Twenty years ago, I took my first journey down the Coromandel Coast to the Shore Temple at Mahabalipuram and then inland to a region I'd heard of called Chettinad. It was largely impulse that led me along routes trafficked mainly then by bullock carts to detour into a semi-arid region where palm-lined lanes traced vectors through the Tamil heartland.
Each led further into a place that seemed, upon first encounter, to have been slumbering in prolonged hibernation. In a time before mobile communication became ubiquitous, the villages of Chettinad felt moated by a distance as much temporal as physical. It was dreamlike to happen upon villages that arose from a placid landscape like places in fable -mansions neatly arrayed along dirt lanes, row upon row of them, in what then seemed the back of beyond.
Self-contained worlds, the villages of Chettinad were founded by a caste of traders and moneylenders known as the Nattukottai Chettiars. Over centuries, these people had established a homeland notable equally for its isolation and for how its linked outposts replaced the organic sprawl of most Indian villages with orderly communities of angled and rational street grids.
From amid the softness of palm groves, rice paddies, bougainvillea and flame trees rose not thatched huts but mansions.
Dominating every aspect of life in these places was a trading and banking caste for which such strict geometries were no more an abstraction than are the lines of a ledger.
Though no one can identify with certainty the origins of these merchants, mariners and traders - whether they arrived in antiquity, chased or lured inland by various dynasties or even descended from 8th century traders that plied the Bay of Bengal - it is agreed that by the 19th century, they had installed themselves in scores of linked villages and in ever more grandiose dwellings designed to accommodate large intergenerational clans.
It is also established that the wealth required for erecting these opulent monuments in the hinterlands derived from the extensive trade the Chettiars conducted in raw materials abundant then in Burma, Ceylon and Indochina, as those countries were still known, in Laos and the Malay Peninsula, in Sumatra and even Borneo.
Hulking in size and ostentation, the mansions tended to startle a newcomer - or anyway this one an impression elapsed time has done nothing to alter.
To come upon these Europeanized structures, with their acres of roof tiles, their castle-like towers, their turrets and weather-scabbed street-facing walls is to marvel at the sophistication of their arrangement. To enter them is to experience amazement at their opulence. To know the Chettinad region over time, as I have come to do, is to be perpetually confounded by the naivete of anyone having imagined that, in the pitiless South Indian climate, these fragile monuments of brick and mortar were any more likely than the great stone cities of the Chola kings were destined to last.
An amazing transformation characterises the domestic architecture of Chettinad. From the middle of the 19th century onwards, the towns and villages in this somewhat out of the way part of south-eastern Tamil Nadu witnessed a dramatic acceleration in building construction. Nowhere is this more evident than in the profusion of huge, grandly planned dwellings that may justly be described as mansions. These veritable palaces proclaimed the prosperity and ambition of the Nattukottai Chettiars, a mercantile community that, according to local legend, had migrated to this part of Tamil Nadu from the nearby coastal zone many hundreds of years before. But the Nattukottai Chettiars were never able to benefit from their new homeland, which was thorny and parched, and mostly unsuitable for cultivation. The unrelenting poverty of this arid environment compelled these commercially inclined, resourceful people to seek their fortunes outside Chettinad, and in time even beyond India itself. And it is the astounding wealth that the Chettiars acquired as expatriate money lenders, traders and land owners which financed the magnificent mansions of Chettinad that form the subject of this volume.
In spite of the foreign source of their greatest prosperity, the Nattukottai Chettiars remained staunchly loyal to their homeland, never losing their original attachment to Chettinad. At the same time that these far-flung merchants accumulated their ever-increasing wealth abroad, they preferred to invest in major building projects in their ancestral towns and villages, rather than in Madras and Calcutta where they established their first enterprises, or in the newly developed colonial port cities of South-East Asia where they came to be based. Such a deeply felt 'nostalgia' on the part of Chettiars for their homeland is best explained as part of an enduring conservative life style that nourished the community's traditional family customs and religious observances. From this point of view, the architecture of the Chettiars, whether domestic or religious, came to fulfill two interrelated purposes: demonstration of new wealth, and preservation of long-standing social and ritual practices. Though the fortunes of most Chettiar families were lost in the middle of the 20th century and only partially recovered in subsequent years, the lifestyle of the community survives, as may be seen in the festivities that continue to be celebrated in the most lavish manner in many Chettinad mansions to this day.
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