Priya Chetty-Rajagopal’s earliest memory of Cubbon Park’s iconic bandstand is hearing the Madras Sappers, one of the oldest of three Madras regiments of the Corps of Engineers that are headquartered in Bengaluru, play there, back in the 1970s.“The bandstand has military band origins, so it has always been about the military for me,” says the founder of the citizen-led initiative, Heritage Beku, which has been instrumental in reviving cultural performances at the Cubbon Park bandstand. The initiative, she says, was catalysed by this dream of bringing the military band back to the park. “That is where it started: saying that we need the bands to play again because it offers a sense of such majesty,” says Priya, whose father was a Sapper too.While the bandstand, first constructed by the British in the 1900s to showcase their military and police bands and renovated by the Horticultural Department a few years ago, was a point of beauty and aesthetics, Priya says, “it was fallow, offering a visual perspective, but not enabling cultural interaction.” Performances used to occur here regularly, around two decades ago, but had become extremely sporadic.This was something Priya managed to change in December last year, kickstarting the initiative with a recital by the Saralaya Sisters. Since then, come Sunday morning, around 8 am, it transforms into a public performance space, open to anyone who wants to experience a slice of Bengaluru’s cultural heritage, including the park’s many canine residents. “We love the parkies (the dogs who live in Cubbon Park) and they occasionally bless us with their presence,” says Priya, who believes that bringing art to a public space is democratising. “People are really so happy to see the bandstand come alive again.”