Bangalore : Roots and Beyond

Barring some photographs of ‘Blighty” teahouses and some special settings of Bangalore, and besides reports of some special events in long defunct newspapers, and of course, the yes-I-remember it- all accounts of a few remaining old-timers, there is not much material on Bangalore, which could bring alive its history of the last century and a half. Maya Jayapal, has with her book Bangalore: Roots and Beyond, brought us a long step further in understanding the city’s past with highly evocative bits, painstakingly culled from a variety of likely sources and random readings. I saw her very attractive book Old Singapore, with its remarkable collection of etchings and paintings of an era, which is as difficult to relate to the present day Singapore as Kempe Gowda’s mud-fort-and pettah town is to the present-day Bangalore of multiple sobriquets- the garden city, the Silicon Valley of India, the pub city and so on. Maya has ably put together history, nostalgia, illuminating titbits, and a batch of mothball visuals of all kinds, which make this book a publication worth keeping on one’s bookshelf. I congratulate Maya Jayapal on this precious gift to Bangalorephiles.