Mysore City Walk — Devaraja Market, Silk Weavers and the City Behind the Yoga

Most visitors to Mysore come for the yoga and barely see the city. This is a mistake. Mysore is an extraordinary place: a former royal capital whose Maharaja still lives in the palace, a city of silk weavers who have produced Mysore silk on handlooms for 400 years, and home to Devaraja Market — one of India's great covered markets, where jasmine garland vendors, sandalwood vendors, fruit pyramids and spice sacks occupy 200 stalls under a Victorian iron roof. I take small groups on a morning walk that begins at the market before 8am (the jasmine comes in from farms at dawn and the entire market smells of it), continues to a working silk weaving cooperative where you can watch the Jacquard handlooms producing the double-warp interlocking technique that makes Mysore silk specific to this city, and ends at my family's neighbourhood tea stall for the South Indian breakfast my father eats every morning: idli, vada, sambar, coconut chutney, filter coffee. The yoga makes more sense when you understand the city it grew in.