A Walk About Bangalore...

A Walk about Bangalore…

 Our introduction to Bangalore and India continued with a walking tour of the city.  I found the morning to be a lesson in perspectives. 

Day 2 in Bangalore.  Arun is standing in the center of our group.

 

Our tour guide Arun started with a short history lesson on the significance of Bangalore, beginning with a list of dates--1776, 1789, 1798, 1805, and 1815.  Recognize any?  I recognized four of the five dates from U.S. and French history but could not explain the dates' significance to India's or Bangalore's history.  Although I did know that Lord Cornwallis resurrected his military career by defeating the French in India, I had not known that he had accomplished this by defeating the King of Mysore, roughly where Bangalore is located today.

Teaching World History, I have become somewhat better at looking at events from different perspectives, but even so, too often those perspectives are still limited by the immediate actors in an event due to limited knowledge and/or the time constraints of a 180-day school year.  For example, U.S. history books rarely explain the financial problems that the British East India Company was encountering due to the start of the Industrial Revolution and the loss of the Indian cotton cloth trade or that Parliament was trying to bail out the East India Company when it granted a monopoly on importing tea into the North American colonies.  U.S. history books almost always cast Parliament’s actions as another example of Britain’s tyranny over those colonies as an explanation of the Boston Tea Party, and India is never mentioned.  In World History textbooks, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in Britain is typically described as if the British were not part of a global network of commerce that was becoming more and more interdependent.

So I greatly appreciated our mini history lesson because it squarely placed Indian events in a global context and not in splendid isolation, and here are the explanations of the dates with which Arun started the tour:  

1776—The war for U. S. independence can also be understood in the context of the on-going conflict between France and Britain over colonial possessions, both in the Americas and in Asia.  After Lord Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, ending the war in North America, the focus of this conflict shifted to India.  Ironically, the same man who surrendered at Yorktown was able to revive his reputation by defeating the King of Mysore and claiming India for Britain.  In addition, Mysore was one of the first governments to recognize the United States as an independent nation, in part because of Mysore’s ongoing problems with the British.

1789—Like the Americans, the King of Mysore asked the King of France for assistance in fighting the British, but due to the start of the French Revolution, King Louis XVI was unable to help the King of Mysore.

 1798—Napoleon’s defeat in Egypt also prevented him from sending assistance to the King of Mysore.

 1805—The loss at the Battle of Trafalgar further limited France’s ability to assist the King of Mysore.

 1815—Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo came at the hands of the Duke of Wellington who had served under Cornwallis in the war with Mysore.

 After this brief background on Bangalore’s past, we began with the colonial portion of the city. 

   

 Bangalore served as an administrative and military center for the British in India.  The facilities used by the British military (above) continue in use by the Indian military today.

At the center of the colonial city is a large park, which people use for recreation and exercise. We arrived after most of the morning activities. We did see one woman meditating, however, with her seven Golden Retrievers. A statue of Queen Victoria stands at one end of the park. One section of the park is specifically for children with a small train, while other areas provide gathering places for concerts and other activities.
 

Queen Victoria

A stage used for concerts and other events

The children's play area

 

The British colonial government was housed in this building. The picture shows only the central portion of this enormous building. As Arun pointed out, a large edifice can be used to inspire awe and hopefully (?) respect. Today the building houses the state of Karnataka’s High Court.

 After independence, Karnataka built an even larger building to house the state government. The construction in front of the building is for the new metro line. Bangalore, like several Indian cities, is working on constructing a rapid transit system. Bangalore's first line had opened six months before our arrival.

 

The lions at the top of the building are from the reign of Ashoka during the Mauryan empire (261-239 BCE).  Ashoka's conversion to Buddhism helped the spread of Buddhism behond India's borders.  Ashoka's edicts encouraged vegetarianism and expected religious tolerance of all religions, not just his own. 

 

On our way through the park, we stopped at this well-known juice stand. The woman has an amazing variety of juices, which she blends together for various health properties.

 

 

 A common feature of India are the dogs that live on the street. We saw a number of them as we walked through the park. The gentleman with the bike came with a bag of bread to feed the dogs, and the brown and white dog picked us up, following us around the park in hopes that we would feed it. He followed us for at least half of our circuit of the park, and did not give up on us until we got back on the bus.  

 

 

 

 Our bus picked us up at the other end of the park, where this statue of King George, Victoria’s son, stands.  His statue faces hers across the park. 

Our last stop in the colonial portion of the city was Trinity Church. The church is in regular use, as evidenced by the electronic display board for which hymns will be sung. The colonial past is also ever present with the plaques and memorials that hang on the walls around the church.

 

 

One of numerous plaques and memorials that hang on the
walls of Trinity Church, in memory of British soldiers.

 To continue our tour, we needed to cross this street of traffic.  In China, my group called it the zen of traffic (although zen is Japanese), but there is a definite mindset needed to negotiate street traffic in India.  Our group had not yet achieved that mindset at this point in the trip.  And I never achieved the fearlessness of Indian pedestrians.

 

 The structure above the street is Bangalore’s first metro line, which we used to return to our hotel.

 The rest of the tour took us through a typical neighborhood, and our second lesson in perspective.  Before we entered the neighborhood, Arun asked if we’d seen “Slumdog Millionaire,” to emphasize the point that what we were going to see was not a slum.  He was reminding us to check our preconceived ideas and to see a neighborhood of houses where families lived, where people went to work each day in offices and hotels and shops, and where children went to school.  It was still incredibly helpful to have Arun with us because of his knowledge of the neighborhood and the people who lived there.

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The streets were very narrow through this neighborhood, and while we had
several motorbikes pass us, I do not remember seeing a car in these streets.

 

Several of the homes had these geometric designs outside of the front door.  While on special holidays, the decorations would be more elaborate.  Arun said the designs themselves are merely decorative, a way to make the neighborhood more beautiful.  This was one of the more elaborate designs that we saw on our walk.

Some of the exterior doorways were more elaborate, like this one.  The red paste is applied as part of a personal regligious observance.  We saw similar applications of paste to carvings in the Hindu temple that we visited. 

Cows were another common feature of India.  I was surprised that most of the cows I saw in Bangalore were Holsteins, which are a common site in the upper midwest's dairylands.  Bangalore's temperatures were in the low to mid-80s F while we were there, which would explain why people are able to keep Holsteins there.  The garbage in this image is also a very typical sight in India.  Both Arun and Maya (the Teacher Foundation) emphasized the importance of keeping one's own home clean, but that an area like this would have been outside the boundaries of what any one householder was responsible, and so personal interests trumps what we would include under civic-mindedness.

 

Here is an example of where Arun's knowledge and understanding of this neighborhood were invaluable.  As we walked past this site, Arun stopped to talk to a woman whose family owns this property and these cows.  The family had recently torn down their old house were preparing to build a new three or four story house.  The family consisted of three bothers and their wives and children.  Each brother would have a floor in the new house and the lowest level of the house would be for parking the vehicles and as stabling for the cows.  Arun reminded us that all of the cows we saw belonged to someone, and many did have a sort of halter like the cow on the left.

We passed this Hindu temple on our way through the neighborhood.  At the end of the tour we visited another, much older, Hindu temple.  We also saw a mosque in the neighborhood, and several streets over we saw a gathering of Jains.  So while most Indians would identify themselves as Hindus, peoples of other faiths are present also.

As places like Bangalore have grown increasingly urbanized, the common grazing locations upon which cows and their owners depended have disappeared.  So now the cows 'graze' on the garbage that is thrown out.  This cow is eating the refuse from a community market that is in the next couple of streets.  One of the women from the Teacher Foundation said that they had seen cows trying to eat greens that someone was trying to sell and the cows had to be shooed away.

Some of the vegetables available in the market.

 

Another example of the diversity of the neighborhood.  This is a beef market, where Muslims can purchase beef.

And another example--which religious image best suits your personal religious beliefs--Lord Ganesh or Lord Jesus?

This was a small primary school tucked into a building just off the street.  We just walked in and were given a very brief tour of the building while the classes were going on.  Note that this is an English-medium school and included students up through Standard (or grade) 4.  Next door to the school, workmen were repairing a mosque, and half a block the other way was the Hindu temple that we visited next.

 

This is the exterior of the temple which Arun took us through.  It is a temple which has been here for centuries and continues to serve Hindu worshippers.  No pictures are allowed inside the temple, and we were allowed in because we wer with Arun.  While I would love to have pictures to show what the ceremony that we witnessed was like, I greatly appreciate the ban on photography.  I have always felt awkward touring a religious site which is a fully functioning center of worship.

Our walking tour of Bangalore was a truly amazing experience that helped give us some perspectives of India which served me well on the rest of my journey.