App-assisted tour of Bengaluru’s literary heritage

Author Zac O’Yeah has curated a self-guided walk to explore Bengaluru’s literary heritage via an app. The walk features 27 stops at book markets, bookstores, libraries, and buildings with literary connections, spanning 9 kilometres from the Pete area to Cantonment. Each stop comes with a story, recorded in O’Yeah’s voice.

O’Yeah, a Swedish writer who has lived in Bengaluru for 33 years, is best known for his ‘Majestic’ trilogy of detective novels.

The walk, which includes audio and text stories, maps, and reference photos, can be booked on the Tourific app for Rs 330. It lasts 2.5 hours without breaks and 6 hours with stopovers at recommended eateries, bookshops, and restrooms. Users can also complete it over multiple days.

Metrolife tried the walk on a Wednesday morning. We passed over a dozen second-hand bookshops on Avenue Road to reach the first stop, Rice Memorial Church. The bright red compound with white walls was closed. “It opens from 8.30 am to 10.30 am on Sundays,” the security guard said. Bhavana Jayanth, co-founder of the app, later said they would specify timings and add longer narrations to improve the walk, which went live in early December.

“Originally founded as the London Mission’s Canarese Chapel in the 1800s, it was later renamed to honour a missionary called Rice,” O’Yeah narrates. Rice’s son, Benjamin Lewis Rice, would go on to author key works on local history, document Karnataka’s veeragallu (hero stones), and start the Bowring Institute, which likely houses Bengaluru’s largest library, he adds.

O’Yeah starts the walk on Avenue Road to remind people of the city’s literary past. “Literature is not just about printed books. Hero stones are literary records too, sort of graphic novels of warriors, featuring old Kannada script,” he explains.

Mysore Bank Circle, our next stop, didn’t have a literary story, but O’Yeah included it to “honour the city’s cultural heritage” as the walk passes through it. When Avenue Road was still Chandra Beedi, this area was probably Kempe Gowda’s preferred entrance to Bangalore, he says on the app.

We headed towards Nrupathunga Road for The Mythic Society, our third stop. The app narrated stories about the British army’s attempt to breach the ‘Ulsoor Gate’, books on Indian culture available at Rashtrotthana Sahitya, and bazaars named after articles they were trading, from clay pots to silk weaves and salt. The Mythic Society has a library of over 40,000 books on South India’s history and a digital project to document hero stones.

The CBD leg of the walk covers the statue of Ferdinand Kittel, a German who compiled a Kannada-English dictionary with around 70,000 words; an office building that was the former residence of wildlife writer Kenneth Anderson; and a mall that was once a public reading room visited by Winston Churchill.

Available on Tourific app on Android and iOS.