Drinking their Black Tea
A conversation between BPS Architects, Compartment S4 and Sharan GS
We conducted an interview with Brinda and Parth Shah, the principals of BPS Architects in Rajkot. As a practice, they have worked extensively for over 20 years in rural landscapes, to explore participatory methods of designing and building schools, especially Anandshala’s. They imbibe a contagious determination towards developing systemic participatory design making and they have a unique way of interpreting different scenarios or projects for their scope for participation. With the intent to learn from their experience in this sector, we talk to them about their intent, method, struggles with power structures and even gender roles which may or may not exist while working for rural participatory design projects. The interview gives us a deep insight into their practice and humble ways of tackling issues, which they interestingly capitulate using anecdotes. Because “the most important aspect of participatory design is drinking the black tea which locals offer to you”.
What inspired you to work with rural communities?
PS: We did not start with a purpose. The idea of ‘drifting’ is very evident in our journey. That is how the whole journey started. One of our first projects was about working with a rural community and designing for them a training centre and a girl’s hostel in a university campus in South Gujarat. When we were given this, we were fresh out of the School of Architecture and the approaches of how to start a project were very fresh. Site studies, case studies, site visits, measure drawing, talking with the client etc. The first such project led to another, and then another and so on for 20 yrs. It wasn’t a planned journey. It was more of a wandering one.
Subsequently, Brinda’s masters and our ways of working have helped us in continuing this approach to many other projects which do not necessarily require such an approach.
BS : When we started our practice, we had no choice. It was more of a readiness to do something on ground, and to see physically for yourself that whatever you have learnt is appropriately put when it is built. That was the main aspiration and everything else was secondary. We wanted to see whether we can build or not, whatever the context. We had only 2 masons, the region was very remote, the people were very unique and culturally strong, the ones who came to study also came from a very native and fundamentally rooted background. To build for them was a challenge. Though it was a very small room, it had to be a place which was an office, a lecture space, a hostel, all at the same time and all the rootedness and grounding had to come together to one minimum thing that we could do for them. At that time it was just a very interesting brief for us and we went for it.
PS : It is also important to make a distinction from what is currently happening in the profession. Working with a community is now a fashion statement. That was never our purpose. We never lost sight of the fact that we are ‘trained architects’, not ‘born architects’, at least myself. In the animal world, a tiger cub grows to be a tiger. They have a killer instinct which they have from day one. We have a lot of cats in our studio and a new born kitten can also immediately catch a mouse. Nobody has to teach them that. You can also train somebody to kill a mouse. Similar to that analogy, we are trained architects, not born masons or craftsmen. In spite of working on sites where even basic facilities were not available, we did not not make drawings, did not not consult consultants, and did not not do a lineout drawing and so on. The process was of course, ‘participatory’. It could, of course, be termed as ‘working with local materials and available technology’. But the process was never devoid of the values that were imbibed in us. There was no fashion statement or no idea of putting it up for display. Thankfully there was less of the internet then. There was no hoo-haa that I went to this place 400 km from the main road and did this. We just followed methods that our teachers taught us, that you have to have a site plan, note the trees, take care of those trees, have a foundation pit etc. It was never about compromises. There was never a compromise at the philosophical level, the spiritual level or the design level. The compromises were there at places where if they did not have 16mm reinforcement bars and had 12mm ones, then we would work with that. And we never said that we were intelligent and therefore would work with it. There was a structural engineer, both of us and a whole team. When Brinda says 2 masons, it is from the client’s side. Because they did not know all these things, in a way we have to thank them for accepting us outsiders, trained architects, to come into their system of things and advise them. They have been building vernacular buildings since ages. They don’t need us. Therefore it becomes imperative for us to behave the way we should. If we try to behave in a vernacular fashion with them, we would out rightly become an outsider. Whereas if we behave with them according to our methods, they pick up what is good from our methods and we pick up from theirs. It is therefore participatory for them as well.
If it is a high end project, for example, if Mr. Mukesh Ambani calls and asks me to build a house, I would not mind if he has no problem. I would ask him if he wants to take part in the system and if he has time. This extreme example is to illustrate that participatory design is a two way thing. The word itself means that the other party should be willing to spend time. If that does not happen, we are not for it, per say. This is because of the system of learning that is engrained in us. We are trained, not born with it. This distinction is very important to be made in current times, where we look upon these methods as a new way of practice, while there is nothing new in this.
What are the challenges you faced while working with rural communities in terms of communication, gendered roles and power structures?
PS : No challenges at all. For me it was very easy. It is like asking a deep sea fish, how challenging it is to move 5000m below the sea level. For the fish it is not challenging. If you have to live there, then it becomes challenging. It becomes challenging when you look at it from an outsider’s perspective. The moment you look at it from an insider’s perspective, they have drunk tea without milk all their lives. So drinking black tea is not a challenge for them. If you are not open enough to drink black tea, then it becomes tough for you. From 3rd year onwards, I always wanted to go back to smaller towns, to my home town or a similar place and that was not a challenge for me. If I know how to work with a 12mm reinforcement bar or whoever is my mason, it no longer remains a challenge. That is where the School of Architecture taught us some wonderful things. We had some brilliant teachers. All credit goes to them in terms of shaping us without decreasing our malleability. I also have to shape myself after the school. If they had baked me, I would be brittle. They shaped me without baking me, left me open enough to mould myself into various conditions. Therefore, these challenges were never difficulties.
BS: I would like to narrate a small incident here. When we were working near the Haryana-Rajasthan border in a very native school, the normal culture there was to speak gaali’s in the sentences itself and it was a very male centric society. Parth said that from the very first meeting both of us have to be there. It was not a call for gender recognition. In the office we complement each other and this was not any different. Therefore certain parts of the project were to be explained by me and some by Parth. I had some idea about the villagers but I had no idea that they speak so many gaali’s. Honestly, the funders the project also had some women in their team, and they were reluctant to come to the village and participate in the discussions. They insisted that Parth do it instead of me. But we decided that we would do it as a team. However, the moment I entered, I somehow did not recognise that they were different. In fact, I accepted their culture and their way of saying things. There was nothing bad about it at all. Of course there were some conversations amongst them, initially. I smiled a bit and did not ignore the fact that I knew what they were talking about, at the same time I was very focused on what I had to explain and get through. They recognised very well, that we were there for some serious work and not faffing around. This changes your role, even though you are a woman. Immediately they perceive the seriousness and sincerity and this is part of any native culture, they know the reason you are there. And then it doesn’t matter if you are a woman, man or a child, because they know that you are there to do some work for them, and they are equally responsible for giving feedback on it. When I was explaining the model and design, they were very participatory. They started to relate with me. Some started calling me behenji, some addressed me as bitiya, addressing me as they would locally address their women. Of course, there was a layer as a result of which they did not talk to me the way they originally treated the women in their family, but there was definitely respect. Wherever we have gone, this thing of accepting the other has always been imbibed in us. There is no extra effort. Like Parth said, thanks to the effort of our teachers and their grounding, we take work as it is for everybody. In fact, I had no issues working in the village. The only limitation, I would say was that I would wear salwaar kameez and go, just to make myself comfortable. There was no need from their side. Even if I had worn jeans or a t-shirt, they would not mind. It was all my perspective and not theirs.
What were the methods that you used to tackle on-ground issues and encounters? How did you communicate with the local workers and build relationships with the villagers?
BS : Every village that we have worked, in Gujarat and outside, is very different. You cannot generalise. The villages in North India function very differently from the tribal belt in Gujarat. There is only one way to connect to them .i.e. How do you really try to understand them in their way? Every approach is different. Every mechanism is different. You cannot use the same mechanism that was used for an earlier school. The children are different, the villagers are different, and their body language, the way they make food, etc are all different. I must also add that we as architects are not always qualified enough to analyse this. We have always had a team that has helped us in analysing and making us understand how these settings work, 24/7 for all 365 days. Because our visit is periodic, we are not with them on a daily basis. But there are people who are residing with them and trained to work within a village. Their questions are always fresh to us, and are a key to what we should be doing. It is not that the architect does everything.
PS : This kind of work is always holistic, just the way vernacular plans are. We use the term, ‘multi-functional spaces’ in formal architecture. This is our understanding of how they live. They don’t have such terminology. Their life is woven around everything. They have a complex network of reliance. Their house relies on their village, their village relies on their house, and their skills rely on each other. Eventually, what happens is that, over a period of time everybody knows everything because of this constant give and take of knowledge. Therefore their buildings are what we term as very articulate, but in a way very general. There is no precise place for taking a bath, there is no bathtub. Depending on the surrounding conditions of where somebody can look upon, that becomes the bathtub. But the timings are such that nobody can see you taking a bath. In that sense their buildings and their take is also very general.
When you say communication, it happens at multiple levels. You do not explain your plans and sections to them. That never happens. You go and be with them. That happens. When you are talking with them, or making tea with them, that’s when the transfer of knowledge happens, if you are observant. Thanks to the RSP’s at the School of Architecture, we become observant. You start noticing how they do things, you start noticing that with just one spatula and a couple of containers they produce delicious food. That reminds you that your design will also have to be that. You cannot have thousand and one things in your design for it to be good. That will not work there. It’s not a formula. What I am trying to articulate is that, there is a switchover from your trained instinct to your inborn instinct. If you are observant enough, you would notice they have very little kitchen utensils as compared to an urban setting. If you are even more observant, you would notice that their food is more delicious than yours. How is that? What is it that makes it so? You have to move around and observe the setting, the noise level, the clean air, the good quality of ingredients, everything. It’s not the variety, it’s the type. Now that can be put back into architecture. It’s not a variety of spaces, it’s the type of spaces, it’s not a variety of bricks, it’s a type of brick, it’s not a variety of columns, it’s a type of column. If you look at a modern urban house, by the time you reach the living room you could count 15 materials. But for thousands of years they have built with just 3 materials. But the spaces are better.
All of us are from the same place and therefore it is very easy for us to connect as we are all trained similarly. But the shift from our trained instincts to our born instincts is more personal. There is no formula for this. I will not be able to tell you that. It is all about observations and your core nature. If your core nature is to be flamboyant, then you will have to remain flamboyant. If your core nature is to be silent, then you don’t talk. Others will pick it up, sooner or later. The spaces are not talking, they are to be lived in. Now that there are these travelogues and travel writers, you have started to know different communities. But you still don’t know how people live in those islands in the Andaman. They would be living a wonderful life, most probably.
Communication is about that. When it comes to our job, we made proper working drawings. Sometimes they did not understand that, and therefore we had an AGT class. We started explaining them the way we do things. The moment we start going out of our methods, we become an outsider and therefore not trustworthy. You don’t do that. Even there, you make tea for them in a way you know how to. If you try to make it like them, they will know that you are lying and you can never do it like them. You don’t lose your trained instincts. If you try to build like people in a vernacular way, most probably you will fail. But if you do it from your trained perceptions, almost always you will succeed. We kept making the plans and sections that Prof. Varkey taught us, that Hemant Vala taught us. But we modified them so that the villagers could understand. We made models so that they could understand what we were talking about.
BS : The way we have developed over the years, with our family, in our school, mostly our school, affects our ways. Our families had a very distinct way to go about things and it was in the School of Architecture that these ways started getting blurry. When we work in rural areas it’s more of how you become a part of them and as Parth rightly pointed out, thanks to those RSP programmes we learnt how to do that. You had to accept whatever came your way. You had to work, measure-draw and to be able to do that you had to do so many other things without anybody guiding you. Your teachers would tell you to measure-draw a particular school, but you had to do a lot of other things. You played with the children, observed the women cooking, talked to the women etc. That part was a very beautiful balance of who you are from inside and being able to smoothly understand and accept their lives and ways. This became part of us rather than an analysis from the outside and that helped us on the longer run.
PS : Language does pose a problem sometimes. But if you talk in your language, it’s easier for them to follow you. I think I read it in one of the Lonely Planet guides, that when you go to an alien land, the best way to communicate is to talk in your own language. Your body starts talking about certain expressive features that they can pick up. Once we got a lineout made in a very different way. This was for the Sanjeevini project. There were gardens where the walkways had to be designed first. The walkways were irregular and meandering and across 5000 acres of plot area in a hilly terrain. We knew that there were around 500 students in the school. We asked the teacher that if you could give them a half a day break, we would finish the line out with the students. He was wondering what we were talking about. We made a chain with the students and made them stand wherever the plan was supposed to move around. We didn’t have strings etc. It was therefore your so called, participatory approach. The children would have fun lining out their building and they would later help us cure the building. Doing that in another way would have taken a lot more time. After the first try the mason started enjoying it, and started instructing the kids on his own. So in a way my task was done. The mason had picked up this understanding of what is to be done and had his own method, which in a way was vernacular. You cannot have Coursera courses on this. But the job was done and everybody was happy as they had all taken part in it. And at the end with very little resources, a very good outcome was in front of us. We don’t go in with any rules. It doesn’t matter that the line has shifted by a couple of metres. It doesn’t matter in the larger scheme of things. Look at the way we eat from our thali. Maybe once you take more chutney and the next you don’t. There is no rule, but at the end you finish it. You need to have control over the larger scheme of things and for that we follow our trained instincts. We have a site plan, site section, details… everything. In my mind I have all the details that are necessary like for an urban project, but I do not tell them that. It would be arrogant of me to do that in front of them. It does not serve the purpose. By and large, we don’t change our learned methods of making drawings. It’s the delivery that changes.
BS : If you are true to yourself you can pick up rural works very easily. If you put a face in front of you then it doesn’t work. There were some people from the team who were very different purposefully in front of them. You had to simply tell them, be who you are. If you have a set of questions that are right in your mind, but are not working, you have to think of how else to ask them instead of changing them. If questions do not have the right delivery they are misunderstood. Therefore you have to work on your methods of communication.
What would be your advice to young women architects who are aspiring to work in similar contexts?
BS : I think they should start their careers with working in rural communities. I would strongly recommend that to young girls who are studying in urban environments and have no clue of society and culture and how things work around us. It is very important to have a taste of that. It is also good to be on your toes, being the woman. Because sometimes we take it for granted, that being the woman we have to be treated differently. Why? You are just like anybody else. We just need to work. It’s a reverse process of learning. You just need to work and be true to yourself and everybody will accept. Wearing something different in front of people who are culturally different is your own call, not theirs. They are seeing movies and film stars and they have no issues whatsoever. It is about how you want to relate with them, that brings about a larger understanding. I feel that for every one of us, not only women, if you have some flavour of working in a rural environment particularly in India it helps us as a trained community. Why are most of us just working in urban areas while we want to live in the rural areas? Why do we just consider the financial aspects and lucrative part of how architecture is progressing? We have to think about real life issues and how we can include everybody in our profession and not just a set of people.
PS : It’s not that everybody should go and work in the rural areas. That again will not work. What I feel is, without being restricted to a particular gender, if somebody is born in a fort area of Mumbai, and has lived his/her entire life there and gets into architecture, if that person feels like moving to a smaller town that’s a different issue. But if you compel that person to even move to Andheri, he would be an outsider. I have some friends who were born in Fort, who are practicing in Fort and for them Mumbai ends beyond Churchgate. Everybody else is an outsider. So it’s not that everybody has to go to the rural areas. If your calling is that, then you have to do it. I have always wanted to do such work and thankfully I have been able to fulfil my calling. If I was born in a different situation I might not have done all this, then also I would have been a good human being. I was just reading today that according to a philanthropy rating index, Azim Premji has become the biggest philanthropist of all time in India. He has donated 7200 crores , as against Mukesh Ambani, who has donated 456 crores. Azim Premji’s donation was all in education while Mukesh Ambani’s was in disaster relief. Now what would you call that? Azim Premji was always from a high profile background, he has perhaps never been to rural communities. But even without going there, he would have made a big difference to them, by simply doing what his calling is. He had a lot of money and donated it to the people. I did not have money myself and therefore I went to the community. The end result was that we both supported each other. I also could not charge enough fees but we still did it, and that was a philanthropic act of a different nature. What I am trying to demonstrate, is that one answer will not fit everybody. You cannot tell every lady architect that you work like this. What you can tell is that you work with your abilities according to your calling. That can give you a more general answer that is acceptable to all kinds of people.
BS : I said strongly that every woman should go and work in the rural community , not as a common statement, but more as a way to progress oneself. I mean, my native engagements are from a village and I am from the village. Most of my family is in the village and that is the reason I feel very strongly connected with the environment there. Even after studying elsewhere and having moved on, I feel very strongly to give back and that is a personal call. I am not doing it as a need of the day or because it is special or different. The calling is from within.
PS : Also the term sensitivity , I think, is a very subjective term. Sensitivity also changes. Juhani Pallasma says that the moment water turns to ice it carries the impurities within it from that point onwards. He was talking about how the environment affects us and what you take across when you move into a different stream. But over the course of time, there are times when I have come across students who were not sensitive and were not at all observant in the village during RSP’s. But the same student has produced wonderful buildings later after 5 years. Then where did the sensitivity come from? Therefore I have stopped judging. I don’t judge others. If somebody judges me, I don’t care. Things change constantly. That is perhaps the key to the way we have worked in the rural setting. I don’t judge them. They don’t judge me. But if they do, it is their problem. That’s also the way they think for themselves. They are so flamboyant. They can do whatever they wish to do in front of us. That’s wonderful. They keep rolling their beedi and spitting as they please, as if I am immaterial to them. It is not wrong, or impolite or uncivilized. I never look at it like that.
I think it’s best to behave like ants, to keep working constantly and never judge. Everything will happen as it should. At this age, that seems to me a simpler, non-intrusive, and a very free way of working.
