Sangama- A Confluence of Art and Culture During the Vijayanagara Period

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Sangama: A Confluence of Art and Culture During the Vijayanagara Period explores the complex interaction among multiple social and cultural forces between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries in South India. It contains studies which are on Vijayanagara in particular using archaeological, architectural, inscriptional and textural sources and those which are broader in nature that suggest a complex interweaving of influences.

This publication has been brought out in conjunction with the seminar Sangama: A Confluence of Art and Culture During the Vijayanagara Period, to be held in Houston and Los Angeles in November 2005.

Works on Vijayanagara in the form of books, monographs, and articles have appeared in immense quantity in recent years. The expanding research on the city and empire of Vijayanagara in South India has generated numerous theories and inspired new questions into the workings of Vijayanagara society and the cultural phenomena. The present volume provides a micro-level understanding of the polity, society and art of the Vijayanagara period which stretched for three centuries, from the fourteenth till the seventeenth centuries.

This book is published in conjunction with the seminar, Sangama: A Confluence of Art and Culture during the Vijayanagara Period, 2005. The title of the seminar emanates from the first dynasty of kings who reigned the kingdom from (c. 1336 C.E.- c. 1565 C.E.). But the primary goal of this endeavor is to comprehend sangama as the confluence of social, cultural and artistic forces. The other objective is to explore the continuity of the dynamic links which emanated before Vijayanagara and continued over succeeding generations. The idea of sangama is expanded to include more than dualistic categories of royal and sacred, city and empire, village and urban; it encompasses interrelated domains and links between pluralistic forces that are woven into a broad reunifying landscape of surviving monuments. The set of essays selected here, explore patterns of interaction, modes of operations of main and intermediate groups and communities and the relational concepts that led to the chiseling of articulations on monumental temples, imperial structures and building of tanks and gateways. These were visual forms of power especially those of social and religious exchange as well as political and cultural continuities.