WRITING SAMPLES
ASHA N M
SACRED SPACES The composite-essay below is a combination of 2 essays written towards the end of my degree program. Both focus on the meaning of sacred but in 2 very different contexts within the same city. The composition is intended to juxtapose the contrasts and the common mystical familiarity of sanctity experienced in such spaces. 01 THESIS - CONSERVING THE SACRED This essay was written in preparation for and as a preliminary report on my final year B.Arch. thesis. ABSTRACT A gardener community whose history is linked with the city’s landscape is lacking in built expression of their existence. An architectural intervention that will reinforce their right to the city and conserve what is sacred to them is being explored here. OBJECTIVE One of the landmark paradigms of any tribe’s existence is architecture. It is a means of laying claims to a territory, establishing dominance and perpetuating a legacy. While a community that has strength and freedom enough will, on its own, naturally manifest itself architecturally, one like that of the Tigalas (most of whose occupations lie in the informal economy) whose former possession of a land has gradually faded to almost nothing will benefit from a built form that reinstates their occupation, culture and sense of community (reverse). The thesis will try to do full justice to the meaning of ‘sacred’ and explore a built form that gives back to the Tigalas who, as a community, lay the foundation for this city. DESIGN/PLANNING ATTRIBUTES While the Tigalas’ sole architectural paradigm continues to be the Dharmaraya Swamy temple, their occupation juxtaposed with urban (and largely capitalist) setting demands a highly self-protective, somewhat exclusive and hence sacred space. The built form will satisfy the functions required of the Tigalas’ original occupation. It will be a climate responsive structure that will contain a good deal of green (cultivated) space. It should be a place of refuge for these people in terms of culture, occupation and political representation. The beliefs, principles and the various demands that the Vahnikula Kshatriyas have been lobbying for (returning their land, declaring a weeklong holiday for city on account of Bengaluru Karaga) must be expressed, communicated and satisfied in the built form. The following will fall under the scope of the design exercise –
• conserving the community’s culture and customs and lifestyle as an agrarian one and as a Vahnikula Kshatriya, • Comprehending the sacred; creating a space that is sacred to the community they are tied to and sacred to the city as something that is vital for its economy and environment. SACRED As a planning initiative the program can be seen to be feasible in the light of agrarian crises across the country. Cities are hardest hit in such conditions and to offer priority to an agrarian community that has already been long-associated with the city will be economically as well as socially feasible. A city that has even the traces of the ability to produce its own food will have a longer life and its society will be more balanced. Farmer societies are predominant in India where the greatest industry is agriculture; however these people should hold special significance in cities, esp. in Bangalore. In terms of the space this will ultimately create, it can even be said to be environmentally feasible. The foundation for this thesis draws heavily from ‘Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred and the Civic in India’s High-tech City’ by Smriti Srinivas that strives to understand Bangalore through the eyes of the Tigala community and contains a deep study of the Karaga rituals. Further readings of older works concerning the region of Bangalore reveal interesting facts. Booklets and essays by Munivenkatappa and Dr M H Marigowda ascribe particular importance to the contribution of this community to Bangalore’s economy and self-reliance in food crops. In Francis Buchanan’s accounts of the then Mysore region, he identifies a ring of forts and hill formations surrounding lands largely cultivated for vegetable, fruit and flower gardens. What he’d identified was actually the home of Tigalas. Even today, their distribution is seen to be contained in these regions. The Tigalas belong to the Kshatriya or warrior class. At the point when Buddhism and Jainism became the predominant religions in India, the phenomenon of battles/ wars/defence became defunct and these people took to tilling the land and became occupational gardeners. The garden city of Bangalore was in fact a city of gardeners. Curiously, despite being denizens of an urban settlement, the Tigalas identity themselves as a rural community. They take pride in their erstwhile identity of warriors that they maintain parallelly by their practice in their garadi manes and most significantly in the celebration of Bangalore’s oldest festival – the Karaga procession. The Karaga procession is almost tragic in its uniqueness – the procession visits sites of sacred importance to the Tigalas which include gardens, temples and water bodies (some of which have diminished to little ponds, or worse, puddles)
that are lost in the new urban grid that has come to take over the city. This festival is significant because it recognizes and traces the boundary of what used to belong to the community, so that even though the sites it visits seem like random places on the Bangalore map, on the night of the procession, the trajectory seems to recall a Bangalore from an older era. The buildings and roads on the path lose their meaning and what stands out is a bunch of warriors running through a garden city visiting sacred sites. Suddenly we are able to see the connection between the fort, the garden areas, lakes, market and temples with renewed clarity. The procession may be understood as an urban experiential tool. Interestingly, the Karaga jatre happens in other rural towns (formerly identified by Buchanan) where there are considerable numbers of Tigala, like Hoskote, Yelahanka, Doddballapur, etc. Hoskote situated in rural Bangalore bears several similarities to the Bangalore pete area. It has a system of lakes, a similar temple dedicated to guardian deity and a fort in the old part of the town. Hoskote today faces a precarious water situation with the groundwater table having been nearly depleted. Heavy industries have bloomed around the district. The district runs largely on agriculture being a significant supplier of flowers, fruits and vegetables to the Bangalore market amongst others. With east Bangalore showing tendencies to grow, Hoskote may be understood to be on the brink of being swallowed by urbanization (though the extent and rapidity of this is disputable) thus snatching another homeground away from the Tigalas. The site of the thesis project is a piece of land in the north of Hoskote town, bordered by a lake and agricultural fields and apart of the town’s edge. The proposal is to create a community centre with the intention of tying the people to their land in a manner that is as metaphorical as literal. The act of rooting a people to their ground should hopefully preserve their occupation as farmers as well as the landscape and ecological value of the region. It is piquing that the Tigalas identify themselves as a rural community while they have actually been denizens of an urban settlement for very long. While the execution of this design project is not going to be the same as giving the Tigalas their land, it should mark the beginning of a viable struggle for their upcoming and be a symbol of their lifestyle and resistance to mindless urbanity. On a more ambitious note, the project may be seen as having the potential, albeit in a very small way, to be part of a much larger urban-rural nexus! The Karaga jatre is basically a procession that begins at the main temple of the Tigalas and visits various sites of significance like water bodies, gardens, garadi mane (gymnasium) and smaller temples. It is a physically exhausting performance carried out by Veerakumaras or warriors who undergo preparation (involves a strict diet and rigorous exercise) at their garadi mane for several days before the Karaga begins that. The Gante pujari is the religious head in-charge of this performance and carries out all the rituals associated with it. There is one main
Karaga carrier who actually bears the heavy Karaga on his head throughout the procession. The Karaga is made of red earth taken from the garadi mane. It celebrates symbolically the sacredness of the earth that the Tigalas worship. ESTABLISH ‘We followed in the trail of water. First we cultivated land at Siddigatta Tank near the City Market. We lost our land there. Then we settled near Lalbagh garden, only to once more lose our land, and were pushed towards Koramangala and Doopanahalli. After that land was acquired, we moved to Varthur. Now with the Singapore Tech Park being planned there, we have been pushed out towards Malur town.’ – K. Lakshmana The significant elements of the community are: a performance such as the Karaga jatre, economic associations in the city such as horticultural cooperatives and sites such as gymnasia, water bodies, gardens and temples. The Karaga jatre shows us how the modern urban grid of the city loses meaning when the older routes are highlighted. A more relevant form of urban planning is seen in the Tigalas’ landscapes wherein green lands are part and parcel of the city patchwork connecting settlements, markets, temples and ponds instead of the modern idea of having a green belt pushed to the periphery of the city. Also the experience of green spaces within their context takes it beyond being a mere green space or lung space. They serve an industry, maintain livelihoods and are thus comprehensive in their outlook. The thesis will try to reinstate this outlook in designing a community centre for them that recognizes the various elements of their community.
02 SACRED SPACES This essay abstract was a Berkeley Prize semifinalist, 2011 “You must be able to enter a church and feel that you are at the centre of the world. I believe that this idea of the sacred corresponds to a primordial need of man.” – Mario Botta. Bangalore was a city that once held its many gardens and trees in sacred hold. Bangalore’s now redoubtable sobriquet of ‘Garden City’ is dying a silent death with the advent of globalization and with it the death of the space of the individual. The space I have illustrated does not have a name, a clear formal use or even an identity. While not being the garden that Bangalore typified, it exists to me as a paragon of an individual’s place. It lies in the midst of my residential layout Sadanandanagar, like a quiet manifestation of the Brahmasthana (the central void that ancient Indian building texts prescribe for harmony) ensconced by a water tank, a coconut tree, a now defunct bus stop, the local watchman’s house and a dairy parlour. No one seems sure what it was originally intended for but there exists a sort of unspoken respect for the area that is visible when you note that: there is no garbage dumped here, the occasionally parked vehicle takes care to gently back out onto the road before moving away and not through the site and yet the land is regularly treaded on keeping it the grass-free ground that it is. It is not the green fenced park that BDA punctuates every layout with, it has an edge that interacts and invites. There is no skyline to look at, only the sky. It is empty and yet safe, it looks up and yet looks within. Sadanandanagar itself ensconced within immovable Defence land on one side and railway line on the other has so far succeeded in keeping away from the and thereby preserves a modicum of sanity. The CDP is fast dissolving into a tragic farce it is. This used to be a desolate layout with very few houses. It is a world where commercial forces have not yet laid their touch, where the common man still has his say. Where wide-eyed residences have not yet been converted into introverted glass-façade-toting offices and footpaths are not run over by twowheelers and hawkers and are still safe. It is important to understand what it is not in order to see what it is; for it is in the experience of this duality do I perceive the sacred that I speak of. Bangalore’s much vaunted Metro has one of its primary stations located near Sadanandanagar. In the light of this development and more, I intend to enunciate in my essay how this place can preserve its sanctimony through careful edge treatments and if required adaptive reuse of the existing residences.
Jaaga
This essay was published on the Jaaga website but the link is unfortunately not available anymore. Jaaga has changed its premises again and with it, its website and some of its operations as well. The retreating monsoon’s rain is incessant, but a group of artists cheerfully rehearse on a smooth, dry second floor with slim partitions, flooded with light and rich with earthscented air. The building, ‘Jaaga’, itself has only recently moved off its old site and settled down here, but its inhabitants are already busy feeding off and nourishing it in every possible sense of those acts. ‘Jaaga’ in the words of its founders Archana Prasad (an artist-designer) and Freeman Murray (an entrepreneur-investor) is a ‘creative common ground’. With a core team and some volunteers, this quirky place came up within a month. ‘Jaaga’ means ‘space’ and that is the core of what it provides – a space for anyone to use for events pertaining to art, design, technology or socio-political values, free of cost, so long as the events are open to all. From film-screenings and conferences to writing workshops and poetry readings, Jaaga is a place teeming with ideas, exhibitions, discussions and most of all - experiences. Visiting artists, green activists, photographers, technicians have all brought to the space a token of experience that help in truly making it a ‘living building’ as the founders describe it. In creative endeavors with visiting artists, sound and light projects have been produced – an interactive feature that seeks to represent space or engage the audience by means of ones auditory and visual senses - the idea being to create a sentient building. Jaaga is a site for art installations and in more ways than one is an art installation itself. The building’s front façade is a vertical garden (a garden expert’s contribution). The site grows its own vegetables. They aim to have a circulatory system of rainwater harvesting and a metabolic system of worms to compost waste. Bright red and blue pallet-rack shelving constitute the low-cost framework of the building, creating a cluster of spaces that can be dissembled and rearranged to adapt to various functions, in a form that is minimal and sustainable at heart. Electronics and media labs, indispensable tools in making the living building a reality, are also contained. The place’s spirit is one of extended amenability. Thus in its vibrant, transparent entirety, Jaaga almost becomes a living, breathing, organism that is sentient and responsive in its own respect. The structure by periodically changing its site, moves through the city, is continuously varying to adapt to functions and as a system is open to all. In its multi-level spaces, simple yet flexible organization and light body, it is unique in how it insinuates into its surroundings and succeeds in being a habitat for a thriving community of creative concerns. It continually absorbs and runs a biotic process as it nurtures new talent and accommodates audiences. The hallmark of Jaaga’s singularity is its malleability and ability to be accessible to all in a simple yet effective technique. It is a community space that is always in the making, a space shaped by everyone. If democracy could be expressed as architecture, it would be