Mysuru

est. 1399 — the long account

Mysore begins as a Wodeyar stronghold in 1399, a small principality in the shadow of Vijayanagara that quietly outlived its overlord. For three and a half centuries the dynasty survived by timing its loyalties well, until in 1761 its own commander, Haidar Ali, took effective power — and with his son Tipu Sultan turned Mysore into the most formidable Indian military state of the century. Four Anglo-Mysore wars followed; Tipu, who corresponded with revolutionary France and fielded iron-cased rockets, died defending his island capital Srirangapatna in 1799.

The British restored a five-year-old Wodeyar to a shrunken throne, took the administration from him in 1831 and ran the state through commissioners for fifty years, then handed it back in 1881 under the 'Rendition'. What followed made Mysore famous: under Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV and a line of able diwans, the princely state built dams, universities, silk factories and Asia's first major hydroelectric station — a laboratory of development that contemporaries called a model state. The present palace, Amba Vilas, rose in 1912 after a fire, in a riotous Indo-Saracenic style that still anchors the city.

Mysore acceded to India in 1947 and gave its name to a state until it became Karnataka in 1973, but it never rushed: the Dasara procession still runs as it did under the Wodeyars, the palace is still lit by some ninety-seven thousand bulbs on Sundays, and the city's trades — silk weaving, sandalwood carving, jasmine garlands, mysore pak — continue in the same blocks. It is one of the few Indian cities where the princely century feels continuous rather than embalmed.

Mysuru · Kaveri