Virupakshapura Ancient Inscription Stones

Scattered across the older villages absorbed into greater Bengaluru are numerous viragallu — hero stones — and inscribed slabs recording grants of land to temples, the deeds of local chieftains, or the deaths of villagers who fell defending cattle and crops. The inscription stones associated with the old settlement referred to here as Virupakshapura, in the Kodigehalli area, belong to this class of epigraphic record: modest, easily overlooked stones that nonetheless preserve fragments of Karnataka’s medieval administrative and social history in a script and language often now illegible to casual visitors.

Such stones are commonly dated by their script and iconography to the Ganga, Chola, or Hoysala periods that successively governed the Bengaluru region before the Vijayanagara Empire’s rise, and they are among the few tangible clues to how these now-urbanised localities were organised centuries before the city grew around them.

Getting there: The stones stand within the older core of Kodigehalli, close to the Kodigehalli Post Office in north Bengaluru.