’Art & soul
Houses of the Chettiars

The Chettinad homes, with their sprawling structures, were emblems
of their success, writes B. N. Goswamy 

WHeN someone told me of a fine piece he had read by distinguished litterateur, U.R. Ananthamurthy, in which he had described the way affluent houses used to work once in the southern part of India, I was intrigued. Apparently he spoke in it — sadly, I do not read Kannada and had, therefore, no direct access to the piece — of two parallel lives being lived in these houses. There was the ‘outer’ part of the house where people would sit down together — male members of the family and visitors from their social circle — and talk for hours about everything under the sun: business, politics, community goings-on, who was likely to come into power, who was on his way out, what commodities were doing well across the seas, and what others were coming in. And so on. And then there was the ‘inner’ part of the house, the private quarters, where women would sit and talk: all kinds of things were the subject, but it was a private, intimate world in which grief and joys, aches and pains, pujas and recipes, gossip and scandal, all figured. Day after day, for these are the things that days were made of.

It is an attractive description, warm and characteristically perceptive. But for the first time I really understood it, this neat division, when I saw recently a Chettinad house in situ in that haven of peace and creativity — Dakshinachitra — in the neighbourhood of Chennai, on the coastal road to Mahabalipuram. Dakshinachitra could be described, in the broadest of terms, as a crafts village, but in many ways it is more than a crafts village, for it is designed to provide insights into ways of life. There, in that sprawling campus, stands, among other structures, a Chettinad house that I was told had been transplanted there from the Chettinad region — in the southern part of Tamil Nadu — and re-raised, brick by brick, column by column. It is a stately house, the frontage consisting of a finely crafted wood doorway, complete with elaborate carvings, set in the very centre of two really deep verandah-like sitting spaces: evidently the ‘outer’ part of the house of Ananthamurthy’s description. Here, one could imagine, there must have been floor coverings and cushions and bolsters once, and here, one can be certain, would have sat the master of the house, an accountant at one end poring over his books, clients and traders sitting around, and visitors coming in every now and then. Inside there is a wonderfully spacious courtyard, square and perfectly proportioned, open to the sky with a covered verandah-like passage going all around it, behind which is room after room: the ‘inner’ part of the house. There, one can imagine, would have sat the women of the household, grinding spices, slicing vegetables, sorting clothes out and — all the time — conversing about those griefs and joys, and aches and pains, that one has spoken of. An air of peace and quietly enjoyed luxury seemed to belong to the structure.

Till this point of time, I had never seen a Chettinad house. But with this in front of my eyes, and some information that I had gathered about these houses, I decided to learn a little more about houses of this kind and about the people that lived in them. The Chettiars — they are the ones after whom a whole region of Tamil Nadu is named — were respected and affluent traders and merchant-bankers, true descendants of what Sanskrit texts speak of as ‘shreshthis’: the same as ‘seths’ of northern India. As a group, they were powerful, some among them having made great fortunes nearer home, others fanning out to the south-eastern part of Asia — Singapore, Malaysia, Sumatra, Ceylon, Burma included — and amassing fabulous wealth which they routinely used to bring back home. And then build great mansions for themselves and their extended families.

The houses were emblems of their success. Around Karaikudi which is in the Sivagangai district of Tamil Nadu and lies at the heart of the 70-odd villages which were home to the Chettiars, one can still see them: sprawling structures, many of them multi-storied, some opening on to two different streets, in front and at the back, one of them known to everyone as the ayiram jannal veedu, the ‘house with a thousand windows’. It was not the size of the Chettinad houses alone that made them stand out — thinking back, the house in the Dakshinachitra complex was relatively small considering what Karaikudi abounded in — it was the range and the quality of materials that they were made of. While the walls could be of baked bricks, covered with a very fine, silk-smooth plaster made from secret recipes, the tiles could be Spanish, the pillars of Burmese teak, the floors of Italian marble, and the glass from Belgium. One could see in them Kerala woodwork mingling with neo-classical or Victorian fittings. Curiously, however, this outlandish mixture of styles and materials somehow worked: startling, but not truly vulgar. In any case, everything succeeded in sending out to everyone in the neighbourhood and the region, in loud terms, the message of success.

No Chettiar, the local saying was, could be accused of making a secret of his wealth. Stories floated around like the one about how a certain moneylender brought in logs of Burmese teak over the seas by tying them on to the merchant ships coming to India and made to float to their coastal destination. Essentially, the Chettiars" — a prominent group among them — were so-called because the term meant "people with palatial houses in the countryside". A highly distinguished Chettiar is known to have been honoured with the title of "Raja", and people still speak of how at the Chettinad railway station, where the Raja’s first-class coach would halt, a paved path led through an arched gate to his private waiting room — which had attached toilets and was furnished with superb divans, recliner bidets and washbasins — to which he could go "directly without having to mix with the rabble at the station".

Clearly, those days are gone, and several Chettiars have played eminent roles in the life, recent and old, of our land. But memories still linger, and some fabulous mansions still stand. Among the memories, incidentally, also is the origin of the word Chettiar which, according to a cynical version, comes from a Dravidian word Ettu that means ‘look up, jump up or forward jerk and around simultaneously calling out to sell’.

HOME