Bangalore's official name became Bengaluru in 2014
Capital of Karnataka, the city formerly officially Bangalore until 1 November 2014 holds archaeological traces of settlement as early as 4000 BCE. British capture in the Anglo-Mysore Wars folded it into princely Mysore; by 2024 the metro GDP was estimated near 590 billion dollars.
Bengaluru, officially Bangalore until 1 November 2014, is Karnataka's capital and largest city; the 2011 census counted 8.4 million residents, third in India and first in the south. Stone Age finds at Jalahalli, Sidhapura and Jadigenahalli point to settlement around 4000 BCE, Iron Age burial mounds date to about 800 BCE, and Roman coins bearing Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula and Claudius, unearthed at Yeswanthpur and HAL, show trade links with Rome.
The oldest written use of the name is an Old Kannada hero stone from 890 CE at Begur, recording a battle under the Western Ganga dynasty, which ruled the area from the fourth century until the Cholas took over in the early eleventh. A popular tale credits the Hoysala king Veera Ballala II with naming it the town of boiled beans after an old woman fed him, but the story is apocryphal. The Hoysala king Vishnuvardhana beat the Cholas at Talakad in 1117. The city proper dates from 1537, when Kempe Gowda I, a chieftain loyal to Vijayanagara, built a mud-brick fort that became its core, and his successor marked the boundaries with four towers.
British forces under Charles Cornwallis took the fort on 21 March 1791 in the Third Anglo-Mysore War; after Tipu's death in 1799 the town passed to the princely state of Mysore, and the British set up a garrison in 1809. The rename was proposed by the writer U. R. Ananthamurthy and accepted by the state government on 11 December 2005, but took effect only in 2014. Today it is India's largest IT hub and exporter, and its metro economy was estimated at about 590.4 billion dollars in 2024.
Source: Bengaluru
