Gooty fort

The Anantapur gazetteer of 1905 describes the fortress of Gooty.¹ A roughly circular cluster of steep, bare hills surrounds the town.¹ Round their outside “runs a strong wall or rampart, built of stone pointed with chunam, which is guarded by frequent round towers or bastions” (chunam is lime plaster).¹ It had two openings, once gated, on the north and west.¹

The westernmost hill carries the citadel.¹ The gazetteer calls it “a huge, precipitous mass of bare rock which towers hundreds of feet above all the others”.¹ A paved path leads first to a strongly fortified spur “known in former days as Mar Gooty”.¹ It then “winds upwards round the steep sides of the great rock above it”.¹ At last it “reaches the summit of the fortress, which is 2,105 feet above the level of the sea”.¹

The summit is defended “by a series of walls perched one above the other along its precipitous sides”.¹ These walls are “connected with re-entering gateways flanked by bastions”.¹ Robert Sewell’s lists counted “fourteen gateways” in the lines of fortification.²

The citadel “contains no buildings or remains of architectural interest”.¹ On the top the gazetteer noted what seemed to be a gymnasium and a powder-magazine.¹ On the edge of a 300-foot cliff stands a small pavilion of polished chunam, called “Morari Rao’s seat”.¹ Reservoirs cut in the clefts of the rock caught the rain.¹ Some ruined buildings had served Munro as prisons for unruly poligars (local chiefs).¹

The Archaeological Department’s notes of 1912–13 record that the fort and its buildings had been placed on the list of monuments specially conserved by Government.³ Large sums had been spent on repairs.³

Who built it

The gazetteer found that “materials for a continuous history of the fort are not available”.⁴⁵ There are eight inscriptions near the deserted Narasimha temple on the summit.⁴⁵ Three belong to the Western Chalukya king Vikramaditya VI, two of them dated in 1121–22 and 1122–23.⁴⁵ Their existence “shows … that the fort was a place of importance 880 years ago”.⁴⁵

The eighth, a Sanskrit verse, praises “Gutti-durga, the king of forts” as the hub of the wheel of king Bukka’s rule.⁶ E. Hultzsch took the king for Bukka I of Vijayanagara.⁶ See the Gooty inscription.

Sewell’s lists of 1882 reported that the fort was “said to have been constructed by Krishnadeva Raya”.² They read the Bukka of the verse as “probably Bukka Raja, one of Krishnadeva Raya’s officers, who built the fort”.² The inspection notes of 1912–13 repeated Sewell’s report.³

The gazetteer disagreed.⁵ It says that Krishnadeva “is popularly credited with having built” the fortifications, “but it has been stated above that they had been begun many years before his time”.⁵ In its account of the district’s history, it allowed only that the Vijayanagara kings “built some portions, not now separately distinguishable, of the fortifications at Gooty and Penukonda”.⁷ See Krishnadeva Raya and Bukka I.

Later sieges

The gazetteer says that the Vijayanagara princes of Penukonda still held the fort at the end of the sixteenth century.⁸ A Mackenzie manuscript tells of its fall by treachery to Mir Jumla after a siege of twelve years, which the gazetteer doubted.⁸ The Maratha Morari Rao settled in it about 1746 and repaired its fortifications in 1754.⁸ Sewell’s lists say that Haidar Ali took it from him in 1776 “after a siege of nine months”.² It passed to the English in 1799.²

Footnotes

1. Francis, Anantapur Gazetteer (1905), p. 153 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶

2. Robert Sewell, Lists of the Antiquarian Remains in the Presidency of Madras, Vol. I (1882), p. 115 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Annual Report of the Archaeological Department, Southern Circle, Madras, for the year 1912–13 (1913), p. 59, Anantapur district, No. 81 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Francis, Anantapur Gazetteer (1905), p. 155 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Francis, Anantapur Gazetteer (1905), p. 156 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. E. Hultzsch, South-Indian Inscriptions, Vol. I (1890), p. 167, No. 154 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²

7. W. Francis, Madras District Gazetteers: Anantapur (1905), p. 18 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

8. Francis, Anantapur Gazetteer (1905), p. 157 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³