In this episode, Namit Arora describes what’s known about Vijayanagar's trade, governance, and policing. He also looks at its religious landscape and courtly norms, its eager embrace of Persianate culture, and its war machine and shifting military alliances in which religion mattered little. Hindu nationalists today fondly imagine Vijayanagar as a self-conscious bastion of Hinduism bravely resisting the ‘onslaught of Islam’. Is that true?