On behalf of her minor son, Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV, the queen quickly signed a contract, offering 371 acres of prime land and a generous grant of Rs50,000 a year. Overjoyed, the Roorkee committee that was scouring for a venue looked no further, and Bangalore became the chosen city. It catapulted the city into prominence as the knowledge capital of India — and prepared the ground for industries such as space research, aeronautics and information technology (IT) to find roots here many decades later.
It has been over six decades since the Mysore royalty ceased to wield power in Karnataka. Despite the changes that have swept India’s IT capital, the Wodeyars live on in people’s reminiscences, musings and memories.
The Wodeyars were among India’s longest reigning royal houses — a dynasty founded in 1399, and one that sprung to a position of eminence after the demise of the mighty Vijayanagara empire. It went through a series of ups and downs that included a 40-year interregnum under Haidar Ali and his chivalrous son Tipu Sultan. With Tipu’s death in 1799, power was restored to the Wodeyars at the behest of the British.
But unlike other princely states of India, which chose to remain mere vassals of the British Raj, the rulers of Mysore — aided by some of the best brains of the country, their able diwans — ensured that the state had attained a high degree of industrial, socio-economic and cultural growth by the time of Independence. Mysore was rightly hailed as a “model state” by the founding fathers of modern India.
Few in Bangalore would know that the water reaching their homes is thanks to the pioneering efforts undertaken during the brief regency of Queen Vani Vilasa and her able diwan Sir Seshadri Iyer. The Marikanave Dam across the Vedavathi River, completed towards the end of the 19th century, was the first major project initiated to supply water to the city. The Hessarghatta project, initiated shortly after that, continues to be the one that provides water to Bangalore. Incidentally, it has been among India’s few sources of filtered water for over a century now.
But what really tilted the scales in favour of Bangalore was the hydro-electric project implemented at Shivanasamudra in 1899-1900. The prime reason for the project might have been supply of continuous power to the Kolar Gold Fields, but Bangalore became an indirect beneficiary as India’s first electrified city in 1905, and the transmission line happened to be the longest in the world then.
What followed was a spurt in rural and urban electrification, and a plethora of industries were set up in Bangalore. The Bangalore Printing and Publishing Co., the Hindustan Aircraft Ltd (that later merged with Aeronautics India Ltd to form Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd), porcelain and glass factories and agricultural implements factories spurred industrial growth in the city. True to its nature of being a knowledge centre, numerous occupational and technical institutes, engineering colleges, libraries and bodies like the Karnataka Sahitya Parishad were also established.