The
Three Little Pigs and the Idea of a ‘Pucca’ House
Perpetuating
a Stereotype
Our
cook’s daughter accompanied her mother to our house some evenings. A bright
child, she had studied in a school in her village in Bengal, where the medium
of instruction was Bangla. Since her parents had moved to Noida, she had been
unable to go to school, where most subjects were taught either in Hindi or
English. I could only manage to teach her on a few days of the week, and both
the mother and daughter were keen that she attended regular school. But the
principal of Nayi Disha, a local
school run by a charitable trust, told me that the child was overage for Class
1, and could not follow the level of teaching in Class 2. So she suggested that
I teach Dulali at home, and if she was able to clear the First Term exams, they
would give her admission.
The
chapter on ‘Shelter’ in one of the school text books brought me up short. I was
reading out the different types of houses shown there, when I came across this
sentence under the picture of a thatched mud house: ‘Yeh ek mitti ka ghar hai. Aise gharon mein nimn jati ke aur garib log
rahte hain’ (‘this is a mud house. Low-caste and poor people live in such
houses’.) This categorization, in a book in schools in 21st century democratic India? Since Dulali could not read as proficiently as I could, I managed to
skip this offensive statement without her noticing the fact of its presence.
What did the teachers in class do, I wondered – especially in a school where
most of the students would come from poor or rural backgrounds? Did they
register how insensitive and incorrect this statement was?
Curious
to see how my daughter’s text books dealt with this, I looked up her EVS book
for class 1 in DPS Noida. It did not make the direct statement between mud and
poverty, but categorised houses as
‘katcha’ and ‘pucca’. So much so, that the term katcha and
pucca which dot our lexicon today, carry overtones of affluence and
respectability - or the lack of it.
The
prejudice against houses made of mud and thatch is inculcated in less obvious
ways as well, from the time that our children are even younger. I renewed my
acquaintance with the Three Little Pigs some years ago. As I read out
the story to my daughter, I huffed and puffed with the Big Bad Wolf when he
successfully blew down the house made of straw and the house made of stick, and
was defeated by the house made of brick. Unstated Moral of the Story? Smart
Pigs build their houses of bricks.
When I
studied architecture two decades ago, in one of the leading schools of
architecture in the country, the instruction then - as now - was heavily
oriented towards making us smart pigs. Concrete, steel and brick construction
was what we were taught to build in. Luckily, as part of the curriculum we also
had to document and study vernacular homes and communities. So we experienced
houses made of mud, straw, stone and sticks. And though we weren’t exactly
encouraged to include traditional modes of construction in our design studios,
the more adventurous students at least experimented with these ostensibly
regressive materials.
So,
are the Three Little Pigs a result of an imperialist industrialist mindset? The Western mind seems to have become
ill-disposed towards ‘katcha’ materials for at least the last three hundred
years. Our disparagement for mud and straw is more recent. Before the British
assumed ascendancy in the political, cultural and the economic landscape of
India, mud was recognized and patronized by rural and urban alike, ruler and
ruled. The current derogatory connotations of ‘katccha’ today are one of the
relics of the Raj. The
recollections of a Professor C. H. Reilly, who arrived in company with Sir
Edwin Lutyens to India in 1928, to write the architectural part of a book on
New Delhi, reveal this. Reilly, on his return to London, contributed - according to the editor of Architectural Design and
Construction
- ‘a wholly delightful chapter...with unequalled richness of reminiscence and
acuteness of observation’ to its November 1934 issue. This is one of Reillys’
‘acute observations’:
‘Everything of
Lutyens is detailed with extraordinary care, and at Delhi some of his working
drawings are dimensioned to three decimals of an inch. To Indian builders and
craftsmen accustomed to their slipshod “kutcha” methods, such accuracy was a
revelation and a very valuable one.’
The
construction and majestic accuracy of indigenous Indian architecture—which
Reilly could scarcely have missed seeing in Delhi, would never have been
achieved by slipshod methods.
In actuality, each material has the potential to be worked well or in a
slipshod manner – it is as misguided to believe that all mud houses are
inherently deficient as it is to believe that concrete is the panacea to all
ills. The reflections of a better known traveler and writer who preceded Reilly
by a few hundred years, Francois Bernier are
interesting in this respect. Bernier travelled in India in the latter half of
the 18th CE, a few years after the new Mughal capital of
Shahjahanabad was established.
‘Amid these streets are dispersed the habitations of Mansabdars,
or petty Omrahs, officers of justice, rich merchants, and others; many
of which have a tolerable appearance. Very few are built entirely of brick or
stone, and several are made only of clay or straw, yet they are airy and
pleasant, most of them having courts and gardens, being commodious inside and
containing good furniture. The thatched roof is supported by a layer of long,
handsome, and strong canes, and the clay walls are covered with a fine white
lime.
Intermixed with these different houses is an immense number
of small ones, built of mud and thatched with straw, in which lodge the common
troopers, and all that vast multitude of servants and camp-followers who follow
the court and the army’.[1]
What is interesting in this description is
that it is the spatial arrangement and workmanship that distinguishes the
quality of a house, not its material. The associations of ‘mud’ solely
with ‘poor people’ or ‘poor workmanship’ were entirely absent in the imperial
city of Shahjahanabad, home to arguably the richest ruler of the medieval
world.[2]
This
is one of the points that our friends Vivek Rawal and Alka Palrecha have been
trying to demonstrate in their work with communities affected by floods, earthquakes
and other such disasters. However, their criteria in assessing the
vulnerability of habitats where each building-type (whether mud, concrete,
timber) was assigned a maximum rating of 10, was contested by government
departments who were unwilling to accept that a mud house could have a rating
of 10 in any circumstance. The belief that mud or wattle-and daub houses
are inherently inferior to more ‘permanent’ materials echoes a Reilly-like
colonial perception. For instance, the compensation to families affected by
disasters if their houses were made of mud or ‘katcha’ materials, is 14 times
less than the compensation to families whose houses were made of concrete. This bias, that makes distinctions between communities affected by disasters, solely on the construction-material of their dwellings, is shocking. It is also perplexing when it has been shown that
houses made in concrete have generally performed badly in our country, not just
in disasters but even in normal situations.
As I
experience the effects of the ‘falling plaster’ of our barely twenty year old
AWHO flat despite repeated repairs; as I witness the spalling concrete in the
State Complex of Chandigarh, the Mecca of most ‘modern’ architects; as I look
at what to me are unquestionably beautifully crafted and detailed bamboo and
mud houses built by villagers in Kosi, as part of the Owner Driven Reconstruction
Collaborative[3]
Vivek and Alka have been associated with; as I see the beautiful qualities of
light and space in the buildings made of rammed earth, thatch and stone with
minimal use of concrete and steel, by our architect friends, Krishna and Anu at
their Centre for Learning in Sittilingi village[4]; it seems to me it is more than time we stop being pig-headed and cease to perpetuate
stereotypes.
Images © Anisha Shekhar Mukherji; Text © Anisha Shekhar Mukherji
[1] p. 246, Travels
in the Mogul Empire 1656-1668, by Francois Bernier, eng. Trans by Archibald
Constable based on Irving Brock’s Translation, Asian Educational Services,
1996, first published London 1891.
[2] Work done by various initiatives in Gujarat has shown:
‘It is not the choice of material but choice of house-building technology that
is one of the main factors determining the scale and nature of earthquake
impact. In reconstruction, therefore, the choice of technology should
necessarily be based on multiple criteria, including self-reliance of the
community, availability of the material, and earth-quake proofing technology.’ Reconstruction of earthquake affected areas
of Gujarat www.pucl.org/reports/Gujarat/2001/quake4.html
[3] See March
2012, Architecture + Design, ‘The Story of Orlaha and Puraini in Bihar’,
Sandeep Virmani and Vivek Rawal, pp. 48-58
