South India in The Post-Vijayanagara Period
The five Bahmani sultanates that had united for the single purpose of laying Vijayanagara waste were soon at odds with each other, and were unable to establish their authority much beyond the vicinity of the erstwhile capital city. They were soon extinguished by the Mughal's under the leadership of Aurangzeb, who spent nearly the whole of his long life attempting in vain to add the Deccan and South India to his empire. This effort, and Aurangzeb's religious bigotry, drained the Mughal empire of both resources and support, and the Mughal empire crumbled into anarchy upon the death of Aurangzeb in 1707.
The Marathas were the primary cause for this sudden decline of the Mughal empire. Chhatrapati Shivaji's spiritual preceptor, Swamy Samarth Ramdas, had been deeply moved by the ruins of Vijayanagara. Shivaji himself was deeply impressed by the resistance offered by the Vijayanagar Empire to Muslim rule in South India. Samarth Ramdas played a critical part in motivating the young Shivaji to dream of Swaraj. The Marathas under the leadership of Chhatrapati Shivaji were successful in ousting from the land those forces that had caused the collapse and ruin of Vijayanagara, and the Peshwas extended the Maratha empire all the way to Delhi within 150 years of Talikota. The relations between Vijayanagar and the Hindu Pad Padshahi of the Marathas can be found elsewhere as well. In a lecture given by Bal Gangadhar Tilak, he says that the land revenue system of the Marathas was taken from Vijayanagar. In this way, one great Hindu empire passed on the baton to the next.
The main powers in South India in the post-Vijayanagara period were rulers of Madurai, Mysore Travancore, Keladi, Chitradurga, the Marathas, including the rulers of Kolhapur and Thanjavur and the Mughals, represented by the rulers of Hyderabad and Arcot. They were gradually either co-opted or supplanted by the British who held sway until the Independence of India in 1947.
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