https://t.inks.page/wiki/Vijayanagara_Empire Follow any website on Inks inks.page https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vijayanagara_Empire?t=2026-04-07 To the pilgrims Vijayanagar is its surviving temple. The surrounding destruction is like proof of the virtue of old magic; just as the fantasy of past splendour is accommodated within an acceptance of present squalor. That once glorious avenue – not a national monument, still permitted to live – is a slum. Its surface, where unpaved, is a green-black slurry of mud and excrement, through which the sandaled pilgrims unheedingly pad to the food stalls and souvenir shops, loud and gay with radios. And there are starved squatters with their starved animals in the ruins, the broken stone façades patched up with mud and rocks, the doorways stripped of the sculptures which existed until recently. Life goes on, the past continues. After conquest and destruction, the past simply reasserts itself.

• Naipaul, V.S. - India_ A Wounded Civilization (Vintage, 2003)

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