Coming back from India about a month ago, I was hit with the reality of an upper respiratory virus so I laid low. And then there was all hell breaking loose in government--which continues. It took a while for me to take a deep breath and want to share the pleasant interlude of my two-week trip to Karnataka, Maharashtra and Goa. Because right now--I think we all need a vacation.
My story starts in the city of our arrival, Bengaluru. My traveling companion, the trustworthy Tony, and I arrived on New Year’s Day at 2 a.m. It took about an hour to get luggage, cash, and out the door at the airport, and then a 45-minute journey by car to the ITC Windsor Hotel, a place I had chosen because the pictures online made it look so old fashioned—the opposite of the sterile, high-tech hotels for which the city is famous. As our driver slowed to pass an old wall and gate and then up long, tree-lined driveway toward a wedding-cake-white building, my spirits rose. We passed through the usual metal-detector security to a round marble lobby with a busy front desk, where I was pleased to see clerks were present at the difficult hour of 4 a.m.
As I was handing our passports to the desk clerk, a drama was unfolding next to us between his colleague and a cluster of teenage boys, all in black T-shirts and jeans.
“I’ve booked a room. My friends are being told they can’t come up. Why’s this happening?” one boy asks, leaning over the desk, holding his American Express Gold Card like a magic wand.
The clerk, perhaps six years his senior, makes a tense reply about hotel policy limiting numbers of people in rooms to numbers of beds, but the kid won’t accept it. He’s paid for a room; he has a right to have his friends there.
Security comes, and so do more staff. The kid softens his tone and says “Look, we’ll just go into Dublin.” And although it was not said aloud—but seemed very clear—the youths would eventually leave the Irish pub and transit upstairs to the room. A number of signs—the card, the clothing, the attitude, the type of English spoken—cause me to suspect the boy came from a wealthy family, perhaps in IT.
“Very sorry about that,” the clerk murmurs after the boys are gone and we are getting our keys. A rush of late reservations meant that the hotel overbooked rooms and thus is surprise-upgrading us to the Lord Auckland Suite. Sounds fancy, I thought—and wow, it certainly was. THANK YOU!
The Windsor Hotel is built inside and out like a British colonial relic, but because it was built in 1980, it couldn’t have hosted Lord Auckland, who was Governor-General of India from 1836-1842. Opening the door, we found a 75-square-meter suite, the size of a nice one-bedroom apartment, with a large drawing-cum-dining room, and a separate bedroom with a king-sized tester bed draped in silk, and a large marble bathroom. New Year’s Eve in a hotel can be noisy, but nothing got through the walls of this room, and sleep between smooth cotton sheets on a thick mattress was paradise. Yet before I got into that bed, a mystery struck me: a plaque on the drawing room wall celebrating the room as the Duke of Cornwallis Suite.Which lord's room was it: Auckland’s or Cornwallis’s?
I didn’t know until later that Cornwallis was the general who led the East India Company in 1790 to conquer the city and topping local ruler Tipu Sultan. For British names to linger on any kinds of marker in India is very unusual. In my mind, Britain’s 250-year exploitation of India’s resources are the reason India dropped from being one of the world’s very richest countries to among its poorest. I wondered if Bengaluru/Bangalore, which never was technically British India but stayed part of the princely state of Mysore, held less resentment about colonialism than other parts of India I’ve visited.
Just looking at the history of the Windsor Hotel --and the artworks hanging that show horses an colonial people--brings up its own story of Indians, Persians and British, Muslims and Hindus and Christians, all finding ways to make money and gain power.
The hotel stands in the place where there once was a fine Bangalore estate known as Baqarabad to some and Bedford House to others. It was built by Aga Aly Asker Shirazi, a Persian horse merchant who emigrated as a 15-year-old alongside two brothers—and their prize property, two hundred horses. The brothers brought the stable to breed and sell, an offer greeted with delight by the British military setting up a cantonment in Bangalore and also selling to the local royal family. The Askers never returned to Persia but settled in Bangalore where they found the wealthy had plenty of business offers for them--not only with horses, but also as contractors for building residences. Aga Aly Asker rose in stature and built properties for the British while buying land for himself. In late years, he bequeathed Baqarabad and its four acres to a family foundation who could monetize it as they wished. According to an article in the Bangalore Mirror, The foundation leased the property, starting in 1973, for 3100 rupees per month (about $45) to an Indian hotel company that later sold it to another company, ITC. The foundation went on to try to raise the ground rent over the ninety years of its term--but the leases were written in such a clever way that the raises have been miserly in an exclusive area of the city where apartments rent for sums comparable to New York City. I imagine that fifty years ago, the Asker family could not have imagined that there would be such a thing as a teenager with a credit card. But this is the new Bengaluru—the city that leads India for job creation, economic growth and foreign investment.
The first time I visited this city was 1973, the very year the family foundation was making its fateful decision that led a house to become a hotel. The city was still called Bangalore, the British appropriation of its name, which is still hard for me to shake. I mainly remember eating dosa for the first time and staying in a simple university apartment with friendly neighbors in the building and walking through fields nearby in the evenings with my father telling us to look out for snakes. I also remembered how calm and quiet the city was, how cool the weather, and the very tall trees with lush canopies stretching over the streets. Coming here fifty years later, I worried that all that would be gone—but to my delight, 100-year-old-plus trees still arch over streets and shade parks and gardens.
Later on New Year’s Day, we roused ourselves to go out for dinner at a cute café downtown called Toast and Tonic. I’d emailed many times and had an Instagram live conversation with Harini Nagendra, author of the Bangalore Detective Club mysteries. However, this was the first time we were meeting in person. Harini brought along her husband, Suri Venkatachalam, a biotech pioneer who’s now pursuing conservation research.
Harini’s day job is as a professor of ecology and sustainability at Azad Premji University. And between her mysteries, she’s just published a nonfiction work: Cities and Canopies, Trees in Indian Cities. Harini gave us great sightseeing recommendations for Bengaluru and Mysore and Coorg, our future destinations within the state of Karnataka. She even told us about Bookworm, a great city bookstore where she’d had events (and they promptly sat me down to sign stock) Tony and I departed back to our hotel that evening with a second wind of energy and excitement. It was undeniable that we had made a quick, but hopefully long-enduring, friendship.
During January 2 and 3, we set out with a local guide to see some of Bengaluru’s most celebrated sites. The Nandi Temple is the home of a large granite statue with an interesting history. Back in the 1500s, a farmer was frustrated that a particular bull kept eating his groundnut crop. The farmer struck the bull with a stick in the hopes it would go away. But no—instead, the bull transformed to a big granite rock. Not going anywhere!
The farmer and everyone who saw it was amazed. The stone was subsequently carved to look more bullish and a temple was built around it. Now the bull is seen as a protector. Our guide insisted that the bull has grown longer in length over the years and is still growing. It’s a phenomenon nobody can explain and that we were not about to argue with.
From there we passed on to see the modern Bangalore Legislative Assembly Building, and close to it Tipu Sultan’s summer palace.
Tipu Sultan, the son of King Hyder Ali, assumed rule after his father was killed in battle against the British. Within the state of Mysore (now named Karnataka), Bangalore has an unusually cool microclimate throughout the year. This made the perfect place for a summer palace which Hyder Ali had started, and Tipu Sultan had finished during his own reign. Walking through graceful arches into dim wooden halls of the modestly sized palace, I could only imagine the medieval sultans and their family and followers flitting through the halls. Some places have a very strong aura; this is one of them.
Just outside the palace was a Hindu temple completed in the late 17th century by a during the time Mysore was ruled by a Hindu dynasty. The Kote Venkataramana Hindu temple has many flourishes special to architecture of the Vijayanagar and Dravidian empires of medieval South India. I was struck by the grace of a Hindu temple and Muslim palace to sitting alongside each other without disturbance for so many years.
We rounded off the day with a long walk through Lalbagh Botanical Garden, a vast green space laid out by Sultan Hyder Ali in the 1700s and completed during the British colonial years. There are conservatory structures and topiaries and a stylized design very common to Indian gardens. I experienced a similar formality in the small enclosed garden on an upper storey at the Windsor Hotel. So much greenery around that place! One of the nicest experiences I had on my own was taking a short walk from the hotel past hedges of bouganvellia to Raintree, an old Art Deco villa that now housed upscale shops and a coffee shop where the lattes are dusted in edible gold.
A few weeks later, I found myself amidst the greatest concentration of trees in Bangalore. I was standing in the Kempegowda International Airport, waiting to send off my luggage, and I looked overhead to see ceiling above was filled with live shrubs. From my perspective below, it looked like several hundred of Christmas evergreens, but an airport employee proudly explained that I was seeing just a fraction of 150,000 hanging plants of various species. The terminal also had 450,000 other plants growing on walls and throughout its space. The airport also boasts a plant museum and a plant-lined walking path based on the legend of the Ramayana.
Such a combination of technical innovation and rain forest habitat is totally unexpected . . . but as I’ve learned, very Bengaluru.
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