Once upon a time a rich businessman decided to build identical mansions for
his two sons. The houses were to be built side by side, each with about 25
rooms. Burmese teak, stained glass from Venice, mirrors from Belgium, Japanese
wall tiles and wrought iron from Britain graced the interiors.
Classic Art Deco embellishments adorned the exteriors, deep porticos shaded
the front doors and a fountain was placed in the centre of the shared driveway.
The sons and their families moved in and when there were parties, weddings and
festivals the specially built reception rooms that stretched the length of the
houses were filled with up to 1000 guests.
And the houses were full of laughter and children and the aroma of spices and
fine perfumes and cumbersome heavy keys were used to lock the storerooms, of
which were there were many because they were filled with money and gold, and
gems and treasures from all over Asia.
This vast mansion in rural Tamil Nadu was once home to one extended family.
It covers an entire block and has now been restored as a luxury hotel.
These were the halcyon days, which of course, if this really was a fairy
story, would have lasted forever. But instead, this is a true tale of the
Chettiars of the state of Tamil Nadu in South India, who once lived in thousands
of mansions like this, until the tide of wealth ebbed away. A few houses have
been restored; in a few dozen more a few family members or ancient retainers
camp out in a few habitable rooms. The rest, hundreds of them, lie empty,
ravaged by monsoon rains, heat, dust, monkeys and other inexorable instruments
of decay.
So now, just four people and a small dog live in one of the brothers' Art
Deco mansions. The other stands completely empty, waiting maybe for one more
family wedding.
It is the granddaughter who shows me around, although it was the family
servant who enticed me in from the weedy, unsealed road outside the house. I did
not need much encouragement. Although slick with sweat from the 35 degrees
Celsius-plus temperature and stifling humidity I'd been staggering around the
streets of the region's main town of Karaikudi for some time already, desperate
to see inside these improbable, incredible palaces.
Pillared courtyards, such as this one in the Visalam Hotel (a mansion built
by a Chettiar businessman for his daughter as a wedding gift), are a typical
feature of Chettiar architecture.
I'm shown through a series of pillared courtyards and then up three flights
of a teak staircase to the roof. From here behind the crumbling concrete
parapets I can see over the neighbouring walls into more of the Chettiar
mansions, a few freshly painted with facades of blinding white, bright orange
and even garish luminescent green. Others stand, blank-eyed, netting stretched
over deep verandas to keep out the monkeys, weeds sprouting from the roofs.
My guide is an accountancy student, a very apt choice for the youngest
generation of the Chettiar caste who made their fortunes as bankers, businessmen
and traders. She opens the door into the long function room. "We can fit
hundreds of people in here," she says. Today she, her mother and two servants
seem to be living in just one or two rooms and in the semi-open back
courtyard.
Iron bedsteads with rumpled covers sit huddled in the corners of one large
room, a tiny ancient television perches on a stool at one bed end. On the
veranda metal trays bearing a few cups and plastic jugs sit beside the courtyard
well. On the walls are black and white photos of family weddings and baby
photos of chubby smiling infants lying bare-bottomed on tiger skin rugs.
An immaculately restored Chettiar palace, still used by its absentee owners
for important family occasions.
It is the family servant, angular and spare under her sari who makes sure to
collect some rupees from me for the privilege of seeing around the home. Maybe
it's she who is more acutely aware of how greedily these houses swallow up
money.
That evening, Ramanathan (Ramu) Chettiar, who lives in another of the
mansions and is guest relations manager in yet another home, now converted into
a luxury hotel,
outdoor pool furniture, tells me just how many rupees home
owners must find to stop their houses crumbling away.
"Houses need up to two million rupees every year (about $NZ45,000) and that's
mostly just to maintain the roof tiles, save the timber from the white ants and
keep the monkeys out."
An Art Deco mansion in Karaikudi, one of two (the other is on the right)
built by a wealthy Chettiar businessman for his sons.
What is astonishing is that in this small region and scattered among about 75
villages are nearly 11,000 of these mansions.
"Eleven THOUSAND?" I reiterate.
"About that," says Ramu, "but 100 years ago there were more than
20,000".
Gently decaying in the tropicis... a Chettiar mansion that has seen better
days.
"All like this?" I'm still struggling with the statistics, waving my hand in
the direction of the 42-room mansion that stretched out behind the terrace we're
sitting on.
"Oh, some are much bigger than this," he says, adding that he lives in his
family mansion which, when he was young, housed close to 30 relatives. Nuclear
families would have their private living spaces but meals were often
communal.
"In this way, if there were disputes, especially among the women when the men
were away, people were forced to come together at least once a day and sort
things out face-to-face."
Many of the older Chettiar houses have ornate facades; this one features
Hindu statuary.
How did these multistorey confections with their turrets and towers,
ornamental gateways, facades adorned with an eclectic assembly of statuary that
includes Queen Victoria, British military figures and Hindu gods and
goddesses,
outdoor furniture manufacturers, come to be here, far off the
beaten track in Tamil Nadu? We're nine hours' drive from Chennai (Madras) and
several hours from the ocean. If the Chettiars were traders why did they invest
so much of their wealth so far inland?
Just as the number of mansions and Chettiar villages seems to vary depending
on who you talk too, so too do the stories of the origins of the Chettiars
themselves, whose history is interwoven with those of South Indian dynasties
such as the Cholas who ruled at least 2000 years ago.
What is certain is that the Chettiars have, for centuries, been masters of
trade and business. According to Ramu they originally based their operations on
south India's Arabian Sea coast but in the mid-1700s a tsunami wiped out their
homes and wealth and forced them to move inland.
A few members of a new generation of Chettiars are now finding employment in
tourism. Chidhambaram Chettiar is front desk manager at the Art Deco era Visalam
Hotel in Karaikudi.
"The reason you see very few fountains and pools around their houses is that
the Chettiars have been rather hydrophobic ever since."
The Chettiars' trading empire encompassed modern-day Sri Lanka, Burma,
Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia but it was during the time of the British Raj
from 1858 to the declaration of Indian independence in 1947 that the Chettiars
really began to consolidate their fortunes (and amass the money to enable them
to build their mansions).
Considered by some historians to be the fathers of modern banking, the
Chettiars served as bankers and money lenders to the Raj as well as continuing
their trading enterprises.
"Visitors sometimes imagine that all these rooms were bedrooms," Ramu
explains. "We've taken walls out to create large bedrooms because originally
they were much smaller and used for storage of family wealth and tradeable
goods. If prices were low families would store products until prices went
up."
"My great-great-grandfather spent most of his life as a gem merchant in
Burma. He would come home every three or four years – that is why all his
children were spaced out at about four-year intervals."
The Chettiars poured more of their wealth into the houses rather than
furniture, although Ramu is now collecting Belgian glassware that some families
are now having to sell to pay for essential repairs (antique dealers have
already stripped many houses, including in some places entire ceilings and
metres of teak. One house alone netted 300 tonnes of teak).
"Burmese teak is everywhere and, of course, you would think it was loaded
into ships to the nearest port but in fact it was towed across the Bay of
Bengal, chained to the ships and with the logs engraved with the purchasers'
names. Then it was loaded into elephant and bullock carts and hauled inland.
"They brought most of the other interior adornments the same way; the stained
glass from Venice, delft tiles from Holland, wall tiles from Japan, chandeliers
from Murano, Carrara marble and Birmingham steel for balconies and the like, in
fact our spiral staircase is from there."
Another unique feature of most of the mansions is the special treatment
applied to the walls – a coating of lime, egg white, powdered sea shell sand
jaggery (palm sugar) to create a silky smooth, mirrored finish.
There are two main styles of Chettiar mansion – those built from 1840 to 1920
and the later Art Deco buildings built between 1920 and the late 1940s.
It's no coincidence that the house-building stopped at the time of Indian
independence from the British. The glory days of the Chettiars ended with the
colonisers' departure as their wealth had become inextricably bound up with that
of the Raj. As the Chettiars' vast incomes largely dried up (there are some
Chettiar families who are still extremely successfully business people) there
was little money to retain their mansions; younger generations were no longer
content to live in what was becoming a rural backwater.
Although house demolition, which saw the number of mansions reduced almost by
half has now been stemmed, of those remaining only about 20 per cent are still
lived in permanently. Unesco is apparently investigating making the region a
World Heritage area. There are major hurdles to overcome, however. For example,
most houses are owned by sometimes dozens of family members not all of whom can
agree on what should be done with their ancestral homes.
The Chettiar houses are not only found in towns. Many are scattered in the
countryside around Karaikudi. Indian rural life, so little changed for
centuries,
folding garden furniture, goes on, right under the walls of
these extraordinary houses.
Farmers plant rice and wait for the rains, bullock carts loaded with flour
trundle down lanes lined with these palatial mansions, marooned in farmland like
abandoned, luxury cruise liners adrift at sea. A smartly uniformed doorman
salutes in front of one of the houses now converted into a hotel. A surprisingly
scant tourist trade has saved some of the houses, but say the locals, how many
beds can the region sustain?
"Help is needed from Unesco, the state government, the Indian government," a
local guide says.
Directly across the road from the hotel, an elderly couple, both with milky
cataract-veiled eyes, stand at the gateway to another vast, ornate, fortress of
lost wealth.
I can hardly resist the perverse urge to step inside the semi-derelict
mansion and wander among the ghosts, scatter the white ants, camp on the veranda
on a string bed, become a misplaced Miss Haversham, mouldering among the
memories.
But I have to move on, as the world has for the Chettiar mansions. Like the
present-day Chettiars, I just hope that someone comes to the rescue of their
astounding architectural heritage.
