The city gets a museum honouring its ancient founder Kempegowda and retracing its roots.
Somewhere in the middle of its march to modernisation, Bangalore has also made time and space to honour its founder. Thus, the city recently opened a museum dedicated to Kempegowda in the historic Mayo Hall, close to the ancient ruler's 500th anniversary.
Kempegowda (1513-1569), a Yelahanka chieftain and feudatory of the Vijayanagara Empire, is credited with having established in 1537 the city we know today as Bangalore. The four towers that marked the limits of Bangalore (one of these within Lalbagh), the Nandi Temple, and several of the city’s lakes and markets date back to his time and even bear the names they had then.
The city’s founder is known to have sunk 120 tanks or lakes in Bangalore as the region receives scanty rainfall. However, not all of these have survived the process of “development.” A case in point is the Dharmambudhi tank, now replaced by the Kempegowda Bus Station. Many other tanks and lakes have been lost in this manner.
However, in an interesting twist, historians say that though the city is honouring Kempegowda, there were actually four Yelahanka rulers of the same name, and there is no clarity on who the founder of Bangalore was. The members of the Kempegowda museum committee too had doubts about who the actual founder was. “I don’t know what Kempegowda looked like. That’s why we have not explained this in any of the charts that talk about the Yelahanka dynasty. We’ve used a statue of (a) Kempegowda at the entrance of the museum. A similar image has been found inscribed on a stone at Hampi. This is the popular image of the many Kempegowdas of the Yelahanka dynasty,” said Ra Thimmegowda, chairperson of the museum committee.
In one of the two halls of the museum, a picture gallery is to be set up. The hall will have two sections — one with pictures about the life and achievements of Kempegowda II, and another for images of temples and forts built by him, inscriptions and writings of foreign travellers on old Bangalore.
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Bangalore has evolved in different stages and all the rulers of the Yelahanka dynasty have contributed to the city, according to historians. The pictorial representations and much of the information on the period of Kempegowda is available in the museum, a collection set to expand over time as more material is added.
“The inauguration is just the beginning. It will only grow and more things will be added as we go long. What’s a museum without artefacts?” says Chiranjeev Singh, a retired IAS officer. The museum committee had turned to Singh for advice on the venture. Efforts are now being made to bring books and relics that date back to the time of Kempegowda to the museum.
As part of the proposed expansion of the museum, there is a plan to use the ground floor of Mayo Hall for an audio visual section on Kempegowda. And the court that is now housed in Mayo Hall, which dates back to the British era, may have to be accommodated elsewhere. “Mayo Hall should be used solely for the museum and the courts should be shifted out. The courts need e-governance and IT and this building is too old for that,” says Singh.