The Vijayanagara Empire and the Evolution of Carnatic Classical Music: Historical, Geographical, and Cultural Intersections (14th–17th Century)

The Vijayanagara Empire (1336–1646 CE), the last great Hindu polity of the Deccan and peninsular South India, exercised a formative and enduring influence on the cultural geography of the Indian subcontinent disproportionate to the brevity of its political ascendancy. Spanning the territorial arc from the Tungabhadra basin in present-day Karnataka to the Kaveri delta of Tamil Nadu and the coastal trading ports of the Malabar and Coromandel seaboards, the empire's political ecology created the conditions — institutional, geographical, economic, and ideological — for the consolidation and systematic codification of the Carnatic classical music tradition that remains among the most sophisticated and intellectually rigorous art-music systems in the world. This article examines, through the convergent lenses of political history, historical geography, and musicology, the mechanisms by which the Vijayanagara court and its subordinate institutional network — temples, mathas, regional Nayaka courts, and the Haridasa movement of devotional saint-composers — shaped the theoretical foundations, pedagogical infrastructure, geographic diffusion, and social ecology of Carnatic music between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries.Drawing on epigraphic evidence (copper plate grants, stone inscriptions from Hampi, Tirupati, and Sringeri), contemporary literary sources (the Amuktamalyada of Krishnadevaraya, the Manasollasa, traveller accounts of Domingo Paes and Fernão Nunes), and musicological scholarship on surviving compositions of the Haridasa saint-composers — particularly Purandaradasa (1484–1564), Kanakadasa (c.1509–1609), Vyasatirtha (c.1460–1539), and Annamacharya (1408–1503) — this article traces the evolution of the raga-tala-sahitya (melodic mode-rhythm-text) trinity that constitutes the structural basis of Carnatic music. It argues that the Vijayanagara period was not merely a context of patronage but an active agent of musical systematisation: the empire's multilingual literary culture, its temple endowment economy, and the institutional geography of the Haridasa movement collectively produced the pedagogical framework attributed to Purandaradasa and the raga classification structures that would be formalised by Venkatamakhi in his Chaturdandiprakasika (1660) — the canonical text of the 72 Melakarta system. The article concludes with an assessment of the empire's legacy in the post-Talikota (1565) Nayaka successor courts of Thanjavur, Madurai, and Ikkeri, tracing the direct institutional and compositional lineages connecting Vijayanagara court culture to the Trinity composers of the eighteenth century.