How this secretariat building came to be

A view of the New Public Offices building. Photos by author

What is common to the following Bengaluru buildings: Tipu Sultan’s Palace, the High Court and a building on Nrupathunga Road? Apart from all of them being handsome structures, all of them have also been, or indeed still function as, secretariat buildings. Their architecture also reflects the times they were built in.

In 1831, when the British East India Company took over the administration of the Mysore kingdom, they shifted the administrative capital to Bengaluru. A building was now needed to accommodate government departmental offices. British eyes turned to Tipu’s Palace in the fort of Bengaluru, which was repurposed to function as the secretariat.

But within a couple of decades, the administration had outgrown Tipu’s Palace. A new building to house these offices was proposed, which was eventually built only in the 1860s. This, of course, is now the High Court building in Cubbon Park, a building that some old-timers still call Attara Kacheri. In 1868, most government offices moved to this building, which was officially called the Mysore Public Offices.

A little over a decade after the Public Offices were built came the Rendition, the Act by which in 1881, the administration of the kingdom reverted to the Maharaja, and Bengaluru once again became a divided city. The Civil and Military Station — which comprised the cantonment areas — came under the British Government, and the rest of the city under the Mysore administration. Cubbon Park came under the Maharaja’s administration, which meant the Public Offices became the secretariat for the Mysore kingdom’s departmental offices, while those of the British Civil and Military Station had to move out.

But by the early 1900s, even the Public Offices in the park could no longer accommodate all the departments and their officers. Several departments had to occupy rented buildings, while those in the Public Offices complained of a space crunch. For example, in 1912, a disgruntled officer wrote to the then Dewan, “Men have to work in dark corners where there is no sufficient light and the seats have to be arranged so closely that sufficient room is not available to keep neatly arranged all papers and registers which the men require for constant reference. Much inconvenience and loss of time thus result and the health and eyesight of the men suffer a great deal.”

Responding to the need for more office space, a new building was erected which opened in 1921 and was called the New Public Offices. One hundred and two years later, the building still retains the prefix ‘New’!

New Public Offices houses the offices of the Department of Public Instruction, Department of Treasuries and others. The wooden staircases and the high-ceilinged rooms are always full of teachers, officers and visitors traipsing up and down.

Western, local elements

The symmetrical, U-shaped building has a basement, ground and first floor, with a portico that strongly emphasises the entrance. Highlighted in green above the entrance is the emblem of the Mysore State, the gandabherunda flanked by two elephant-lion hybrids.

The two wings on either side of the entrance porch have rooms opening out onto a colonnaded hallway. The square columns create rectangular openings (now all grilled), with sloping overhangs or chajjas. Above them are semicircular pediments with small circular windows. A prominent, projecting eave with decorative brackets runs around the entire building. Windows on the ends of the building are highlighted with projecting hoods, balcony-like pediments topped with cupolas, and prominent, decorative sills. Cupolas also abound, in miniature, all along the parapet, and above the portico.

Architects Jon Lang, Madhavi Desai and Miki Desai in their book Architecture and Independence find such details very reminiscent of and displaying “a similar aesthetic philosophy” to Edwin Lutyens’ work in New Delhi.

Public buildings in Bangalore that were built by the Mysore government in the 1900s often reflect a syncretism in their architecture, incorporating western and local elements in their facades and planning. In the case of the New Public Offices though, the effort seems to have been to exert a particularly Indian identity.

Certainly, as T P Issar says in his book The City Beautiful, the New Public Offices is a striking “Indian-style” building, one that is “a beautiful and stately composition which does justice to what it represents.”

(Meera Iyer is the author of ‘Discovering Bengaluru’ and the Convenor of INTACH Bengaluru Chapter.)