Bangalore Fort History

These walls of the Bangalore Fort stand today in silence, but in the year 1791, they shook with cannon fire, screams, prayers, and betrayal. Every block of granite you see here once absorbed the shock of iron shot fired by the armies of the British East India Company, as they advanced step by step to break the spine of the Kingdom of Mysore during the Third Anglo-Mysore War.

The Third Anglo-Mysore War (1790 / 1792) was not a misunderstanding or a border dispute. It was a deliberate, multinational assault on a sovereign Indian power that dared to resist British expansion. Hz Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore and son of Haider Ali, had committed what the Company considered an unforgivable mistake: he refused to submit. He built alliances with the French, modernised his army, introduced iron-cased rockets, reformed administration, and ruled as an independent monarch in a land the British believed was destined to be theirs.

For this defiance, Mysore was surrounded.

By 1790, a massive coalition had formed against Tipu Sultan the British East India Company, the Marathas, and the Nizam of Hyderabad. Three armies closed in from different directions. The plan was clear: isolate Sultan, crush his strongholds.

And Bangalore was the key.

Bangalore was not a peripheral town. It was a strategic fortress city, guarding the eastern approaches to Tipu Sultan’s capital, Srirangapatna. The fort whose walls you see here had been strengthened under Haider Ali and Tipu Sultan, built with thick stone ramparts, rounded bastions, and deep defensive logic designed to absorb artillery fire. These very curves you see in the walls were not aesthetic they were meant to deflect cannonballs, to make siege warfare slow, costly, and bloody.

In early 1791, Lord Charles Cornwallis the same man who had surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown marched on Bangalore with a massive British force. The irony is cruel: a general defeated by colonial resistance in America now came to extinguish it in India.

The Siege of Bangalore began in February 1791.

British artillery pounded these walls relentlessly. Cannon smoke filled the air. Stone cracked. Dust and fragments rained down inside the fort. Mysorean defenders Indian soldiers, many poorly remembered by history manned the ramparts under constant fire. They repaired breaches at night. They dragged guns into position. They fought not for empire, but for home.

Hz Tipu Sultan himself was not inside Bangalore at this moment, he was maneuvering near Kengeri, trying desperately to confront multiple invading armies at once. This was one of the great tragedies of the war: Mysore was strong, but outnumbered and encircled.

On the night of 21 March 1791, the British launched their final assault.

They targeted a breach in the fort walls, very likely along stretches like the ones you photographed. Under cover of darkness, British troops stormed forward, climbing rubble, slipping on blood and broken stone. The defenders fought fiercely, but numbers and firepower told. By morning, Bangalore had fallen.

The fall of Bangalore was not just a military defeat. It was a psychological wound. It opened the road to Srirangapatna. It proved that even Tipu Sultan’s fortresses could be taken at terrible cost, but taken nonetheless.

And yet, even in defeat, these walls did not collapse easily.

They held long enough to bleed the invaders. They forced the British to commit enormous resources. Cornwallis himself admitted the difficulty of the campaign. Mysore was not conquered because it was weak it was conquered because it stood alone.

After Bangalore fell, Cornwallis marched toward Srirangapatna, but monsoon rains, supply failures, and Mysorean resistance forced him to retreat. The war dragged on another year. Only in 1792, surrounded again and betrayed again, did Sultan sign the Treaty of Srirangapatna, surrendering half his territory and handing over two of his sons as hostages.

The Third Anglo-Mysore War ended, but the fate of Mysore was sealed.

Eight years later, Hz Tipu Sultan would be Martyred fighting on the walls of Srirangapatna, sword in hand, refusing to flee. The British would call him a tyrant. But Real Indian Patriots would always remember him as The Tiger of Mysore.

And these walls?

They remained.

Today, traffic passes. Vendors gather. People walk without looking up. But the stone still remembers. It remembers the thunder of cannons. The prayers whispered by defenders at dawn. The moment when Bangalore, once free, fell into the long shadow of colonial rule.

These walls are not ruins.

They are the evidence 

Evidence that resistance existed.

Evidence that India was not handed over quietly.

Evidence that before the empire rose,

it had to break itself against stones like these.