Mysore Palace: The Story of Amba Vilas

For a few minutes each Sunday evening, and every night through the Dasara festival, the outline of Mysore's royal palace ignites. Close to a hundred thousand small bulbs trace every dome, arch, cornice and turret of the Amba Vilas Palace, and the grey daytime building becomes a glowing diagram of itself against the dark. It is the single image most visitors carry away from the city — and it belongs to a building barely a century old, raised from the ashes of an older palace that burned down on a wedding night in 1897. This is the story of that fire, the rebuild it forced, and the festival the palace was made to stage.

A palace that burned

There has been a palace on this site inside the old fort for centuries, and it has burned and been rebuilt more than once. The version that stood at the end of the nineteenth century was largely of wood, and on 20 February 1897 — during the wedding celebrations of Princess Jayalakshammanni, a daughter of the royal house — fire broke out and destroyed much of the old structure. The Wodeyar maharaja of the day, Krishnaraja Wodeyar IV, was still a boy, so it fell to the regent, the Maharani Kempananjammanni Devi, to commission a replacement. Rather than patch the ruin, the court resolved to build a wholly new palace in stone, one that could not burn so easily and that would announce the standing of the Mysore throne. Construction began the same year the old palace was lost.

Henry Irwin's rebuild

The commission went to Henry Irwin, the British consulting architect to the Madras government, whose work runs through the public buildings of late-colonial south India. Irwin designed in the Indo-Saracenic manner then in favour for princely commissions — a deliberate blend that set pink-grey domes and deep arcades of the Islamic and Rajput tradition over a plan and framing that owed something to Gothic and to Hoysala temple design. Grey granite walls carry domed towers of pink marble; a five-storey tower rises over the centre, capped by a gilded dome. The building was finished in 1912, though the court went on adding to it for years after.

Inside, the craft is the point. The public Durbar Hall opens as a long pillared gallery looking out over the grounds, its ceiling and columns worked in colour and gold. The octagonal Kalyana Mantapa, the marriage pavilion, is roofed by a stained-glass dome of peacock motifs carried on cast-iron pillars shipped from Glasgow — the light through it is the interior's signature moment. Beyond are carved rosewood and silver doors, mosaic floors, oil paintings of the royal Dasara processions, and the ornate rooms where the maharaja received guests. Interior photography is not allowed, and footwear is left at a counter before you go in, so the inside stays in memory rather than on a phone.

The Wodeyars and Mysore Dasara

The palace was never only a residence; it was a stage for a festival. The Wodeyars have marked Dasara — the ten-day Navaratri that celebrates the goddess Chamundeshwari's victory over the demon Mahishasura — since the early seventeenth century, inheriting the rite from the Vijayanagara kings. For the nine nights the palace blazes with light, and inside, the fabled golden throne of the Wodeyars is assembled and displayed, brought out only for this season. The whole city takes its cue from the hill above it: Chamundeshwari, enshrined at Chamundi Hills, is the family and state deity, and Mysuru itself takes its name from the demon she slew. On the tenth day, Vijayadashami, the Jamboo Savari procession forms up — a lead elephant carrying the golden howdah with the goddess's idol, escorted by caparisoned elephants, horses, camels and massed bands, moving out from the palace through the city to the Bannimantap parade ground.

Seeing it today

The Mysore Palace is open through the day and takes an hour or two to walk; the trick is to time your visit for the Sunday, holiday or Dasara-evening illumination, which runs briefly after dusk. A short walk west, the older Jaganmohan Palace of 1861 — an earlier Wodeyar residence — now holds the Jayachamarajendra Art Gallery, with paintings by Raja Ravi Varma and the Mysore school, and makes a quieter counterpoint to the main building. To close the loop of the story, drive up to Chamundi Hills for the goddess whose festival the palace exists to stage, and for the view back down over the city and the palace at its heart.

A palace built to be seen at its best on festival nights rewards a visitor who plans around them — an evening for the illumination, a morning inside for the halls and the peacock dome. If you want to fit it into a fuller itinerary of the royal city, our guide:mysore-in-2-days sets out an order for the palace, Chamundi Hills and the museums, and guide:places-to-visit-in-mysore rounds up what else is worth your time nearby.