There was some surprise when Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul turned up at the BJP office last week and gave what many in the press took to be a pre-election endorsement not just of the party but the entire Sangh parivar programme. India was indeed shining, the Nobel laureate was quoted as saying, and yes he was quite happy being "appropriated" by the BJP.

More striking was the quote attributed to Naipaul about the violent destruction of the Babri Masjid: "Ayodhya is a sort of passion," he said.

For Naipaul, the Fall of Vijayanagara is a paradigmatic wound on India's psyche. It's a theme he first developed in 'An Area of Darkness' and holds to date.

"Any passion is to be encouraged. Passion leads to creativity." For a man whose work contains many eloquent warnings of the dangers of misplaced political passions—such as the Islamic Revolution in Iran—this might appear to be a surprising volte-face. Indeed, it led one commentator in the Times to wonder if Sir Vidia was not being misquoted or at least misunderstood.

Yet the quotes, especially Sir Vidia's remarks that Babar's invasion of India "left a deep wound", are consistent with ideas Naipaul has been airing for many years now. In 1998, for example, he told The Hindu: "I think when you see so many Hindu temples of the tenth century or earlier disfigured, defaced, you realise that something terrible happened. I feel that the civilisation of that closed world was mortally wounded by those invasions.... The Old World is destroyed. That has to be understood. Ancient Hindu India was destroyed."

A few years earlier, following the destruction of the Babri Masjid, Naipaul told the Times of India: "What is happening in India is a new, historical awakening.... Only now are the people beginning to understand that there has been a great vandalising of India. Because of the nature of the conquest and the nature of Hindu society, such understanding had eluded Indians before...." Such attitudes form a consistent line of thought in Naipaul's writing about India from An Area of Darkness in 1964 through to the present.

Today few would dispute Sir Vidia's status as probably the greatest living writer of Indian origin; indeed, many would go further and argue that he is the greatest living writer of English prose.

By 16 c, Hindu and Muslim states lived in creative harmony, Hindu kings wearing Islamic-inspired costumes, Bijapur's Ibrahim Adil Shahi II in rudraksha rosary.

For good reason, his views are taken very seriously. He is a writer whose fiction and non-fiction written over half a century form a body of work of great brilliance, something the Nobel committee recognised when they awarded him literature's highest honour.

His credentials as a historian are, however, much less secure, and so when Sir Vidia gets something badly wrong, it is important that these errors are challenged.

There is a celebrated opening sequence to Sir Vidia's masterpiece, India: A Wounded Civilisation. It is 1975—a full quarter century before he won the Nobel—and Naipaul is surveying the shattered ruins of Vijayanagara.

Naipaul leads the reader through the remains of the once mighty city, its 24 miles of walls winding through the "brown plateau of rock and gigantic boulders". These days, he explains, it is just "a peasant wilderness", but look carefully and you can see scattered everywhere the crumbling wreckage of former greatness: "palaces and stables, a royal bath...the leaning granite pillars of what must have been a bridge across the river". Over the bridge, there is yet more: "a long and very wide avenue, with a great statue of the bull of Shiva at one end, and at the other end a miracle: a temple that for some reason was spared destruction, is still whole, and is still used for worship".

Naipaul goes on to lament the fall of this "great centre of Hindu civilisation", "then one of the greatest (cities) in the world".

Desecration of Hindu temples did take place but it was paradoxically a continuation of the Indian tradition of sacking tutelary 'state' deities.

It was pillaged in 1565 "by an alliance of Muslim principalities—and the work of destruction took five months; some people say a year". It fell, according to Naipaul, because already the Hindu world it embodied had become backward-looking and stagnant: it had failed to develop, and in particular had failed to develop the military means to challenge the aggressive Muslim sultanates that surrounded it. Instead, Vijayanagara was "committed from the start to the preservation of a Hinduism that had already been violated, and culturally and artistically it (only) preserved and repeated; it hardly innovated.... The Hinduism Vijayanagar proclaimed had already reached a dead end".

For Naipaul, the Fall of Vijayanagara is a paradigmatic wound on the psyche of India, part of a long series of failures that he believes still bruises the country's self-confidence (or from which, according to some of his more recent statements, the country is only just now beginning to recover). The wound was created by a fatal combination of Islamic aggression and Hindu weakness—the tendency to 'retreat', to withdraw in the face of defeat.

Naipaul first developed the theme in An Area of Darkness. The great Hindu ruins of the South, he writes there, represent "the continuity and flow of Hindu India, ever shrinking". But the ruins of the North—the monuments of the Great Mughals—"speak of waste and failure". Even the Taj and the magnificent garden tombs of the Mughal emperors are to Naipaul symbols of oppression: "Europe has its monuments of sun-kings, its Louvres and Versailles. But they are part of the development of the country's spirit; they express the refining of a nation's sensibility". In contrast, the monuments of the Mughals speak only of "personal plunder, and a country with an infinite capacity for being plundered". Time has not mellowed these views: in an interview Naipaul gave to Outlook ("Christianity didn't damage India like Islam", Nov 15, 1999), Sir Vidia maintained that "the Taj is so wasteful, so decadent and in the end so cruel that it is painful to be there for very long. This is an extravagance that speaks of the blood of the people".

Not many other observers have seen the Taj Mahal—usually perceived as the world's greatest monument to love ("a tear on the face of eternity," according to Tagore, an earlier Indian Nobel laureate)—in quite such jaundiced terms; indeed it takes an unusual perversity to see one of the world's most beautiful buildings merely as a piece of cultural vandalism. Nevertheless, Naipaul's entirely negative understanding of India's Islamic history has its roots firmly in the mainstream imperial historiography of Victorian Britain.

The gentle cult of Sufism, vernacular Islamic literature find no mention in Naipaul, neither does the religious tolerance of Akbar or Dara Shikoh.

For the Muslim invasions of India tended to be seen by historians of the Raj as a long, brutal sequence of rapine and pillage, in stark contrast—so 19th century British historians liked to believe—to the law and order selflessly brought by their own 'Civilising Mission'. In this context, the Fall of Vijayanagara was written up in elegiac terms by Robert Sewell, whose 1900 book Vijayanagar: A Forgotten Empire first characterised the kingdom as "a Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquests", a single brave but doomed attempt at resistance to Islamic aggression. This idea was eagerly elaborated by Hindu nationalists who wrote of Vijayanagara as a Hindu state dedicated to the preservation of the traditional, peaceful and 'pure' Hindu culture of southern India.

It is a simple and seductive vision, and one that at first sight looks plausible. The problem is that such ideas rest on a set of ignorant and Islamophobic assumptions which recent scholarship has done much to undermine.

A brilliant essay published in 1996 by the respected American Sanskrit scholar, Philip B. Wagoner, was an important landmark in this process*.The essay, titled 'A Sultan Among Hindu Kings'—a reference to the title by which the Kings of Vijayanagara referred to themselves—pointed out the degree to which the elite culture of Vijayanagara was heavily Islamicised by the 16th century, its civilisation "deeply transformed through nearly two centuries of intense and creative interaction with the Islamic world".

By this period, for example, the Hindu kings of Vijayanagara appeared in public audience, not bare-chested, as had been the tradition in Hindu India, but instead dressed in quasi-Islamic court costume—the Islamic-inspired kabayi, a long-sleeved tunic derived from the Arabic qaba, and the kullayi, a conical cap derived from Perso-Turkic kulah—all part, according to Wagoner, of "their symbolic participation in the more universal culture of Islam".

Far from being the stagnant, backward-looking bastion of Hindu resistance imagined by Naipaul, Vijayanagara had in fact developed in all sorts of unexpected ways, taking on much of the administrative, tax collecting and military methods of the Muslim sultanates that surrounded it—notably stirrups, horseshoes, horse armour and a new type of saddle, all of which allowed Vijayanagara to put into the field an army of horse archers who could hold at bay the Delhi Sultanate, then the most powerful force in India.

Not for Naipaul a Romila Thapar, Satish Chandra or Nurul Hasan. It's the 'Dark Ages' history of the new NCERT books that's more to his taste.

A comprehensive survey of Vijayanagara's monuments and archaeology conducted by George Michell over the last 20 years has come to the same conclusion as Wagoner. The survey has emphasised the degree to which the buildings of 16th century Vijayanagara were inspired by the architecture of the nearby Muslim sultanates, mixing the traditional trabeate architecture of the Hindu South with the arch and dome of the Islamicate North.

Moreover, this fruitful interaction between Hindu- and Muslim-ruled states was very much a two-way traffic. Just as Hindu Vijayanagara was absorbing Islamic influences, so a similar process of hybridity was transforming the nominally Islamic sultanate of Bijapur. The landmark study of this fascinating City State is Richard Eaton's Sufis of Bijapur. The picture revealed by Eaton's work is of a city dominated by an atmosphere of heterodox intellectual enquiry, with the libraries of Bijapur swelling with esoteric texts produced on the intellectual frontier between Islam and Hinduism. One Bijapuri production of the period, for example, was the Bangab Nama, or the Book of the Pot Smoker: written by Mahmud Bahri—a sort of medieval Indian Allen Ginsberg. The book is a long panegyric to the joys of cannabis:

"Smoke your pot and be happy—
Be a dervish and put your heart at peace.
Lose your life imbibing this exhilaration."

In the course of this book, Bahri writes: "God's knowledge has no limit...and there is not just one path to him. Anyone from any community can find him." This certainly seems to have been the view of Bijapur's ruler, Ibrahim Adil Shahi II. Early in his reign, Ibrahim gave up wearing jewels and adopted instead the rudraksha rosary of the sadhu. In his songs he used highly Sanskritised language to shower equal praise upon Saraswati, the Prophet Muhammad, and the Sufi saint Gesudaraz of Gulbarga.

Perhaps the most surprising passage occurs in the 56th song where the Sultan more or less describes himself as a Hindu God: "He is robed in saffron dress, his teeth are black, the nails are red...and he loves all. Ibrahim whose father is Ganesh, whose mother is Saraswati, has a rosary of crystal round his neck...and an elephant as his vehicle." According to the art historian Mark Zebrowski, "It is hard to label Ibrahim either a Muslim or a Hindu; rather he had an aesthete's admiration for the beauty of both cultures." The same spirit also animates Bijapuri art whose nominally Islamic miniature portraits show "girls as voluptuous as the nudes of South Indian sculpture".

This creative coexistence finally fell victim, not to a concerted communal campaign by Muslim states intent on eradicating Hinduism, but instead to the shifting alliances of Deccani diplomacy. In 1558, only seven years before the Deccani sultanates turned on Vijayanagara, the Empire had been a prominent part of an alliance of mainly Muslim armies that had sacked the Sultanate of Ahmadnagar. That year, Vijayanagara's armies stabled their horses in the mosques of the plundered city, and the Emperor Rama Raya had demanded that the Sultan come to his headquarters and eat paan from his hand as the price for peace. Before this Rama Raya had allied with the same Ahmadnagar Sultan in two joint invasions of Bijapur, then with the new Sultan of Bijapur in two campaigns against Ahmadnagar. It was only in 1562, when Rama Raya plundered and seized not just districts belonging to Ahmadnagar and its ally Golconda, but also those belonging to his own ally Bijapur, that the different sultanates finally united against their unruly neighbour.

The Fall of Vijayanagara is a subject Naipaul keeps returning to: in an interview shortly after he had been awarded the Nobel prize, he talked about how the destruction of the city meant an end to its traditions: "When Vijayanagar was laid low, all the creative talent would also have been destroyed. The current has been broken." Yet there is considerable documentary and artistic evidence that the very opposite was true, and that the city's craftsmen merely transferred to the patronage of the Sultans of Bijapur where the result was a major artistic renaissance.

The remarkable fusion of styles that resulted from this rebirth can still be seen in the tomb of Ibrahim II, completed in 1626. From afar it looks uncompromisingly Islamic; yet for all its domes and arches, the closer you draw the more you realise that few Muslim buildings are so Hindu in their spirit. The usually austere walls of Islamic architecture in the Deccan here give way to a petrified scrollwork indistinguishable from Vijayanagaran decoration, the bleak black volcanic granite of Bijapur manipulated as if it were as soft as plaster, as delicate as a lace ruff. All around minars suddenly bud into bloom, walls dissolve into bundles of pillars; fantastically sculptural lotus-bud domes and cupola drums are almost suffocated by great starbursts of Indic decoration which curl down from the pendetives like pepper vines, winding their way up brackets and gripping around the cusps of archways.