Jerry Pinto - Talk of the town: stories of twelve Indian cities

If you believe one of the many legends around the name of Bangalore, the city is named after a bowl of boiled beans.

One day, hundreds of years ago, (some say that it happened precisely in the year AD 1120), a king named Hoysala Ballala (also known as Veera Ballala II) was on a hunting expedition. As is the habit of kings on hunting expeditions, he was separated from the rest of his party. You can see why this might happen. After all, the king probably had the best horse. And even if there were better riders among his courtiers, it would be a silly chump who would race the king.

After a while Hoysala Ballala lost his way as well. This too seems to have been fairly common. Getting lost is a reliable way of making sure something exciting happens to the king. Thus, Hoysala Ballala began to wander until he came to a small village at the edge of a forest. By this time, he was also very hungry. The village was empty except for a poor woman who fed him a delicious but simple meal of boiled beans. As the proverb puts it, hunger is a fine sauce, and this dish must have tasted like ambrosia to the starving king.

And as was the inclination of proud and satiated kings, he decided to rename the village to celebrate the simple meal he had just eaten. He christened it Bende Kaalu Ooru or Town of Boiled Beans. That is how this city is said to have gotten its name!

City historians dismiss the story as the figment of a particularly hungry imaginationor what is worse in their dictionarymyth or common lore. Instead, many of them believe that the citys name actually derives from an older village that still exists near Bangalore city, in a place called Kodigehalli. The village is known as Halebenguluru, which literally means Old Bangalore. Others point out that as early as the ninth century AD , the word Bengaluru appeared on a stone edict of the Ganga dynasty, marking the occasion of a great battle fought in the region. And so the never-ending debates about the origin of the name continue

If we move on to the medieval history of the city, we arrive at the glorious Vijayanagara kingdoma prosperous, urban sprawl of forts, palaces, shrines, tanks and villages and townships that spread all over the region in the sixteenth century AD . According to some historians, a Vijayanagara king gifted a piece of land to a chieftain called Kempe Gowda I (15131569). Kempe Gowda started to build on the site at once. He began with a mud-fort that was completed in 1537 and called the place Bengaluru. Subsequently, he built the towns of Balepet, Cottonpet and Chickpet inside the fort. Today, these are the wholesale and commercial markets of Bangalore.

Bengaluru then must have been a cluster of local villages and small townships, connected by a network of dirt and paved roads. It was a province of the Vijayanagara kingdom. This meant that it was part of a global trading network that spread all the way to southern Europe. The kingdom had a healthy textile and armament industry based on skills of the many artisan and craft-based communities that lived there and contributed to the kingdoms prosperity. Other inhabitants included construction workers, shopkeepers, priests, monks, merchants and traders. Numerous farming villages surrounded these small and scattered urban habitats. Young children must have chased bullock carts, played with hens, sheep and goats, and teased hawkers selling their wares on bazaar days. Come evening, the small trading centres and markets would have come alive with food-stalls, dance, music performances and people hawking all kinds of goods from local pottery to spices and from clothes to cooking ware.

Kempe Gowdas descendant, Kempe Gowda II, built four watchtowers that eventually came to mark the boundaries of the city. One legend says that he had a bullock cart driven in four directions and mapped the boundaries based on the distance they covered in a day. The four watchtowers include Lalbagh, a point near Kempambudhi tank, Ulsoor Lake and Mekhri Circle. Kempe Gowda II also built several tankslike the ones at Kempapura and the Karanjikere Tank near the Bangalore Fort. This shows he was a man who clearly understood the importance of urban planning. Water tanks meant an organized water supply for relatively large populations. They also acted as magnets to attract people from the thirsty villages around.

However, water was not the only thing people were looking for. For the city to grow, it had to attract migrants who could provide skilled and unskilled labour. In addition, it needed merchants. The merchants needed clerks to keep accounts and workers to carry their loads. They also needed smooth roads so that their goods could come and go easily. This meant engineers to design bridges and labourers to carry stones, bake bricks, and carry water. When the roads began to be used, some form of police was needed to prevent theft and dacoity.