Behind the Scenes of South India (3): Homes and Palaces

Modern with historic touches

This is the third in a series of reports from a three week study trip to Kerala and Tamil Nadu in southern India

The tour of the Chettinad houses began with chai in a modern home, so new that the final coat of paint had still to be applied. Mutthaiah Kathiresan (or short: KT) stands proudly among the colorful walls of the house he had designed for his parents. This is the first Indian house our travel group sets foot in, not counting the apartment building in which we reside for our stay in Kozhikode, Kerala. We, that is a group of architecture students from Morgan State University in Baltimore, their professor and I. We had taken the trip from Tanjavur in Tamil Nadu to Karaikudi to see the houses of the Chettinar. After leaving our shoes in the yet to be tiled front entry area we are welcomed with coffee, tea and warm water.

Like many new homes in southern India, this new structure is modernist in a way that reminds of the Bauhaus but could also have been derived from the traditional rectangular white Mediterranean architecture found on some Greek islands or in North Africa. The popularity of the austere modernist style for new homes in Southern India is quite surprising, given the ornate sculptural character of Hindu temples and given that the modernist style is derived from hot arid climates and not the tropical humid one prevailing in Southwest India. The cubist white structures don't hold up well during the extended monsoon rainy period as the typical display of big dreary patches of mold proves after some years. Our base, the city of Kozhikode,(English: Calicut), is riddled with once white modernist concrete buildings which look triste and abandoned after only a few decades. Without wanting to sound too much like Robert Stern, who despises modernism, one cannot avoid the observation that adjacent century old structures with tile roofs held up just fine.

View across the roofs of a Chattinad village

But here in the heart of the Chettinar region Mutthaiah's brandnew house is pristine and glistens in the late morning sun like a freshly unwrapped present unexpectedly placed among the traditional houses of the village. The Indian knack for opulence through color, brass, gold and roundish forms etc. is restrained in favor of modernist angularity, simplicity and plainness except for some touches: The interior walls are colorful, there is a heavy teak-wood front door loosely modeled after the traditional doors which we should see in great numbers during the rest of the day. The roof is flat and provides excellent views across the tile roofs of the neighboring houses where some monkeys are climbing around. Solar tubes provide hot water.

We walk a few around the corner, where Mutthaiah, who actually doesn't live in the village, introduces us to "the uncle", a loose term for all kinds of older male relatives and their next of kin, and what he calls the "base model" of the Chettinad house. This traditional house is built around a court yard and represents the layout we should see in many, ever more splendid variations while hopping from village to village. Uncle's grandmother sits on the ground shaded by a porch roof in the courtyard, Mutthaiah provides her with an explanation of what this curious group is doing in her house, even inspecting her sparse room which, as "uncle" explains, is only good for holding her belongings, not so much to live in. Life happens in common spaces in these multi-generational homes.

Typical enclosure and entry-gate of the mansion houses

The Chettinad region is in Tamil Nadu, the state to the east of Kerala. Chettinad is the home of the Nattukottai Chettiars, once a prosperous banking and business community whose power came from trade and was largely tolerated by the British colonists. The area is known for its local cuisine, architecture, and temples. We were here for the architecture and the forms of the traditional multi-generational home. The dozens of Chettinad villages are laid out in a grid, the buildings hold the street-edges and follow a rigid pattern of axial alignments along the directions of the sun.

The Chettinad houses were usually tile-roofed with a small two-storeyed tower at both ends of the front elevation. They later expanded vertically into two-storeyed structures, and horizontally through the addition of numerous halls and courtyards that could accommodate guests at marriages and other ceremonies. The Chettinad houses accommodate up to four generations before separate houses are built by individual sons.
Chettinad architechture stands out for its use of large spaces in halls and courtyards, ornate embellishments like Belgian glasswork, intricate woodwork, spectacular ceramic tiles, stone, iron and wooden pillars like nothing else that can be seen in this part of the world. (website)

Heavy teak doors, big keys

All buildings, no matter what size, follow a set arrangement of perimeter wall, front yard, front porch, reception room, courtyard and rear kitchen and service areas, even if in the larger mansions and palaces courtyards and arrangements can be repeated several times to accommodate the multi-generational families and their festivities. Depending on the wealth of the owners the buildings grew to preposterous dimensions to a size where one mansion-palace could take up an entire 400' building block. The sheer opulence combined with the rigor in arrangement has drawn the attention of the UNESCO which is suggesting the area as a world heritage site.

The Natukottai Chettiars belong to a lineage of wealthy traders and financiers who made their fortunes by extending their business to the whole of Southeast Asia, particularly during the second half of 19th and early 20th century when they were at the peak of their economic power. Vital component in the south Indian economy, the Natukottai Chettiars represented the major banking Hindu community of South India. Their vast influence and richness allowed the community to build a dense network of 96 villages among which 73 remain (Unesco).

The familiar arrangement of the buildings in blocks with streets and alleys on a grid occasionally forming a plaza attracts the western visitor who is bewildered by the perceived disorder of the typical south Indian town with its onslaught of billboards, mopeds on what seems like a curvy maze of streets lined by shacks and occasionally shiny stores. That, as well as the modernist concrete cube buildings dotting cities and towns, merit consideration of the prejudice with which the tourist is arriving here with his "colonial" gaze and filtered perception. Luckily articles about that type of gaze have been written and the western visitor would be well advised to read them to be armed against his own bias.

Street in Karaikudi: Grid and street walls

We now are well aware that the process of heritage formation — well expressed by the French term patrimonialisation — is ideologically and politically charged. If travel narratives are to be read as part of a ‘political process’, heavily conditioned by ‘idioms of hegemony’ then the ‘discovery’ of the historical and memorial qualities of architecture appears as a complex issue producing conflicting sets of heritage definitions and values. The late-18th-century shift from the European
Grand Tour to a politically charged Tour d’Orient is a crucial moment in this respect. Travels in Architectural History

The bigger the Chettinad mansions become, the less authentic is current life in them. Many are abandoned and in poor condition because their upkeep has bankrupted the families who own them. A few supersized house have become event venues or hotels. Our tour includes only homes where parts of the families still live thanks to Mutthaiah KT and uncle who provide us with access.

We walked down a dirt path to duck under the long roof of a tile "factory" where artisans crouch on the floor and makes decorative cement tiles by placing and stirring colorful dabs of powder on a glass stabilized with a backing of cement. (The traditional tile would have used clay which apparently became scarce).When the sun becomes too strong we enter a home where we are treated to lunch. We had already eaten Thali with our fingers from a banana leaf in the first hours after getting off the plane. Now we had to do it not only without plates and silverware but also without tables and chairs. We crouched in a long row on the tiled floor of the courtyard, half savoring the rich flavor of the many chutneys and half being afraid that our bellies may not withstand the local way of preparing the meal. (None of us got sick).
tile making in Chettinad

Cement lean-tos and shacks give way to a formal grid of streets with mansion after looming mansion in various states of maintained opulence and elegant decay, their decorative facades partly hidden by high walls. Built between 1850 and 1950, these homes — some of which dwarf the grand cottages of Newport and the villas of Cap Ferrat — number over 15,000 throughout Chettinad, which covers about 600 square miles. Many have more than 60 rooms spread over interiors as large as one and a half acres. A trippy Walt Disney World of styles, there’s a Raj-inflected Victorian next to a Georgian Palladian with hints of Tudor, and down the street, an Art Deco confection straight out of South Beach.(New York Times)

The houses became even "more bigger" as the day went on, the furniture more elaborate and materials, lamps, glass and porcelain included many trophies brought home from the trade conquest the Nattukottai Chettiars had undertaken from here reminding us that not only western colonial powers (Portugal, Spain, England) had plundered this region but that it, too, had foraged into other lands, mostly towards southeast Asia, not through war but simply through trade and not even that long ago. (Most of the houses were less than a hundred years old. India achieved independence from Britain in 1947).

cooking places for large parties

It was long after dark when we toured the last house with an axis of 400 feet from the front to the rear door. Mutthaiah explained that across the street there would be another mansion taking up an entire block, and then another, seven in all and if they all would open all their doors one could look straight from one end to the other. The house had a kitchen with 20 open fire spaces for cooking and one of the courtyards was being transformed into a banquet hall for a very big wedding to be celebrated here. We got one last chai before we tumbled exhausted into our bus that would take us to Madurai, our next hotel and the Meenakshi Temple the next day.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA

Chettinad houses
Culture and Architecture of Chettinad
India's Lost Party Mansions (New York Times)
The UNESCO Revive Chettinad Project