Victory City(83)
“You are indeed an able ruler,” he told Pampa Kampana. “I accept, of course.”
Only when Krishnadevaraya returned from the wars did Pampa Kampana confess to him that she had carefully practiced writing in his hand, and that the letter she had shown to Madhava Acharya had been an outright forgery. “I throw myself upon your mercy,” she said, but Krishnadevaraya roared with laughter. “I could not have found a better regent,” he cried. “For you found the way to bend Bisnaga to your will, even those parts of it that were not well disposed to your decisions. It is not one’s decisions that matter when one is king, but one’s ability to impose them on the people without bloodshed. I could not have done better myself. Also,” he said, frowning, “I did write you many letters. It was as if I heard your voice whispering in my ear, saying, Tell me everything. Are you sure this one letter wasn’t one of those?”
Pampa Kampana smiled lovingly. “If one is to tell an important lie,” she said, “it’s best to hide it among a crowd of unarguable truths.”
* * *
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This is a (genuine, unforged) letter from Krishnadevaraya to Pampa Kampana: “Beloved Queen Regent, when I think of you I am filled with wonder, for you, who have made miracles, are a miracle in yourself. Sometimes I find it hard to believe it even though I know it to be true: you have seen everything, you have known all of us from the beginning until this moment, and all the answers to our questions can be found in you. I ask myself sometimes about those beginnings, Hukka and Bukka long ago, what was in their thoughts, what were they fighting for? At the birth of Bisnaga they fought, I think, for survival, to establish themselves, cowherds who became kings. You know their hearts better than any living person. Tell me if I am right, for now, as the years of battle stretch out, I am asking myself the same questions. Why am I fighting? If it is to defend ourselves against enemies who thought we were weakening, then the victory at the Eastern Mountain has shown everyone that we are strong. Our defenses in all directions are now assured. Is it for vengeance, then? No, for that would be the lowest of motives. A vengeful king does not send his enemy’s auntie home unharmed, and she can certainly bear witness to how kindly she was treated while she was in our care. Certainly I do not fight for religion’s sake, because Prataparudra is our co-religionist, and some of my finest generals and soldiers worship their supposed one god, and nobody has any problem with that. Maybe I fight for land, for the simple desire to expand the empire until it is the greatest thing that there has ever been. In that sense the conquest of land may also be born of the desire for glory. Many will say that my motives are a combination of all of these, but I have discovered that it is none of them, and it is my enemy Pratapa who has revealed the truth to me.
“I write this to you, Beloved Queen Regent, as I march ever deeper toward the heart of Kalinga, aiming my force now against the fort at Kondavidu, where Pratapa’s wife is in residence and his son is the governor; and I have intercepted a messenger bearing a message from Pratapa to this son. In this message Pratapa insults not only myself but all our line, calling us barbarians, not of blue-blood stock, because our ancestors were ordinary soldiers, not aristocrats. He further demeans the entire history of Bisnaga, saying it is a place created by cowherds, low-grade people, lower-caste, and so good behavior cannot be expected of us. ‘Do not surrender to such a man as Krishna,’ Pratapa writes, ‘for he is no better than a common savage, and I fear for the safety of the queen and yourself if you should fall into the hands of a man without breeding.’ This, after receiving his aunt back, safe and sound!
“And so I surmise that perhaps the entire history of Bisnaga has been driven by our need—my need and the need of all who came before me—to prove ourselves the equals—no! The betters!—of arrogant princes such as these. It doesn’t matter what gods they worship. It is their snobbery and conviction of caste superiority we must overthrow. Only one kind of social class matters: that of the victor. That is why I fight. Maybe it is not why Hukka and Bukka fought. You will tell me if I am right or wrong. But as for myself, that is why.”
* * *
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And Kondavidu fell, and Prataparudra’s son committed suicide, and Pratapa’s queen became Krishnadevaraya’s prisoner. But—perhaps to prove he was no barbarian—he treated her and her retinue courteously, and returned them to his enemy unharmed, with a note saying, “So we treat our foes in the kingdom of love.” And after Kondavidu, in victory after victory Krishnadevaraya showed extreme kindness to his vanquished opponents, as if he was fighting a war of etiquette. “You know,” Minister Timmarasu worriedly advised him at one point, “just for the sake of tradition, of what is conventional, it might be advisable, from time to time, to cut off a few heads and stuff them with straw and send them on a tour of the region. It’s what people expect. Hangings, tortures, beheadings, heads on sticks…people enjoy the spectacle of victory. And fear is an effective tool, but good manners don’t really instill respect.”
Influenced by this advice, Krishnadevaraya marched north and destroyed Pratapa’s capital city, Cuttack. On this occasion he authorized the execution of the one hundred thousand soldiers defending the city—“There,” he said ferociously to his chief minister, “as many decapitations as during all of great Ashoka’s Kalinga campaign long ago. That’s for you.” But he ordered that no harm should come to the city’s ordinary residents. He also made large placatory donations of gold coins to all the nearby temples. Thus—in spite of the hundred thousand severed heads—he believed he had maintained his reputation as the king who conquered with love.