Mysore Palace Museum

The story of Mysore Palace Museum

What you’re standing at now is Mysore Palace, also known as Amba Vilas Palace, and the one thing that makes it immediately striking is that it is both a historic royal residence and a public museum. It was the official residence of the Wadiyar dynasty and the seat of the Kingdom of Mysore, so this is not just a grand building: it was the centre of power for the kingdom.

The present palace was commissioned by Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV in August 1897 after the previous structure was destroyed in a fire. Construction began in 1897 and was completed in 1912. The design is attributed to Henry Irwin and Edwin Wolleston Fritchley, and the palace that rose here is the largest of the seven palaces in Mysore. Britannica describes the site’s history as closely linked to the Wadiyar dynasty, and notes that the city became the kingdom’s capital in 1799.

The story of the site reaches back much further. The land was recorded as the site of a small fort in the late 14th century. A first palace occupied the location in the 17th century during the reign of Kanthirava Narasaraja I, and it was destroyed and rebuilt multiple times. The history here is one of repeated replacement rather than a single uninterrupted monument.

If you look at the building itself, it is a three-story structure, roughly 75 m in length and 48 m in width, chiefly built of red and grey-green granite. The most important feature to pick out is the five-story central tower, which ends in a gold-plated onion-shaped dome. That dome carries a smaller chhatri rather than a typical finial, and the main façade has a large central archway as the entrance, with four smaller arches on each side supported by granite pillars. At both ends are three square towers, each five stories tall and topped with a pink marble dome and finial. Above the central arch sits a sculpture of Gajalakshmi.

The palace is usually described as an example of Indo-Saracenic architecture, blending Indo-Islamic, Rajput, Hoysala and Gothic styles. That mixture is visible in the way the tower, domes, arches and decorative elements are combined rather than kept separate.

This place also carries political history. On January 26th, 1950, Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar read a proclamation in the Durbar Hall formally ceding control of the Kingdom of Mysore to the newly-created Republic of India. He was then named the first Governor of Mysore State. Later, in 1951 and 1953, two temples were constructed on the palace grounds: the Bhuvaneshvari Temple and Gayatri Temple.

The complex around you is more than the main palace. It includes multiple gardens, several Hindu temples, and the old walls of the original fort. Some of those temples predate the current palace itself. Since the early 19th century, the Mysore Dasara festival has been held on the palace grounds, ending with an elephant procession on Vijayadashami, so the site still has a living ceremonial role.

Today the main palace houses a public museum alongside the living quarters of Yaduveer Krishnadatta Chamaraja Wadiyar, the current ceremonial head of the Wadiyar dynasty. Mysore Palace is also one of the most visited tourist attractions in India, with more than four million annual visitors. Visitors enter through the Varaha gate on the south side, and the palace is open from 10:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. on all days of the week, excluding the final two days of Navaratri.

If you’re looking for one detail to keep in mind while you stand here, look up at the central tower and then down to the main archway beneath it: that vertical axis is the clearest way to read the palace’s composition.