DEMOGRAPHICS AND THE POPULATION OF BANGALORE

Bangalore has a distinct mix of people from different backgrounds.

Before British habitation Bangalore must have been some kind of a forest with ferns, shrubs and trees much abound with cobra snakes. Most of these snakes took shelter in the crevices of rocks that lay close to the many lakes and water bodies. The terrain of this place made it easy to create cachment basins for water which is characteristic of bangalore largely because of the land which had a symmetric and regular distriburion of crests and troughs. In the seige of srirangappatanam in the fourth mysore war the madras front was one faction of the british army mobilised from madras to the battle front in srirangapattana describe their 250 mile journey from madras to mysore as one through forests. The marching troops must have passed through bangalore at that time which must have been a forested land and not very significant as a place but for some bsic support in the form of food and temporary hangout for the troops.

What made bangalore an interesting place for the British would be a moot question. Possibly they were looking for an alternative to madras or a support center for the government in Madras and bangalore being fairly not very distant from madras chose it as a settling ground. They set up a cantonment here possibly to store ammunition and thence came many officers and their dependants to this place. This must have happenned not earlier than 1900 in full measure in my opinion. So officially the modern city of Bangalore could be a barely 100 years and more in vintage.

What makes bangalore different from many other cities is its dichotomous heterogenity. Upto the Bangalore cantonment was in the hands of British and the area further in the hands of the mysore maharajah and this city even to this day is yet to come to terms with this inheritance. The british controlled bangalore had a large tamil population brought to this place by their masters for various kinds of vocations and jobs. The mysore controlled bangalore had a distinct mysorean flavour and possibly the local population indulged in business of various kinds for survival. What a distinct contrast. Kannada was possibly the most spoken language in the mysore part while tamil became some kind of a defacto language in the other part. These two parts of bangalore have very distinct culture which is getting smoothened today by large scope for acculturation among the growing up generation today.

Something very significant about the populace today in bangalore is that no single tag or description fits well to describe the population and any such effort would become even more cumbersome in the days to come. One significant event in this dimension is the large influx of students from Northern India into Bangalore in search of education from the 1970's which began to intensify even further in the 1990's when jobs became plentiful for the youth in this city and such events will dictate and have a large scale bearing on the population of Bangalore of the future.