Bengaluru Fortin Bengaluru · Karnataka · India

Popular memory says a Hoysala king, lost while hunting and hungry, was served boiled beans by an old woman, and grateful he called the place “Benda-kaal-ooru” (town of boiled beans) — which slowly became Bengaluru. The name already appears in a stone inscription near Begur dating to 890 CE, so the beans story is best read as folk memory rather than a proven etymology.

Kempe Gowda I chose the site and laid out the settlement that became Bengaluru. As later retellings record, the foundation ground was ritually ploughed with four pairs of white oxen in four directions. Old descriptions speak of a moat and gates around the mud fort, a layout that a busy market town soon outgrew.

Hyder Ali rebuilt the mud defences in stone around 1761. The surviving gateway traditionally known as the Delhi Gate and the curved bastion elements date from this stone phase. Under Tipu Sultan the stronghold remained one of Mysore’s key military and arsenal centres before the wars with the British.

During the Third Anglo-Mysore War, British forces under Lord Cornwallis captured Bengaluru Fort on 21 March 1791 after a short siege. The fort never recovered its old military role; through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century its walls, gates and ditches were progressively dismantled as roads and buildings replaced ramparts.

The surviving fragment is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India under the name “Old Dungeon Fort and Gates”. The word “dungeon” puzzles visitors; some colonial-period descriptions suggest the gate complex was used for detention, but written records are limited. Urban digs add another layer of memory: during Namma Metro work in the old city around 2012, iron cannons and cannonballs reportedly linked to the fort’s Tipu-era military history were unearthed, a reminder of how much history still lies beneath the streets.