Karnataka
Stone, Coffee and Empire
“Empires end. Breakfast, in Karnataka, has proved more durable.”
Photo: Sangramgovardhane / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
A City That Speaks Every Language
The overnight bus from Hyderabad delivered me into Bengaluru at dawn, and Bengaluru did what it does to every new arrival: it confused me on purpose. Here was the city half my classmates dreamed of (the software capital, the start-up mint, glass towers with names like verbs) and yet my first hour in it was spent in a hundred-year-old eating hall with a queue out the door, where men in white uniforms moved between marble tables carrying nothing but dosas. Vidyarthi Bhavan opened in 1943 for students; the dosas arrive stacked along the waiter's arm like roofing tiles, crisp outside, molten inside, ghee announcing itself from two tables away. Around me: Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, English, and one man on a video call speaking what I later decided was German. That is Bengaluru's secret, and Karnataka's, the state is a junction box, and it has learned to be generous at junctions. I ate two dosas, drank a filter coffee strong enough to file taxes, and got on a bus heading south, because the city was the newest thing in Karnataka and I wanted to start with the oldest.
Jasmine is sold by the length of a forearm, 'so the price is honest, because everybody's arm is with them always.From the chapter
Mysuru, the City That Kept Its Manners
Mysuru is what happens when a city decides, collectively and over centuries, not to be in a hurry. The Wodeyar dynasty ruled here for over five hundred years (with one violent interruption by Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan) and left behind a town of boulevards, silk, sandalwood and an unhurried courtesy that survives even in its auto drivers, which is the true test of any civic culture. The palace at its heart is a twentieth-century building with a nineteenth-century soul: Indo-Saracenic domes, stained glass peacocks, a durbar hall open to the breeze. But its real performance is on Sunday nights, when nearly a hundred thousand bulbs outline every dome and arch, and the whole enormous building switches on at once like a decision. The crowd on the lawns (families, ice-cream sellers, one very committed balloon man) exhaled together. I have seen grander monuments. I am not sure I have seen a happier one.
In the morning I walked Devaraja Market, a covered bazaar of banana varieties I could not count, jasmine strung by the metre, and pyramids of kumkum powder in colours that do not otherwise occur in nature.
The chapter continues in the book…
- AnticipationA City That Speaks Every Language
- ArrivalMysuru, the City That Kept Its Manners
- ExplorationThe Hills That Smell of Rain and Roast
- DiscoveryThe Morning the Empire Came Back
- The TableFrom Darshini to Durbar
- FarewellWhat Stone Remembers
Karnataka, from the road
Read Chapter 3 in full
The complete Karnataka chapter — with when to go, getting around, what things cost, what to eat and how to travel responsibly — is in 28 Shades of India.