Righto- this is going to start out very vague and sketchy. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Vijayanagara was the last of the great Hindu empires and the last great South Indian empire. After it's fall, South India would be broken up into European colonies and independent statelets for the next two centuries (until Britain established hegemony over the region) and India's centre of gravity would remain in the North.
ITTL, I'm going to attempt to create a Vijayanagar that avoids the crushing defeats at the hands of the Deccan sultanates that destroyed it IOTL. I plan to have it become a trading partner of the European powers that were beginning to nose around India in the late 16th C and to begin to adopt European military science. In another thread some of us were discussing the tactical and strategic weakness of Indian armies of the 18th and 19th C against European ones: basically they had had time to adopt European artillery technology but lagged in disciplined musket infantry (which were confined to elite royal guards regiments in most Indian states in the late 18th C). By positing a coherent large state like Vijayanagara open to foreign influence as early as the 16th C I aim to give Vijayanagara (and by extension other Indian states) a leg up militarily.
Lets see how it goes