Though our Project has been essentially archaeological in aims and techniques, we have appreciated the importance of contemporary literature in vernacular languages, especially medieval Kannada, for interpreting the physical remains of the site.

To begin with, there are 500 or so inscriptions scattered throughout the area on buildings and boulders, which have been documented by various scholars throughout the 20th century. An overall concordance of all these records by Patil and Patil is now available. (See Bibliography)

Then there are the vivid accounts of the Italian, Persian and Portuguese visitors. (See Foreign Visitors) These are comparatively well known, thanks to A Forgotten Empire (Vijayanagar), the celebrated publication brought by Robert Sewell in 1900. (See Bibliography)

However, there are also large numbers of literary sources belonging to the Vijayanagara period, mostly in Kannada but also in Telugu, Sanskrit and even Persian, which have remained largely untranslated. These give insights into courtly life and traditions, activities in war and peace, palace architecture and temples, and other topics relevant to our Project.

To make these available to an English-speaking audience, we have attracted literary scholars to the Project. The late Dr Asim Krishna Das helped to compile and also translated part of the Pampamahatmya (sometimes referred to as the Hemakutakhanda), a body of local Sanskrit writings on the religious lore of the Shaivite tirtha at the Vijayanagara site. For his analysis of the mythological geography of the region, based on this text, link to his ‘The Mystic Gateways into Pampakshetra’.

We also encouraged Dr Philip Wagoner to investigate the Rayavachakamu, a quasi-historical early seventeenth century text in Telugu that purports to be a friendly undercover agent’s account of the sixteenth century court of Krishnadevaraya. This important literary work, with a comprehensive introduction, is available in his translation. (See Project Publications)

Most recently, we commissioned an esteemed Kannada archaeologist, C.T.M. Kotraiah, to search through some 30 Kannada texts of the Vijayanagara period for information relevant to our Project. The result was a compendium of literary selections, translated and arranged conveniently under a variety of topics. Edited by Anna Dallapiccola, it is published as King, Court and Capital: An Anthology of Literary Sources from the Vijayanagara Period. (See Project Publications)

We note that other scholars have been exploring the literature of the period to better understand local knowledge of the period, for example, William J. Jackson in his Vijayanagara Voices. (See Bibliography)