Indian Writing

“I have my own principles, which I am unwilling to abandon. I dislike falsehood and deceit. A building should be truthful.” - Laurie Baker.

Via sms, the sad news that Laurie Baker, pioneer of low-cost housing, inspiration to generations of young architects, true Gandhian and great Indian, has passed away. He had turned 90 just weeks ago.

From this Kerala Online report:

Baker was a symbol of Kerala’s penchant for multiculturalism and experimentation as well as a living reminder of what real `globalisation’ could achieve in terms of social advancement and innovative problem-solving.

He proved that it was not impossible to build houses with low budgets on land written off by everyone. Effectively combining traditional techniques with indigenous innovations , he managed to bring down the cost of construction by half. Baker was the pioneer of cost effective architecture movement in India, becaming a legend for the future generations.

More about his work here and here, here and here:

You can’t get more sustainable or renewable a resource than mud, and Baker is its champion. Approximately 58 percent of all buildings in India today are made of mud brick, some as many as 50 to 100 years old. Mud is gathered either at the construction site or very nearby, formed into bricks and dried in the sun. It is readily available and can be made by people with limited initial training—all resulting in projects that can be built at a fraction of the cost of those using concrete and steel. Baker is especially fond of mud’s total recycle-ability: simply add water and reuse it.

Baker has truly adopted his motto to “make low-costery a habit and a way of life” by reusing everything, from brick to glass bottles, as building materials. “One of the things I’m noted to be crazy for is that I use old colored bottles set in cement—they give a nice light,” comments Baker. His own home, made entirely of mud brick, is a model of his recycling ethos; including timber salvaged from an old boat jetty. Other signature elements of his design include the use of circular walls, which use far less brick than rectangular walls. In addition, when he does use concrete for a roof, he embeds chipped or broken terra cotta roofing tiles into the mixture. These tiles, which normally would be thrown away, contribute to the strength of the roof, allow less of the expensive concrete to be used, and reduce the structural load of the building.

Here, the other side of Laurie Baker:

Laurie detested anything mechanical and a bicycle was about the only vehicle that he could handle. However, as a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit, during World War II, he had to drive huge lorries through mountains and wild rivers in China. There is a hilarious account in the book, in his own words about his first lesson in driving a lorry.

“I got in and hung on to the big steering wheel…manhandled and foot-handled some of the devices in front and below… and shot off like a bullet to crash straight into an architectural gem of a gatepost…”

His marriage to Elizabeth Chandy, a doctor, led the couple on a years-long honeymoon to Pithoragarh, where they took medicine to remote rural hamlets:

They went to the village of Chandag, 13,000 ft up in Himachal Pradesh, near the Tibetan border, for their honeymoon…, which lasted for 15 years. There were no roads and in the hilly terrain, one had to walk miles to get anywhere. “There was no doctor in the area and we stayed back to help people. Laurie was my nurse-assistant and for years we trudged together all over the place to give medical care,” Dr. Elizabeth remembers.

Only accept a reasonable brief
Discourage extravagance and snobbery…
Get your conscience out of deep-freeze, and use it
Look closely at your prejudices and question them
Have faith in your convictions and have the courage to stick to them.

Here are some of Baker’s designs. And here is an article in Utne by Adam Hochschild, first published in Mother Jones:

I got a taste of life in Baker buildings at Trivandrum’s Centre for Development Studies, a research institute and graduate school where my wife and I were Fulbright lecturers. The 10-acre campus, stretching across a heavily wooded hillside, is Baker’s masterpiece. The offices, classroom clusters, and dormitories are all brick, with few straight lines: Each structure curls in loops and waves and intersecting semicircles. The main building has a majestic entrance 30 or 40 feet wide, whose ceiling rolls out and up toward the sky and whose sides roll outward onto an even wider set of steps. Symbolic of an institution whose aim is to apply economics to helping the poor, the building has, amazingly, no front door. Anyone can walk up the steps and through the wide entrance and down the corridors at any hour of the day or night. If you want to lock your office door, that’s up to you, but you can’t lock the front door because there isn’t one.

Not only is this campus beautiful, but Baker built it for roughly half the normal cost per square foot of Indian university buildings. And like all his buildings, these were comfortable on even the most oven-like of days. Some of the coolness was due to the breezes blowing through the jalis that fill many outside walls. A Baker jali is a brick version of traditional south Indian patterned wooden grillwork: Gaps between bricks lead air and daylight through a wall while diffusing the glare of direct sunlight. Some of the center’s coolness also comes from tiny courtyards built around pools whose evaporation helps fight the heat. And coolness also comes from the shade of the many coconut palms overhead: Baker located the buildings so he would have to cut down as few trees as possible.

Here are some of his sketches on the CDS pages.

Baker’s remarks on the Indian church buildings that he had designed:

There is a need for an atmosphere to be given where you can be quiet and absorbed and let your religious thoughts free and so on, which to me imply being at the centre of things. Then there is light, which is always a good symbol… you know you suddenly think of something, some way out of a problem or some way of overcoming a difficulty and the natural expression is `suddenly there was light’. I think light is one of the commonest, probably not deliberately so, symbols of all religions. Also, I’ve always been fascinated by the stained glass windows in the old churches particularly in England and Europe. I’ve always felt that in the traditional long narrow cruciform shape or cross-shaped plan of the church, people at the back have difficulty in seeing what is going on at the front in the altar or the functions that take place during the church performance or service and the round ones or fan shaped ones are much more effective - many more people can, as it were, take part in and feel that they are part of what is going on. The circle or the round space is so much better from my point of view. I find the circle much more interesting a shape for anything, whether it is religious or play or sport or teaching or wherever people in a crowd need to be organised so that they can focus on one particular spot.

Here is an article about Baker’s approach to waste. I especially like the suggestion about bicycles.

Here’s his mud-based building approach. Also see this manual by Baker on low-cost housing.

A Riot of Green Reasons has a post here, and one on Baker’s passing here. Like Green Reasons, I too wished I could have a Baker house of my own someday.

Some of Baker’s books are available here.

Three Doon School boys, speeding in a Honda City car after the end of their Std XII board exams, were allegedly involved in an accident that killed one person and left another on life support. Ironically, the man who died in the accident had been a schoolteacher. Apparently, according to the police,

the boys were involved in a car race with other students, including some girls of another well-known school, after attending a party post the annual Class XII ISC examination. Some eyewitnesses brought this to the notice of the police, which also learnt that Walia, who was allegedly driving the car, had been egged on by the other two friends to drive fast. Consequently, the car hit the motorcycle.

The students had originally organised the party at Opel Restaurant on Rajpur Road. However, after learning about the presence of two Doon School teachers there, they shifted the venue to a farmhouse on the same road.

According to the school principal Kanti Bajpai, the boys were not under school jurisdiction. “These three students were not living in the school hostel but outside in town… due to a disciplinary decision taken earlier about them by the school.”

Had the boys been drinking? The fond parent of one of the boys named in the accident denies this. She denies also that any of the boys had been at the wheel. According to her, it was the driver who had been driving the car when the accident took place.

The boys are now absconding.

From an article in today’s DNA After Hours, titled “Coming Full Circle”:

“We might not have the statistics but it seems to be an emerging trend. Some might call it coming full circle, or some might say it is just women being comfortable with their choices, but more and more women want to quit a flourishing career to be at home.”

And in DNA’s Me Supplement, a four-page advice column on keeping a “delicious kitchen” begins with a full-page photograph of a power-dressed woman standing in her kitchen, with an open laptop and planner before her, one hand holding a cellphone stuck to her ear, the other stirring something in a pot, with assorted vegetables, pots and pans on the counter, and an incredibly got-it-all-together look on her face. It begins:

“First of all, stop thinking of kitchen work as boring chores. However much we may progress, a woman remains Annapoorna - the one who fulfils. There is nothing more pampering and pleasurable to her soul than to be the Goddess of Comfort to her family.”

The same issue of After Hours has an interview with a journalist who mentions, among other things, the “ferocious work ethics” of a businessman.

I am just saying.

I wrote about Arunava Sinha’s translation of this cult novel of Calcutta for the Indian Express.

Keki Daruwalla, in the Hindu Literary Review, about Revathy’s book and the struggle that went into getting it published:

I had met her first when she won the second prize at the All India Poetry Competition organised by the British Council and the Poetry Society. (She was to win that prize twice). She then sent me some fine stories. The Sahitya Akademi decided to publish her in a scheme where authors with exceptional first books get published (just one author a year). But this applies to only authors under 40, and she, born in 1947, was way beyond that. The book had to be withdrawn from the press. Revathy went to a Mumbai publisher who asked for Rs. 35,000. She sent her mauscript to Ravi Dayal, but Ravi died tragically, also of cancer. Eventually Prof. P. Lal (God bless him) of the Writer’s Workshop came to her rescue, as he has with over a thousand poets and playwrights.

One has mentioned all this to show what travails a poet has to go through to get a book out. Things will not get better till people learn to buy poetry as opposed to merely writing it.

Indira Goswami’s novel protesting the practice of animal sacrifice at the Kamakhya Temple. From Katha.