
A new audio tour takes you on a walk across Bengaluru’s bookish haunts

Summary
A new, self-guided audio tour of the city’s literary landmarks, from old libraries to independent bookstores, is a delightThe tautologically named Avenue Road in Bengaluru’s oldest commercial district of Chickpet is where I start the literary walk, standing in between an ancient Anjaneya Temple at the corner prepping for the evening aarti and the early 20th century Rice Memorial Church, bedecked with string lights.
I am on a self-guided tour of Bengaluru’s literary haunts, created by author Zac O’Yeah, whose Majestic trilogy of detective novels is set in and around this very neighbourhood, for Tourific, a travel company that curates self-guided tours across the world.
Bengaluru’s claim as a literary city is not new—the city’s network of independent bookstores, book clubs, reading groups, literary festivals and a generally thriving literary culture has been well-recorded, but this particular walking tour throws a spotlight on the not-so-well-known aspects of this culture.
Also read: Gerald Durrell’s Corfu, and a magical world of animals
I walk up to a tiny bookshop a few doors from the temple—one of a series of hole-in-the-wall stores with neatly arranged rows of books and the proprietor sitting on a stool on the pavement. They mainly sell academic books—but look closely and you may come upon the occasional English (or even French) novel, possibly sold or left behind by tourists who stay in the area’s many hotels and lodges. This is the first stop on the tour (there are a whopping 27 to be done over about six hours) and a peek into a side of Bengaluru’s book market that not many are familiar with.
Having lived and worked in the city on the culture beat for almost two decades, I’d have said I was familiar with most of the city’s bookish haunts, but I hadn’t stepped inside the Mythic Society, housed inside a lovely colonial building called Daly Memorial Hall, before. It has a vast library, research and publishing wings and historical archives, including the digital versions of 1,500 ancient stone inscriptions found around Bengaluru, the veeragallus or hero stones.
My next stop, the Indira Priyadarshini Children’s Library, is equally unfamiliar—despite it being in the news for a recent renovation in 2019. Nestled inside Cubbon Park, which is also a stop on the tour, the library is part of Bengaluru’s “museum mile", with the State Central Library, the Government Museum, the Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum and the Museum of Art and Photography, all of which are featured on the tour.

It is only now that we start heading towards the best-known markers of Bengaluru’s literary culture—its massively popular independent bookstores in and around Church Street. Higginbotham’s, Blossom Book House, Select Book Store, The Bookworm, Gangaram’s Book Shop, and The Bookhive all get stops on the tour—but before that, you get to drop in at Hard Rock Cafe (housed in a building that used to be the Bible Society) and Koshy’s, the venerable pub/cafe that has been a favourite haunt of the city’s literati for decades and has appeared, under different guises, in novels set in the city, including in Vivek Shanbhag’s Ghachar Ghochar.
This is not a tour to be done in a day. When I finally call it a night on Church Street with a well-earned mug of beer at one of the pubs spilling over with people, there are more than five stops still left on the list at the other end of MG Road, from the Indian Institute of Cartoonists to the Trinity Church. Being a self-guided tour, you can pick it up wherever you left off on another day, and find a talking point about the city beyond its traffic and potholes.
Also read: Why nocturnal tourism is set to be one of 2025’s biggest travel trends
To take the tour, download the Tourific app, register and get your tour code on email. The tour will be downloaded to your app; you can find it in the 'downloads' section for offline access.