End of the Empire

August 15 is Independence Day in India. We celebrated by joining a small group of expats on an early morning Bangalore Walks tour. The tour was fittingly called “End of the Empire” walk. We enjoyed the “Victorian Walk” which we took earlier this year. On that walk, Arun, our guide, told the story of the early days of the British Empire in Bangalore.

The Empire Walk started at St. Mark’s Anglican Cathedral. St. Mark’s was founded shortly after the British victory over the native ruler Tippu Sultan in 1799. The British now ruled the Deccan Plateau in Southern India. It was time for church-building and settling into a comfortable life on a large swath of land which would become Bangalore.

By 1831 the British ended local rule of the Mysore Kingdom and made Bangalore the seat of government. For 50 years the British ruled the kingdom directly. More churches were built, railroads inaugurated, Sunday declared a public holiday, and the elite Bowring and Bangalore Clubs were founded along with the Bangalore Golf Club.

The British laid the cornerstone for St. Mark’s in 1808 at 1 South Parade Street. From the small hillock on which St. Mark’s stands, one could walk to Cubbon Park, visit the museum, the high court building, the exclusive men’s clubs, tea rooms and a very British import, the pubs. The feeling of empire must have been present.

Today, one can still walk across the street to Cubbon Park, but South Parade Street is now called M.G.(Mahatma Gandhi) Road. A statue of Queen Victoria still stands at the entrance to Cubbon Park, but across the street in another park is an elegant statue of Gandhi. In yet another nod to the cooling embers of the empire, the road we crossed from the statue of Victoria to Gandhi’s is called Kasturba Street. Kasturba was Gandhi’s wife.

Soon we stood at the old front entrance (now the back façade) of the bright red museum and saw the equally bright, red high-court building built by the British. As our eyes continued down this line of sight through the trees in the park, the towering image of the Indian-built government building called the Vidhana Soudha came into view.

The location of the old cash market, where the civilian population of the-then very British military town shopped, is now a Ford dealership. Tiny homes of the previous well-to-do now sit on an abandoned, dead end road behind it. Many other old homes have been torn down to make way for multistory apartment buildings or offices.

Despite the passage of time and the clear signature of Indian sovereignty on Bangalore, there is one bit of British heritage that Bangalore now calls its own. A short walk from St. Mark’s is Church Street, the venue for many weekend pub crawls. The demand for beer by the former British overlords apparently also took root in the hi-tech, mobile-phone enabled generation in Bangalore. Fortunately, the weekend bacchanalia takes place away from the ever-watchful gaze of both the Empress of India and the frail Hindu from Porbandar who ended her rule.