Empire inside out: religion, conquest and community in Kr̥ṣṇadēvarāya's Āmuktamālyada

Empire Inside Out examines the emperor-poet Krsnadevarāya (r. 1509-1529), his magnum opus, the Āmuktamālyada (Giver of the Worn Garland), and a wide array of texts from South India, bringing to light the richness and complexity of a local culture and its ideas. The monograph explores the Vijayanagara Empire (fourteenth to seventeenth century) at its zenith, during the reign of its most celebrated monarch. The book considers how a royal author navigates cosmopolitan and regional, public and personal, convention and innovation, political duty and religious devotion. It highlights how profoundly literary texts from this period were both influenced by classical and conventional models of South Asian literature and invigorated by personal experiences, linguistic experimentation, and new modes of poetic expressivity. Empire Inside Out argues that KrsNadevarāya's text was groundbreaking, reflective of the dynamic period in which it was produced-replete with religious, political, historical, and ethnographic detail. It argues that the ŚrīvaisNava community, its ideology, and its Tamil landscape helped to define a new imperial idiom.