When Golconda’s army sacked Tirupati

In the middle of the 1600s, the army of Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah of Golconda attacked Tirupati. His soldiers broke the idols in the temples of the town at the foot of the hill. They kept their horses in the thousand-pillared mandapam, beat the nambis, cut down the jiyars and robbed the people. A Telugu poet who saw it all poured his grief and anger into a hundred verses addressed to the Lord of the hill. The poem is called the Sri Venkatachala Vihara Satakamu. The temple on the hill itself was never attacked.

For three hundred years, the Lord of the Seven Hills was the Lord of an empire.

The emperors of Vijayanagara came up the hill as pilgrims, and they gave the temple more than any kings before them. Krishnadevaraya came to Tirumala seven times. In 1517 his gold covered the vimana over the sanctum, and his bronze statue still stands in the temple, with his two queens beside him. Dr N. Ramesan, in his book The Tirumala Temple (1981), says this bond lasted a little over three hundred years: from 1359, when Mangideva gilded the vimana, to 1665, when the last emperor left a plain stone slab at the temple.

The empire broke in January 1565, at the battle of Rakshasa-Tangadi near Talikota, and the great city of Vijayanagara was looted. What was left of the empire moved south, first to Penukonda and then to Chandragiri, only a few miles from Tirupati. In the end the emperors were living almost at the foot of the hill. By the 1640s the emperor Sriranga Raya ruled little more than the land around it, and the Sultans of Golconda and Bijapur were sharing out the rest.

Golconda came south under its minister, Mir Jumla.

Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah ruled Golconda from 1626 to 1672. Through the 1640s his minister Mir Jumla captured the forts of the south one by one. Udayagiri fell in 1643, after one of the emperor’s own commanders showed the enemy a secret way in. By the end of 1646 Mir Jumla had taken most of the emperor’s lands. Soon after, he took Gandikota, and Chandragiri and Tirupati with it.

His army did not spare the temples it passed. In September 1652 a French jeweller named Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, on his way to the diamond mines, reached Gandikota eight days after Mir Jumla had captured it, and met him there. Mir Jumla wanted cannon made for the fort, and Tavernier wrote down where the metal came from:

He was supplied with copper for this purpose from all quarters, and the Nawab collected a quantity of idols which had been removed from the pagodas which his army had visited.

Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India

Pagoda was what Europeans called a temple in those days. In the end the gunner failed, and not a single cannon was made from the idols.

In 1656 Mir Jumla changed sides and joined the Mughals, and the emperor Shah Jahan gave him the conquered lands, temple and all, as his own estate. Golconda fought to win them back. Sriranga Raya returned for a short time and held Tirupati again in the late 1650s. Then Golconda’s army came back. Dr Ramesan thought that it was this time, around 1660, that the town at the foot of the hill was sacked.

A poet watched it happen, and he wrote to the Lord.

The Sri Venkatachala Vihara Satakamu, written శ్రీ వేంకటాచల విహార శతకము in Telugu and sometimes spelt Shatakam in English, is a satakam, a set of a hundred verses. Ninety-eight of them survive in the copy kept by the Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams, edited by the scholar Veturi Prabhakara Sastri. Every verse ends with the same line, calling on the Lord as satru samhara Venkatachala vihara: destroyer of enemies, You who live on Venkatachala. The poem is a nindastuti, praise through blame. In this old form a devotee scolds and teases his God, because he is close enough to Him to dare. The poet was a Vaishnava, and he saw all this with his own eyes.

He saw the army of Sultan Abdullah, with its wazirs and its horsemen, and he names the Sultan himself. He follows the army as it comes down the coast. Modegunta, Kavali, Jaladanki and Kodavaluru tremble at the sight of its war elephants. Kavali, Kovuru, Nellore and Ravuru vanish in the dust its horses raise. Kalahasti falls. When the army crosses the Rallakaluva, the noise echoes back from the caves in the hills. At Nellore the poet stops and counts what has been done.

At Siddhavatam, he says, they massacred the people and defaced the goddess Kamakshi.

Then they came to Tirupati.

Nothing holds them back any more, the poet says. They have surrounded Tirupati and are looting it. In the next verse he lists everything they have done, and asks the Lord why He does nothing. This is how Dr Ramesan translated it:

Should you not strike [those] who spoiled Your food-offerings, converted the thousand-pillared mantapam space into stables, made a gori (tomb, sepulchre) of your temple, for Babayya; filled the garbhagrihamulu (sanctums) with filth, broke the idols, stole the sacred jewels, threw kitchen articles into disorder, struck the Nambis, hewed the bodies of the Jiyyangars, desecrated the surrounding tirumalighalu (mansions of the archakas and big men), and are robbing the people?

Verse 95, in N. Ramesan’s English

The nambis are the priests who serve the Lord. The jiyars are the ascetics who watch over the temple’s worship, and the tirumaligais are the homes of the priests and teachers around the temples. Dr Ramesan read all ninety-eight verses, and he did not soften what the poem describes. Women were raped. Men, women and children were murdered. The temples of the town below the hill were desecrated, and their idols were plundered and broken. The people who lived through it fled to the woods and forests, having lost their homes, their families and everything they owned.

In another verse the soldiers walk into the temples, smash the idols to pieces and drag the great teachers by the tufts of their hair. It did not stop at the temples. The poet asks how he could ever be made to give up his own faith.

Then the poet turns on the Lord Himself.

Your fame as the holder of the discus is still there, he tells the Lord, but You cannot strike them. Lakshmi still lives on Your chest, yet You will not give up even one pie of the interest owed to You. They call You the Supreme God, but You cannot give Your devotees a gift. They say You are dressed in gold, but You eat rice that has not even been pounded, and You have piled up Your money like a miser. If You plan to hand this money over to them as ransom, he asks, will Your devotees ever trust You again? And in the next verse he pleads: as Your well-wisher, I beg You, do not pay these mean-minded men.

Your fans and Your vahanas, Your umbrellas and Your golden war-drum are already gone, he says. At least do not lose the diamond necklace that Krishnaraya gave You. Then, as only a devotee would dare, he threatens to tell the world about the Lord’s own past: the butter He stole as a child, the gopis of Repalle, and Putana, who came to Him pretending to be a mother. And then his anger boils over. Stop calling Yourself Srihari and Perumal, Vishnu and Krishna, he says. Use the names their soldiers have for God, Khoda and Kartar, because they will insult You and beat You anyway. I am warning You because I have eaten Your food. Run while You still can.

Your Tamil ears, he says, have listened for so long to the Dravida Prabandham, the hymns of the Alvars. Our one fear is that they will now be forced to hear something else.

And if the Lord will not fight, the poet says he will:

In the last verse, he asks to be forgiven.

I called You a coward, he says, You, the greatest of warriors. I called You heartless, You who always watch over Your devotees. I called You powerless, You whose power is in every atom and every pore of the skin. I called You idle, You who are light itself. I blamed You only because I was in pain, so that You would rise for the good of the world and destroy them.

The temple on the hill was never touched.

The attack the poet feared never came. The Sultan’s men broke the temples in the town, but they did not climb the hill. Dr Ramesan believed the reason was money. Every year the temple at the top earned more from its pilgrims than any army could carry away in one raid. So Golconda’s governors did not loot it, and neither did the Nawabs of the Carnatic who ruled after them. Instead, they rented it out.

Every year the temple and its lands were auctioned to a renter. He kept the pilgrims’ offerings and paid the Nawab the amount he had bid. T. K. T. Viraraghavacharya, in his History of Tirupati (1954), explains how the renter made his money back: a tax on every pilgrim, and fees for the kanukas, the varttanas and the arjitams. These fees, he adds, have been charged ever since. Tirupati, the pilgrim town, became the seat of Golconda’s governors for the whole area. The renting went on long after Golconda itself had fallen, until 1801, when the East India Company took over the temple from the Nawab of Arcot.

The Venkatachala Mahatmyam tells how the Lord borrowed money from Kubera for His marriage to Padmavathi, and how the offerings at the hill go towards the interest. Dr Ramesan believed that it was in these years that the story came to include the rulers of the land, who would collect that interest on the Lord’s behalf, and that the fees for pilgrims were fixed to match. The conquerors were happy to collect. “The temple archakas of that period are entitled to the eternal gratitude of posterity,” he wrote, “for this daring piece of diplomacy.”

The poet had begged the Lord not to pay them. In the end the hill did pay, year after year, and it survived. In the long wars between the Mughals and the Marathas that came next, Viraraghavacharya wrote, “the population of every other religious centre in the south suffered but not so in Tirumala.”

Who was the poet, and when did he write?

The poem does not give its author’s name, and Dr Ramesan could not find one. He dated the attack to between 1656 and 1668, probably around 1660, because the poem names Sultan Abdullah but never Mir Jumla. Later, in 1985, a study by E. Padmabala, first written as a thesis at Sri Venkateswara University, named the poet as Nallakalva Varakavi Sitapati, who was writing between about 1620 and 1670.

There is also a second, shorter copy of the poem at the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library in Chennai, written out by hand on paper. It has twenty-nine verses from the same poem, in a different order, and it ends with the same plea for forgiveness. One of these verses names Aurangzeb.

Aurangzeb attacked Golconda once as a prince, in 1656, and captured it for good in September 1687, a year after he took Bijapur. So either the poet lived long enough to see both kingdoms fall, or someone added this verse later while copying the poem. Either way, the verses about the sack of Tirupati were written by a man who saw it happen.