Tidings of the King: A Translation and Ethnohistorical Analysis of the Rayavacakamu

Tidings of the King presents an annotated translation and study of the Rayavacakamu, a medieval South Indian historiographic text in Telugu dealing with the reign of Krishnadevaraya (r. 1509-1529), the best-known ruler of the Vijayanagara empire. Although often taken to be a contemporary document of Krishnadevaraya's period, the Rayavacakamu is in fact a historiographic representation of that period written some ninety years later at the Nayaka court of Madurai, one of Vijayanagara's most important successor states. In his ethnohistorical introduction to the translation, Phillip Wagoner argues that one of the primary purposes of the text is to articulate an ideological argument for the political legitimacy of the Madurai Nayaka regime. By historicizing Madurai's relationship of subordination to Vijayanagara, the text affirms Nayaka legitimacy at the same time that it denies the authority of the contemporaneous Vijayanagara rulers of the Aravidu house. According to the implications of the text, the rulers of this last Vijayanagara dynasty were perceived in Madurai as bereft of ritual authority due to their loss of the fundamental source of that authority: the city of Vijayanagara itself, destroyed in 1565 by a coalition of Muslim forces.
Tidings of the King will be welcomed by scholars and students occupied with any aspect of medieval South India, and it will appeal to a broader readership as well. Furthermore, the book will be of interest to historians of religion concerned with the Hindu-Muslim encounter, since the Rayavacakamu articulates one of the earliest examples of a systematic anti-Islamic polemic in South India, as discussed in detail by Dr. Wagoner in his introduction. On a more general level, anyone with an interest in the nature and functions of historiographic discourse in non-Western cultures will appreciate this book, as it offers one of the first complete translations of an Indian historiographic text in a vernacular language.