Bengaluru Fort and Delhi Gate

Bengaluru Fort is the historical seed of the city. In 1537 Kempe Gowda I, a feudatory of the Vijayanagara empire, raised a mud fort on this ground in what is now the Old City near KR Market, in Karnataka, India, and laid out the pete (market town) around it. The fort passed to the Mysore rulers and then to Hyder Ali, who rebuilt the walls in stone around 1761; his son Tipu Sultan strengthened the defences and used the fort as an arsenal and administrative base. On 21 March 1791, during the Third Anglo-Mysore War, British forces under Lord Cornwallis breached the walls and took the fort, an episode that shaped the balance of power in southern India. Very little of the original circuit survives. The principal remnants are the Delhi Gate, a stone gateway that faced the road toward Delhi and Mysore-era trade routes, and one bastion, both standing today beside busy Fort Road in Kalasipalya. The architecture is military rather than ornamental: massive laterite and granite masonry, an arched gateway passage, and loopholed parapets typical of eighteenth-century Mysore fortification. There is no museum inside and no curated interpretation on the ground; the site is understood best as an open-air monument whose meaning comes from the surrounding streets, which still follow the layout of the old pete. Nearby, Tipu Sultan's Summer Palace and the Kote Venkataramana Temple sit within the former fort area and make a natural walking circuit. Much of the fort was demolished during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the city expanded, and the surviving gate and bastion are protected as monuments, though traffic, hoardings and surrounding commerce leave them in a cramped urban setting. Visitors should treat the gate as a short stop rather than a destination, ideally combined with the palace and temple, and should note that the surroundings are one of the most crowded parts of Bengaluru.