Monsoon Electives
Semester 3
Batch- Vertical Studio
The elective Experiencing Home discussed 6 books that had a central idea of a home. Each story had a character and what does home mean to that character. Different definitions of home like a corner of a huge bungalow, a person, a courtyard, the street, came through these stories. One of these books was The Last Bungalow: Writings on Allahabad by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra which is a collection of stories having their roots in the city of Allahabad.
The three special stories we came across were 1. “From An Autobiography”, narrating the story of Jawaharlal Nehru and his interest in theosophy. The chapter begins in the year 1936 where Motilal Nehru, a successful lawyer of his time, had bought a new bungalow with a swimming pool and electric light which was considered an amenity that most people couldn't afford in those days. Beside this, the bungalow had a big garden and separate verandah spaces. This residence was named ‘Anand Bhawan’.
From the extremely privileged to story shifts to “the Chak Mohalla”, the locality where Harivansh Rai Bachchan spent most days of his childhood before he immersed completely into Hindi literature. This mohalla consists of varying typologies of buildings, from multi-storey bungalows with courtyards and stables, to two room cottages, to mud-brick houses. The author describes the locality with a very specific sense of directionality and spins a web of an associational map that allows the reader to experience the space way more than the satellite map which only shows the geographical setting and the cartographical features. The author mentions distinct details of the life-form that make the space as alive as it used to be. There were people with various kinds of occupations in the transitional phase of this village becoming a town during the 1920s.
Moving from a mixed to a very specific colony, the following extract “Railway Colony”, is a text talking about Esther Mary Lyons’ days in the railway colony in Allahabad during the 1950s. This colony permitted only Anglo-Indians and European families to live there. The author is a half British girl of a single Indian mother and thus lived with a friend of her mother in the colony. They lived with Mr. de’Cunah, who was paid a certain amount every month. There were 6 of them who lived in a flat consisting of two rooms, a storeroom and a bathroom. There were 4 such flats in a two storey building whose lowermost floor acted as kitchen and was occupied by servants in exchange for service. The bedroom, storeroom and bathroom were next to each other with a front verandah where Mr. de’Cunah used to spend most of his evenings. With time, the cook set up another chulha in the back verandah as well so as to keep it closer to the dining space.
These three stories existed at different times, in different people’s lives, in different forms and events affecting each in a different sense. But there is one thing that the author kept constant; the city of Allahabad, which had regained its glory in the colonial days.
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