Visitors to Heritage Village, Manipal, Southern Karnataka, are awed, excited, and sometimes even humbled by the experience of walking through its streets. They are surrounded by the centuries-old houses and other structures that have congregated here. These could have been the homes of any of our familial ancestors had we but known how to value them, as Vijayanath Shenoy (1934 - 2017) did. He was a pioneer in conservation architecture who single-mindedly advocated the cause of the arts and built-heritage in India, culminating in the remarkable ‘open-air’ heritage museum called Hasta Shilpa Heritage Village.
Open-air museums in the European tradition, showcasing buildings and artefacts over lived culture, are rare in India. Heritage Village is unique because it combines the esoteric beauty of the buildings with the mundane charm of domestic tools and ritual objects to comprise a pleasing, yet functional aesthetic. There are no singers and dancers to welcome and herald you as elsewhere; no regional meals cooked on site to distract you. The buildings and their treasures are the raison d’être for the Village.
As modernity took root in Manipal, retired bank employee Shenoy witnessed the decline and ultimate death of ‘vernacular architecture’. He saw graceful homes lying abandoned and derelict, and recognised their importance for the collective memory of the community, as well as for nurturing the creative spirit of future generations. Even as liberalisation rounded the corner, Shenoy was as usual tramping the countryside of South Kanara, completely oblivious to anything but salvaging pieces of old houses that were being dismantled. With these, he built his own home, Hasta Shilpa House in the early 1990s which he threw open to the public in an act of idiosyncratic generosity. A few years later he was forced to move out of it, owing to the bus loads of tourists who descended to view it, destroying the privacy of his family and the peace of his dream home.
Shenoy continued to focus on saving dying houses, working on a shoe-string budget, with virtually no monetary help from rich locals, even as neoliberalism and corporatisation made millionaires out of ordinary business folk in this coastal region. He started a public, non-profit charitable organisation, Hasta Shilpa Trust in 1991. It appeared inevitable that he would turn the anguish of being ousted out of his home into yet another boon for the public, with the creation of Heritage Village in 1997.
Over a period of twenty years, Shenoy populated the six acres of land given to him by the Government of Karnataka with more than thirty structures which he dissembled at their original site and translocated to Heritage Village, in the hope of preserving some of these beautiful architectural marvels for posterity.
Many of the structures are the last examples of their individual architectural style. Each is a demonstration of how architecture can have continuities and contiguities with its surroundings, environment and climate. Together, these structures, huddled close to each other, are a perfect representation of many a small, dusty, South Indian village. The colour of mud dominates, and there is no relief which landscaped gardens, artificially imposed, might have provided.
Heritage Village also includes several galleries of art, paintings, crafts, textiles, utensils, tools, furniture and toys, painstakingly collected by Shenoy at considerable cost to himself. Although individual donors have contributed to the Village, it is international agencies which initially financially supported him. Recently, Sir Dorabjee Tata Trust and Allied Trusts have joined hands with Heritage Village to help consolidate its work.
While the owners of many houses are known, the architects of these structures are nameless and unknown. This is the ‘architecture without architects’ that philosopher-aesthetician Roger Scruton wrote about. He would have recognised a fellow traveller in Vijayanath Shenoy’s defence of the ‘vernacular tradition’ – which Scruton described as the ‘vulgar tongue which is the natural language of space, proportion, and light’.
There is no doubt that Shenoy was a maverick of sorts who drew upon the entrepreneurial heritage of his Goud Saraswat Brahmin community, yet transformed it by engaging in the arena of arts and heritage. When he was barely 27 years old, he started Sangeeth Sabha in Udupi in 1961 and, twenty years later, Yaksha Mandal in Manipal. He also introduced the cultural tableaux of performers into the important binnial paryaya festival surrounding the change of administration of the Udupi Krishna Mutt in 1968 which is now a part of every paryaya in Udupi, engaging ordinary people in the cultural events leading up to the change of guard at the Krishna Mutt. These initiatives demonstrated his belief in the importance of arts as an integral part of a community.
Shenoy was a prolific writer in both Kannada and English, writing articles and letters with fiery zeal and eloquence. He was also fluent in Tulu and Konkani, the two languages without scripts of this region. Yet, his best work came when he wrote about the village, also the focus of his fellow compatriots from Karnataka such as U.R. Ananthamurthy, R.K. Narayan and M.N. Srinivas -- except that he did it in the language of mud, wood and stone. With his emphasis on vernacular architecture and his command over the oral languages of two important local communities, Shenoy could be seen as being more akin to A.K. Ramanujan, albeit in built-heritage, with the latter’s respect for local, non-standard dialects and his sensitivity towards them. Shenoy too spoke passionately about the knowledge resources of the unknown, possibly illiterate people who built the graceful houses of the countryside and were part of largely oral cultures. It was fitting that he built them a space in a language they would have understood, to honour their labour and aesthetics. It is this legacy that Shenoy has left behind, which will be nurtured now by a small group, led by architect Harish Pai, who worked with him over the years.
Vijayanath Shenoy is no longer with us. He passed away in his sleep on March 9, 2017, quietly and peacefully. Perhaps he was dreaming new plans for his beloved Heritage Village even as it basked in the hot sun of Manipal, glowing elegantly and in sharp contrast to the concrete, glass and steel modernity of the rest of the town.
