Bengaluru

Bengaluru's recorded history begins with a hero stone and with the Western Ganga and Chola periods, but the city dates itself to 1537, when the local chief Kempe Gowda I, a vassal of the Vijayanagara empire, built a mud fort and laid out the market streets, or petes, that still carry trade names such as Chickpet and Balepet. Four towers raised by his successor Kempe Gowda II marked the limits the town was expected to reach. After Vijayanagara's defeat the town passed to the Bijapur sultanate, then to the Mughals, who leased it to the Wodeyars of Mysore in 1687.

Hyder Ali and his son Tipu Sultan rebuilt the fort in stone and planted the garden that became Lal Bagh. British forces stormed the fort in 1791 during the Third Anglo-Mysore War, and after Tipu's death in 1799 the kingdom returned to the Wodeyars under British oversight. In 1809 a cantonment was established north-east of the old town, and for more than a century Bengaluru grew as two distinct places: the Kannada-speaking pete around the fort, and a garrison suburb of bungalows, churches, parade grounds and the shops of MG Road. The climate earned it a reputation as a retirement town and a garden city.

After independence public-sector science and engineering institutions concentrated here — aircraft, machine tools, telecommunications, space and defence research — giving the city a large pool of engineers. That base drew the software industry from the 1980s, and through the 1990s and 2000s Bengaluru became the centre of Indian information technology and later of its start-up sector. The population multiplied, Whitefield and Electronic City filled with campuses, and the official name changed from Bangalore to Bengaluru in 2014.

Bengaluru is a Kannada city that has absorbed most of India. Kannada literature, theatre and the Sandalwood film industry are centred here, and language politics matter: campaigns for Kannada signage and hiring recur, and long-running river water disputes with Tamil Nadu over the Kaveri periodically bring protests. At the same time roughly half the residents have roots elsewhere, and Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam and English are all heard in a single street.

Two cultural streams run side by side. The southern and western neighbourhoods keep temple festivals, Carnatic music sabhas, sari and flower markets and old tiffin rooms; the eastern half is where pubs, live music, stand-up comedy, independent theatre and design studios cluster. The city claims India's microbrewery culture as its own, and it has long been a centre of rock and metal bands as well as of classical dance schools. Sport is followed intensely, with cricket at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in the middle of town.

Manners are informal by Indian standards. People are addressed in English as often as in Kannada, work hours are late, and weekend life revolves around restaurants, parks and lakes rather than around a single centre. Older residents speak with some regret of the garden city of tanks, trees and single-storey bungalows that the last three decades have largely replaced, and tree-felling for road widening is a reliable source of public campaigns.

About 8.4 million people lived in the city at the 2011 census and the urban area has grown well past that since, making it one of India's largest and, for much of the past decade, fastest-growing metropolitan areas. Software and services dominate the economy, alongside aerospace, defence electronics, machine tools, biotechnology and one of the country's densest concentrations of start-ups, but a very large informal workforce of drivers, construction workers, delivery riders and domestic staff keeps it running.

The day starts early, with filter coffee and idli or dosa at a darshini — a stand-up tiffin counter — and walkers circling Cubbon Park and the lakes. Offices in Whitefield, Electronic City and Outer Ring Road campuses run late, which is why evening traffic lasts for hours and why restaurants fill after nine. Many young workers live in shared flats or paying-guest accommodation near the tech corridors; families cluster in the older southern and northern layouts.

The city's pressures are well documented: congestion, the state of the roads, flooding when drains and built-over lake beds cannot take a downpour, and water supply, which depends on pumping the Kaveri uphill from far away and on groundwater that has fallen sharply. Rubbish disposal and the loss of tree cover are recurring local political issues, and the metro's expansion is the main hope attached to the traffic problem.

Bengaluru's everyday food is Karnataka vegetarian cooking served fast. The darshini, a stand-up counter where customers pay first and eat at chest-high tables, was popularised in this city and put idli, vada, khara bath and kesari bath — the two together called chow chow bath — within everyone's reach. The Bangalore-style masala dosa is thicker and softer than the Tamil version, red with chilli-garlic paste inside and generous with butter; benne dosa, fried in butter, is a speciality brought from Davanagere. Rava idli, a semolina idli, is credited to a city tiffin room during wartime rice shortages.

Lunch for many is a thali or a plate of bisi bele bath, rice cooked with lentils, tamarind and a distinctive spice blend, or ragi mudde, stiff balls of finger millet eaten with a thin lamb or vegetable curry in the countryside around the city. Meat-eating Bengaluru has its own tradition of military hotels, plain Kannada eating houses serving mutton curry, pepper fry and donne biryani, the latter ladled into a bowl of dried leaves. Shivajinagar and Mosque Road add kebabs, biryani and Ramadan-night sweets.

Filter coffee, decoction mixed with hot milk and poured between a steel tumbler and its dish, is the city's drink, sold at tiffin rooms and at small standing counters everywhere. Mysore pak, obbattu or holige — a flat sweet stuffed pancake — and Dharwad pedha are the sweets most often bought. The evening food street at V. V. Puram fries snacks until late, and the microbreweries of Indiranagar and Koramangala have given the city a beer culture unusual in India.