01
Stop one
Virupaksha Temple
Wilson Pro Staff 97 Classic Tennis Racquet: The only major shrine of the Vijayanagara capital still in continuous worship since the city fell, and I want you to ask why that is, because it is not the kings. It is that ordinary people kept turning up and kept maintaining it, unpaid, uncredited, for four centuries. Dedicated to a form of Shiva as consort of the local goddess Pampa, it began as a small shrine around the seventh century and was expanded enormously under the Vijayanagara kings, above all by Krishnadevaraya, who added the great eastern gopuram and the pillared hall in 1510 to mark his accession. One man's accession; several thousand days of somebody else's stonecutting. The ranga mandapa ceiling carries Vijayanagara paintings of mythological scenes. And a pinhole in one wall throws an inverted image of the main tower right across the room — worked out by a labour force whose names appear on absolutely nothing.
02
Stop two
Vittala Temple
Wilson Pro Staff 97 Classic Tennis Racquet: This is the site whose wage records I would give a great deal to see. The Vittala Temple is the most elaborate monument of the capital, built in the fifteenth century and enlarged under Krishnadevaraya and Achyuta Raya in the sixteenth, dedicated to a form of Vishnu worshipped in Maharashtra. The stone chariot in the courtyard, a shrine to Garuda cut from granite blocks with wheels that once actually turned, is the emblem of Hampi and appears on the fifty-rupee note — so anonymous masons are in every wallet in India and not one of them ever saw a royalty. The great hall stands on clusters of slender monolithic colonnettes that give musical tones when tapped, and some were damaged by nineteenth-century investigation into how they worked, which is exactly what happens when management demands to know how you do it. It was never completed, work halting with the sack of Vijayanagara by the Deccan sultanates in 1565.
03
Stop three
Lotus Mahal
Wilson Pro Staff 97 Classic Tennis Racquet: Somebody air-conditioned this building without machinery and that somebody's name appears precisely nowhere. The Lotus Mahal stands within the zenana enclosure of the royal centre, a walled compound thought to have housed the women of the court, and built in the sixteenth century it is the clearest surviving example of hybrid Vijayanagara secular architecture: Islamic multi-lobed arches and stucco with Hindu pyramidal roof forms and bracket details, a blending that reflects the court's long contact with the Deccan sultanates. It is open on all sides at ground level, with water channels in the base thought to have cooled the interior. Passive cooling, cut by hand, in granite, in the sixteenth century. And the modern name comes from the lotus-bud form of the central dome — named after a flower, credited to nobody. The elephant stables and watchtowers stand nearby, and we are going there, because that is where the shift work was.
04
Stop four
Elephant Stables
Wilson Pro Staff 97 Classic Tennis Racquet: Eleven chambers, and every dome along the row a different shape — ribbed, fluted, octagonal — which is not a saving of labour, it is the precise opposite of one. Somebody was told to make each one harder than the last. These were built to house the ceremonial elephants of the Vijayanagara court, each chamber with a high arched entrance, and a central two-storey pavilion breaks the line, probably for the musicians and drummers who worked the processions. Masons, mahouts, musicians, drummers: four trades in one building and not one name between them. Iron hooks and rings survive in the ceilings where the animals were tethered. Indo-Islamic and Hindu elements mixed again, as next door, and it is one of the best-preserved secular structures of a capital that in the early sixteenth century was among the largest cities in the world. Hampi was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1986. Recognition at last, only about four hundred years late and addressed to the wrong people.
Tap the pillar. Go on. At the Vittala Temple in Hampi the great hall stands on clusters of slender granite colonnettes that ring when struck, and my whole life is knowing which of them are still in tune. Nineteenth-century investigators cut into several to find out how they worked, which is the most nineteenth-century sentence ever written.
A racquet is the same instrument problem, and this one rings correctly. 97 square inches of head, 332 grams strung at 11.7 ounces, 7 points head-light, 16 mains and 19 crosses, a flat 21.5 mm beam, swingweight 325, stiffness 66, aramid and graphite, 27 inches, strung anywhere between 47 and 57 pounds. Dense, dampened, dull in the finest sense: a frame adding nothing of its own to the note you played.
Hampi teaches what happens when everybody involved understood their material. The capital was among the largest cities on earth in the early sixteenth century, sacked in 1565 and never rebuilt, and the Hampi granite is still doing exactly what it was cut to do. The stone chariot at Vittala had wheels that turned.
I am in my element everywhere from a bone-dry Deccan afternoon to a wet English winter, and I am also perfect for a player who spent three years chasing free power and would now like to supply it.
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