like a district gazetteer (a trait that is even more pronounced in T. V.
Mahalingams unreadable work of the next generation), and this is not a
coincidence. Though Venkataramanayya was a very talented scholar and
philologist, who edited a number of important Telugu texts from the Mackenzie
collection, he typically insisted on seeing Vijayanagara as an empire in the mould
of the British Raj in India. A major part of his enterprise was thus to classify taxes,
lands and other aspects of the land-system in a way that would be recognisable to

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official. Atop this system sat the (as it turns out, somewhat
of
bogus) category a sort of Vijayanagara military fief-holder, the arnarandyaka,
the description of whose activities seems to derive essentially from Nuness
a

British

revenue

account of the 1530s.

Indeed,

Cambridge economic history,

as

Stein himself noted in his

chapter

in the

while

Venkataramanayya surely knew the materials

real
the
theoretical statement was that of K. A.
anyone,
Nilakantha Sastri, who in his general work, History of South India, described
Vijayanagara as a confederation of military chieftains, perhaps unconsciously
at first hand

as

well

as

borrowing the early British description of the Marathas in the closing years of the
eighteenth century.
These monographs, and a few other works devoted to the Nayaka
principalities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (R. Satyanatha Aiyar on
Madurai, V. Vriddhagirisan on Tanjavur, C. Hayavadana Rao on Mysore), defined
the baseline from which any analysis might be attempted in the baseline from
which any analysis might be attempted in the late 1950s. The last major
publication in English at that time was the three-volume work (Further sources of
Vijayanagar history) edited by Sastri and Venkataramanayya in 1946, and as its
title indicates this was really a source-publication, even though one volume of the
three tried to establish a clear chronology of political events, which was then
extensively used as background material by such historians as Tapan Raychaudhuri
in his Jan Company in Coromandel, 1605-1690 (1962).
Steins doctoral thesis thus tries to set itself apart from this received wisdom,
at the same time making use of it for the empirical detail it provided. The

while

focus of the thesis

was

Tirupati temple, and the research was facilitated by the

source-publication, that of the Tirumalaiepigraphical series in six broadly chronological volumes
the

existence of still another coherent

Tirupati Devasthanam

The main thrust of Steins argument was a modernist and

developmental one, which is quite adequately brought out in two very well-cited

(1931-38).

published by him in the early 1960s; since they represented the core of the
thesis, it is probably no surprise that the thesis itself remained unpublished. In
retrospect, echoes can be found between Steins position of the time, and some
aspects of his occasional collaborator Morris D. Morriss views of the same period;
in particular, both insisted on downplaying the idea of Indian other-worldliness,
and argued (Morris explicitly, Stein implicitly) against values as an obstacle to
social and economic change in South Asia. To Stein, writing in the Economic
Weekly in the early 1960s, it appeared clear that Vijayanagara was a state that was
oriented towards agricultural development, and that the patronage of temples was
papers

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part of

strategy towards this end. Ingeniously, he showed how donations

to

temples had to be invested fruitfully, yielding a certain minimum rate of return if

the puja that was to be conducted in exchange for the donations could be sustained.
Also, he analysed the changing form of donation, from a preponderance of land to
more and more cash, as well as the changing identities of donors (amongst whom
merchants, and related groups, appear rather more prominently in the sixteenth
century than before). In some sense, it seems to me that the Stein who wrote those
papers (later collected in his All the Kings Mana, published from Madras)
represented a rather more radical (and perhaps more nationalist!) view of the
modernity of Vijayanagara than either Sastri or Venkataramanayya. Let us stress,
once more, that these papers privileged the inscriptional materials over all others,
whether the European sources (which do have some rather interesting things to say,
in point of fact, about Tirupati), or literary and narrative texts (from kavya to
kaifiyats) of the type found excerpted in the two volumes on Sources and Further
sources.

In the 1960s, even though Steins unhappiness with the formulation associated
with K. A. Nilakantha Sastri on the Cholas grew more pronounced, the views he
held

continued to stress its power, its thrusting character, its

destruction of autonomous local institutions, and so on. The paper that I have cited
on

Vijayanagara

briefly above, Coromandel Trade in Medieval India, is a good example of this

position, since it stresses the power and efficacy of Vijayanagara military
intervention in the Tamil country in the fifteenth century, in the aftermath of the
campaigns of Kumara Kampana. Even trade, it seems, must be seen in this

conception in relation to state power, and is almost subsumed in a narrative where

the Vijayanagara state holds centre-stage.
It is thus surprising, in this light, to re-read the last chapter of Peasant state and
society (1980), on Vijayanagara. Of course, in the meantime, the focus of Steinss
interests in relation to Vijayanagara had shifted from the state to forms of sectarian
religious organisation, viewed largely from a sociological (rather than a religious
studies) viewpoint. In the South Indian temples volume that he edited (1978), two
papers represent this rather well. The first is Steins own, arguing from Census
materials on the foundation-dates of temples, for a shift in the composition of

temples were devoted in the Tamil country between 1350 and

Arjun Appadurais essay on the relationship between temples,
while arguing for a form of
sectarian leaders and the Vijayanagara state, which
of
medieval
shifts the brunt
the
actors
vote-bank
on
part
rationality
strategic
of change from the state to a rather different level in society. (Incidentally, Stein

deities to whom

1750. The other is

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cite this essay with approbation into the late 1980s, indeed rather
frequently than the essays author himself, for Appadurai himself had

continued
more

to

metamorphosed by that time into a post-modernist guru). Besides, Steins interest

in viewing the state as held together by ritual elements had grown by leaps and
bounds in this period; the analysis of the mahanavami at Vijayanagara as a
constitutive ritual also dates from these interim years. It should be stressed that
Stein was never interested in the ritual of kingship for its own sake, but for its

function; this is the reason why his analysis, while strikingly innovative at the time
for the Indian

appears rather broad-brush in retrospect, from the

of view of the close reader of texts like the Amuktamlyada, from the

historiography,

point
Vijayanagara period.
To

society then, its last chapter claimed that what

period concerning the segmentary nature of the
Chola state broadly held good for Vijayanagara as well. Despite being provided
with considerable detail (including some limited narrative detail concerning
Vijayanagar rule), the reader was left with the impression that a highly stable
structural model, rooted in a far earlier past, explained all the essentials concerning
this state. Even if the rituals had changed somewhat, ritual kingship still
remained the rule; the importance of fiscality as either constitutive or reflective in
any way of state power was dismissed; localities preserved their autonomy from
the centre, even if the nomenclature (and perhaps even the dimensions) of the
local units had changed. But, curiously, the chapter at the same time reproduced
the core materials of the two papers from the early 1960s that I have discussed
return to

Peasant state and

had been said for the earlier

above.

This created

in Steins work, a tension that he himself

extent. As C. A. Bayly remarks in his companion essay, the
a

major problem

recognised to an
dynamics of historical change proved difficult to bring into the segmentary state
model, which is no surprise since the model was conceived by structural
anthropologists whose primary concern was never historical change anyway.
(Aidan Southalls self-congratulatory essay of the 1980s in Comparative studies in
society and history, reflecting in part on Steins work, is typical of this). Thus,
between 1980 and 1985 (when he published several further important essays on
Vijayanagara), Stein had time to reflect on these problems. One of these later
essays, in a collection from the Journal of peasant studies on the applicability of
feudalism as a concept to India and other non-European societies, returns in
some respects to the position of the 1965 essay on Coromandel trade.
Vijayanagara warriors are seen as powerfully intruding into the Tamil countryside,

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but Stein also nuanced the

analysis by suggesting

that the situation in Karnataka

rather different (and more stable), than that which obtained in the Telugu and
Tamil country. The other essay, presented at the review conference on the
Cambridge economic history of India, went even further. Influenced in part by
Frank Perlin, with whom he briefly contemplated a collaboration on the subject
(their essays, with very similar titles, appear side-by-side in Modern Asian Studies,
was

1985), Stein now posited a considerable change between the medieval state of the
Cholas, and the late eighteenth century state of say, Haidar cali and Tipu Sultan.
From the work of Perlin, Stein appears to have seized the importance of
in determining rural power relations, as
of the medieval system on collective bodies
all peasants were represented in these bodies). The

eighteenth-century magnate figures

distinct from his insistence in the

case

of peasants (even if not

solution he found was to apply the idea of

military fiscalism taken from the early

modern French historiography to southern India in the long transition from the
Cholas to the British. Thus, Vijayanagara now appears as part of a transition to
patrimonial regimes (here, the reference was to Max Weber on Sultanism),
powered by military-fiscal changes.
This also brought Stein to another problem that he grappled with in the late
1980s, and especially the early 1990s, without however coming to a very
successful resolution. I refer to the status of Islam in South India (discussed at
length for the eighteenth century by Susan Bayly in her 1989 book), and
conversely, the extent to which states like Vijayanagara could be looked at as
Hindu kingdoms, as quite a lot of the Indian historiography tended to do. To the
extent that Steins own focus on ritual kingship had tended to bring out the role
played by Hindu ritual, there was obviously a drift in that direction. At the same
time, he was also aware, in particular after an important essay by Hermann Kulke
published in the 1980s, that from the fifteenth century onwards, the image of
Vijayanagara had been manipulated for posterity by a series of powerful
ideological agents, such as the Sringeri matha, for example. The Vijayanagara
volume thus veers somewhat uncertainly between rejecting the communalist
characterisation of Vijayanagara, and accepting that it was indeed a Hindu
kingdom fighting its Muslim rivals. On balance, I believe, the reader of Stein is
left with the first impression, among other things because of the manner in which
the narrative for the sixteenth century is constructed. Both Krishnadevaraya and
especially his son-in-law Aliya Ramaraya are shown as strategic actors, practising
a form of realpolitik (and here we hark back once more to the formulation of the
late 1950s). They are as ready to ally with the Deccan Sultans, as to fight against

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them; power,

not

religious ideology,

dominates their actions, when all is said and

done.
The first of the 1985 papers, in the feudalism collection, does address this
problem of a Hindu nationalist reading of Vijayanagara in passing; on the other

hand, the preoccupations of the State formation and economy reconsidered paper
lie elsewhere. The main interest of this rather schematic essay is that it proposes a
solution to the problem of change, and an escape route from the homeostatic, self-

reproducing model of the segmentary state.

motor from the

This is

by producing a technological

outside, in the form of firearms in particular, and military

generally. For Stein, Vijayanagara began a process of thrusting

technology more
centralisation using these technologies, which at one stage he suggested were
essentially brought in by the Portuguese. Various rounds of change are said to
have followed, with resistance continually being offered by earlier communitybased political structures to the new dispensation. The period of Krishnadevaraya
(r. 1509-29) was identified by him as one such key period of change, a formulation
that he carried forward into the monograph on Vijayanagara. Then, there was a
rather long hiatus, but centralisation is said to have resumed with Chikkadevaraja
Wodeyar in late seventeenth-century Mysore. Finally, Haidar and Tipu were
thought to have represented highly sophisticated forms of centralised rule, a view
in which Stein believed he was confirmed by his own researches in the second half
of the 1980s into the papers of Sir Thomas Munro (and by Devdas Moodleys
unpublished research of the same period in SOAS).
The problem however was in large measure very simply empirical: for Stein
never seems to have gone back after 1980 to do primary research on Vijayanagara
itself, from materials generated in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth
centuries. True, he kept abreast of the secondary literature, writing reviews of
almost every major work that appeared on Vijayanagara in the 1980s and early
1990s. But, the real bases of the revision (for revision it clearly was, though he
never explicitly said so) in views that took place between 1980 and 1985 were
elsewhere: first, the theoretical problem of finding a dynamic of change to escape
from falling into the trap of seeing the segmentary state as a sort of Asiatic mode
of production; second, the research into the early colonial archives, which
convinced him that there was more to south India in the late pre-colonial period
than robust and more-or-less autarchic communities.

Thus, Vijayanagara straddles several faultlines, for while vestiges of the

still be found there, the broad thrust of the analysis
has moved towards the dynamic process of military fiscalism, based in good part

segmentary

state model

can

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135

technological deus ex machina. Equally, to support the military fiscalism

hypothesis, recourse has to be taken by Stein to Portuguese sources in translation
(notably Nuness account of the siege of Raichur by Krishnadevaraya), even
though elsewhere in the same book, he is dismissive of these same sources,
somewhat unjustly dismissing them as no more than Orientalist fantasies. It is
rather difficult for the general reader to understand why Nunes cannot be used, say,
to support the idea of feudalism in Vijayanagara (as is done by A. Krishnaswami
on a

and

others), if he is so reliable on other counts.

In the

1980s, in the years between Peasant state and society and Vijayanagara

(which stand

at

the two ends of the

authors had also been

decade),

work

by

certain number of other

that the

published
Vijayanagara,
historiographical
changed somewhat too. Some of this work Stein found
unproblematic, and integrated without difficulty into his schema; in particular, the
work done on the site of Hampi itself by George Michell and his collaborators was
seen by him as providing useful complementary materials to his own conception.
More problematic for him was a series of essays that Noboru Karashima produced
on Vijayanagara and the Nayakas, culminating in his book Towards a new
formation (1992). Steins review of the work appeared in this journal (Vol. 14,
no. 2, 1994, pp. 226-28), and it was a rather critical discussion, tempered by some
appreciation at the beginning and end. Karashimas broad argument was that
Vijayanagara in the fifteenth century was a powerful, expansive, state, which
crushed the peasantry with fiscal levies while expanding into the Tamil country.
However, in the sixteenth century, for unexplained reasons, this relatively
on

so

constellation had

centralised and bureaucratic structure dissolved into

dominated

by figures

called

form of feudalism

ndyakas, whose role Karashima had earlier explored in

brief fashion. The materials from which this argument was built were, as is usual
with Karashima, the inscriptional record which is still so rich in the period up to
a

the mid-sixteenth century.

Stein might well have found the first part of this argument congenial, although
he probably thought Karashima exaggerated the extent of centralisation that had

been achieved

by the fifteenth century. At any rate, his principal critiques lay

elsewhere. First, he noted the general framing according to rather old-fashioned
Marxist concepts in Karashimas work, combined with an unspecified state
structure, which he considered strange in view of the importance given by
Karashima
movement

objection

the state, which provided the major dynamic, the historical

(indeed, rather as in Steins own work of the mid-1980s). A second
to

that

was

raised

by

him concerned Karashimas usage of the notions of

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136

slavery, and individual property. On the latter, he was particularly

sceptical, though, to my knowledge, he never produced a detailed critique of Peter
A. Grandas thesis, which has a persuasive argument on forms of private landed
property in Vijayanagara times.
On one matter, Stein seems to have agreed with Karashima, and this was
concerning the centrality of the inscriptional record for an understanding of the
Vijayanagara state. Reviewing a work I co-authored with Velcheru Narayana Rao
and David Shulman, titled Symbols of substance (1992), he cautioned (albeit in an
uncharacteristically gentle way) against the extensive use we made of literary
sources, which I suppose was a reflection of the position both he and Karashima
held at that time (see this journal, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1994, pp. 228-30). This may
therefore be the place to issue a disclaimer, since it was never my intention (nor
that of my co-authors) to deny the utility or importance of the inscriptional record,
merely to argue that there are other important and rather neglected source-materials
for the recovery of pre-colonial south Indian political culture, and to clarify besides
that the dominant statistical (counting) approach to inscriptions has severe
limitations. However, where literary materials were concerned, one also discerns a
mild shift in position in some of Steins last writings. For, reviewing a work,
namely Phillip Wagoners translation of the Telugu text Rdyavdcakamu, his
judgement of it was broadly rather positive, even if he did express distress at one
point in the review at Wagoners genuflection in the direction of the fashionable
methodology of ethnohistory (this journal, vol. 15, no. 1, 1995, pp. 139-41).
And finally, there was a new historiography on trade, that also finds a place in
the Vijayanagara book, representing a rather nice closing of the circle from the
1965 essay. Whereas Stein had earlier read the history of trade out of the history
of the Vijayanagara states dealings with the so-called merchant guilds, now he
devoted a good deal more attention to the articulation of ports, merchants and
trading networks in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, issues that he had
referred to only tangentially in one of his chapters in the Cambridge economic
history. For this, he drew among other things (I may note immodestly) on my
unpublished thesis, though I know from correspondence (including a long, helpful,
state

and very critical letter of 1987) that he did not agree with a number of my
formulations. Of course, this reflected anew the ambiguity with which he

(and especially Portuguese) materials, a subject

on which we had a number of verbal, and occasionally written, arguments. In
particular, it has been (and still is) my position that the relationship between the
Portuguese and the use of firearms in peninsular warfare is rather more complex
understood the

place

of European

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137

than Stein made it

out to

essays I

on

be; he, for his part, never responded in print to various

published
subject (or to the chapter on this subject in Symbols of
substance). On the other hand, since no one else seems to refer to those papers
either, perhaps Stein was not the only one unconvinced by my arguments.
Thus, to sum up, at the core of the Vijayanagara book lies a profound
the

ambiguity, a paradox even. For having begun his academic career working on the
Vijayanagara period in the 1950s, Burton Steins work took him to adopt different,
and at times contradictory, positions in relation to this state. From the modernist,
forward-looking state of the early papers, with its sophisticated system of agrarian
and water-management, Vijayanagara became in the middle years just another
segmentary state, a mere continuation of the early medieval past. Then, from the
mid-1980s, Vijayanagara came to be transformed in Steins view into a state
located in a phase of important changes, on the road to the full-blown military
fiscalism of the late eighteenth century. I have argued in these pages that these
different views that Stein himself held on Vijayanagara were a result of a set of
complex processes. There was, among other factors, his anxiety to classify, not to
have what he called an unspecified state structure. This was one of Steins
strengths, something that made his work accessible to both comparativists
(especially impatient comparativists), and anthropologists, a fact that Chris Fuller
too notes in his essay, albeit from another perspective. From many other
historians point of view, this overriding desire to give the state a name, is
somewhat puzzling, and might even be construed as a weakness. In retrospect, one
reason was probably determining in the ambivalence of Steins formulations: for
Vijayanagara does lie at a cross-roads, between the medieval heritage of the
Cholas, Kakatiyas and Hoysalas (with each of which it shares some analytical
features), and the phase of early modern innovation in south India. It is thus only
appropriate to end this essay, I suppose, by revealing that the Polish-owned hotel
where I stayed in 1985 was called Janus Hotel.
Select bibliography
S. Krishnaswami (ed.), 1919. Sources of Vijayanagar history. Madras:
University of Madras.

Ayyangar,

Byres, T. J.

and Harbans Mukhia

(eds.), 1985. Feudalism and non-European

societies. London: Frank Cass.

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