The Ancient History and Living Culture of Bengaluru

Bengaluru carries more than 480 years of documented history within its boundaries, yet most people who move here for work or study encounter the city only as a technology hub. They rarely pause to ask what existed before the glass towers and ring roads. The answer is a city of astonishing depth. It was founded in 1537 by a feudal chieftain serving a crumbling empire and shaped over the following centuries by Mysore kings, a Mughal-influenced military dynasty, British colonial administrators and the continuous undercurrent of Kannada cultural life. To understand Bengaluru properly is to understand that its present is built on layers of deliberate human activity going back to the medieval period. Every temple gopuram in Basavanagudi, every narrow lane in Chickpet and every tree in Lal Bagh carries evidence of the decisions made by people whose names the city now largely forgets. This is a guide to recovering some of that forgotten depth.

The Founding of Bengaluru and the Vijayanagara Era

The city was founded in 1537 by Kempe Gowda I, a feudal chieftain who held authority under the Vijayanagara Empire. This was one of the last great Hindu kingdoms of medieval South India. Kempe Gowda built a mud fort at the centre of what is now the old city, laid out market streets according to specific trades and marked the city’s intended boundaries by erecting four watchtowers at its cardinal points. These towers, parts of which survive at Lal Bagh, Ulsoor, Mekhri Circle and near Kempapura Agrahara, were not just territorial markers but a declaration that this settlement had a plan and a future. The Vijayanagara Empire’s patronage brought with it a culture of temple construction, artisan trade and classical learning that shaped the earliest character of Bengaluru’s social life. Kempe Gowda also oversaw the construction of a network of water storage tanks, which were stepped reservoirs that would supply the city for centuries. He built the early temples at Basavanagudi and Halasuru that remain active places of worship today. His city plan, with its trade-specific street layout and civic water infrastructure, created a foundation so practical that successive rulers largely chose to build upon it rather than replace it.

The Mysore Kingdom and the Transformation of the 18th Century

Between the fall of Vijayanagara at the Battle of Talikota in 1565 and the early 18th century, Bengaluru passed through several hands, including the Bijapur Sultanate and the Mughals, before coming under the Mysore Wadiyars. The most consequential change came in 1758 when Hyder Ali, a military commander who had risen to control of the Mysore Kingdom, captured Bengaluru from the Wadiyar governor. Hyder Ali recognised the city’s strategic value immediately and moved to develop it as a major administrative and military base. He established Lal Bagh Botanical Garden in 1760. He laid out the original 40 acres in the Persian and Mughal garden tradition and stocked it with plants brought from his military campaigns across the subcontinent. His son, Tipu Sultan, inherited the kingdom after his father’s death in 1782 and rebuilt Kempe Gowda’s mud fort in stone and granite. This created the stone fort whose Delhi Gate still stands near the present-day Krishna Rajendra Market. Tipu Sultan expanded Lal Bagh to approximately 240 acres and arranged for the import of plants from France, Persia and Mauritius through his diplomatic contacts. This made it one of the few botanical gardens in 18th-century India with a genuinely international plant collection. Tipu Sultan’s defeat and death at Seringapatam in 1799 brought British forces into control, ending the Mysore period and beginning a new chapter.

The British Cantonment and the Making of a Dual City

When the British East India Company assumed control in 1799, they did not immediately overwrite the existing city. Instead, they established a military cantonment separate from the Indian town in 1809. This was a deliberate spatial separation that reflected both military doctrine and the social assumptions of colonial administration. The cantonment was laid out several kilometres northeast of the pete area with wide avenues, large compound bungalows, parade grounds, barracks, clubs and churches that created an urban character entirely different from the dense, temple-anchored neighbourhoods of the old city. St. Mark’s Cathedral, consecrated in 1812, and St. Andrew’s Kirk, built in 1866, remain architecturally intact examples of the religious buildings that defined the cantonment’s institutional life. The Indo-Saracenic style of architecture that British designers brought to major civic buildings, most visibly in Attara Kacheri (the High Court) completed in 1868 and the Public Library, left a built legacy that still marks the centre of the modern city. Cubbon Park, laid out in 1864 under Major General Richard Sankey, brought European concepts of the planned urban green space into the cantonment area. This dual-city structure, with an organic Indian town on one side and a planned colonial settlement on the other, created spatial and social divisions that persisted long after independence and are still faintly legible in the different characters of the city’s various neighbourhoods today.

Independence, Karnataka’s Formation and the Post-Colonial City

India’s independence in 1947 and the subsequent reorganisation of states along linguistic lines brought a new chapter to Bengaluru’s history. On November 1, 1956, the Kannada-speaking districts of the former Mysore State, Coorg, Hyderabad-Karnataka and Madras-Karnataka were unified into a single administrative unit. It was initially called Mysore State and renamed Karnataka in 1973. Bengaluru was confirmed as the state capital, a status that directed investment, educational institutions and public administration toward the city. The 1960s and 1970s saw the establishment of major public-sector enterprises, Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, Bharat Heavy Electricals and Indian Telephone Industries among them. These formed the industrial foundation on which the city’s later technology sector would be built. The opening of software and technology companies from the 1980s onward transformed Bengaluru’s economy and demographic composition dramatically, drawing skilled migrants from across India and eventually the world. But beneath this transformation, the city’s older identity persists in the temples that predate the fort that predate the cantonment that predates the IT corridor, in the festivals that follow the same routes they have followed for centuries and in a language that carries two thousand years of literary history into the present.

The Kannada Cultural Fabric that Holds the City Together

Beneath these layers of political history runs the continuous thread of Kannada culture, a language with over two thousand years of literary history and a set of performing arts traditions that have never left the city’s life. Bengaluru is home to Ravindra Kalakshetra, one of the most active classical arts venues in South India, and to the Kannada Sahitya Parishad, which has worked since 1915 to preserve and promote Kannada literature. Annual festivals like Karaga, a 300-year-old ritual of the Thigala community centred on Dharmaraya Swamy Temple in the old city, and Kadalekai Parishe, the groundnut fair held at Bull Temple in Basavanagudi, continue to draw enormous participation from old neighbourhoods that maintain their own community identities even as the city around them transforms. Karnataka has produced eight Jnanpith Award winners, more than any other Indian state, and Bengaluru has been the home and platform for many of them. The city’s classical music scene, anchored in the Carnatic tradition, supports a dense network of academies, concert venues and hereditary teacher-student lineages that transmit centuries of musical knowledge to new generations. Kannada Rajyotsava, observed each year on November 1, is the moment when Bengaluru pauses to acknowledge that beneath the cosmopolitan surface of a global technology city lies a deeply rooted regional culture that shaped the space long before the first software company arrived.

Heritage Sites That Remain Open to Everyone

One of the most accessible aspects of Bengaluru’s historical depth is that so much of it remains physically present and publicly accessible. The Delhi Gate of Bengaluru Fort, located in the Krishnarajendra Market area, marks the entrance to what Tipu Sultan built in stone in the late 18th century. Lal Bagh opens every morning and admits visitors to a garden that has been cultivated continuously since 1760, where some of the trees planted during the Mysore period are still alive. Gavi Gangadhareshwara Temple, a cave shrine with origins in the 9th century, continues to function as an active place of worship in Gavipuram. The Kempe Gowda watchtower at the southeastern corner of Lal Bagh stands as a direct physical remnant of the 1537 founding. Attara Kacheri, the High Court building that remains one of the finest examples of Indo-Saracenic architecture in South India, faces Cubbon Park and can be seen by anyone walking through the central city. These sites are not behind fences or restricted to paid tours. They are simply there, waiting for anyone curious enough to stop and look carefully at the city they are standing in.

Why This History Matters Now

Understanding Bengaluru’s history is not an academic exercise. It is the difference between living in a city and understanding the place you live in. Every metro station built over a former tank bed, every IT park constructed on agricultural land that once fed the city and every heritage building repurposed into a restaurant tells a story about choices made over 480 years. When residents of any city understand how the streets they walk were laid out, who paid for the parks and what the old buildings were originally built to accomplish, they engage with urban decisions in the present with more intelligence and more care. Bengaluru’s history is not finished. It is being written every day by everyone who lives here.