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The Raja was an obscure representative of a magnificent Indian Empire of the past; Mr. Francis Day was an obscure representative of a magnificent Indian Empire that was yet to be; and the document that the Raja handed to Mr. Francis Day was in reality a patent of Empire, transferred from Vijianagar to Great Britain.
The last and greatest of the Hindu kingdoms of Southern India did not succumb to the sword of Islam till 1565, and the splendid ruins of Vijianagar bear out, if we make allowance for oriental hyperbole, the contemporary testimony of a Persian Ambassador that "the pupil of the eye has never seen a place like it and the ear of intelligence has never been informed that there existed anything to equal it in the whole world."
In Bijapur alone, of all the great Mahomedan cities of that period which I have seen, did the proud austerity of Mahomedan architecture shake itself free from the complex and flamboyant suggestions of Hindu art perhaps because the great days of Bijapur came after it had taken its full share of the spoils of Vijianagar, the last kingdom in Southern India to perish by the sword of Islam.
The Moslem conquerors laid Vijianagar low. But, by the curious irony of fortune, it was from a descendant of its royal house, some remnants of which escaped destruction, that the British, by whom Mahomedan domination was to be in turn overthrown, received their first grant of land on the Carnatic coast close to where Madras now stands.
Take, for instance, a small town like Tirupati, only a few miles from Chatnagiri, where the Rajahs, whose forebears made that momentous grant to Francis Day a little less than three centuries ago, still live in modest state. Were Tirupati still ruled by the Vijianagar kings in all their splendour, it could hardly present a better-preserved picture of ancient Hindu life.
The negotiations were successful: but the Naik was subordinate to the lord of the soil, the Raja of Chandragiri, who was the living representative of the once great and magnificent Hindu empire of Vijianagar; and any grant that was made by the Naik of Poonamallee had to be confirmed by the Raja if it was to be made valid.
Chepauk Palace belongs to the history of the Carnatic, and a few historical notes will make things clear. In our first chapter we intimated that Madras, when Mr. Francis Day acquired it, was within the domain of the disappearing Hindu Empire of Vijianagar, of which the living representative at the time was the Raja of Chandragiri, from whom Mr.
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