One of the great pleasures of growing up in the 20th century was poring over large atlases and foldout maps at the dining table and discovering cities and towns with exotic names that you had no hope of ever visiting but complete creative freedom to conjure up, in any fashion you desired, in your head. That joy is denied to us in the age of Google maps, when you can see, at a click, that Woolloomooloo and Woonsocket are just regular old towns, with not much to differentiate them from any other. And with Google Street View coming to India this past week, we are all in great danger of zooming further and further in and entirely losing sight of the big picture.
That’s what makes this is a good time to take a zoomed-out view – on Google maps, if you must – at the street-grid pattern of one of the oldest Bengaluru neighbourhoods, Basavanagudi. Set up on a war footing in the aftermath of the plague epidemic that swept through Bengaluru in the mid- to late-1890s, Basavanagudi (literally, Basava’s Temple), named for the giant monolithic Nandi that, from its shrine on a hill, presided over the new suburb’s western end, was designed very differently from its slightly older neighbour, Chamarajpet, a neat, compact grid of (long) east-west and (short) north-south streets.
For one thing, the houses here were set much further apart – the plague had brought home sound lessons on the dangers of overcrowding and the benefits of good ventilation. For another, in what was perhaps a Europe-inspired deviation from convention, Basavanagudi was built around a large central square with circles at its vertices – going clockwise from the north-western vertex, they are Tagore Circle, Madhavrao Circle, Armugam Circle and Nettakallappa Circle – from which diagonal roads radiated. Since 1941, that 23-acre ‘square’ has been beloved to Basavanagudi residents as the lush, tree-filled MN Krishna Rao Park.
The man who would in the future be hailed as Rajakarya Prasakta Dewan Bahadur Sir MN Krishna Rao was only in his early twenties when the blueprint for Basavanagudi was being drawn up, but already a rising star in the finance department of the Mysore government. Accordingly, when the government offered plots in the new extension to its employees, the young man snapped one up, and had his home all built and ready by November 1907. Only the third house to come up in Basavanagudi, the stately 115-year-old building, built on a 19,500 sq ft plot, has sustained generations of Rao’s descendants, and still stands on the Kanakapura Road, very close to the park that carries his name.
Over the next two decades, Krishna Rao’s rise continued unabated. When Sir Mirza Ismail was appointed Dewan of Mysore in 1926, he had Rao, who was famous (and often infamous) for his unshakeable integrity, as his finance minister. When Sir Mirza travelled to England in 1930 as the Maharaja’s representative at the first Round Table Conference, it was Krishna Rao who filled in as acting Dewan.
It wasn’t the many achievements of its famous resident, however, that prompted Basavangudi to name its erstwhile public square after him. It was a mark of gratitude for the man, who, contending that there were too few spaces in the city for women and children, donated the princely sum of ₹20,000 for the square to be turned into a park exclusively for them, and another ₹15,000 for the construction of the pavilion at the centre of it. Today, the park is open to all ages and genders, and the Krishna Rao Pavilion, which once hosted all manner of cultural programmes, serves as a public library.
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)
