A fort, then a grid
Kempe Gowda I, a chieftain under the Vijayanagara Empire, threw up a mud fort here in 1537 and laid out a market town beside it in a grid of streets named for the trades that worked them. The petes — the old commercial quarters — are still there in the south-west of the city, and still named that way. Nothing about the site was obvious except its height: at nine hundred metres on the southern lip of the Deccan Plateau, it was cooler than anywhere else that mattered, and that single fact has decided the city's fortunes at least three times since.
The Wodeyars of Mysore took the town, then Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan made it a garrison and a garden at the same time. Hyder laid out Lal Bagh in the 1760s; Tipu extended it, bringing in trees from Persia, Kabul and Mauritius, and turned the old mud walls into a stone fort. When the British finally broke Tipu at Srirangapatna in 1799, they inherited both the fort and the garden.
Two cities, side by side
In 1809 the British moved their garrison here and built a cantonment on open ground north-east of the old town. For most of the next century and a half Bangalore was two settlements with different languages, street plans and habits — the Kannada-speaking pete to the south-west, the Anglo-Indian cantonment around what is now MG Road and Richmond Town. The seam between them is still legible on foot. Walk from Cubbon Park toward Chickpet and the grid tightens, the street names change register, and the buildings drop two storeys.
The cantonment side is where the city's famous institutions took root: the Attara Kacheri, the red brick High Court, went up in 1867; Cubbon Park was laid out around it in 1870; the Wodeyars built their Tudor Revival palace in 1878 on the model of Windsor Castle. When Karnataka's legislature needed a home after the states were reorganised in 1956, it built the Vidhana Soudha in granite directly across from the High Court — Neo-Dravidian, deliberately monumental, and an answer to the colonial building facing it.
The garden and the glass
Lal Bagh outlasted every regime that touched it. The British turned it into a botanical garden and put up a glass house in 1889, modelled on Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace, to mark a royal visit. Twice a year — around Republic Day in January and Independence Day in August — the glass house fills with a flower show that draws crowds who would not otherwise set foot in a botanical garden. At the southern end of the same park sits a lump of peninsular gneiss that is one of the oldest exposed rock surfaces on earth, older than the Himalayas by an order of magnitude, with a Kempe Gowda watchtower on top of it.
The gardens are why the city spent the twentieth century known as the Garden City, and why so much of it is still shaded. They are also the reason the newer nickname grates on people who remember the older one.
Silicon plateau
The same climate that suited a cantonment suited state laboratories, and after independence Bangalore filled with them — aeronautics, telecoms, machine tools, electronics. The engineers those institutions trained were already here when the software industry arrived in the 1980s, and the city became the address for it. That boom doubled the population, filled the Outer Ring Road with campuses, and gave Bangalore both its wealth and its traffic, which are now the two things anyone who lives here will mention first.
On 1 November 2014 the state made the Kannada name official: Bengaluru on every signboard, timetable and government form. Bangalore is what most people still say aloud. Both names are correct, and using either will get you where you are going.
What a day here actually feels like
It feels cooler than you expect and slower than the map promises. Mornings belong to the parks — Cubbon and Lal Bagh both fill with walkers before eight, and the light through the rain trees is the best of the day. Temples run on their own timetable and close for the afternoon. Traffic decides everything between four and eight in the evening, which is the argument for finishing south and staying there for dinner.
And there is filter coffee, everywhere, all day: hill-grown, dripped through a steel filter, poured back and forth until it foams, and drunk standing at a counter in about ninety seconds. It is the one habit the city has kept through every version of itself.
Beyond the plateau's edge
A longer stay pulls in two places outside the city that explain the region rather than the city alone. North, Nandi Hills is the same plateau air taken up another thousand metres, a Ganga-dynasty hill fort Tipu Sultan later held, where cloud rolls over the plain most mornings and burns off around sunrise. South, a two-hour train ride away, is Mysuru — the Wodeyar capital Bangalore's own rulers once answered to, and the reason a granite legislature building and a Tudor palace exist here at all. Seeing both in the same trip is less a detour than the rest of the sentence Bangalore's own history is already making.