When the Chalukya king, Vinayaditya I camped on the banks of the Tungabhadra river in the seventh century A.D., the landscape around him would have featured little more than a few small settlements, punctuated by trees and wild animals. But a Vedic scholar at the time evidently saw much more; he saw the presence of God.

At this scholar’s request, Vinayaditya issued a grant of land around 690 A.D, located at “Pampa’s crossing,” a sacred pilgrimage centre of the river goddess Pampa. It’s the earliest known record of what became the great city of Vijayanagara – now no more.

Through the ninth and sixteenth centuries, Vijayanagara was the pinnacle of architecture and infrastructure in South India. When the Portuguese traveller Domingo Paes visited in the early 16th century, he noted: