Karnataka historical timeline

Karnataka was the seat of several of southern India’s most consequential dynasties.

Chalukyas and Hoysalas

From the sixth century the Chalukyas at Badami and Pattadakal experimented with temple form, building northern and southern styles side by side in what amounts to an architectural laboratory. From the eleventh century the Hoysalas developed a star-shaped plan and a soapstone carving technique of extraordinary density, at Belur, Halebidu and Somanathapura.

Vijayanagara

Founded in 1336, the empire ruled most of southern India for over two centuries and its capital at Hampi grew to perhaps half a million people — Portuguese and Persian visitors described a city with bazaars selling diamonds by the measure and an irrigation system of great sophistication. In 1565 a coalition of Deccan sultanates defeated its army at Talikota and then sacked the city over several months. It was abandoned, and what survives survives because nobody built over it.

Mysore and Tipu

The Wodeyar dynasty ruled Mysore from the fourteenth century. In the eighteenth, Haidar Ali and his son Tipu Sultan built a formidable state that fought the British in four wars, deployed iron-cased rockets that the British copied, and ended with Tipu’s death at Srirangapatna in 1799.

What Hampi was

Persian and Portuguese accounts agree on the scale. Abdur Razzaq, sent from Herat in 1443, described seven concentric walls and bazaars where jewellers sold openly; Domingo Paes, a Portuguese horse trader writing around 1520, said the city was as large as Rome and better provisioned than anywhere he had seen. Modern estimates put the population at several hundred thousand, supported by an irrigation network of canals and tanks that partly still functions.

Modern

Bengaluru was a cantonment and a centre of public-sector science and aerospace, which supplied the engineers when the software industry arrived in the 1990s.