Victory City(81)
“For the moment the northern border is safe,” Krishnadevaraya told his generals. “Also, thanks to the alliance with my father-in-law King Veera, the south is reasonably secure. Therefore the assault our enemies are planning will come from the east, and so our plan must be to launch a preemptive attack.”
To the east was the fabled land of Kalinga, against which the legendary Emperor Ashoka had launched his bloodiest war eighteen hundred years earlier, a war in which over one hundred thousand men had died, and which had led, it was said, to the emperor’s conversion to Buddhism. To walk in Ashoka’s footsteps was an attractive idea, even if Krishnadevaraya was not of a Buddhist inclination. But the gateway to Kalinga was the Eastern Mountain, and the king of the Eastern Mountain was Krishnadevaraya’s most powerful enemy, Prataparudra of the Gajapati dynasty, known by many as Krishnadevaraya’s twin, because they were equals in grandeur, and, it’s said, they looked like each other, too. So to win his great war Krishnadevaraya would have to face the mirror of himself, and to win, it was this version of himself he would have to destroy.
The Eastern Mountain was a three-thousand-foot-high wall of thickly forested rock and on top of it was the fortress-citadel. Pratapa’s commanding general Rautaraya was up there with thousands of men and good provisions. There was no way up. A siege was the only possibility.
Two long years went by before starvation forced General Rautaraya to surrender. During these years Krishnadevaraya made seven pilgrimages to the renowned local temple complex of Tirupati, to pray to Lord Vishnu in marathon, flamboyant sessions, begging the god for an heir. (After prayer he also made sizable financial donations to the temple coffers to help the god look kindly on his request.) And secondly, he and Tirumala Devi took what may politely be called direct nocturnal actions of their own to make the prayers come true.
And so during that two-year siege Krishnadevaraya and Queen Tirumala Devi became the parents of two children, a girl first—Tirumalamba, an elongated version of her mother’s name—and then, to great general excitement, a boy! And both children lived. This news traveled back to Bisnaga rapidly. It is interesting to note that Pampa Kampana’s history barely mentions the new arrivals. Her silence, one might say, speaks volumes.
After the birth of the boy, to whom Tirumala Devi gave another version of her own name, Tirumala Deva, the Eastern Mountain finally surrendered, as if in response to the auspicious event. Krishnadevaraya gave the command of the conquered fort to his chief minister Timmarasu’s son. He also took many trophies from the Mountain. One was Prataparudra’s aunt. Another was a grand statue of the god whose incarnation he said he was. The aunt was eventually returned undamaged. The Krishna statue was not returned. It was sent to Bisnaga and installed in a special chapel of the palace.
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Pampa Kampana’s first regency, one and a half centuries before her second, had been followed by an eternity of exile. She knew that in this, her second time around, she needed to do things differently. To establish her authority over the court, she decided to adopt a daily routine that closely followed the king’s, so that all might remain familiar with the shape of the day. She rose before dawn and drank a large cup of gingelly oil, the amber oil extracted from toasted sesame seeds, and then asked her handmaidens to massage the same oil into her body. After that it was the king’s habit to exercise with weights. Instead of lifting heavy pots, however, Pampa Kampana went to the old kwoon of Li Ye-He and practiced with her sword by the light of flaming braziers, inspiring awe in all who watched from the balconies above her. In this way she sweated out the oil she had drunk. Then for some time she rode her horse around the wide Bisnaga plain outside the outermost gate. When the sun rose she dismounted. It was time for the religious part of the day, the part that fitted Pampa Kampana most awkwardly, like an ill-made garment. She went to the Hazara Rama temple for dawn puja, putting on a version of the clothes Krishnadevaraya liked to wear when at prayer: a loose white silk dress embroidered with golden roses, with a diamond collar around her neck, and a tall brocaded conical hat. After prayer she went to sit in the mandapa, a pillared hall open to the elements, each pillar intricately carved to look like animals or dancers, and here she heard the matters of the day, the reports of her ministers, the complaints of discontented citizens. She would evaluate the reports and pass judgment on the petitions, and then issue her daily orders, while the noblemen of Bisnaga stood silently in lines before her with their heads bowed, only lifting up their eyes if she addressed them by name. If she wished to honor one of them especially she would invite him to share a betel nut. Nobody else dared chew betel at court. So skillfully did she preserve and mimic the routines of the king that people said, “It’s as if the king never left us, and is still here, after all.”
Behind the facade of such dutiful mimicry Pampa Kampana set about quietly changing the world. She ordered the creation of new schools for girls to correct the imbalance in numbers between girls’ and boys’ places of education. In these new schools, and also, more gradually, in all existing schools, she proposed that education should no longer be centered on theological instruction, no longer placed exclusively in the hands of Brahmin priests trained at the sprawling Mandana mutt, the complex of temples and seminaries where the influence of Vidyasagar and his Sixteen Systems was still inescapable. Instead, she set out to create a new professional class of people who would be called, simply, “teachers,” who might be members of any caste, and who would possess and seek to impart the best available knowledge in a wide variety of fields—history, law, geography, health, civics, medicine, astronomy. These so-called “subjects” would be taught without any religious slant or emphasis, with a view to producing new kinds of people, broad in knowledge and mind, still well-versed in matters of faith but with a deep additional understanding of the beauty of knowledge itself, and of the responsibility of citizens to coexist with one another, and with a commitment to advancing the well-being of all.