Dating from the 14th century, Hampi is a place of devotion where the cults of Śivā and Viṣṇu were practiced and at the same time a fortified city center of royal power, both a place of pilgrimage and the capital of the Vijayanagara empire. History marks this ambivalence in the name of the site. As a whole, it has always been called Hampi. In the 14th-15th-16th centuries, the kings added a larger city to the already large site and named it Vijayanagara “City of Victory”.
Hampi is a remarkable and admirable site. The geological environment imbues the space with a magical atmosphere and its majestic monuments carry a wealth of iconography.
Galerie Hioco’s passion for Asia is expressed primarily through the Paris-based art gallery specializing in ancient sculptures from India and Southeast Asia, but also through a philanthropic project that is close to their hearts, aiming to publish reference works on major but undocumented sites in India. This project was motivated by a visit they made in 2015 to the site of Khajurāho. Disappointed to find no recent monographs on these major temples, they decided to publish with us a book on this Khajurāho site in 2017 and another on the Ellora Caves in 2020.
This book is available only at Galerie Hioco.
The book is written by an eminent specialist of India, Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat. During his missions in India, in Pondicherry from 1955 to 1992, and in Mysore since 1993, he and his wife Vasundhara have researched and studied Hampi. Mr. Filliozat’s achievements were particularly recognized in 2000, when he was elected a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-lettres (Institut de France, Paris). He obtained a degree in Hindi from the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales in 1959, then in 1962 a degree from the École Pratique des Hautes Études with a thesis on “Le Pratâparudrîya de Vidyânâtha” under the direction of Louis Renou. He was a member of the École française d’Extrême-Orient from 1963 to 1967. Thereafter, from 1967 to the present, he has been director of Sanskrit studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Since 1998, he has also been an associate member of the Center for the History of Arab and Medieval Sciences and Philosophies. On March 25, 2015 in New Delhi, the President of India, Shri Pranab Mukherje, presented him with the award called Letter of recognition for skill in Sanskrit letters and scholarship in science, in recognition of his work on Sanskrit language and literature.