When Sarjapur was a Jagir

It is the emerging IT and real estate hub of Bangalore. Once known as a small village coming in Anekal taluk, it was a forgotten outpost of history till a decade ago.

Today, this village boasts of hosting several IT majors and it has been seeing a booming real estate market, all thanks to the innumerable IT and BT companies that dot the place.

Located south east of Bangalore, it is now being spoken of as the place where WIPRO is housing its world class university and Infosys is setting up a special economic zone (SEZ).

The SEZ and university makes good sense as this area is well connected to other IT hotspots such as Whitefield, Electronic City, Bommanahalli, Bommasandra, Marathahalli, Silk Board Junction, Anekal, Koramangala, Madiwala and Outer Ring Road.

This is Sarjapur, which was once a sleepy village. It is emerging as a fast growing IT hub and the Aziz Premji Foundation plans to acquire 50 acres here to set up a university. Similarly, Infosys has purchased 202 acres to set up a SEZ exclusively for IT.

Though Sarjapur is seeing a boom now, very few know that it was once a jagir granted by the Mughals and that this Jagirship continued  for more than a century.   

Sarjapur till 1873 was also the headquarters of the taluk by the same name. Sarjapur, till the beginning of the 21st century, was mostly rural in character and it was a place where a fair or jatre was held every Sunday.

The fair was popular and people from Sarjapur and surrounding villages and even Anekal came here to buy and sell goods. The fair gave an opportunity to local farmers and growers to display and sell their commodities and small time traders to sell their goods.

The fair disappeared once Sarjapur was swallowed by in the throes of urbanisation. However, the conduct of the fair can be gauged if one were to visit the Madivala fair which is held even today.        

Coming back to Sarjapur,  it was a small trading centre and its importance lay in the fact that it bordered Bangalore on one side eighteen villages on the other three sides.

Sarjapur had access to all these eighteens villages and obviously it was the biggest of them all in population.

Sarjapur was known for the manufacture of cotton, clothes, carpets and tapes. Muslins of the finest quality were woven here and sold in Bangalore and other places. The Sarjapur Muslin was well-known in and around Bangalore and it was in great demand.

The Sarjapur products were sold in the petes of Bangalore and the Muslin competed with similar products from Doddaballapur. If Doddaballapur was known for sarees, Sarjapur was known for its clothes and cotton. Today, neither are manufactured in Sarjapur.  

Sarjapur was a jagir along with 18 other surrounding villages. The first mention of the jagir of Sarjapur goes back to the time of the Mughals.

The Mughals invaded Bangalore and took over the fort of Bangalore under the Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb, sometime in 1686. The Mughal General, Khasim Khan, wrested Bangalore and its surroundings from the Marathas and in 1689 leased Bangalore to the Wodeyars of Mysore.

In the meantime, the Mughals appear to have leased Sarjapur as a jagir. Their main condition was that the jagirdar train and station troops to help the Mughal Emperor in tines of war. This condition appears statesmanlike as the Mughals were constantly battling the Marathas all over the Deccan (South India).

The Mughals had also brought an end to the Adil Shahis of Bijapur in 1686 and the Qutb Shahs of Golconda in 1689. With both these Muslim Kingdoms annexed by the Mughals, the Marathas came in direct conflict with the Mughal Emperor, Aurangzeb.

Emperor Aurangzeb realised that the Hindu kingdom of Wodeyars was just a little more than a hundred kilometers from Bangalore. His General, Kasim Khan, gave away Bangalore to the Wodeyars but kept Sira and Sarjapur as Mughal provinces. While Sira, near Tumkur, became a regular Mughal province, Sarjapur was given as a Jagir. However, both Sira and Sarjapur were part of the Mughal province in the south.

The jagir of Sira and also Sarjapur was confirmed b successive rulers. While Sira finally fell to Hyder Ali, he allowed the jagir of Sarjapur to continue. This even as Hyder Ali took Bangalore from the Marathas.

B.L. Rice, in his gazetteer, speaks of having seen the documents confirming and reconfirming the Sarjapur Jagir.

The first grant is in Persian and it is by Dilawar Khan, the Mughal Subedar of Sira province. The grant is in the name of the Mughal Emperor and the Mughal Emperor is called as Alamgir Padshah i Ghazi.

Then comes the grant of the jagir by Madhava Rao, a minister of the Peshwas of  Pune. This grant is in Marathi. This document bears the inscription, Raja Ram Narapati, Harsha Nishan Madhav Rao Ballal Pradhan.

The next confirmation of the grant is by Hyder Ali. This paper has the signature of Hyder Ali and it is also in Marathi. It is signed as Fatte Haider. Then comes the grant by Lord Cornwallis and it is sealed with the Persian word Salar E Inglistan. It is initialed at the back as “GFC”.

Then comes the grant by Captain Cherry and this too is in Persian. It says the seal is by George Fredrick Cherry, Khayim Jang, fidvi E Kampani Angresi Bahadur.

The last grant of the jagir is by Captain Reed in 1791 and it is in Persian. The seal says Alexander Reed Bahadur. The grants were finally cancelled by Dewan Purnaiah when he found that the Jagardir of Sarjapur wanted to sell the jagir.

Purnaiah bought out the Jahagirdar, After that there was no jagir or Jahagirdar. The Sarjapur province was merged with the Mysore Kingdom and it soon lost all its former glory and by the turn of the century it was just a small village.

Today, Sarjapur is on another incline. Modernisation and development is going hand in hand and the area is seeing a boom in the real estate sector. IT and BT companies are setting shop in Sarjapur. Connectivity to and from Sarjapur has improved by leaps and bounds. Alas, the march of modernity has ensured that all relics of the past, barring a few temples, have vanished without a trace. This is the price one has to pay for growing urbanization and development. 

The looms that fell silent

It was nearly ten years ago that one of Bangalore’s best loved institutions closed down. The closure brought down the curtains on one of  Bangalore’s most important industrial relic. Since then, the institution has remained a mute spectator to developments that has overtaken Bangalore and transformed it into a front-line city of India.

This relic was in the news recently when the Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) decided to swap a part of the land on which the institution stands with the Indian Railways.

The Indian Railways have been desperately trying to acquire lands for the much-expansion of the City Railway Station in Majestic. The City Railway Station is over utilised and further expansion has been put on hold due to the non-availability of land. The City Railway Station has ten platforms and all of them are utilised to the maximum extent possible. The platforms cater to 95 trains every day.

The railways have been unable to introduce new trains from the City Railway Station due to the non-availability of platforms and related infrastructure. Therefore, they have had to introduce new trains or extend the existing trains to and from Yeshwanthpur and Mysore.

The City Railway Station comes under the Bangalore Bangalore division of the South Western Railways (SWR).  The division has  managed to obtain 3.3 acres of land of the erstwhile Binny Mills in Cottonpet.

While the Railways get the land to expand their operations, they will hand over 3.16 acres of Railways land to the BBMP for construction of the Okalipuram Corridor for the flyover connecting Majestic to Fountain Circle in Rajajinagar.

The swap might not be that easy as a company petition relating to the assets of Binny Mills was decided in the Madras High Court regarding partition of the assets, including the mill land in Bangalore.

However, the 16-acre land on which Binny Mills is situated had attracted the attention of  SWR authorities who felt it would go a long way in meeting their demand for the expansion of the City Railway Station.

With the BBMP agreeing to hand over only 3.3 acres, the SWR now plans to expand the pit line from its present 18-coach facility to a 24-coach facility. The Railways are yet to get possession of the land, though a preliminary notification has already been issued on February 12, 2013. 
Whatever be the status, the mill is now history. The iconic institution closed down in 2005 after a long and illustrious innings in which it made a name for itself as one of the foremost manufacturers of cotton clothes. The proximity of the mills to both the railway station and bus stand and also to several markets gave it an edge that others could only envy.
The Bangalore Woollen, Silk and Cotton Mills, as it was known, was one of the most prominent landmarks of Bangalore and it was as much known for its quality of clothes as for its antiquity. You see, this was the first of the textile mills set up in Bangalore way back in 1884.

The steam driven looms in the mill continued to operate till 1902 after which it was discontinued and it ran on electricity. The mill then first received power at a rate of  2300 volts through the Bangalore power station and this equalled 800 horse power. It was among the largest consumers of electricity in 1912. It regularly used upto 950 HP of power, which made it the biggest consumer in Bangalore

The Binny Mills had both cotton and woollen spindles. The cotton yarn of Binnys commanded top price in Calcutta, and its woollen and hosiery products were known all over India. One outstanding record of the mill is that in 1913 it produced one million pounds of weight of blankets which were supplied to all units of the Army and Government departments.

Binny Mills was taken over by the Chennai-based Buckingham and Carnatic Mills (Binny & Co.), which operated it for over a century, manufacturing high grade cotton, and, a range of products for the defence – bed sheets, green sweaters, pullovers and blankets.

For thousands of school children till the 1980s, Binny meant excellent and high quality uniforms both in Bangalore and in Chennai. In Bangalore, the Binny georgette sarees, which were a rage among Bangaloreans, have now been revived by a few people

who were originally employed in the Mills. The sarees are available in a store called Rajnikant in Chickpet just off Avenue Road. The lane is just opposite the well-known shop of  Byrappa Silks.

The Binnys, originally from Scotland, lived in Madras, and they came to the port city in 1797 and established the cotton mills. Apart from Finlays in Bombay which had three mills with a combined capacity of one lakh spindles and 2000 looms, the other major mill in the textile sector was Binny Mills.

Binnys had two cotton mills in Chennai which it set up in 1876 and 1881 and it took over a smaller unit in Bangalore. Soon, Binnys sold goods not only in the country but also to China and became known as pioneers of mechanised dyeing and finishing. Its motto was quality before quantity and its Khaki clothes commanded a good price and were rated the best in India. 

The mills spun out their trademark goods till the 1980s when the decline set in. Labour problems, high cost of production, competition, high taxes, declining profits and a litany of other factors saw the mills trimming their labour force from 7500 to a mere 1,000.

Binny was formed in 1969 by amalgamation of  The Buckingham & Carnatic Company Limited, Madras (it is located in Perambur  and till a decade ago, it was the biggest textiles mill in Asia, having an installed spindleage capacity of 88,208 spindles, of which 79,072 were utilised. It had an installed loom capacity of 2,074 looms out of which 1,816 looms were utilised. It has a "dye house" or "processing house" and a central power station) , The Banglore Woollen, Cotton & Silk Mills Company Limited, Banglore, Madura Company Private Limited, Cochin, The Ganges Transport & Trading Company Limited, Calcutta, Binny & Company Limited, Madras and Binny's Engineering Works Limited, Madras.

However, after amalgamation, Binny incurred losses and in 1993 the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR) declared Binny a sick unit. It came out of the purview of the BIFR by the August 7, 2008 order of the Madras High Court. 

The mills closed down completely in 2005 and since then they stood mutely watching the City going forward even as its fate remains to be decided. The once clattering looms have now gone silent and the near future might see the whistle of locomotives.

Apart from the building, many thousand houses in and around Cottonpet, Kempapura Agrahara, Okalipuram and other areas still shelter employees of this mill.

An interesting anecdote is that Pandit Rama Rao Naik of Agra Gharana who  played the role of the thief in Sadarame, produced by the famous Gubbi Drama Company, was a daily wage worker in Binny Mills.

Coincidentally, other mills around the City Railway Station such as Raja Mills, Minerva Mills, TR Mills and Chandra Spinning and Weaving Mills too have closed down, a sad reminder of the bygone days but that is another story.