Dynastic History|Elephant Stables, Hampi — Eleven Domes, and What the Listing Called Them

Eleven chambers stand in a row on open grass in the royal centre at Hampi, each under its own dome and the domes not all of one form, with a pavilion set in the middle of the range. The building housed the elephants of the Vijayanagara state. India's tourism ministry puts its construction in the reign of Krishnadevaraya, in the sixteenth century, and points at the working detail rather than the ornament: metal hooks still set into the roofs, used to tether the animals or to hoist a howdah onto a back, and a small opening cut into each chamber so that a mahout could get in and out. Elephants were an arm of government here, used on campaign and in procession. The openings are there because men lived alongside the animals.

In 1986 the Group of Monuments at Hampi was inscribed on the World Heritage List, and the description UNESCO published made an argument about this building. Vijayanagara architecture, it says, is "also known for its adoption of elements of Indo Islamic Architecture in secular buildings like the Queen's Bath and the Elephant Stables", the site "representing a highly evolved multi-religious and multi-ethnic society". The arches and domes are the vocabulary of the Deccan sultanates — the same states whose confederacy took the city in 1565 — and the court that fought them built with those forms in its own capital, for its own use. Anila Verghese has made the same reading in print.

Nothing is stabled here now. Visitors walk the length of the range under the domes, inside a precinct the Archaeological Survey of India protects.

📸 Cover: the eleven chambers of the elephant stables seen from the front, iMahesh, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons