Date with history: Here's a village of rice fields that Bengaluru swallowed

The subaltern Akkithimmanahalli is dwarfed by the upscale Langford Town and Richmond Town on its flanks. The village, overrun by a city, still retains its pocket-sized shops and mud-brick homes whose small, hinged doorways open into the street.

Maps drawn by the British in the 1800s called it ‘Accatimpally’ and indicate that it was located just outside the boundary of the Cantonment. “It is named after a wealthy merchant who owned many rice fields in the area,” said architect and urban expert Naresh Narasimhan, whose office is opposite the Akkithimmanahalli Tank. ‘Akki’ means rice in Kannada and ‘halli’ means village.

So Thimma, popular notion goes, was the name of the person after whom the area is named. Old maps indicate the existence of rice fields fed by the tank.

When the British set up the Cantonment in 1809, homes along the lake were allotted to influential administrators and Anglo-Indians.

The tank was breached in the early 1980s as part of a malaria eradication drive. In its place came the Karnataka State Hockey Stadium and a commercial complex. Part of it is also a playground that is mainly used by children from the localities nearby.

Narasimhan reminisces how the tank was an important source of water. “It was seasonal and when the water dried up, people took the clay to make bricks and homes. They also spent time fishing,” he said, adding that the gate of the tank’s bund was eventually used to lay the foundation stone of a nearby temple.

In her book ‘The Promise of the Metropolis’, historian Janaki Nair points out how Bengaluru’s many tanks eventually became only muddy puddles. Moving away from providing water to fields and gardens, they were put to new uses of serving as an oasis of ‘nature’ in the urban landscape. But as the demand for housing or commercial spaces grew, tanks like Akkithimmanahalli were built upon. Subsequently, the adjoining villages also shrunk.

Old-time residents remember Akkithimmanahalli’s many communities lived in groups of about 20 households each, including an upper caste cluster called the agrahara. Today, only a handful of houses tucked away in a faceless street is all that is left of the village.