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Old Mysore · Deccan Inland Plateau

छोटी-छोटी बातें

A city built on a watershed, which is the worst place for oneBengaluru sits on a ridge that divides the Cauvery drainage from the South Pennar. Water leaves it in every direction and none arrives, which is why there is no river and why the founders built tanks in chains instead. The modern answer is to pump the city's supply about a hundred kilometres from the Cauvery and lift it some five hundred metres — one of the most energy-hungry municipal water systems anywhere.
The tanks are still there under the bus standDharmambudhi tank became the Majestic bus terminus; Sampangi tank became a stadium; Siddikatte became the city market. Dozens more survive only as ward names ending in -kere. When central Bengaluru floods, the water is finding the old valley lines and the built-over channels that used to connect them.
The streets are named after what was sold in themThe old pete is a commodity index in street form — Akkipete for rice, Balepete for bangles, Cottonpete for cotton, Taragupete for the grain brokers, Chikkapete for cloth. Most of them still trade roughly what they are named for, four and a half centuries on.
A sweet with a cook's name attachedMysore pak was made in the palace kitchen for Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV by Kakasura Madappa, who is said to have named it when the king asked what he had just eaten. His descendants still sell it a kilometre from the palace. No geographical indication protects the name, which is why the word appears on hard, cheap slabs in every railway station in India.
A soap that exists because of a warIn 1916 the state was sitting on sandalwood it could not export because the war had closed the market. Rather than store it, Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV, his Dewan M. Visvesvaraya and the chemist S. G. Sastry set up a sandalwood oil factory at Mysuru and a soap works at Bengaluru and turned the surplus into a consumer product. The oval bar and its printed carton have barely changed since.
The tree that never belonged to the landownerSandalwood in this region has been state property regardless of whose land it grows on since the late eighteenth century, a rule successive governments kept and only relaxed in the early 2000s. The effect was to make growing it pointless for a farmer and cutting it a serious offence, which is a large part of why the carving trade works on rationed stock.
Silk arrived by embassyTipu Sultan sent men to Bengal in 1785 to learn sericulture and bring it back. Two centuries later the cocoon markets at Ramanagara and Sidlaghatta are among the largest in Asia, and a substantial share of the raw silk woven into wedding sarees three hundred kilometres east on the Coromandel plain starts here.
Power before the capital had itThe hydro-electric station at Shivanasamudra was commissioned in 1902, among the first in Asia, and its first customer was not a city but the Kolar gold mines, reached by one of the longest transmission lines in the world at the time. Bengaluru's streets were lit from it three years later.
The howdah changed its passenger, not its routeThe Dasara howdah weighs about 750 kilograms and carries roughly 85 kilograms of gold. It carried the maharaja until the privy purses were abolished; since then it has carried an image of Chamundeshwari. The procession, the route and the elephant training regime were all left exactly as they were.
Two gessos, two schoolsMysore painting builds its jewellery and architecture in gesso applied so thinly that gold foil over it reads as a glow in the surface. Thanjavur painting, on the other side of the plateau, lays gesso thick and sets glass and stones into it, so the same subject reads as relief. One tradition wants light; the other wants weight.
Grain you can keep for a decadeFinger millet stored dry in a sealed underground pit keeps for years without insect damage, which no other grain here manages. That single property is why ragi was the crop a household planted against a bad year, and why the region's staple dish is made from it rather than from the rice growing two fields away.
A banana that nearly went extinctThe Nanjangud rasabale is short, thin-skinned and so aromatic that a bunch scents a room. Panama disease took most of the plantings out in the twentieth century, and the variety survives on a small acreage under a deliberate revival and a geographical indication. It cannot be shipped green, so it is almost never sold outside the region.
A national highway that closes at nightThe road through Bandipur is shut to traffic between 9 pm and 6 am, because the reserve is a corridor elephants and other animals use after dark. It is one of very few national highways in India with a curfew, and the diversion adds an hour.

Old Mysore की छोटी-छोटी स्थानीय बातें — रीति-रिवाज़, अनोखी आदतें और वे चीज़ें जो किसी गाइडबुक में नहीं मिलतीं। (13)