A new publication on Parsi housing in India, was recently released by the SID Research Cell, Center for Environmental, Planning and Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad. The book that has been titled – ‘Gaining ground – Making a new homeland’ is a set of explorations based on history, migration, growth, architecture and lives of the Parsis in India. The SID Research Cell has published close to ten publications with funding from TATA foundation. The following article is a set of excerpts from Shuchi Vyas’s conversation with Snehal Nagarsheth.

Shuchi is the Associate Development Director at The Akanksha Fund and a friend who has also written ‘Bringing vernacular architecture to a wider audience’ based on another publication from the SID Research Cell. Snehal Nagarsheth is a well known architect and Assistant Professor at the School of Interior Design CEPT and also heads the SID Research Cell along with Krishna Shastri who is the Head of Department at SID. Shuchi had an opportunity to speak with Snehal during her visit to Ahmedabad earlier this year.

In these excerpts Snehal talks about understanding Indian architectural history. She explains why architecture cannot be defined by styles and structures alone but needs to be understood in a more holistic way. According to her, compiling ‘Gaining Ground…’ was about winning the trust of the people involved and understanding their lives and history because understanding architectural history is not about standalone buildings and styles but about social connections formed by people.

(I have taken the liberty to categorize the excerpts from the conversation under various headings for a more comprehensive read)

ARCHITECTURE AS NARRATIVE

“At the department (SID CEPT), the faculty had been wondering how to discuss the history for interior design. Should it be the same as history for architecture ? When one looks at architectural history, it is actually to understand how people lived in those spaces and not just to see the styles and structures of the spaces. Then we figured out that this will be the way we would do it. We’ve been interested in narratives, and wanted to actually understand what people had to say”.

ARCHITECTURE AS SEEN BY PEOPLE

“This book is a small little project that builds indian history and you need many such projects to have a correct perspective of Indian history. Otherwise we are looking at our history, which is generated for us by the British or by the people who are studying India. Our intent is not to understand architectural history holistically, but to understand all the different threads that make up the history. It needs to be seen not only from an architectural perspective but we discuss the homes through its narrative by the people who live there, so they give us an experiential understanding of the space through time. We are then given an abstract understanding by the plans and elevations and then we’ve got this understanding which you develop by photographs. That is how we put the pieces together to understand a historical space.”

INDIAN HISTORY

“If one takes a smaller window to look at Indian history, our history might get a little clearer to us and it might even shift this larger overview the foreigners have built for us. Without having a deep understanding of India, a general overview of history was formulated by outsiders who ruled us for 300 years. If one looks at Indian history through a lot of small windows, all windows will connect revealing a panorama. We don’t really have a microscopic view of what India is all about. So we started looking at history in our department by saying that if you had to teach Indian history, would you just have this larger overview to fall back upon which talks about typologies, dynasty rules or is there something else that we can develop.”

SID RESEARCH CELL

“We got the project going by funding from the Tata fund. We have put together ten books since then. There are three monographs. The school has been doing a lot of documentation, so all of our documentation is converted into books. And then we had another research, which was the history of interior design. So we were lucky to have students because we have been talking about publishing work but we had not really produced books because it involved a lot of work. The whole Parsi housing publication started off as a school project. A thesis was going to be put forth for printing by the SID research cell. A similar project was being undertaken by the School of Architecture and their book covered more ground than what we were thinking about. So we expanded on the same topic of Parsi housing and then another student came by with photographs of Parsi Aramgah. Aramgah is a place where they bury their dead if they don’t have a tower of silence. We saw the photographs of these spaces, it was decided to convert this thesis into something bigger. The idea was to open and expand the topic of Parsi architectural history.”

STARTING OFF

“We have a photographer without whom this book would not have been possible. That is Cyrus Mobedji. He’s a Parsi, so we got access to a lot of places because of him. He has been a friend and since we were doing a book on Parsis, he helped us out. It is tough to get permission sometimes to document a house. Here we are actually invading their privacy so for them to feel that it’s alright is a difficult thing. It is a community, which has been leading a sheltered life for a long time, so to get access to really nice, beautiful old homes is tough.”

PARSI MIGRATION & IDENTITY

“If you are a minority just moving to another place, you don’t get benefits or you don’t come out so strongly as a community. When it’s a new nation, then moving in is slightly easier but in India you had a formed country and to come out as a really strong force in a country like that is commendable. They are a small community, today they are about 68,000 and I don’t think they exceeded ever over 1.5 lakhs. They were extremely well positioned and they really did very well for themselves. That made us think about what this milieu was like, which allowed them to survive. Then we realized that before coming to India they spent a short while, about twenty years at another location, which is like an island off shore, so they did not get to the mainland and they settled there for a while and then they moved. At that time, it is conjecture, but they figured out that to go further south of the main state, would be sensible.

They landed at the extreme point, which was Sanjan- that is like the last bastion of the Gujarat. which became their gateway. And the king there gave them the permission to stay and removed a lot of appearances, they couldn’t have their language, they couldn’t have their dressing, they had to marry according to the indian rites. They had to give up a lot but they maintained their religion and said they can’t convert. They removed distance in terms of appearances. They just melted into the background. They were absorbed because they spoke the same language, their mother tongue was Gujarati and they had their own religion but in India you have so many religions, so you had one more. They had a special status because they were given special permission by the king but they would be by themselves. They always strategically politically aligned themselves with the ruling class, because they were a minority, and aligned with the ruling body to get the benefits. The community benefited, all along. That gave them a kind of leap over a lot of the other communities. This community built off of various places but strategically they didn’t have an outward desire to build an identity.”

PEOPLE

“They are very passive people. They consider themselves Gujarati, they speak the same language so they were allowed to retain their identity. When you actually see their dwellings, they are not very different from other Gujarati houses. They live in almost the same style. At one point, though, when the British came, they aligned with the British. They had an exponential jump in prosperity. They emulated the British tremendously as a result you had this amalgamation of quasi-colonial, quasi-Gujarati individual that was developing in this milieu.”

CLASSES

“They also have classes. In Persia they had eight classes. Finally when they came over here, they only had two . One class preaches the religion and they are the ones who will probably do all the rituals at the place of worship, and they are the ones who are the traditional keepers of the religion. While you have the other class who are the followers of that religion. It’s not as though that the divide is as strong as in the Hindu’s but I think the divide does play a certain role in holding onto traditions. Also, they take Parsi first names so they go back to their roots when they pick their names. But that is the only thing they take from Persia, they do not have surnames that are Persian.”

LAST NAMES

“Last names in India came about largely because of the British because they had the tax structure, which is very formalized. So even for us, we had distinctions in our last names which was to do with what you do and where you work. Those were the initial ways of finding some kind of identity; they actually had to make a new homeland so they started taking on last names, which were Indian. It was a real fusion of things that happened within the Parsi community.”

TRADE

“I have a feeling that they were trading even before they decided to come to India. India was a part of the spice trade and there was the Chinese silk route which existed. Ultimately the spice route went up to the silk route so the trading went on for a long time. I have a feeling that they were pretty much aware of the fact that we worshiped fire and they worshiped the fire as well. The similarities were there in a manner of speaking. The Parsis probably traded along the western coast of Gujarat. They could have had smaller settlements. It is interesting how only their religious building is where they reflect back on culture, nowhere else.

After migration, a lot of investment for the Parsis was in cotton. The cotton boom that happened in India in the early 19th century was initiated by them.

It is interesting how we found that all the stone that was used to build Bombay came from the Parsis of Porbandar. Most of the yellow stone that is seen in Bombay comes from Porbandar. The Parsis of Porbandar had a very good relationship with the king who had the mining rights of the stone, while the Paris used to have an off loading facility in Bombay. That is how we realized that looking at this small little community of one lakh people, actually tells you a lot about the development in India, because they were aligned politically, they always managed to be in the forefront. Almost all the railroads that were made were all worked on by the Parsis because they were all engineers and were all educated, during the times of the British. It was not unknown that they built a separate identity, but the fact that they remained in the background allowed them to be accepted by both, the locals as well as the ruling class.

The liquor licensing came about by the British because almost everybody in India brewed their own liquor so you couldn’t tax it. The British banned the liquor practice so you couldn’t brew it and then you could only brew it through licensing. Almost all the licenses belonged to Parsis. To get the license it surely mattered that you knew somebody high up. You realize that there is a tremendous strong strategic move to align with the ruling class.”

LAND

“Some of the Parsi houses which are in the villages of Gujarat have huge tracts of land, because they were given a lot of advantages during the British times. They were used as people who were the in between for communication, for ruling, for everything. They formed this whole group of people who negotiated between the British and the local groups. And in that whole process, they had tremendous advantage, because if there was any declaration by the British they were the first to know. British were always looking for avenues of income, so lands which were forest land, which didn’t yield income for the British were given away. Tracts as big as 25,000 hectares of land or a jungle was given out to the Parsi community. That jungle then, was partly converted to agriculture. The British could then can tax the income from the produce.”

ARCHITECTURE

“They didn’t build with a specific style. We realized that consistency is what they were really addressing, and there was an intention to make this their new homeland so they didn’t do something specific architecturally . They did not go ahead and build, like you have the Portuguese, who came and built a style. However they transformed the English bungalow to Indianize it. That allows you to see how the bungalow becomes a simple village home. They asked for their basic architectural needs to be met. When they needed a well, they built wells. The women during menstruation live in a separate little chamber with an iron door which is present in many houses. So they built things, as per need, but an outward appearance to state a presence is never seen. Just 200 years after them, the Muslims followed. They couldn’t, state their difference at all then since they had fled from the Muslim persecution in Iran. There are about 50-60 houses all belonging to Parsis in Parsi villages in Gujarat, they are all landlords, and largely into agriculture. That’s where you see these bungalows, which became quasi-Indian homes. They’ve taken up this idea of the bungalow, the British bungalow, and it kind of gets overlaid with what they considered important.”

THE BOOK

“The book we have put together is not a very large book. It is difficult for us not to have a lot pictures because the Parsi homes are so beautiful. What is really amazing is the manner in which the spatial arrangements are done. The interiors are exquisite, it’s kept very beautifully, so we divided this book in four parts. The first part is before they moved to India. We looked at their background and their architecture which is only present in their religious buildings. They are called Agiari. Their homes are pretty much like ours. It’s not necessary that they would only have had Parsi craftsman build it.

For the book, we wanted to come up with a holistic understanding of history of Parsi housing rather than saying that this is the architectural style. We wanted to understand architecture as a cumulative process. A building up of what this architecture was about comes from understanding of architecture not as stand alone buildings but as connections to its people and their history otherwise we were going to end up probably just having an overview versus the details. We didn’t have styles of building, we actually didn’t even have extensive styles in clothing but we had people who had lived this history and contributed to the growth of India, mingled with the British, acquired styles from everywhere while preserving their religion and customs. Its a truely amalgamated religion.”

The book – ‘Gaining ground – Making a new homeland’ pays a homage not only to the spaces the Parsis created and called home but their undefeated spirit of survival as well.

Click here for the list of other publications and order form for publications by the SID Research Cell

Jay Thakkar’s first book, Naqsh, is reaching out to individuals from varied backgrounds and his second, Matra, was just named ‘Best written work on Architecture 2009’ by India’s ‘Foundation for Architectural and Environmental Awareness’. Jay Thakkar, author, designer and faculty member of the School of Interior Design at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, talks to Designwala about India’s vernacular architecture, documentation, and design policy.

Click below to hear the interview with Jay Thakkar:

by Shuchi Vyas

IN THE OLDEN DAYS, the popular Gujarati dish, Undhiyu (a medley of vegetables eaten during the Kite festival in January) was made underground in an earthen pot with carefully handpicked vegetables from the market and fresh homemade spices – and chatting while it was being cooked was a part of the ritual. Now it’s either made on the stove, or worse, it’s take out. “Crafts were about time, and people don’t have too much of time now. It’s all about getting things ready-made,” says Jay Thakkar. What Jay aimed to do with his first book, ‘Naqsh: The Art of Wood Carving in Traditional Houses of Gujarat’, was to present it all to a larger audience instead of confining it to academic circles.

A majority of drawings for Naqsh were done during Jay’s graduation thesis at the School of Interior Design (SID). “I wanted to do something which was urban, so I looked at old cities and how the urban inserts started to take place. I would sit down in the old city of Ahmedabad and just sketch. This turned into an expression of wood carving which Naqsh was then based on,” he explains. Along with his team, he completed the entire project using one of the earlier versions of Pagemaker, which in hindsight seems almost impossible and primitive considering it lacked the basic ‘undo’ function.

Naqsh has been used extensively by people in the restoration field, historians, textile designers, and pattern makers, among others. A teacher at the Mahatma Gandhi International School in Ahmedabad even conducted a class exercise where the kids made colored versions of the Naqsh designs

While the purpose of publishing ‘Matra: Ways of Measuring Vernacular Built Forms in Himachal Pradesh’, co-authored by Skye Morrison, was to cater to a larger audience and broaden the dialogue on vernacular architecture, it was also a reason to get SID students out of their classrooms and feel architecture and design. About 60 students voluntarily and enthusiastically worked with him, and brought in different perspectives and various design technology to enhance some of the images.

“In India, there are two categories of books on architecture: coffee table books and research books. The idea for publishing Matra was to combine both – it’s more of a research travel book,” says Jay. After Matra was published, the team went back to each home in the Himachal village, gave them copies of the book and asked all those involved in its making – students, drivers, villagers and their children – to sign the first couple of pages of one of the books as a symbol of ownership and involvement.

Click here to see the video of the book signing

“People became a part of the book. We wanted it to be of use to the local people and we made everything three dimensional so that it could be referenced by the masons and carpenters,” explains Jay. He also had architects and builders in mind for if and when they want to reference the structures covered in Matra there to build something similar in the future. “Technicians get to see the seismic side of the region as Himachal has a history of earthquakes and landslides which we’ve managed to cover,” says Jay. This detailed work also caters to historians and anthropologists, even as it is an easy read devoid of jargon for the layman and tourist interested in vernacular architecture.

Some useful insights about vernacular architecture came to the fore during their travels to Himachal Pradesh for Matra. For instance, the team studied a particular house that was made with 40 trees. You’d gasp, “How is that environment friendly?” Jay feels it is: As the lifecycle of a tree is about 25 years, people in the village made it a ritual to plant anywhere between 25 and 40 trees whenever a child was born, so by the time he/she grew up there would have enough raw material to build a house. “While we buy insurance, they invested in nature. If you have a reforestation process in place, wood becomes very economical, but we don’t have that system in India,” Jay explains. The sad story now is that the government is restricting the use of wood and so these people don’t have wood to repair their houses.
“There are a lot of students that want to pursue research after Matra’s success,” Jay says. “Now when we take up a project at school, we think about the possibility of it being published, and we work on it in such a way that it becomes viable,” he adds. CEPT has been documenting since 1962, which means that it has a sizeable amount of work. “But because there has been no real encouragement for research, it all remains on campus,” says Jay. It’s only recently that SID started a research cell and gained the required funding to be able to publish about a dozen books. The Sir Ratan Tata Trust published Matra and some of the other work that is now being published from CEPT.

Another problem he outlines is the lack of funds for academics. There are individuals that are interested in research, but are carrying it out on a small scale. “When we were working on the second book, my whole team gathered around 6:00 pm and work till 3:00 am for two years. You can’t sustain yourself like that, you’ll soon burn out,” says Jay. “If academics are asked to write a grant, do the research, get the publishers and do their own marketing and publicity, isn’t that too much?” he adds. But this is slowly changing. The Indian government is getting more involved and interested. The system for disbursement of funds for such projects is a slow and laborious one, but CEPT has a few proposals in the pipeline.
Jay feels the main issue that plagues interior design today is licensing. As the field is relatively new in India, there are no laws or regulations that certify the practice. Anyone can practice interior design without the required education and training – a carpenter, a housewife and even celebrities call themselves ‘interior designers’. But this is changing with efforts by the Institute of Interior Designers (www.iiid.org) that is formulating rules and plans to certify those from a five year course and encourage those from a two-year course to work a little before meriting them with a license. The Council of Design is being formulated by the Government of India to regulate most design fields in India.

So, what’s next for Jay? He is interested in publishing more research work, for which he is looking for funds and grants from the government, individuals or NGOs. The larger issue is how to enable it to reach more people and not just lie in store rooms. CEPT University is not allowed to sell research books that are worked on by the students, so whatever money comes in for Jay’s books, is mostly in the form of a donation. “I have worked on these books honorary. Normally, you need a grant, publisher, research assistant, production designer and a team,” he outlines.

If all goes as planned, Jay hopes to work on a host of projects: For one, he plans to work closely on wooden architecture in India. “There are five states that have wooden architecture that’s bound to get lost soon. So first, the idea is to document it, which will hopefully open it up to further research,” he explains.  Jay is thinking about a large-scale project on the vernacular architecture of India, for which, he jokes, he will “need a lifetime”. The books available on the subject today are a few and niche. As 2010 is ‘Swarnim Gujarat’, the State’s heritage year as it completes 50 years since establishment, he wants to produce a body of work on the state’s indigenous arts and crafts by creating a platform to bring NGOs, handicraft corporations and the government together to better document these subjects.

Click below to hear Jay’s views on India’s cultural and social issues :