JOIN USRestoring a heritage school
A heritage building in the heart of Shivamogga is unusual in many ways. For one thing, it has a slight identity crisis. Officially, it is called the Government Mines Middle School (GMMS). But according to local historian H Khandoba Rao, it is really the Government Main Middle School.
Rao, who teaches history in a college in Shivamogga and has written books about the city, says the school has nothing to do with mines. Corroborating this view, there appears to be no archival record of a ‘mines school’ in Shivamogga, although they are several references to so-called ‘mines schools’ in Kolar and Mysore. Rao posits that it was called Main School because it was Shivamogga’s first school. Indeed, although Shivamogga already had a government high school by 1854 and the Wesleyans ran several Kannada schools, GMMS was likely the city’s first English-medium government school.
GMMS was established in 1888 and appears to have started life as the Municipal English School. In its early years, it functioned out of rented accommodation. In the 1890s, the government decided to buy the current site and erect a new school building. A plaque on the building informs us that it was constructed in 1903.The GMMS building is a single-storeyed structure of brick and lime mortar, kadappa stone flooring and lime-plastered walls. Like many other buildings of its time, it is symmetrically planned along a central axis. An entrance porch leads into a central hall with rooms extending on either side of it, forming I-shaped wings. Sloping roofs with Mangalore tiles, gable roofs and arched ventilators are all charming and characteristic elements of that period. But GMMS stands out for several unusual features.
Architecture
The central hall is cleverly designed with collapsible wooden panelling on the walls, so as to make it expandable. In his book 'Amulya Shimoga: Indina Shivamoggada andina vaibhava', Khandoba Rao, who studied in GMMS for a year, recalls how these wooden panels were folded open to create a large hall where various kinds of school programmes were held.
The corridors running on the front and rear of the two side wings are unusual for their arcade of low, wide arches, each with a pointed apex. Such four-pointed arches were somewhat uncommon in buildings here. These corridors, the 7 m-high ceilings in the classrooms, and ventilators near the ceilings all ensure that children can study in a well-lit and airy space. As Rao writes, “the school has been beautifully and unusually designed to have good ventilation and light.”
A curious design element here is the false door. The western and eastern ends of the building appear to have a central door flanked by two windows. In reality, the central opening is but a pretend door, made by shaping the plaster to mimic a door. Other decorative touches like dentils and mouldings over the arches are quite understated. A particularly delightful design is the delicately detailed pinnate leaf that adorns every arched window.
Over the years, GMMS has produced some of India’s finest minds in various fields. Khandoba Rao counts several eminent people among its alumni, including archaeologists A Sundara and SR Rao, Gandhian and Chief Justice of the Mysore High Court Nittoor Srinivasa Rao, industrialist T V Narayana Shastry and many others.
However, over the years, the school building itself began to suffer, due to lack of maintenance. Rooms were arbitrarily converted to bathrooms and storage spaces. Insensitively designed new kitchens and toilets were built, abutting the heritage building. Not only did these lead to the inefficient use of spaces, they also damaged and marred the heritage building itself.
In 2019, Shivamogga Smart City Limited decided to restore the school building, and the Bengaluru chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) was asked to do the needful.
“The Madras terrace roofs were a concern as they had been badly damaged in many places,” shares Pankaj Modi, a conservation architect with INTACH. Previous cement repairs had blocked water outlets. Wooden rafters had deteriorated. Ficus saplings were growing luxuriantly on the terrace, their roots boring through the roof and snaking down the walls in some places.
Today, these roofs have been carefully rebuilt, tiles replaced, walls re-plastered, and floors and windows repaired. The building's decorative details have been restored. GMMS shines sturdy and resplendent again, once more a fitting place for bright young minds.
(Meera Iyer is the author of ‘Discovering Bengaluru’ and the Convenor of INTACH Bengaluru Chapter.)