One of the earliest and most heard arguments in favour of large, wealthy temples has been that they nurture a local ecosystem, provide patronage for merchants and artisans, and generally act as an economic engine of the region. All this, of course, in addition to their original role as places of worship and grand projects of power projection for the reigning monarchs.

The ‘temples as economic engines’ argument, while perfectly valid, has almost never been explained to the general public in detail with data and examples. We attempted to look for ways to do this and found our answer in a paper titled ‘The Economic Function of a Medieval South Indian Temple’ (1960), authored by Burton Stein in The Journal of Asian Studies. Stein was a well-known historian who specialised in India with some notable works on the Vijaynagar and Chola empires. This particular paper that we will now discuss appears to be an adaptation from his PhD thesis on the economic functions of the Tirupati temple.

The paper looks at a crucial period in the history of the Tirupati temple, i.e., from the times of Krishnadevaraya to the fall of the Vijayanagar empire after Achyuta Deva Raya and Sadasiva Raya roughly for a significant part of the sixteenth century (1509-1550). Benefiting from the then newly translated inscriptions (some 1,000 had been translated and published) from the temple complex, the study also maps the flow of money through the local ecosystem and provides a clear picture of the temple economy and management.

Not surprisingly, the paper also notes the very efficient and near-professional management of the temple. Acting both as investing officers and administrators of the temple, it seems as though the seeds for the enormous wealthy status of Tirupati were sown during this crucial period of the great rayas of Vijayanagar. The temple had been receiving endowments from powerful south Indian royalties as early as tenth century, but we will restrict this study to the later Vijayanagar period.

It all began with the most powerful and well-known emperors of Vijayanagar, Krishnadevaraya himself. An ardent devotee of Lord Vishnu, the emperor composed many a work of devotional poetry – the amuktamalyada in particular. During his reign, nearly 20 villages were made over to the Tirupati temple as land grants. A further 90+ villages would be provided as grants to the temple in the next four decades.