Bengaluru: A Palimpsest of Past and Present
If a longue durée of Bengaluru’s historical evolution is taken, both romanticised nostalgia and presentist reductionism can present problems. A nuanced, pedagogically sensitive approach that reimagines memory, heritage, and the city’s layered identity is needed.
Bengaluru, now solidified as India’s key economic epicenter by its IT juggernauts and unicorn startups, looms large with its towering parks, sprawling complexes, and cavernous malls, devouring the hamlets, pastures, and lakes that once defined the region. Yet, beneath this frenetic modernity lies an antiquity far older than India’s other metropolises, enshrined in the name Bengaluru, predating its anglicized alias, Bangalore. This past, stretching from prehistoric murmurs to the Western Gangas’ six-century reign (4th to 10th century CE) and the 17th-century vision of Kempe Gowda, pulses with a vitality often eclipsed by today’s apocalyptic traffic, garbage heaps, cratered roads, and reckless construction. A chorus of scholars, activists, and storytellers is now laboring to rekindle this heritage, reminding Bengaluru’s blasé denizens and visitors of a time when valorous, courageous subjects governed with responsibility and pragmatism, offering a vision to rejuvenate a beleaguered city from within.
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| Reviving Antiquity: Narratives in the Digital Age |
This resurgence thrives on modern platforms—tours, walks, seminars, YouTube channels, and podcasts like Sri Dharmendra’s zestful Insta shorts and Ramjee Chandran’s History of Bangalore podcast, with over 50 episodes. These efforts foreground Bengaluru’s layered past, even in its crowded, quotidian corners, tracing dynasties from the Gangas to the Wodeyars and Tipu across regions like Mysore, Hassan, Tumkur, and Kolar. In the first few episodes focusing on Bengaluru’ s origins and its early medieval history under the Western Gangas (approx 400 - 1000 CE) and the numerous inscriptions and hero stones (viragallus) scattered across that mark this epoch, Chandran highlights pioneering epigraphists like Bernard Lewis Rice contribution along with contemporary voices—P L Udayakumar, S K Aruni, Anirudh Kanisetti (of Lords of the Deccan fame), add urgency. (Check here for a fabulous site of Mythic Society of Bengaluru which has mapped the presence of various inscriptions, the hero stones that embed them and the temples hosting them across the city and now which can be translated by any user!)
The Historiographic Dilemma: Nostalgia, Modernity, and Nuance
Yet, my historiographic premise resists a linear connection between past and present. Bengaluru’s technological leaps and material transformations belie a lingering feudal-patrimonial undercurrent. Deep nostalgia risks glorifying honor, courage, and valor in their feudal, patronage-bound forms, ill-suited to today’s democratic ideals of citizenship and agency. Conversely, discarding cultural memory for abstract modernity risks anomie. Claims to objectivity, informed by democratic and citizenship quests too are not exempt from selectivity and prejudice where many scholars even with their methodological finesse aren’t but ‘inventing’ a past. Therefore nuance is needed—one that reinvents memory within modernity’s ambit, tempering its excesses, arising from such antinomic conundrums. History, then, must be reframed, not just as facts but as a dialogue between structures and stories, avoiding overdetermined frameworks that either glorify despots or fixate on structural hierarchies.
Still the narratives I’ve encountered - in podcasts, walking tours, insta reels and YouTube videos - brought some issues where I reckoned more factuality, even when wrapped and articulated using useful storytelling heuristic. In Ramjee Chandran’s podcast and a walk down MG Road and old Bengaluru where I had been a participant, the raconteuring was spellbinding, stitching together vignettes on edifices, roads, shops, temples, churches, and parks. Yet as perils of narrative history goes, I wonder if this plethora of anecdotes missed the woods for the trees (and alas literally speaking this city today has little of both today!) where presentism and teleology willy-nilly creep in, embedding epistemes implicitly and often explicitly signposting politics or ideology.
For one, as a history teacher, I muse whether I’d burden students with this data deluge - inscriptions of land grants, temple constructions, lakes and anicuts, alongside hero stones commemorating fallen warriors. What, could be the keys to unlock the interconnections between society, culture, and polity in the early medieval period, to which these hero stones belong, and how are these entwined with present-day Bengaluru and Karnataka in complex, often invisible ways? The challenge I wager, lies not in amassing facts but in discerning patterns—economic shifts, religious transformations, power dynamics—that transcend individual skirmishes or heroes.
Reassessing Historical Narratives: Beyond Facts and Battles
The Badami Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas, and even the later Western Chalukyas had more centralized polities in north Karnataka and parts of the Deccan. Their political system relied much on a standing army and imperial administration rather than on local warrior chieftains who had to prove their loyalty through personal sacrifice. This meant that while battles and conflicts certainly took place, the commemoration of fallen warriors was not as central to their political or religious culture. Their focus was more on grand temple-building projects, patronizing Sanskrit and Kannada, and integrating diverse regions under a single administration rather than celebrating localized martial traditions. Similarly, the Cholas in Tamil Nadu developed a highly centralized administration, with a strong emphasis on temple-based land control rather than on feudal militarism. While battlefield heroism was certainly important to them (as seen in inscriptions praising victorious kings), it was not commemorated in the form of hero stones. Instead, warriors were honored through inscriptions within temples, donations made in their names, and courtly literature. The Chola military machine was more professionalized, and less reliant on small-scale, clan-based warrior traditions in contrast to the much earlier Sangam era but where heroism was more celebrated in verses and folklore whose output was literary for which the Sangam era is well known.
Let’s look at matters in South Karnataka over a larger time frame - it’s almost axiomatic that early societies in south Karnataka and many parts of Deccan and Tamil regions were animist, pastoral, and semi-agrarian till early centuries of the first millennium. And rather than institutional Hinduism under ideological hegemony of priests it was Buddhism or Jainism’s ethical framework that was dominant operating in a world of charismatic ethics—individual monks, wandering mendicants, and small monastery networks. Buddhist and Jain monks were moral and ethical advisors. These early Buddhist and Jain monks and monastic settlements were supported by trading guilds and merchant communities, rather than peasant villages or temple economies. As works by historian Himanshu Prabha Ray highlight, Buddhist and Jain institutions were cosmopolitan, closely linked to external trade economies rather than local agrarian hierarchies. These regions were major nodes in the Indian Ocean trade system, where Buddhist and Jain monks traveled along maritime and caravan routes to establish Buddhist viharas and Jain basadis - Ajanta, Early Ellora, parts of Andhra, littoral and interior Tamil Nadu were important as trading centres and centres of both Buddhism and Jainism with rich archaeological heritage. Indeed further north in Deccan and eastern Andhra vis turn of the millennium Satvahanas represented a polity and society in a flux - agrarian expansion and rich land and maritime trade where both Buddhism and ‘Brahmanised’ Hinduism competed and co-existed.
The Western Ganga dynasty, ruling from southern Karnataka (Talakad region), started as a relatively tribal-pastoral polity before becoming more agricultural and wherein ‘Brahmanical’ practices and institutions like land grants and temples were incorporated. However it can be considered if unlike the Chalukyas or Rashtrakutas, their shift to a land-based economy was slower and more hybrid, retaining significant Jain influences even as they embraced ‘Brahmanical’ Hinduism. The early Ganga rulers, were patrons of Jainism but by the 8th century, as agriculture expanded in the region, the Gangas began granting land to Brahmanas and temples, mirroring developments in Tamilakam and the Deccan. However, these land grants did not immediately displace Jain power -rather, Jain basadi coexisted with emerging Shaiva temples. These differences in geography and political economy was also reflected in difference in the governing types that these Deccan and South Indian early medieval dynasts followed.
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The first mention of the name Bengaluru, is 'Benga-val-oru', the City of Guards in old Kannada from an inscription in Begur-Nagaratar inscription dated to 890 CE, found today at Begur’s Nageshvara temple complex, near Bengaluru’s notorious Silk Board junction. It is one of the earliest dated inscriptions in the region, which details the deaths of two warriors in a battle against the Rashtrakutas. These two warriors died defending their community, earning posthumous honors. Historians S Settar and Gunther Sontheimer in a study on memorial stones see such stones as cultural tributes to grassroots heroes, supporting a ritualized display of courage over systematic war. Post-battle, the king identified as Ereyappa, ruler of Gangavadi, a vast Ganga province granted Iruga, Nagattara’s successor, twelve villages in the Bempuru, Begur region as a reward for their sacrifice. |
The Hoysalas too approximately reigning from 1000–1350 CE, their base was in the same region as the Gangas, modern Mysore, Hassan, Tumkur. They still retained some Ganga legacies - one still find hero stones, local warrior commemorations, but the emphasis was now on monumentality, devotion, and courtly aesthetics. Their extremely ornate temples- Belur, Halebid, Somnathpur were not just acts of piety but statements of power, legitimacy, wealth, and craftsmanship. They used temple-building as a way to integrate local elites, display their new imperial status, anchor new towns and settlements and consolidate agrarian expansion.
So, if we put all of this together, it seems that hero stones flourished in areas where local chieftains played an active military and administrative role, as in the case of the Western Gangas and Hoysalas. They were less common under rulers like the Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas, Pallavas, and Cholas, who governed through more centralized systems, relied on professional armies, and had different ways of recording military achievements. Further battles were often ritualistic in many societies and served to reinforce a warrior’s honor rather than solely to gain wealth or land. Could a similar reading be applied to Karnataka’s hero stones? Instead of seeing these as records of feudal oppression or material extraction, can they be viewed as markers of social ethos, where war was a way of being rather than merely an act of destruction?
Re-looking (and Persisting with) ‘an old view’…
Subsequent to the Ganga-Hoysala era, the development of Bengaluru as a planned city much coveted by many historical regimes like the Wodeyars, Marathas, even the Mughals, Haider and Tipu and finally the colonial British, was undoubtedly Kempe Gowda of the Yelahanka Gowda clan. Both the Gowdas and Wodeyars were feudatories of the Vijayanagar empire by which time, hero stones culture sees a perceptible decline. The culture of inscriptions and temple building as it were evolved with the Hoyasalas to become the more dominant form of official communication and memorialising of events, personas and governance - of taxation and public works carried like tanks, canals, militarist endeavours. The many walking tours, YouTube videos and Wikipedia entry on Bengaluru in general and more specifically Meera Iyer’s book on Bengaluru would give all the granular details of the city’s past particularly from Kempe Gowdas time and the way the regional satrap supposedly planned the city in certain ways.
What is key to my mind is the understanding that planning, design and layout which are critical for a city to emerge as a space for residence, work, socialising, commerce, enterprise, commute, with the necessary infrastructure of roads, water supply, public spaces were essentially a Vijayanagar and post Vijayanagar feature. In such a sense Kempe Gowda could truly claim as a pioneer and Bengaluru’s founder. This holds true even though several clusters of settlements with their fields, tanks, commerce, temples and memorials certainly predate the ‘city, market’ heart of ‘old Bengaluru’ of today. It was centring around Kempe Gowda’s pethe from where Haider, Tipu, the British and the Wodeyars that Bengaluru evolved further in greater finesse.
The British, drawn to Bengaluru’s salubrious climate and central location, established a cantonment to the east of Kempe Gowda’s old town. This created a dual city - one indigenous and organically grown, and the other engineered for colonial administration and military residence. Over the 19th and early 20th centuries, this duality fostered a cosmopolitan but spatially segregated modernity, with institutions like the Bangalore Club, Parade Grounds, military barracks, and railway networks serving colonial needs, while the pethe areas continued older traditions of trade, festival, and artisanal production. Under indirect rule, the Wodeyars, now modernising princes within the British imperial framework, developed Mysore state into what some have called a “model state.” They invested in hydroelectricity (e.g., Shivanasamudra power station), education (Mysore University), planning (Bangalore’s extension areas like Malleswaram and Basavanagudi), and public health. Bengaluru, by the early 20th century, had become both a node of imperial power and princely modernity.
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An attempt to diagrammatically represent growth, developments and shifts in Bengaluru more than a millennium. It is argued that it is from Kempe Gowda’s fort city (pethe) that Bengaluru as a modern urban conglomeration can still claim to have expanded to include so much of its older parts skirting and dotting the region landscape. |
Even post independence, in colonies like Jayanagar, J P Nagar one could see some thought and planning as Bengaluru expanded in certain order and structure maintaining an unique character with its mixture of colonial and early post colonial edifices.
A myth as an normative quest for a modern city
Bengaluru history as much as history of numerous cities and places in India was a lot sanguinary, traumatic and not the most edifying. That as late as 1791-92 Bengaluru was besieged and wrecked by a bloody war and several times centuries before for which hundreds were martyred is little remembered in public memory that probably has been wilful in its lapse. Yet the apocryphal story of an old woman feeding the Hoyasala king Vira Ballala a meal of boiled beans (Benda Kaaluru) persists for which no historical evidence is found. My reasoning is Bengaluru’s shift from Viragallu based martial memory to a founding myth of feeding and settlement indicates a new identity: from a war-prone rural space to a peaceful node of exchange and hospitality. Hoysala period sees a slow but marked shift from decentralized, martial feudalism to more unified integration where the place is identified not as a battlefield, but as one of conviviality and settlement. Thus a socially lived and remembered urban imaginary that challenges the purely martial story of Bengaluru emerged and sustained, a story more of warmth than war, a legend suited to a ethos where a city seeks to reposition with an new identity in consonance with development of post colonial modernity. Here civility, hospitality and amiable sociality become the more valid criteria and a myth worth believing in than adherence to a historical fact. The latter being so savage, violent and bloody is better forgotten to be supplanted by something more endearing which again has a historical basis even if not being historically accurate. This ploy works better for any places’ worth and its (re)imagination - Panipat for instance, today being associated not with three brutal battles but as an industrial and commercial city!
Ironically it is the new Bengaluru of IT parks, a strip that skirts along the its Ring Road, Whitefield and Hebbal-Airport road where the city’s seamiest disconnect and horror today manifests in all dystopian cataclysm. Incidentally these parts that emerged post India’s liberal reforms of 1991 cover the very same settlements of hero stones, inscriptions and its many temples that have made way to and dwarfed by marquee technology companies, shopping malls, fancy high rises and gated communities which going by GDP alone would make it the wealthiest in India leave alone Karnataka. In this ‘new Bengaluru’, zilch planning and thought for provisioning water supply, drainage, allocation for parks, playgrounds, roads, public transport has been factored as a collective requirement other than purely as a private task for commercial and residential complexes to undertake within their proprietary limits. It is such collective provisioning in certain coordination and alignment across vast stretches with a representative city organisation i.e. municipal governance that can validate a city’s claim to be a city. This is particularly true in the context of modernity which in many sense cannot be divorced from industry, commerce and technology best exemplified and embodied in a city where millions across demographic divides coexist in certain coherence, organisation and harmony. In such a sense, normatively speaking and from a historical import, a city can still be less alienating, chaotic or dystopian where its layout, planning, architecture and upkeep can still give meaning to people and promote social intercourse. A city then, and not just Bengaluru which is such an anomaly in India today, even tempers very individualistic and reckless insularity that a consumer riven modernity is otherwise seen to engender by default or where people once again cocoon themselves in their own boroughs based on caste, class or other socioeconomic demographics.
Guess it’s such insights and understanding that is critical to emerge as we participate in many city walks, watch YouTube videos and Insta shorts where innumerable, undoubtedly interesting and revealing anecdotes of a colony, building, monuments can overwhelm us and blur it all or remain discrete. Sometime in the past, even post independence Bengaluru evidenced such a spirit, not of complete nonchalance and alienation, but one where the city invited one to wander and explore in certain warmth and assuredness, that its many scapes exuded. (click here for pdf of above graphic)
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| Contemporary hero stones?! |
