Abode of heritage homes

Living museum

DakshinaChitra in Tamil Nadu provides a peek into the idyllic lifestyle of the bygone era by bringing together a host of dwellings from the countryside, writes M A Siraj.

Having grown amidst a mélange of lingos, people south of the Vindhyas have tended to be extremely tolerant of cross-cultural influences. Quick to adopt new ideas, the life in Dakshina Bharata has always been culturally permeable. It takes all that comes in the stride forward with no idea of jettisoning what has kept company all along. This incongruous cohabitation is reflected in prayer rooms retaining the centrality even in high-rises, cosmetised visages flaunting strands of Mysuru mallige and rangolis adorning the threshold of villas.

A healthy mix of change and continuity underlies the essence of life and development in the four (now five) states of South India. The four Dravidian languages have had a lot to exchange and lot more to preserve of what lay at the core of their cultures. Relentless onslaught of economic liberalisation has been transforming the cities of the South. Chennai, Bengaluru, Mysuru, Coimbatore, Hyderabad have become the hubs of new technologies, bringing in hordes of youths from afar. Tongas have disappeared from their streets; popular eateries like Kamats and Pais have yielded place to space-conserving Darshinis; the nostril-thrilling aroma of coffee from erstwhile Udupi restaurants has simply vanished from the air; row houses have come up where agraharas once stood; temple bells now barely find an echo. Modernity has swamped the lifestyles just as gopurams and spires are being dwarfed by the skyscrapers.

Change proceeds with its inexorable pace, drawing into its absorptive embrace the art and the architecture, crafts and music, flavours and lifestyles, and society and the economy. For Deborah Thiagarajan, an American married to a Chennaite, the transition was painful. A whole lifestyle was under the threat of modernisation. The humongously huge houses of Chettinad were being pulled down merely for the sake of Burma teak. Staircase-fronted tiled homes of Syrian-Christians were up for sale in Malabar. Aina Mane (ancestral homes of Coorg) were falling victims to the elements. Deborah’s sense of unease propelled her to conceive the Madras Crafts Museum and DakshinaChitra, a complex housing an array of crafts, skill-imparting centres, a thriving bazaar, homes transplanted from distant places,  and spaces for performing artistes to regale the visitors with fun and music of the bygone era.

Under one roof

Though Deborah began the work in 1984, the museum she visualised — DakshinaChitra — materialised only in 1996, with all the kaleidoscopic ensemble of fanciful heritage homes, village bazaars, lotus ponds, mud houses, thatched hovels and terracotta-latticed partitions. A walk on the curvilinear pathways interlacing the charming structures inside the complex on the East Coast Road (ECR) momentarily revives the romantic memories of a childhood lived in those villages dotted with ponds and tiled homes.

The complex brings together a series of beautifully crafted wooden homes, inviting in their intimacy majestic stone structures with elaborately carved windows and door lintels and homes with intricate stucco designs — all reminiscent of a past that was being lost in thoughtless mimicry of the modern and the urban.

According to Deborah, meticulous research went into the investigation of geography, environment, history and social groups. An army of shilpis, asaris or acharis (carpenters) worked with teams of architects and documentarists for years together to identify heritage homes, save them from the demolishers’ axe, dismantle them systematically with each bracket, pillar and rafter being numbered, and cart them away to Chennai.

These homes with high ceilings, timber floorboards, ornate cornices, double-hung windows and solid doors often carved out of single timber planks, epitomised the identity and distinctiveness of the architectural values of the era they were built in. There were indications that some of the inheritors had tried to renovate and restore them, but all too often they used inferior material or brought in styles that were incongruous with their former selves, which, in fact, destroyed their value.

Some of these heritage properties were falling in ruins as the heirs of the original owners found the maintenance cost beyond their means.

The centre sought the expertise of Laurie Baker and his disciple Benny Kuriakose to locate all the 18 houses reassembled at the site from various corners of South India. A Nattukottai Chettair house, ancestral house of Chettiar businessmen from Ramnad, is a major attraction. The phenomenally rich Chettiars, who did roaring business in Malaya and Burma, had incorporated into their homes decorative elements from colonial buildings and towers from Indian palaces. These homes in their original form usually housed three generations together.

Potter’s House from Tiruvallur and Basket Weaver’s House are reproductions of homes of these humble practitioners of yore. The Weaver’s House from Kanchipuram comes with a functional pit loom used for weaving sarees, with a kitchen, a puja room and a front hall. A whole range of Brahmin houses from Ambur (in Tirunelvelli district) replicate the living styles of an agrahara. Karnataka’s housing heritage has been pieced together with Weaver’s House from Ilkal, coffee-grower and trader Mohammed Ismail’s house from Aldur (Chikkamagaluru), a house from Coorg, and a British-inspired bungalow from Bengaluru. While most houses from North Karnataka were built with stones (only locally available material), the ones in coastal region were tiled and richly decorated with lime stucco work.

If houses in Tamil countryside tended to cluster around each other, Kerala followed the pattern of each house standing alone inside a farm with no one to share a neighbourhood. These houses typically used steeply sloping roofs to drain the rainwater away from walls. Richly endowed with wooden frames, these dwellings typified the egalitarian style. Technique, form and materials were the same for houses of all classes and communities, but size and embellishment determined the affluence and class of the occupants.

The stately Syrian-Christian House (belonging to circa 1850 and transplanted from Puthuppally in Kottayam) represents the life of Syrian-Christians, where the main entrance led directly to the granary. Hindu houses of Nair families from Trivandrum and Manakavu in Calicut exhibit some spectacular carvings and rare joining skills of the carpenters of the erstwhile era.

The craft of rebuilding

An ikat weaver’s house from Koyyalagudem (Nalgonda district) and rounded palmyra homes of the coastal communities represent the housing heritage of Andhra Pradesh. Weavers typically chose smaller courtyards to minimise the effects of the monsoon on their weaving. The villagers from coastal Haripuram were brought to construct Chuttilu House in DakshinaChitra. These mud homes comprised two circular walls, one enclosed into another. The flat ceiling was topped by a conical thatch roof supported with bamboo beams. The circular walls were meant to deflect and effectively withstand the cyclonic winds. The museum is still in the process of acquiring a house of a Hyderabad nobility.

The process of transplantation of these dwellings was no small feat. Says Lakshmi Thiagrajan, education coordinator, “It was a great learning experience. The craftsmen used a variety of local measurements with variations within the same regions.” For instance, the Coastal Andhra craftsmen employed kole and angulas instead of geometrical degree to measure the slope of the roof. Cost of transplantation (dismantling, carting and reassembling) often worked out to be equivalent to a newly constructed building.

DakshinaChitra has emerged as a centre of education, research and training in art, and a centre for performing artistes. Ethnic style structures of Kadambari Art Gallery, Vajira Art Gallery, Activities Centre and the amphitheatre offer ample visual treat for art lovers.