Reading history brick by brick

“If you start to read buildings through their material, you’re also reading the buildings as archives,” says architect, writer and educator Dr. Priya Joseph at a recent illustrated talk, Reading the City Through its Material, held at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru.

At the talk, followed by a conversation with Prathijna Poonacha Kodira, Lead, IIHS Director’s Office and Practice, Joseph discusses her recent book Brick Architecture Craft in Nineteenth-Century South India: Reading Buildings as Archives. “What I would like to bring through the book is the reading of cities… the history and the polemics of a time (that) can be revealed through a material,” states Joseph, a professor at the Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology. “My argument in the book is how, when we read our buildings as archives, it decolonises the reading of cities itself,” she says. “You give agency to the people who made it.”

Bricks and the city

Humans have been using bricks for millennia, making them an ubiquitous part of our built environment. Brick, a material that she has researched extensively, “has embedded information from various other times” and is “a medium to speak about people, craft, agency, standardisation, decoloniality, much more,” she believes.

Joseph’s book goes all the way back to the building materials used in the Indus Valley Civilization. According to her, bricks from Mohenjo-Daro were often “in vibrant colours, straw-yellow, bright red and brown (with) unexpected footprints of leopards, dogs and cattle.” Sharing a picture of a brick whose surface has been marked with the footprints of a child and a goat, she says, “When you read Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) reports, a lot of it is about coins and pots, but equally important are the bricks.”

While this ancient Bronze Age civilisation finds mention in her book, it is primarily about the use of bricks in the 19th century, where a lot of mixing took place between “the colonial agency… the missionaries…the indigenous ways of practice,” she says. “And so, it becomes a very important time to look at these intersections, and also see that though these times were oppressive, there is a certain intercession that happened.” Until the 19th century, she says, bricks came in different details and sizes. “So, it is almost like a memory of humanity in a brick. The sizes, for instance, reveal a lot; they tell you what fuel was used.”

Fort High School building in Chamarajpet.
| Photo Credit:
MURALI KUMAR K

The origin of Mangalore tiles

At the talk, Joseph pivots across to Mangaluru, home to pristine virgin beaches, ancient temples, Portuguese legacy and the red clay tiles that get their name from the city where they were first produced. Showing a picture of Mangalore tile, she says that its origins are not simple. ”While a lot of architects call these Mangalore tiles a vernacular material, this point can be debated,” in Joseph’s view. “Earlier, we used to have these tiles, which were half cylinders made on the potter’s wheel. But this pattern is very European,” she says, further expanding on how the Basel Mission played a role in introducing these tiles to India and beyond.

The Basel Mission, founded in 1815 by a group of German and Swiss evangelists, “significantly changed the production of terracotta roofing tiles, bricks, and many other terracotta products.” The Mission owes its uniqueness to the fact that it was as much an industrial enterprise as a religious one. “From 1831 to 1920, the mission was involved in several industrial and commercial activities in South Canara.”

The Mission, which established its first production centre in Mangaluru in 1834, later went on to launch a letterpress unit there, an initiative spearheaded by the German missionary Georg Plebst. “The press he established in Mangaluru produced and printed documents in Kannada, Malayalam, Tulu and more,” she says. Plebst also began working with the local people, drawing from existing craft traditions and using the rich alluvial soil found on the banks of the Netravati River, leading to the intermingling of technologies. In 1865, the first factory manufacturing Basel Mission tiles was established, says Joseph, sharing archival images of this factory and explaining that the tile ended up getting standardised here. “What happens with standardisation is that you can mechanise it and produce it in numbers.”

“Ultimately the technical knowledge was transferred to artisan communities in Asia and Africa,” she says, pointing out that the way our cities look often lies at the confluence of missionary colonial ways and indigenous ways. “The history of bricks is complex with intersections and interlaps due to the industrial revolution.”

Inside the Fort High School building.
| Photo Credit:
MURALI KUMAR K

Buildings and more

From Mangaluru, Joseph takes her audience to Burma, talking about how the British often tried to apply techniques and labour practices there from their experience in India. She then moves on to the buildings of the Madras Presidency, which had a lot of 19th-century British influence but still drew on a lot of indigenous knowledge. “The conversations between the indigenous and the colonial were hegemonic, but also very opportunistic,” she says.

She also talks about the resthouses or chatrams of Thanjavur, built by Maratha rulers. According to her, since Serfoji II, the last Maratha ruler of Thanjavur, had a Danish mentor, “he had a lot of influence from the West,” she says. “There was a lot of mix in these twenty chatram where they have very European volutes, but you also see details that are very local.”

Other buildings discussed included the Fort High School in Bengaluru and the beautiful but now ruined Shettihalli Rosary Church in Hassan, built by French missionaries in the 1860s. Using photographs of these buildings, she points to the mixed influences that shaped these spaces. “If you have to read buildings and cities as deep colonial work, you also have to read the hybridity…to see that it is not the purest form, whether the building or city or detail of the material,” she says.

An old printing press that used individual block letters.
| Photo Credit:
SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

Future or bricks

She also talks about the future of brick, especially important if one considers the vulnerability of brick kiln workers and the environmental impact of making this material. Old South Indian brick, she says, was much thinner than the contemporary brick, using lesser fuel obtained from agrarian waste such as rice husk and was a part of the agrarian landscape of India, “a society that continues to be agrarian,” says Joseph. “Brickmaking was integrated into the larger ecosystem of the lands, and the production of bricks was linked to the larger ecological cycle; the desilting and distilling of tanks and lakes were necessary, and the silt could be used to make the bricks.”

Also, despite the issues associated with brick, “it is still here to remain,” she says. “It is still cheaper and incremental, unlike concrete. And it still is a solution for a billion people who cannot afford other materials.”