A house for Mr Vyas

“Do you know Guruji? Madhavrao Sadashivrao Golwalkar?” asks Duttatrey Vyas, sitting in his living room that was once used to store grains. “He visited this house. As did Narendra Modi, when he was an RSS worker.”

Vyas is referring to the 200-year-old haveli his family has lived in since 1942. One that embodies two decades of his struggle to reside in and restore a crumbling relic of Ahmedabad’s architectural heritage. Located in the old city, in Pushkarna Ni Pol, named after the once predominant Pushkarna Brahmin community, the haveli was rented out to his father, advocate Harish Shankar Reva Shankar Vyas, for ₹40 a month by Balabhai Girdharbhai Seth, a cotton mill owner. Harish Shankar Vyas was also the head of the Ahmedabad branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which functioned out of the haveli until 1968.

After his father’s death, Duttatrey Vyas continued to live in the house with his two brothers and their families. At the time, he was the chief cashier at Bharat Suryodaya Mills. But by the late ’80s, the brothers had all bought flats in newer parts of the city, and Vyas and his family — wife, two daughters and a son — became the haveli’s sole occupants.

Like any other city, hyper-urbanised Ahmedabad has little room or empathy for its musty, dilapidated heritage. But people like Vyas hold out hope. In the eventual result of his fight against time and real estate sharks will lie the future of most privately owned heritage architecture in the country.

The storeroom-turned-living room we’re in is neither too hot nor too cold. “And during the rains, you feel like it’s air-conditioned,” says Vyas. It overlooks the courtyard, which has scaffolding running along its edges. Furniture and other household items are lined up in one corner. The water tank is at the farthest corner of the courtyard. “We don’t use it anymore, but in my father’s time, we would drink from it,” says Vyas, as he slides the heavy stone lid off to show me its depth. It is about 25 feet.

If one stands right at the centre of the courtyard and looks up, one can see a cloud of dust — a sure sign of a house under repair — illuminated by the setting sun. Further up are glassless windows. Through these come the sound of wood being sawed and the scratching of the trowel against a wet trough of cement.

The haveli has all the elements typical of Ahmedabad’s architectural tradition — wood carvings in the courtyard, on the pillars and the façade; original flooring and frescoes on the top-floor walls, informs Nikhil Vyas, architect by training and technical head of City Heritage Centre (CHC), an NGO focusing on the restoration and conservation of heritage properties in the old city. “Only three or four houses that have frescoes remain in Ahmedabad,” he says. But what really sets this haveli apart from the rest is that there have been no modifications. “It is the way it was a 100 years ago.” The haveli has now been categorised as a Grade I heritage property by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC). “There are only 500 such structures left in the city,” he says.

For centuries, the itinerant Gujarati trader has travelled across continents, bringing back from his travels the knowledge of diverse architectural traditions — from places such as Indonesia, East Africa and West Asia. This is reflected, for instance, in the woodcarvings in each of these havelis, says Manvita Baradi, convener of the Gujarat Chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). Timber was the preferred material for construction as most of these homes were two- or three-storey high, and unlike stone, timber was lighter and provided ventilation. Before electricity and air-conditioning changed the tenets of insulation, climate dictated the layout of all such homes. The entrance of these havelis, for instance, is narrow, which, according to Baradi, minimalised the entry of hot air. The air that managed to slip through, eventually travelled upwards and out of the house through the open courtyard.

The courtyard was the ‘core’ of the house used as a space for the family to come together. A private room recessed in one corner was used either as a storeroom or bedroom, and in another corner was the kitchen, usually adjacent to a puja room, according to a paper published by Jay Thakkar of CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Thakkar also surmises that ornamentation was used in a deliberate manner — the spaces that were on public display, such as the courtyard and the otla or raised entryway supported by columns, were marked by elaborate carvings, while private spaces, such as the kitchen, were relatively spartan.

In Vyas’s house, the façade of the first floor has carvings of elephant heads and peacocks with their beaks curiously buried in their feathers. According to Thakkar, elephants were a common motif engraved in wooden panels, since they were easy to “draw and carve”, and so were peacocks, a celebrated symbol among ancient Greeks, Sufi iconographers and the Mauryas.

In 1996, architect Debashish Nayak, then associated with the AMC, along with French conservationists, paid Duttatrey Vyas a visit. They offered to undertake restoration worth ₹10 lakh, but the offer was contingent on his owning the haveli. This encouraged Vyas, who was a tenant, to begin the process of seeking ownership of the house. But before that could go anywhere, a property shark started pressurising Vyas to vacate the house immediately: “He wanted to see this haveli demolished. He said he wanted to build a commercial complex on the ground floor and flats on top.”

Although the old city has historically been a commercial hub, it’s also home to housing clusters or pols located in alleys, off the arterial roads reserved for business. The heritage havelis are located in these pols, and residents of many such homes have now shifted to ‘new’ Ahmedabad due to the high cost of maintaining the properties. The vacant houses are then ‘occupied’ by godowns. They often collapse due to neglect or, in some cases, are torn down by the AMC.

Not surprisingly, families that decide to stay on but are unable to maintain their homes are targeted. Real estate dealers “have realised that [such] individuals have not been able to maintain the property. They eye such havelis, so that they can convert them into concrete buildings,” says Baradi.

In 2001, even as the Vyas family faced threats from the property dealer, a massive earthquake struck Gujarat. It caused the haveli’s façade to lean away from the main structure. Vyas says that people from the neighbourhood came to see if his house had caved in. As the fore portion of the haveli stooped, he says he could see 12-inch-long iron nails that held the structure together and kept it from collapsing. Although this re-affirmed Vyas’s faith in the ‘heritage value’ of the haveli, he recognised that it needed more than just minor renovation. He would need expert help. But even with the added trouble of a leaning façade, Vyas had no intention of vacating.

In July 2009, while visiting his elder daughter who lived overseas, Vyas received a call from his younger daughter about the murder of the property dealer who had his eye on the haveli. It was in the news. Soon after, people connected to him started making the rounds, insisting yet again that Vyas vacate the haveli. One of them was closely associated with Asaram Bapu (and was arrested by Gujarat Police in October 2013 in connection with a sexual assault case implicating the godman and his son Narayan Soni.)

That year, in September 2009, as the front of the haveli leaned outward at a 30° angle, the AMC issued a notice directing Vyas to restore the façade, failing which it would take it down. Vyas, whose tenancy status had still not changed, did not have the legal right to carry out the restoration. He didn’t have the financial means either.

Vyas’s eldest daughter then advised him to buy a flat, as it was too dangerous to continue living there. So he started looking, but “my heart was not in it. I didn’t like these flats, they were so small… I felt like if I walked from one end to another, I would end up banging my head against a wall.” The apartment hunt was called off and the Vyas family decided to stay.

In December 2010, when his eldest daughter returned to India, she went with her father to meet the then chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, with a photograph of their house. “He said I would get the house and gave MLA Bhushan Bhatt the responsibility to get it done,” says Vyas. Meanwhile, the family faced yet another hurdle: “The tilt of the house had increased substantially. We were now afraid that it would fall and we would suffer a tremendous loss.” Fixing it was now imperative

A year later, architects from City Heritage Centre visited Vyas’s house. Conservationist Debashish Nayak had been instrumental in its establishment and had referred Vyas to them. “We had [identified] this house among the top 10 houses that needed to be restored urgently,” says Nikhil Vyas. But full restoration of such a large property was a costly affair. And the leaning façade was a pressing issue. So the conservationists decided to focus on securing the house structurally.

But before work could start, Duttatrey Vyas received a stay order from the city’s Small Cause Court prohibiting him from renovating the haveli, as it did not belong to him. Six months later, the stay was lifted, and after more than a decade of tilting, the façade was finally ready to be restored.

Masons and carpenters specialising in restoration were hired. First they removed an unstable part of the wooden roof and replaced it with plastic components, and moved to the doors and windows. Som Bhai, the head craftsman, says, “I almost fell off the roof when we were taking down a part of it.” Although only “minimal restoration” has taken place so far, the house is saved and standing tall again.

Duttarey Vyas envisions a day when the haveli will become a place frequented by local and foreign visitors and prominent people. He wants to set it up as a homestay. For now, the doors are open for students who come to marvel at it and learn about its architecture.

As I walk away, turning back to look at the haveli, through the grid of the wooden pillars that support the roof, I can still see the deep brown wood of the house, textured and carved elaborately. Only a few feet away lies a busy street, clogged by rush-hour traffic, but here, the silence is astounding.

(At the time of going to print, Duttatrey Vyas was still fighting a case in a local court to get ownership of this haveli.)

(Meher Ali is a freelance journalist)

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