A milestone book on Bengaluru’s historiography, Bangalore Through the Centuries, out of print for long and enjoying a cult status among bibliophiles and city history enthusiasts, is finally available again in a new reprint after 53 years. The reprint is already a hit, and the entire print run has been sold out.
The only print edition of the work was brought out in 1970. It is an amateur historiography of the city by M. Fazlul Hasan, who was a retired Administrative Officer of the Revenue Department of Bangalore Municipal Corporation (BMC). The book, then priced at ₹25, was reportedly usually gifted at BMC events back then. However, it went out of print, and a rarely used copy of the book was being sold for as high as ₹10,000, said Krishna Gowda of Bookworm, a leading bookstore on Church Street. He added that some sellers had demanded even as high as ₹25,000 for a copy of the book.
Dharmaraya temple at Halasuru gate featured in the book.
The book has now been edited, enlarged, and re-published by leading architect Naresh Narasimhan. “It’s the first such work in English on the city and is a very well-written book and a work of passion and love. I had read the book long back, probably in the 1980s and had loved the book. I knew the book was not available. A chance encounter with Fazlul Hasan’s son led me to republish the book again,” he said.
The book has been edited to remove typos; it now has annotations and includes a lot of illustrations and photographs of previously unseen paintings and maps. “We have included a lot of images, mostly of paintings and illustrations, previously unseen, as they are from a previously unexplored source — The Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata,” said Mr. Narasimhan.
Fazlul Hasan’s interest in the city’s history is said to have been triggered by an inscription he found on a stone in a relative’s farm at Sunkenahalli on Bull Temple Road, and later worked on the city’s history. The book starts with the old Pete Bengaluru established by Kempe Gowda in 1537 and takes the reader through its rollercoaster ride — from being captured by the Mughals, sold to the Mysore king Chikkadevaraja Wadiyar, and the war between Tipu Sultan and the British, to becoming a cantonment town and the city’s post-independence sojourn.
Historian Janaki Nair, the author of one of the authoritative works on the city, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s Twentieth Century, said the book was a commendable work. “It is a warmly written book, and the love for the city comes through the writing, but at the same time very well grounded despite not being written by a professional historian. I have relied on the book myself and I am very happy that it is reprinted and is available for readers again,” she said.
