City of boiled beans

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The city previously known as Bangalore has now been restored to its original Kannada name of Bengaluru. Unfortunately, this name cannot easily be abbreviated as copyright on Bengal has already been taken.

The city's name, is said to have arisen when Veera Ballala II, a local king during the twelth century, was lost and had a dinner of boiled beans cooked for him by a peasant woman. He therefore named the area where she lived as the Place of Boiiled Beans and that's how it's been known ever since. The problem is that this can't actully be true because the place was known as Bengaluru as early as the ninth century. But if the truth and the legend differ, blog the legend.

My driver insisted upon my hiring a local guide in addtion to himself as he was unfamiliar with Bengaluru's roads. This cost Rs 1,000.

The three of us first set of to visit the Lalbagh Botanical Gardens. This is similar to London's Kew Gardens and is enormous. Interestingly enough, they were founded at almost exactly the same time - Kew in 1759 and the Lalbagh by Hyder Ali in 1760.

Once we got there I boarded the Harini Express - which claims to be completely non-polluting - for a 45 minute guided tour. This was a sort of large autorickshaw but with a much smoother engine. It made almost no sound as we moved along.

We passed some large glasshouses that were, unfortunately, empty - they were modeeled after teh original structure of the Crystal Palace as used for the Great Exhibition. A waterless fountain stood in front.

We went past Japanese black eucalyptus as well as white eucalyptus trees from Australia (every koala bear's tree of choice). There was a tall Christmas tree 135 feet tall.

There was a mango tree, still bearing fruit, which was planted by Tipoo Sultan, the son of Hyder Ali and in whose reign the park was completed. The oldest tree there, though, was a Silk Cotton Tree or Bombax planted by Hyder Ali himself and 300 years old. It was also the biggest tree in the park. According to Wikipedia, these trees can grow as high as forty metres (about 135 feet, like the Christmas tree) and have a trunk diameter of 3 metres (10 feet). Its branches extended a fair way too!

Ohter interesting things there were Indian bamboo, growing in immense clumps close together and so resembling a large tree trunk, a great Peepul tree and an Elephant Apple Tree, so called because its apples were the kind that elephants like best!

There was a rose garde, a large lake that apparently contains many fish and a floral clock, showing the correct time. At one point the Harini express left the pathway and I thuhgt we were going to have an interesting journey into the trees. But the driver was only turning around!

On the way back we passed an interesting topiary garden with bushes cut into all sorts of shapes and sizes. Some did look like animals but others just looked like interesting shapes and I had no idea if they were intended to represent something specific or not! There were also some completely naked wire structures around which the bush would presumably later be grown.

There were some pencil trees from which, our guide said, the wood for pencils was obtained. They were tall, thin trees.

Finally we ended up back near where we had started, near a staute of Kempe Gowda the Vijayanager (these were the people who built the ruins at Hampi which I didn't visit), who founded the town. When he founded the town he had also planted four towers on each side of the town, far away from its perimeter in those days. He said that hs dream was that one day the town would reach as far as those four towers. Well, it has certainly done all that and a lot more now! One of those towers is close to his statue, on top of a rocky hillock that is made up of some really ancient rock. I climbed to the top to see the shrine there and the people selling fruit and water and to enjoy the view - you can see about 30 per cent of Bengalurur from that vantage point, I was told.

Next we visited the Big Bull Temple. And that's what it was - a temple dedicated to Nandi, the vehicle of Lord Shiva and with an immense and multi-garlanded statue of the bull at its centre. Next to it was a Ganesh temple where the priest gave me some holy water.

Then we drove off to see the Summer Palace of Tipoo (or Tipu) Sultan, the son of Hyder Ali. These two rulers were a bit of a bugbear to the British in the late eighteenth century. They were our opponents in the four Mysore Wars. The final score was two all, but we won the last two :-)

The palace was not particularly large but I thought it was beautiful. There are many elegant columns of teak wood, painted brown and white. Inside the palace were many informative posters. I was taken with the story of Tipoo Sultan's throne. He had a truly magnificent throne constructed with the head of a tiger as its centrepiece and a great howdah placed thereon with the whole surmounted by a great golden bird. It was complete and ready for him, but he'd just lost a battle agaist the British and he swore a mighty oath that he would never sit on the throne until he had driven the British out of all "his" lands.

So, he never sat on the throne. After his death the throne was broken up and auctioned. Parts, including the golden bird and the tiger's head are now to be found in Windsor Castle!

The palace also housed Tipoo Sultan's favourite toy - a working model of a tiger mauling a British officer to death, complete with grisly sound effects. It was easy to imagine how the unfortunate Sultan comforted himself by winding up the tiger and letting it loose! Apparently it was based on an actual incident of a British commading officer who really was mauled to death by a tiger.

The wooden walls of the palace had once been decorated with mural paintings. Unfortuantely, little can be seen of them now. Tipoo Sultan and his father were actually good administrators and ran the state they had taken from the Wodeyars well. A poster explained how Tipoo Sultan had made a law that all new officials should disclose their assets on appointment so as to discourage corruption. Interestingly enough, this topic is in the news today with the newspapers suggesting that newly appointed HIgh Court judges should do this.

As we drove away I noticed that the police here have their own distinctive headgear - they wear cowboy type hats! We drove through Cubbon Park which seemed quite like Hyde Park in London. We stopped outside the Vihana Soudha, the Karnataka Parliament. This was a very beautiful building, constructed soon after Independence in the 1950s. My guide, however, told me that it was over a hundred years old! Surprisingly, it is supposed to be the largest Parliament building in India.

We drove past the High Court and I saw barristers outside. Despite independence they, like their English coleagues, were still mourning the death of Queen Anne by wearing black. Instead of the "Give Way" signs on the roads I noticed the more poetic "Yield" which does have exactly the same meaning but somehow has more resonance with the knights of old than with modern roads.

I went to the Government Museum, which is combined with the Venkatappa Art Gallery. My expectations were not high. One book calls it "the poorly labelled and maintained Government Museum" while another says "it houses a drably presented collection of stone carvings and relics". But I enjoyed the visit. As you go in there are two giant skull bearing figures which are labelled as Dwarapalakas and which I think stand as doorkeepers.

Upstairs (I suspect the books' authors stayed downstairs) there were some interesting musical instruments including a Makata Veena (some sort of lute) in the shape of a crocodile. There were also miniature paintings of various schools - Mysore, Tanjore, Deccan, Bundelkhanda, Amer and Kangra.

In the dimly lit sculpture gallery there was a tenth century Tara with her attendants.

In the art gallery I liked the works of the eponymous K Venkatappa, including a bust of Ravindranath Tagore and a large self portrait bust. There were also some nice wooden carvings by Major C P Rajaram and some beautiful paintings and drawings by K K Hebbar of whom I had previously not heard. These were all unlabelled but I particularly liked a dark painting which seemed to show a hospital orderly, watched by two figures in white, rolling an apparently dead man (the artist?) towards a nuse or angel of death figure who holds up her hand forbiddingly, and another painting of musicians playing and dancing while a giant elephant seems to hover over them in another dimension.

In some ways the lack of labelling made me think about the paintings more! There were some good line drawings too. The museum is said to be the oldest one in India.

Our last stop was the Bengaluru Palace. The current Wodeyar (or Wadiyar) Rajah of Mysore still lives there and I was told by the chap showing me round to be quiet so as not to upset him. I'm not sure why he chooses to live here and not at Mysore. The palace charges Rs 200 for entrance, which is steep enough, but a whopping Rs 500 on top of that if you want to take photos. The battery on my camera had run down by then and I chose not to buy the right to take pictures.

The building was not originally built as a palace but was designed by a British schoolmaster to look like Windsor Castle (when I first saw it from the car I burst into laughter - it looked so non-Indian!) and was sold by him a few years after its construction to the then Maharajah of Mysore. It was very interesting to see coats of arms with the motto in Kannada characters rather than Roman letters.

There is a massive elephant head, complete with gigantic tusks, mounted on a wall as you enter. According to my guide this was "original" and from an elephant hunted and killed personally by one of the Rajahs. Later on in the palace I saw stools made out of elephant feet, and also out of the feet of bison, and a vase stand made from the trunk of an adult elephant.

I saw the bedroom in which the Rajah slept up to 1994 and a toy car that his children had played with.

Much of the furniture was very nice and there were loads and loads of family pictures of the Rajah and his family.

I had wanted to go to the ISKCON temple but my guide and driver did not really want to go so far and we called it a day. The interest for me would have been to see the curious mix of tradition and newness that are compounded in the temple. But looking about almost anywhere in Bengaluru, you see similar combinations.

Ho for Mysore tomorrow!

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