Entry 4 -- A Palace of a Thousand Wonders

Mysore Palace

the roofline of Mysore Palace; you can see several different cultural influences at once in this architecture

the Mysore Palace illuminated at sunset

Mysore Palace: A lesson in history, and culture

As part of an organized tour for the Mount Allison group, VIIS staff arranged a tour of the Mysore Palace for us.  This was intended to open us to the history of the Wodeyar dynasty, who ruled in this region for over five hundred years, and specifically the history of Mysore; it accomplished this task, but along the way we also learned a little more about Indian culture in the present day.

Mysore Palace is an impressive royal structure; the fourth to occupy the present site in downtown Mysore, it was completed in 1912.  British architect Henry Irwin designed the structure, drawing on Indian, Mughal, British and Italian architectural forms.  A sweeping front entrance, surrounded by magnificent gardens and an outer wall and gateway, is made even more magnificent each Sunday evening when it is lit, along with the walls and gates, by over 100,000 lights, outlining its stunning architectural form, its towers and domes.

I am told by the Director that the Palace can see as many as ten to fifteen thousand visitors a day; with an impressive annual visitor rate of close to 3 million, rivalled in India only by the Taj Mahal,  regular daily numbers would certainly be high. And the day we visited, it felt like it must be an all-time daily high, but perhaps that’s just the Canadian in me reflecting on the day.  And it was hot, but that is certainly a recurring theme here.

Our visit was not like that of the average Palace visitor.  We began in the waiting area of the Executive Director, and from there we were taken on a private tour; viewing things unseen by the public, we would occasionally emerge through a doorway and join the throngs of people making their way through the main hallways of the Palace, and then we would be ushered through another semi-secret doorway into an area not toured by regular visitors. The only problem was, every time a door was opened for us, crowds of people would try simply follow us, huge numbers of people pushing their way along the route we were going, while we were left to close the door behind us.  I feared a couple of times that we were going to start a mass riot, but thankfully it never happened.  I did count the people walking past us in a huge hallway at one point, and in the space of one minute well over hundred people passed us in the hall where we were admiring portraits of the great Wodeyar king, Krishnaraja IV.  And all at twenty rupees (not quite forty cents at current exchange rates) a head, children free.  And all in temperatures in the mid-thirties, with high humidity, but I am sure I have mentioned the heat already. 

We saw the collection of arms and armour, some dating back to the eighteenth century and the famous Tipu Sultan, who died in the Fourth Mysore War, the last stand against the British in 1799.  I must admit, I cannot imagine wearing any kind of metal armour in the Indian heat and humidity; one can only hope that battles were fought in the somewhat more moderate winter season.  The game room held stuffed tigers, leopards, bears, and two stuffed elephant heads.  The Palace, as a whole, seemed an interesting blend of late Indian royalty combined with elements of British high Victorian neo-imperialist sensibilities.  In one central room, huge iron pillars (cast in Scotland and shipped to India) carefully painted to hide their construction form, seemed to rise up to the very heavens. Architectural detail in every throne room, receiving room, salon, was superb, finely carved and polished teak adorning many rooms.

The whole tour was interpreted by an historian, who teaches at the Institute.  Leading us into the middle of a massive, moving crowd, he would suddenly stop and ask that we stop; as hundreds of people surged around us on either side, he would explain detail of a pillar, or picture, or point of history.  Children would look at us, and point at us, and sometimes smile shyly, and I felt at any moment I might be swept away in the crowds, or lose one of my students in the crush.  But no one seemed to mind; the people surged on, as though there was no end in sight, and then we would vanish through another door and try to stem the rush behind us.

At last we finished, struggling to remember even half of what we had seen or heard.  Resting in the  Board Room, attendants rushed in to bring us cold, refreshing bottled water; running my thumb nail around the cap, I quickly realized that the bottle had been previously opened (and probably re-filled), and I could see the students also examining their bottles cautiously.  Having been in India only a week, with no immunity to local water, one by one we put our bottles on the tables in front of us; desperately thirsty, we longed now to return to the van where we had left our own bottles of water.

And we planned to return on our own, to take in the gardens, to watch the elephants and possibly ride one, and possibly to plunge into the crowds once more and be carried through the palace with the people who proudly see the palace as a great emblem of a great and noble Indian history.