A Commentator in Service of the Empire seeks to investigate an intricate web of relationships between knowledge and power, and empire and book history in the fourteenth-century South Indian state of Vijayanagara. It concerns the border area of the crossroads of disciplines inasmuch as it addresses problems of intellectual and political history as well as cultural and textual studies while attempting to demonstrate the complex world of ideas and practices in the making of an empire to come. The ambitions of the first rulers of the rising Vijayanagara empire, the issue of the religious authority of the charismatic pontiffs of the monastery of Śrngeri and the scholarly ideas of Sayana, a rare polymath, are presented as intertwined in the unprecedented project of a commentary on the whole of the scriptural Veda. The book demonstrates how the enterprise of commenting on the whole of the Veda assumed an active role in the making of the empire and its ideological image. The book proposes a rethinking of the relationship between power and knowledge in the historical context through a close reading of Sayanas introductions to his Vedic commentaries and attention to the historical context of the commentarial project while situating it in the reconstructed social practices of writing, editing, copying, circulating and using manuscripts in late medieval South India. The chapters are designed to reinforce the intention of the book, namely, to rethink the question of power, knowledge, writing and manuscript culture in relation to the inception of the empire of Vijayanagara in particular and to medieval Indian forms of political power in general.
