When Beauty Gives Way

Every time I pass by the old streets of Athimanjeri, I can’t help envying the residents there. Irrespective of the time of the day, people are out of their houses, having a good social time. Mostly they are weavers working on power looms installed in their houses. 

These houses are 70 - 100 years old, built with stones and mud. The pitched roof is made of palm (or teak, occasionally) rafters and country wood purlins. Curved clay tiles, aka “pan” tiles, are arranged closely on top of the timber framework. This roof thus provides countless vents for the hot air inside the house to escape, keeping the house naturally cool. WYSIWYG – you can see what these houses are made of. Laurie Baker called this kind of construction “honest”. 

These traditional houses follow a certain pattern that has evolved to suit their profession -- thin, long wall to wall houses with a street-facing sheltered sitting area (called “thinnai”), a big room housing the loom, an open courtyard with water storage facility, a kitchen over-looking the courtyard followed by one or two rooms at the back. At the very end of plot there are some trees or plants.

The thinnai is basically a bench, broad enough to accommodate a person who needs to sleep there. In olden days when people used to travel on foot, thinnai offered just what a tired traveler was looking for. Sometimes, the travelers were fed by the house owners, but they would never charge anyone for using the thinnai. During the day, the thinnai offered a space for women to process food together (clean grains, deseed tamarind) and for children to play. Pretty much all thinnai have occupants in the afternoon hours enjoying their afternoon naps. Some thinnai have a dice game (like ludo) painted on the sitting surface. Dice games are old people’s favourite. Thinnai welcomes animals too; I have seen goats and dogs enjoy this space on very hot afternoons or rainy evenings. Thus for ages, thinnai has been an essential element in the social fabric here but it fast getting obliterated.

As people started getting richer, they wanted to build “modern” houses with burnt-bricks, cement, steel and tiles. Without understanding the patterns that their old houses were built on, they demolished them and built boxes that turned beautiful, lively streets into dead streets lined with high-raised walls. The modern construction involves building brick walls with cement mortar, plastering the walls (inside & outside) with cement mortar and laying RCC slabs for the roof. This construction leaves no outlet for heat to escape the house. In the recent years, people here have started pasting tiles on plastered walls. I have seen tiled walls inside the houses too (not just in bathrooms and toilets). Thus there are layers and layers of material, one hiding another, leaving honesty that once existed, way behind. 

On the right is a newly constructed house with tiled facade

Multistorey vitrified tiled facade and high gates looming over the modest next door

These modern houses lack aesthetics, cost a lot and are uncomfortable for the residents. So, why do they construct these houses?

When we were procuring old roof tiles for the construction of our house, we got our answers to this question. “We are just following the crowd, like goats do”, said a man remembering his old house sadly and hanging his head low. “People don’t respect the families living in indigenous houses and won’t marry in to those families”, said another. “We fell for the flashy looks of the new kind and no one told us that our new modern house will be hotter than the old tiled house”.

-- Hema