hampi 2-

It’s historical !

The medieval southern city of Vijayanagara - City of Victory, capital of the rich, and eponymous empire that ruled south India from coast to coast, and included at its prime parts of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Orissa - was the second-largest in the 15th-century world, its size rivalled only by the urban sprawl of Beijing.

Even today, four and a half centuries after it was sacked in the Battle of Talikota and summarily abandoned, its 41.5 sq km spread...

- punctuated with temples (including one in which the stone pillars sing in all the 12 notes of the Carnatic scale), bazaar streets (where, it is said, rubies and emeralds the size of pigeons’ eggs were retailed like peanuts), palaces, elephant stables, the Queen’s Bath, giant monolithic sculptures of Ganesha and Narasimha, and the mammoth Mahanavami Dibba, a stepped platform from which the great Vijayanagara monarch Krishna Deva Raya watched the 10-day long Dasara celebrations that he first instituted unfold (the tradition lives on to this day, in the Mysore Dasara celebrations) -

...boggles the imagination.

South Indian history is not very well covered in either the middle-grade or high-school syllabi, so visiting Hampi is a great way to introduce the kids to one of the greatest southern empires. Make sure to do some pre-trip reading up as a family so that the kids are equally excited.

~bron~