"You know you're in Bangalore, you know you're in the Silicon Valley of India, when you go to play golf and the caddy on the first tee says you can either aim at the Microsoft building or the IBM building. You know you're in Bangalore when you see the Pizza Hut advertisement says 'gigabytes of taste'," famously said the US journalist Thomas Friedman in 2004. Ever since, reams have been written on outsourcing, the software boom and the rise of the uber-smart, uber-rich new technogeeks of Bangalore. But whatever happened to the other Bangalores, the ones that shun the arc lights that the outsourcing world shines upon the city? What happened to the Bangalore that lives in its crowded markets, or the one that lives in the shaded avenues of its genteel old suburbs?
Bangalore is unique among all major Indian cities for its very special history. For almost 150 years, the city was actually two cities, each with its own administration, and following entirely separate growth trajectories. The cantonment, established in 1809, was administered by the British; while the western part of the city, including the Fort and, later, suburbs such as Basavanagudi and Malleswaram, were under the rule of the Mysore maharajas. Naturally, the different histories of the two parts of the city left distinct impressions on the populations in these two areas. With the setting-up of the cantonment during the first decade of the 19th century, the area experienced in-migration from neighbouring regions, especially of Tamil-speakers, who came in both as soldiers in the Madras regiments, and as suppliers and contractors to the British Indian Army. It was only in 1949 that the city was united under a common municipal corporation.
But being located at the junction of three areas, each of which spoke a different language – present-day Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh – and situated not too far from Malayalam-speaking Kerala, Bangalore has always been a city of multiple languages. During their reign in the late 1700s, Tipu Sultan and Hyder Ali invited the Tamil-speaking Tigala community to tend to the many gardens of the city, and also invited Persian toymakers to the neighbouring settlement of Channapatna. Going further back, Bangalore has been ruled by multiple dynasties, including the Gangas, Hoysalas, Nolambas, Cholas, the Vijayanagar kings and the Marathas, many of whom patronised languages other than Kannada, and who no doubt left their stamps on the local populations of yore. Later, the Wodeyars of Mysore encouraged migration through a tradition of appointing administrators from outside Mysore state, and by recruiting eminent personalities from other parts of India, especially in the field of education. During the 1950s, following Independence and later, with the reorganisation of states, inter-state migration to Bangalore was gradually replaced by intra-state migration into the city.
As a city, Bangalore was industrialised fairly early on. Sir M Visvesvaraya, Diwan of Mysore state during the early 1900s, spurred this process with his belief in the maxim, 'Industrialise or perish'. Several technical and academic institutions, including the Indian Institute of Science, were subsequently established in Bangalore. Later, during the 1940s and 1950s, the city saw the establishment of several large public- and private-sector industries, including Hindustan Aeronautics, and Indian Telephone Industries. Later, it became a centre for the automotive industry, with the establishment of the Motor Industries Company, a collaboration with the German company Bosch. The Indian Space Research Organisation came to Bangalore during the 1970s. By then, with its tradition of knowledge-based industries and academic excellence well established, Bangalore was thoroughly primed to exploit the coming computer revolution.