Bengaluru's crumbling heritage

With new buildings tearing down old ones, Bengaluru is struggling to protect its heritage

When Mark Cubbon, the longest-serving Commissioner of the then Mysore state, became the first resident of a stately bungalow built in the 1850s, he lovingly called it Balabrooie. The structure perhaps reminded Cubbon of his hometown on the Isle of Man in the Irish Sea, where many homes were called Balabrooie, meaning “farm on the river bank”, TP Issar wrote in an illustrated book, The City Beautiful.

Balabrooie, the official residence of the first three chief ministers of Karnataka that boasts of a classical European structure was to be razed in late 2014, despite being a place that housed notable guests including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and M Visvesvaraya. The absence of an official “heritage tag” made the 14-acre plot an easy prey, and the fact that legislators wanted the place to build a club of their own was no match for the building’s notable history, a history even Rabindranath Tagore was part of.

Among the very first to hear Tagore’s Shesher Kabita (1928), the love story of an Oxford-educated Indian barrister and a governess, were the walls and century-old raintrees of the Balabrooie guest house, when Tagore read out the story to Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobois, founder of the Indian Statistical Institute, and his wife, Nirmalkumari Maitra.

Balabrooie avoided the wrath of ruthless bulldozers because of an uproar by citizens who came together to preserve a slice of Bengaluru’s history, an action because of which a plaque near “room no 5” commemorates one of the Nobel laureate’s many visits to Bengaluru. It reads: Rabindranath Tagore stayed here in 1919.  

But unlike the support that Balabrooie garnered because of its famous residents, there are countless other buildings steeped in history that have faded over time. This is a change that begins physically, and gradually turns its fatal attention to memories.

In 1985, KN Iyengar of INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) had compiled the first list of Bengaluru’s heritage buildings. Listed in this inventory were 823 iconic structures that included government, private and commercial buildings. Last year, INTACH’s Bengaluru chapter rolled up its sleeves to do a second count. “We keep hearing that city has lost much of its heritage. But there was no record of how much we’ve lost,” says Meera Iyer, co-convenor at INTACH-Bengluru.

The results of the survey, Iyer says, are appalling. In the past 30 years, 823 heritage buildings have petered down to just 354. With no “protected” label to keep them from being torn down by real estate developers as well as government authorities, only 43 per cent of Bengaluru’s heritage structures have survived the last three decades.

The casualties of unabashed concretisation include historical landmarks like the iconic Cash Pharmacy building at the junction of St Marks and Residency Road, as well as the Golden Threshold that has been replaced by a commercial complex called House of Lords.

Cash pharmacy building (Then)

Cash pharmacy building (now)

Golden threshold (then)

House of Lords

The grandeur of a name like the House of Lords doesn’t rub off on the structure on St Marks Road at all. A sense of heavy gloom sets in as you walk into the long, closed corridor of this complex that now houses tour operators, real estate dealers, a pastry shop, an ice cream parlour and other sundry stores.

It’s hard to believe that this was the place that many Bengalureans have fond memories of. Once owned by Camilo Miranda, a dental surgeon who moved to the city from Goa, the Golden Threshold was a scene straight out of a fairy tale, recalls Iyer.

The imposing colonial bungalow with four bedrooms and many pantries, besides Miranda’s consulting rooms, had two garages with a Terraplane, an Oldsmobile and a Ford Mercury. There was a rose garden in the back, the front yard had a pond and was lined with avocado and lime trees brought in from Africa; two Alsations gifted by the then Maharaja of Mysore (Mysuru) were the other non-human elements of the two-storeyed home.

“We called the balcony the Romeo-Juliet balcony as my grandparents would sit here together,” Miranda’s granddaughter, Camille M Gonsalves, recently shared in an interview. The house was torn down after Miranda passed away in the ’80s.

Less susceptible to pressure from real estate developers, government buildings have fared much better than others, explains Iyer. But there are internal pressures, too. Another iconic building, Carlton House, which functions as the CID headquarters currently, was being considered to be converted into a legislators’ club.

Armed with the survey and the Karnataka Ancient and Historical Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1961 that identifies historical monuments as being a 100-year-old, Intach approached the government with a list of 47 buildings that qualified for a monument status.

This is the response they received: “We have taken note of your letter. Government has reviewed it. I have been directed to inform you that it is not required to declare the buildings as heritage structures.”

As structures that help preserve stories of the past, the value of a heritage building lies beyond the economics of land and realty. “One of the characters that define a city is its buildings,” says Aravind Candramohan, project coordinator with INTACH. “Even though Vidhana Soudha is not very old (over 60 years), one still identifies it with Bengaluru, as one does Victoria Terminus with Mumbai.”  

With just that in mind, INTACH had put together a “then-and-now” photo exhibition earlier this year, with images taken in 1985 and when the recent survey was done. City-based photographer Perumal Venkatesan, or PeeVee, who took the “now” images for INTACH, explains how a heritage protection policy works in his hometown of Puducherry. “You can’t make any changes to the façade or physical structure.”

Most of the heritage structures that dot Bengaluru today are either hidden behind eye-sore hoardings, or are found in quiet lanes lined with flowering trees.  Buildings alone don’t make heritage, feels architect Naresh Narasimhan, who is in talks with the authorities to build a “heritage zone”.

“There are about 30 government buildings in 2,500 acres between the Bangalore Fort on KR Road to the Bangalore Palace. The idea is to vacate the government offices in the buildings and make them into public places. A heritage building should not only be preserved and restored, it should also be inclusive,” he says.

An example of inclusivity is the building that houses the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) in Bengaluru. Once known as the Manikyavelu Mansion, the British-colonial structure was a shambles before it was re-introduced as NGMA Bengaluru — Narasimhan headed the redesigning project. “Just the other day I saw vitrified tiles being used in a heritage building. You can’t make such changes, it’ll lose its character.”

While a majority of private buildings have been completely lost, a handful of structures have been conserved and repurposed, such as the former residence of an Anglo-Indian lady in Richmond Town. Living in a house that was built in 1915, she worked as a florist. Today, the structure stands firm as a privately-owned heritage bed and breakfast place called Casa Cottage.

Since private property is to be dealt with differently, INTACH’s proposal was only restricted to government buildings. While talks of demolishing the Central Observatory, a meteorological centre built in 1893, surfaced earlier this year, a proposed flyover will swallow up at least one acre of the Balabrooie Guest House land. “All we ask is that the government shouldn’t demolish its own structures,” says Chandramohan.

There will be no pride in a city unless you see the many layers of history in it, believes Narasimhan. “Bengaluru is older than Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, but a lot of people think Bengaluru started with Infosys,” he jokes, adding how pride in your city cultivates a sense of belonging.