The Hindu Business Line : Heritage or home?

The best part of leaving Palakkad is coming home again. When I purr up the quarry road towards the plantations and see the magnificent blue range rear up behind the trees, a snatch of Desh Raag plays in my head.

Homecoming is immediately followed by a visit to nearby Kalpathy to buy provisions, bother the tailor, and mark attendance in my uncles’ houses. Whenever I drive into this centuries-old settlement on the riverbank, I look out for my favourite la ndmarks. This time, one sight stopped me cold.

The Achan Padi is gone. In this graceful tile-roofed mansion half hidden behind a stout wall and gate, the raja of Palakkad traditionally camped for ten days during the annual chariot festival of the Viswanathaswamy Temple. It stood in line with the temple’s southern gate. Some concrete pillars and beams have come up, grey and dripping, but I’m too heartbroken to look again.

Kalpathy is officially a heritage village, and this wasn’t supposed to happen, but what do I know, I’m a laywoman. The legalities have no doubt been observed.

The first thing the Government tackled under the heritage scheme in Kalpathy was the thinnai or seat just outside every front door. This was where householders held court, chatting sideways and across the road to their neighbours. Some houses had broad thinnais and some had narrow ones, some high and some low. The doll-maker’s thinnai had elephant-shaped sides. All that was broken up, in order to preserve our heritage, and uniform thinnais were built, each with an identical kolam slab in front.

Next the drains were covered, the road raised and levelled, and granite slabs laid as footpaths. The slabs were rough cut, and elderly evening-walkers sometimes tripped over them, but the tourism minister felt “it should have an old look”. High lamp posts were put up that would clear the tip of the chariot, so that power would not have to be cut during the festival. Dustbins were installed. The riverside was cleaned, and you can now walk along a paved path there.

Because of the tourism department’s publicity campaigns, Kalpathy’s chariot festival now draws hordes of sightseers, and the department offers a heritage walk, at $100 a head.

And what of the villagers? They always had a robust pride in their history. K.N. Lakshminarayanan says it was a humble, unambitious community till the early 20th century, each new generation studying and passing on its wealth of Vedas, music, and astrology, till new schools and typing institutes set off a wave of emigration and a flow of money back into the village. He was a member of Kalpathy’s first village heritage society and set up a Web site that gives an exhaustive history of the community. Even during an impromptu morning chat, he had this history at his fingertips, along with a full account of the heritage scheme.

These are plain dwellings with many shortcomings, or, says one proud but candid native, not much better than slums. Still, some people kept the old frontage, mainly out of sentiment, while they added sanitation and other improvements inside. When the scheme was first proposed, said Lakshminarayanan, villagers feared it would prevent them from modernising their houses, but during initial meetings with the tourism department, they were assured it would not, and that the Government was simply requesting them to maintain the traditional frontage.

From this year, however, many families who can finally reconfigure rooms and build concrete roofs find the municipality is enforcing the rule that the verandah and first room within must be left as is. Few families can afford to replace wooden beams or pay the wages demanded by carpenters skilled enough to replicate the old structures. The Government promised to reimburse 25 per cent of restoration costs, but Lakshminarayanan says that seven or eight such applications, from families of limited means, have been ignored. There is no carrot, only stick.

And the post-project village already shows wear and tear. Storm water washes into some houses from the new, higher road. Electricity workers don’t have ladders high enough to change a bulb in the new lamp posts. The dustbins rusted through in less than a year, and the concrete paths to the river have begun to crumble.

The project had a budget of Rs 1.5 crore. A promised fund of Rs 10 lakh for the village to maintain the newly created posts and roads never materialised.

It was Lakshminarayanan who told me about the historical importance of Achan Padi. Some houses are worth preserving, he said, houses associated with Palghat Mani Iyer, Rama Bhagavathar, Chathapuram Subba Iyer, and the famous astrologers… He stopped himself just in time and chuckled, wait, we don’t want the Government to acquire your grandfather’s house.

So there are grey areas, and the beholder’s vision of heritage is also a family’s home. Chiefly, he and others in the village feel that heritage is not a matter of architecture and tourist attraction alone, that the village’s way of life, rather, should be preserved. “Vedic culture, music culture, jyothisha, this is what needs to be maintained, not just the structures.” He feels that learning the Vedas for a week, or learning to play a mridangam, would be a more meaningful experience for a visitor. The museum-library, which has not been talked of since the inauguration of the project, would be a welcome step. And the world could then look into Kalpathy’s past without burdening its people.

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