The queen and us: A 130-year-old story

Last week, Queen Elizabeth II passed at the age of 96, having reigned longer than any female head of state in history

Last week, Queen Elizabeth II passed at the age of 96, having reigned longer than any female head of state in history. Expectedly, the news was followed by a flurry of WhatsApp forwards in the jewel in the imperial crown – and we don’t mean the Koh-i-Noor – about the queen’s visits to India over the years. Of particular interest to us in this fair city was her visit to Bangalore in 1961.

Roopa Pai (HT Archive)

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that the queen was met off the plane by the last Maharaja of Mysore, Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar, then serving as governor of the reorganized Mysore state, created in 1956. She was then part of a royal cavalcade that was flagged off at the Vidhana Soudha and wound its way down MG Road.

During her brief visit, the queen would visit three Bangalore institutions. The first was the India HQ of the then 150-year-old Bible Society of India, where she was gifted a Hindi translation of the Bible. Founded in Serampore in 1811, the Society had the same objectives as its London parent – to coordinate the translation and supply of the Bible to ‘existing Christians, in Portuguese, Tamil, Cingalese (Sinhalese), Malayalam, and Canarese (Kannada)’. In 1950, the Society’s headquarters moved from Nagpur to Bangalore, where it was housed in an incongruous Tudor-style building built in 1912 to commemorate its centenary. The building, located at the junction of St Mark’s Road and MG Road, now houses a 20th century American institution – the Hard Rock Café.

The second institution was Koshy’s, a decade old and already iconic, where the Queen dined on south Indian dishes alongside the café’s signature roast chicken. The third was the over 200-year-old Lalbagh, where she planted a sapling of Araucaria cookii or New Caledonian Pine (or, as the locals would have it, ‘Christmas tree’), to the west of the Glass House. Today, that sapling is one of the tallest trees in the garden.

Speaking of the Glass House, it was Elizabeth’s granduncle, Prince Albert Victor, who laid its foundation stone on 30th November 1889, when he was on a visit to Bangalore. Sadly, Albert Victor was dead by January 1892, just 28, of gonorrhoea. During his short, tragic life, he was considered slow by his tutors, suspected to be involved in a male brothel scandal, rejected by his lady loves, and even believed, for a while, to have been the serial killer of the London East End, Jack the Ripper!

Queen Victoria and her son, King Edward VII (Albert Victor’s father), have their own connections with Bengaluru. Their statues grace either end of the stretch of Cubbon Park that runs parallel to the west wall of the Chinnaswamy Stadium. Victoria never visited India, but Edward did, in 1875-76, becoming the first British royal to arrive after the Crown had taken charge in 1858. He was forced to skip Bangalore because of the cholera raging hereabouts, but his second son, George Frederick, later King George V (Elizabeth’s grandfather), did visit in 1906, to unveil the aforementioned statue of his grandmother.

As for Elizabeth’s eldest, Charles, he first visited the city in 1992, when he sent the Raj Bhavan a list of his (rather avant-garde, for its time) food preferences – brown rice, brown bread, sea food, no coffee, no chocolate (ever wondered about the secret of the Windsors’ longevity? Now you know). More recently, the new king celebrated his 71st birthday in the city, enjoying appams, dosas and yoga as part of a six-day rejuvenation programme at a wellness facility recommended by Queen Consort Camilla, who accompanied him there.

(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)