Bangalore
Bangalore keeps its history low and green: a 1537 watchtower fort, Tipu Sultan's teak palace, the cantonment the British laid beside the petes, and the parks that earned it its garden name.
1537
The mud fort
Kempe Gowda founds the pete town.
1791
The Company's city
Bangalore falls in the Third Mysore War.
1809
The cantonment
A second, British city grows beside the first.
1956
Vidhana Soudha
The granite seat of the enlarged Mysore State rises.
est. 1537 — the long account
Bangalore begins in 1537, when Kempe Gowda, a Vijayanagara chieftain, built a mud fort and laid out the petes — market streets named for their trades, from cotton to bangles — and set four watchtowers at the edges of where he thought his town would ever grow. The town passed to the Bijapur Sultans, then to the Mughals, who sold it in 1689 to the Wodeyars of Mysore. A century later it belonged to the story of Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan: Haidar Ali rebuilt the fort in stone, Tipu finished the teak summer palace beside it, and Bangalore fell to Cornwallis in 1791, in the Third Anglo-Mysore War.
After Tipu's death at Srirangapatna in 1799, the British returned Bangalore to the Wodeyars but kept a garrison, and in 1809 moved their cantonment to the city's cooler ridge. Two cities grew side by side: the old Kannada pete around the fort, and the cantonment with its parade grounds, churches, and Civil and Military Station — the separation that explains why Bangalore still reads as several towns stitched together. When the cantonment was handed back to Mysore in 1947, the princely state's model-city habits had already given Bangalore its parks, its broad roads and its botanical garden, Lalbagh, planted in 1760 by Haidar Ali himself.
Independent India chose Bangalore for its strategic industries — HAL, BEL, ISRO — and the enlarged Mysore State (Karnataka from 1973) crowned the city in 1956 with Vidhana Soudha, the granite legislature Chief Minister Kengal Hanumanthaiah commissioned to outstare the colonial buildings. The software boom of the 1990s turned the garden city into the silicon one, but the historical layers remain walkable: Kempe Gowda's towers still stand, Tipu's palace still smells of teak, and Cubbon Park's rain trees were planted when Bangalore was two rival towns and a field between them.
Bangalore · Cubbon Park