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Incarnations: India in 50 Lives: Krishnadevaraya: Kingship Is Strange

Krishnadevaraya: Kingship Is Strange

28/05/2015

BBC Radio 4 - Incarnations: India in 50 Lives, Krishnadevaraya: Kingship Is Strange

A portrait of the 16th-century warrior, intellectual, poet and self-doubting king.

A portrait of a great warrior who lived in a brutal age and yet wondered about his allotted role in life. Sunil Khilnani visits Krishnadevaraya's capital at Hampi in Karnataka.

Professor Sunil Khilnani, from the King's India Institute in London, visits Hampi in today's Karnataka, site of the sprawling capital of Krishnadevaraya, 16th-century warrior and self-doubting king. Krishnadevaraya lived in a brutal age and yet his writings show he was both learned and thoughtful, with an artistic temperament. He was a compulsive self-promoter whose presence is felt amongst the ruins at Hampi, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. But it is in the Amuktamulyada, his long poetic work, that we hear his original voice which marks, says Professor Khilnani, "the emergence of an individual self, a subjective voice - centuries before the arrival of colonial ideas of the individual".

Produced by Mark Savage
Researcher: Manu Pillai
Editor: Hugh Levinson.

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