Bengaluru's long history of backing the right horse

Hindustan Times

15-07-2025

This past Sunday, July 13, the most glittering race of the 105-year-old Bangalore Turf Club's summer season, the Zavaray S Poonawalla Bangalore Summer Derby, was won by the favourite, Fynbos, who, with this win, claimed her fourth championship. The excitement that continues to surround the racing season is an ode to the city's longstanding equestrian culture, lovingly stewarded by its rulers and administrators through the ages. If Tipu Sultan is credited with founding the Kunigal Stud Farm, the oldest continuously operated stud farm in India, the Mysore Maharajas, like several British Residents and Commissioners of Mysore, were passionate horsemen. More recently, homegrown business baron Vijay Mallya revitalised horse racing in the city, after his company, United Racing & Bloodstock Breeders Ltd, won the bid for the lease of the Kunigal Stud Farm for 30 years (1992-2022). This Sunday, the Zavaray S Poonawalla Bangalore Summer Derby, was won by the favourite, Fynbos, who, with this win, claimed her fourth championship (HT photo)
Coincidentally, yesterday, July 14, was the 231st birthday of one such horse-loving Mysore royal, Mummadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar; it was during his reign that the very first recorded horse race in Bangalore was run, on October 14, 1811. Unfortunately for Mummadi, his significant contributions to the fashioning of Mysore into a culturally vibrant, educationally forward, liberal-thinking, inclusive, and yes, horse-loving space, the very attributes that define Bangalore today, are not celebrated enough. For although his reign lasted close to seven decades (1799-1868), it fell to Mummadi's fate that he would only be the titular ruler for 37 of those years.
Mummadi was only five when Tipu Sultan was killed in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War in May 1799, ending the 40-year-long reign of Hyder Ali and Tipu. Throughout this period, Mummadi's adoptive grandmother, the Chanakya-esque Maharani Lakshmi Ammanni Devi, had kept the possibility of a Wadiyar scion reclaiming the Mysore throne alive, parleying with the British and to secure this for her family. On June 30, less than two months after Tipu's death, her dream was realized when Mummadi was crowned king. In January 1811, the British Resident in the Mysore court, Arthur Henry Cole (after whom Bangalore's Cole's Road and Cole's Park are named), transferred the reins of state to 16-year-old Mummadi. It was with Cole that Mummadi came to the race course in Bangalore, then located in Domlur, for the city's first-recorded racing fixture.
In 1824, Aga Aly Asker, youngest of three brothers from a horse-breeding family of Shiraz in Persia, arrived with his horses in Bangalore Cantonment, having heard that there was brisk business to be done here. To Aly Asker's delight, not only was he able to garner British custom, he also went on to become equestrian advisor, and good friend, to the deposed Maharaja. By this time, however, the inexperienced Mummadi, not quite cut out for the cloak-and-dagger world of politics, was battling internal rebellions and uprisings at every turn. In 1831, his government was dismissed, and Mysore came under the direct control of the British; it would not return to the Wadiyars until 1881, 13 years after Mummadi's passing. Perhaps relieved that he no longer had to deal with the exigencies of administering a kingdom, Mummadi proceeded to write, support artists and musicians, play board games, solve thorny never-solved chess puzzles, and enjoy his horses.
In 1834, an East India company officer called Mark Cubbon took over as Chief Commissioner of Mysore. He was fair-minded, had great respect for the local language and customs, and loved horses to distraction with a passion. Slowly but surely, he won the trust of both the king his government had dismissed, and the Persian horse-whisperer. That friendship, and others like it, would set the tone for the city to come – one in which provenance, political positions, and cultural differences would be set aside in the joy of a shared passion and a common humanity. Simple horse sense, what?
(Roopa Pai is a writer who has carried on a longtime love affair with her hometown Bengaluru)