Bangalore Vignettes - Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace

I lived in Bangalore for 9 years and yet never visited Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace. On a trip to Bangalore this year, the wife and I decided to remedy this omission, especially since it was now a convenient metro ride away.

We took the purple line from the M. G. Road station towards Challaghatta, changed over to the green line at the Nagaprabhu Kempegowda (Majestic) station towards Silk Institute and got down at the Krishna Rajendra Market station. From there the palace was a short (5-10 min) walk.

We needed tickets to enter the palace, but there wasn’t a booth nearby selling the paper kind. We had to buy them online by scanning the QR code printed on a placard affixed to the entry gate. There were a couple of liveried guards at the gate who scanned them from our mobile phone and let us in.

From the gate, a footpath with two small lush green patches on either side of it leads you to the palace. The airy, arched hallway we stood in front of was grand. A man at its entrance had just poured some water on the floor and was scouring it with a broom with the fervour of Lady Macbeth trying to rid herself of her imagined bloodstains.

We were visiting on a working day around 10:00 AM. It was a good time to visit. We pretty much had the whole palace to ourselves.

Behind the palace was a small courtyard that housed a defunct fountain. At the moment it was merely a big, dry, rectangular, concrete hole in the ground a foot or two deep. It wasn’t particularly well marked. Someone walking without paying attention could fall in and hurt themselves, but I am probably letting my newly acquired European sensibilities come in the way here.

Just past the palace’s perimeter was a decrepit building that houses a school. The school was in session. Despite the din of the traffic, we could hear a chorus of children learning something by rote in one of the classes…

I retreated back into the palace hallway to admire the rows of ornate, wooden columns supporting the scalloped arches.

There are staircases at both ends of this hallway that you are allowed to climb. These led us to a small, brightly decorated room that was connected to a gallery on the first floor.

A couple of arched openings on either sides of the gallery lead to balconies. Access to them had been blocked by a wooden barrier. It had been tied to the columns from two sides so that people won’t move it aside and try to step onto the balconies.

While Tipu Sultan’s Summer Palace is definitely grand, it is not very palatial (say like Mysore Palace). Meaning, after spending a few minutes, we had seen everything there was to see here.

I was glad that I could finally visit a longtime favourite of Bangalore tourists and yet I also left feeling a little sad. There were signs of wear and water damage throughout the palace. Could the restoration and upkeep be better? Sure. Though to be fair, wood can be a notoriously difficult material to maintain and restore - especially when it is exposed to the elements all year round. Short of building a climate-controlled superstructure around it, what are they to do?


Date
January 25, 2025