The first hotels of Bangalore

Bangalore is known as City of Darshinis and almost every busy street and road has a darshini or two. One of the earliest Darshini to come up in Bangalore is the Uphara Darshini on DVG Road in Basavanagudi.

Since then, Darshinis have mushroomed in every nook and corner and today there are no less than 5,000 of them. Some have a chain of Darshinis such as Adigas, Sukh Sagar, Woodys, while a majority are stand alone eat outs.

The Darshinis are essentially fast food joints that generally serve hot Indian cuisine and some have also specialised in north India, north Karnataka, Chinese and Jain dishes. However, it must be noted that Darshinis are of recent origin though Bangalore had hotels and restaurants going back to the closing years of the nineteenth century.

While many people go on and on about how and when West End and Windsor Manor and other hotels and eateries in the Bangalore Civil and Military Station or Cantonment came up, they tend to forget that the Pete or Peetah area or Old Bangalore too had its first brush with hotels around the same time and that they too had a romantic tale to narrate.

It is generally believed that the eateries first came to Bangalore when the city had a plague epidemic in 1898. The plague saw people emptying themselves out of Bangalore in thousands and many houses became deserted.

People in many homes were left to fend for themselves and in thousands of house holds women went out of Bangalore taking away children and the aged. Able bodied people and youth left behind were left to fend for themselves and while many managed to cook, others had to depend on someone for their daily food.

The Bangalore Municipality set up free boarding and lunch homes but they proved to be inadequate. Besides, the rich and orthodox refused to partake food with the rest of the populace as they felt it beneath their dignity to mix with people of other religion and other classes.

It was then that many entrepreneurs hit upon the idea of starting exclusive eating out joints. Sometime in 1898 itself, Avani Narsing Rao started perhaps the first hotel in Bangalore. The hotel came up at the Doddapet-Chickpet circle and it was a small establishment that offered limited food to people.

The hotel soon caught the fancy of people who flocked to it. However, very few women dared to come to hotels and those that came had a quick bite before bolting away. When the new establishment began making profits, another Bangalorean, Venkanna, set up a hotel a little away on Arcot Srinivasacharya Street.

Venkanna’s hotel was slightly different from Rao’s eatery in the sense that people had to reserve seats in advance. However, the first modern hotel and the true beginnings of hotel industry in Bangalore came when K.T. Appanna (1884-1962) set up his hotel in the Pete area.

Appanna was a man with a shrewd business sense and he quickly cahsed in on the demand from people for cheap and good food. His hotel served meals for two annas. He also began the practice of preparing fried south Indian dishes like bondas in the evening.

Even as the pete area began expanding, hotels also came to be set up in Cantonment area. The hotels in Cantonment primarily catered to Britishers, Europeans and aristocratic and rich Indians and they were out of bounds for natives and for a majority of  people living in the Pete.

When Sir M. Visvesvaraya took over as Dewan of Mysore in 1912, he decided to industralise the Mysore Kingdom and his motto was “Industralise or perish”. He recognized the importance of the hospitality sector and urged people to open more hotels in Bangalore ands Mysore.  

He personally took the initiative to give a fillip to the hotel industry and directed the Mysore Government to promote the industry by giving several sops such as subsidy, loans, low rate of interest and in some cases even business loans.

One of the first people to realise that hotels could be a gold mine was Kolar Thirumalaswami Appanna.  He was one of the thousands of people in Bangalore who were affected by the plague. Appanna had lost his father in 1898 and the burden of running the family fell on him.

Not skilled in any trade and not having the finance to start any other business, Appanna hit upon the idea of starting a hotel. He approached his neighbour, Ramaiah and his maternal uncle and took a loan from them. The same year, he opened his eatery which he named as Hindu Coffee Club and this was also in Chickpet.

Appanna’s mother helped him in running the new venture. The Club;s popularity as the best eat out in Bangalore soared when Appanna decided to add south Indian dishes to the menu. The hotel soon became crowded and earned a name for itself as one of the best eating joints of the Pete.

With crowds streaming in at the club, Appanna decided to provide comfort to his customers. He introduced for the first time the concept of chairs and tables, cups and seated his customers. Coffee was served in cups and saucers and soon they became a hit with the customers.

Till then, people had to either squat or stand to eat and drink coffee. The seating pattern of Appanna’s hotel worked so well that large crowds thronged to his eatery. When other eateries spied his innovation, Appanna decided to serve meals at affordable rates f two annas. Students and visitors to Bangalore flocked to have the meals.     

Very soon, Appanna’s business acumen caught the attention of the Mysore Government, including Dewan Visvesvaraiah. By then, Appanna had taken up catering to visitors to the Bangalore City Railway Station where he opened an eatery in 1905.

Then came the landmark Modern Hindu Hotel in 1916. Appanna started it after encouragement from Visvesvaraiah and the then Wodeyar King.   

The Modern Hindu Hotel became the first eatery to cater to people of all communities and religion. Soon Modern Hindu Hotels came up in Mysore and Ootacamund.

Appanna died in 1962 and today Bangalore celebrates October 10 as Hoteliers Day. That was the day when Appanna was born.

Today, setting up eateries is reckoned to be one of the easiest ways to make money. This is what people think when they see even road side vendors and push cart sellers making a profit.

What they seems to forget is the services of  Avani Narsing Rao, Venkanna and  Appanna in starting out hotels and the role of Sir M. Visvesvaraiah in encouraging hotels and restaurants in Bangalore and Mysore.

No wonder, Bangalore today is overflowing with hotels, restaurants, Darshinis, bakeries and motels and the credit for this must go to these three early entrepreneurs and Sir M.V.    

This is where it all began

This is one of the oldest roads in Bangalore and it dates back to the time Bangalore was founded by Kempe Gowda. This means that the road was formed sometime in 1537 which is when Kempe Gowda is believed to have founded Bangalore.

The road is also the place from where Kempe Gowda harnessed four bullock to four carts and sent them in each of the four directions. Kempe Gowda constructed towers at the four places where the bullock stopped.

The place where the journey of the bullocks began is also part of the road, but Bangaloreans seem to have forgotten this romantic slice of their urban history.

The road was also the place which divided the erstwhile Peta or Pettah into different localities and each locality was populated by a different trading community. Thus we had bangle sellers concentrating in Balepet, rice sellers and commodity sellers in Akkipet and other communities occupying different areas which radiated from this road such as Chickpet (small market), Nagarthpet which houses craftsmen, Tharagupet which mainly dealt in grains, Sunkalpet (limestone sellers’ market), Kumbarpet (potters’ market), Gollarpet (cowherds’ market).

During the Adil Shah period when Bangalore was under Muslim rule from 1638 to 1687, Shahaji had his beautiful palace at Chickpet, which is just off this road. His two sons from Jijabai-Sambhaji and Shivaji and his son from Tulabai Mohite-Ekoji all lived and played in the vicinity and honed their skills in guerilla warfare and statecraft here.

A large number of Marathi speaking people migrated to Bangalore and occupied high positions under Shahaji who was the Governor of  Bangalore province. These people settled in Pettahs around this road and they were instrumental in pushing back Kannada and making Marathi the main language of Bangalore and also the administrative and political language of the province.  

After the Mughals conquered Bangalore in 1678, they too made this road an important thoroughfare and the Mughal Commander Kasim Khan or Quasim Khan occupied Shahaji’s palace in Chickpet. The Pettah area soon the birth of a new language and this was a mixture of Marathi, Urdu and a little of Hindustani. This new language came to be called Rektha and it rapidly spread to north India, particularly in Mughal Delhi and Nawabi Lucknow.

Once the Mughals sold Bangalore to the Wodeyars, the road was repeopled by Kannadigas and the old fort of Kempe Gowda repaired.

When Bangalore passed into the hands of Hyder Ali (1721-1783) and Tipu Sultan (1750-1799) sometime in 1758, the road once again became an important throughfare and two of  the many gates of the fort opened onto the road-Yelahanka gate and Ulsoor or Halasoor Gate .

The vast open space adjacent to the road also saw the British camp there during the third Anglo-Mysore War and finally overcome the forces of  Tipu Sultan. The area commenced from what is today Ulsoor Gate police station-Corporation and extended upto State Bank of Mysore or SBM or Mysore Bank Circle.

After the fall of Tipu in 1799, the road was once again part of Wodeyar Kingdom. It slowly began taking the shape of what it is today and by the turn of the 20^th century, it looked almost as it is today.

This is Avenue Road, which once led directly from the fort towards the Sampangiramanagar tank. One of the intersections of the road is Doddapet Circle and this is believed to be the exact spot where Kempe Gowda harnessed four bullocks and sent them on the way so that he could subsequently demarcate Bangalore’s boundaries.

A little away from Doddapet circle and in preset day Chickpet was the palace of Shahaji. Unfortunately, the building did not survive and we have only Maratha and Adil Shah accounts of Shahaji and his family living in the palace.

Hyder Ali is believed to have camped here in the vicinity around 1758 and forced the Marathas to retreat from Bangalore. The Marathas too camped here when they took Bangalore from the reigning Wodeyars of Mysore under whom Hyder was a mere commander.

One of the heroes of the Indian War of Independence, Tatiya Tope, took shelter in the Kashi Visvesvara temple which is at the junction of Chickpet and Balepet. The Venkateshwara temple was built by Chikadevaraja Wodeyar more than 300 years ago. This is the only temple in Bangalore to display the names of people who helped build the structure and endowed it.
The Anjaneya temple at SBM Circle and Ganapathy temple, which is of recent origin, are important landmarks.  

However, today not much of  the past remains on the road. Though it is named Avenue road, there were hardly any avenue trees and it is a mystery why this road was so named.

The road today is a buyer’s delight offering everything from stationary to books, card board boxes to old and antique items, craft materials, jewellery, textiles, plastic goods, silk sarees, sweets, electronic goods and many other commodities at wholesale rates.                      

Avenue Road stretches from Mysore Bank Circle to City Market and the narrow road is clogged with street vendors, hawkers, push carts sellers and whole sale and retail dealers.

All the pettahs were linked to Doddapete road or avenue road which is more than a kilometer on length. The meandering road measures 4.8 metres to 7.5 metres.

Another landmark on the road is the Rice Memorial church. It was built in 1852 as a memorial to Rev Benjamin Holt Rice (1814-1887), who came to India as a missionary. His son, B.L. Rice is known for his magnum opus, Epigraphia Carnatica and the Mysore Gazetteer.

Avenue road is today among the busiest roads of Bangalore. If students and academicians frequent it for second hand and rare books, old timers throng the area to shop in their favourite shops, while women in thousands frequent the busy lanes and bylanes around Avenue Road looking for gold and ornaments.

There are scores of shops and establishments which are decades old and they sell a range of products. A stroll down the road is nothing but a walk down memory lane.