Place · Mysorean bastioned fort · India
Bangalore Fort, Bengaluru
Also known as Bangalore Fort, Bengaluru, Hyder, Kempegowda, Kempegowda / Hyder-Tipu fort, Tipu fort
Kempegowda's mud fort of 1537 at the centre of the town he founded, rebuilt in stone by Haidar Ali from 1761 on an oval bastioned plan with a ditch. Cornwallis stormed it in March 1791 at the Delhi gate during the Third Anglo-Mysore War, and the breach is still shown.
- Date
- 1537 · 1761 · 1791
- Function
- Military & resistance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 12.963, 77.575
Worth knowing
Two bastions, the Delhi gate and Tipu's summer palace survive inside the modern city; the rest was demolished in the nineteenth century for the Victoria Hospital, the market and the roads. Kempegowda is said to have founded the town after a hare chased his hunting dog on the spot, which he read as a sign.
Connections (2)
- Bengaluru civicVidhana Soudha, Bengaluru
The Vidhana Soudha, finished in 1956 in granite and a deliberately invented Neo-Dravidian manner, rose a short distance from the Bangalore Fort that Kempegowda built in mud in 1537 and Hyder Ali rebuilt in stone — the fort the British stormed in 1791. The civic centre of the city moved from one to the other over four centuries, and the legislature's building was designed to argue that independent India could build in an Indian idiom.
- CampaignChitradurga Fort
Chitradurga's seven mortarless granite walls among natural boulders resisted Haidar Ali twice before falling in 1779; Bengaluru's mud fort he rebuilt in stone himself from 1761 and Cornwallis stormed in 1791. Mysore's expansion is a sequence of Nayaka forts taken and then modernised, and the Company's conquest is the same sequence run again thirty years later.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bangalore Fort”. Mysore Gazetteer, ed. C. Hayavadana Rao (1927); Robert Orme and the Third Anglo-Mysore War despatches.
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