Bengaluru Fort

The story of Bengaluru Fort

You’re standing at Bengaluru Fort, where one of the few surviving elements of the city’s 18th-century fort is a monumental, carved stone gate. The fort itself began in 1537 as a mud fort, and the story of this place is really the story of layers: an older military stronghold, later stone rebuilding, and then traces of a much smaller building that once stood inside it.

The fort’s earliest phase was built by Kempe Gowda I, and later, King Hyder Ali in 1761 replaced the mud fort with a stone fort. His son King Tipu Sultan improved it further in the late 18th century. The place was damaged during an Anglo-Mysore war in 1791, and the British East India Company army, led by Lord Cornwallis, captured it on 21 March 1791 during the siege of Bangalore in the Third Mysore War. So what you are looking at is not a single moment in time, but a fort that was fought over, altered, and reduced to fragments.

The original fortification was substantial. A public history study describes the old fort as reinforced with heavy granite stones, with broad ramparts and bastions, a faussebraye, five cavaliers, a glacis, a deep moat and a covered way without palisades. It also notes French influences, including banquettes and embrasure openings. Colonel James Welsh, passing through in 1809, described it as originally shaped much like an egg, with a high stone rampart and deep ditch. It had two gates: the Mysore Gate in the south and a north-facing Delhi Gate.

What survives today is very little of that larger structure. The Delhi Gate is all that remains of the fort today, and the practical thing to look for is that carved stone gate as a reminder of the old enclosure. This is a place where the past has been pared down to a few visible pieces, with the rest absorbed by later use and building.

Inside the fort once stood the Fort Church, Bangalore, also called the Drummer’s Chapel in early records. It was a church located within Bangalore Fort and, for British soldiers, it was the first protestant church to be raised in Bangalore. It was among 15 churches built by the Government of Madras before 1833, when there were no special rules with regards to building churches, and the Military board of the Madras Army approved the construction. The church raised in 1807 was for the use of the British troops posted in the Bangalore Fort, and it was built in 1808.

It was a modest building, unlike other churches in Bangalore of the period. It resembled a barrack, with a tiled roof supported by beams, and it was referred to as the Little Church. That plainness matters, because it tells you this was a military chapel rather than a grand civic church. The church was visited by Bishop Turner, travelling from Madras to Bangalore, but by 1836 it was no longer used. Bishop Corrie found that there was only one chaplain for Bangalore, and he could not travel from the Bangalore Civil and Military Station to the Bangalore Fort. After that, the building was used by the Madras Army for other purposes.

In 1836, the army moved out of the Fort and handed it over to the Government of Mysore. Later, the Fort Church was demolished to make place for the construction of the Vani Vilas Hospital. Some items from it were reused in St. Luke’s Church, Bangalore, in Chamrajpet, including the church bell, bearing the inscription ‘Madras Mint 1868’. The Government of Mysore then allotted land in Chamrajpet for the new church.

So when you stand here, you are seeing a fort whose original fabric has mostly gone, but whose gate and memories still mark the ground. If you have time, pause at the surviving gate and imagine the fort as an enclosed military world, with a small barrack-like church tucked inside it, now long demolished.