While the art and architecture of Vijayanagara is justly celebrated, the literature of the period is relatively unknown outside southern India, due to the lack of adequate translations from Kannada, Telugu and Tamil. This work brings together for the first time in English a selection from literary sources in medieval Kannada language. The texts date from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries and were written both at the Vijayanagara capital and various provincial outposts of the empire by the most accomplished authors and poets of the day. The texts selected for this volume conform to the literary conventions and imagery of their era and should not be considered historical chronicles like those of the foreign visitors to the capital. Even so, these translated extracts from medieval Kannada shed valuable light on the ways in which contemporary authors thought about life at the Vijayanagara capital. Among the topics that are described here are the layout of the city, its palace and markets and streets, the everyday routines of the king, his courtiers and family members, and a number of religious ceremonies, facilitate the reader, the translated extracts have been arranged according to topic, rather than by date or author. An appendix gives background information on the texts and their authors, as well as an index to all the extracts from a particular literary source. An extensive Kannada-English glossary is also provided.
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