Restoration work of historical buildings in India has depended on traditional, caste-based skills of workers, but they are no longer as much in demand even as the need for their skills grows
Aarefa Johari
File image of restoration work at Gateway of India, Mumbai. Pic courtesy: Prashant Nakwe
MUMBAI: For decades, the Horniman Circle Garden has served as a small but peaceful oasis in the chaotic bustle of south Mumbai’s Fort area, a heritage precinct. On weekday afternoons, office-goers on a break rest on benches, tired labourers nap on the grass, and couples walk lazily around the large circular fountain in the centre of the park.
One afternoon, however, the usual peace at Horniman Circle is punctuated by the clunk-clunk-clunk of hammers hitting chisels. In a cordoned-off section of the garden, a group of 15 workers busily re-pave a portion of the pathway near the fountain, pull out old stone pavers, break off damaged ones and replace them with new blocks of textured basalt.
Passersby pay no attention to the workmen. For them, they are akin to – and as invisible as – the thousands of other construction workers ubiquitous in a city full of upcoming new buildings. But these stone masons toiling away in the 150-year-old Horniman garden (named after a British-Indian editor of a local newspaper who was supportive of India’s freedom movement) belong to the diminishing breed of specialist conservation workers in one of the world’s oldest countries.
India has 43 major sites that are recognised as UNESCO World Heritage Sites. In addition, the Indian government recognises 3,696 ancient monuments and archaeological sites of national importance. They are valued not only for the centuries of history they represent – from ancient dynasties to the Mughal era and the long period of European colonialism – but also for the diversity of unique architecture they display.
The need for restoration work of these monuments across the country is perennial. Many of these structures are several centuries old, attract an ever-rising number of tourists and are subject to harsh climate. But the heritage keepers - workers skilled in ensuring the look and feel of a restored monument is the same as the original - are increasingly finding themselves undervalued.
Manoj Mudde, who hails from the Patrud caste of traditional stone masons in Maharashtra, has been working as a skilled craftsman in heritage conservation for 25 years. Aarefa Johari/The Migration Story
“To you, it may look like we are doing ordinary mistri work [masonry], but everything in the heritage field is different,” said Manoj Mudde, 44, the head mason and supervisor of the group at Horniman, who is a third-generation heritage conservation worker.
Mudde is a tall bearded man who grew up surrounded by “stones, chisels, hammers and quarries”. He belongs to the Patrud community, which is known for its craftsmanship in stone and has for years been travelling to Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra from their home district Latur, a drought-prone region, to work at heritage sites.
As a senior stone mason, he earns at least Rs 2,000 per day for heritage projects, while masons at other construction sites get Rs 1,000 per day. For junior stone masons, the daily wage is Rs 1,000 for heritage work and Rs 500 for ordinary construction.
“Doing heritage work is harder than regular masonry, but it pays so much better,” said Mudde. “Still, it is a daily wage, and we don’t get paid if we fall sick or miss work on any day,” he said, as he supervised other workers on this sunny afternoon, wearing bright red shorts, his hands calloused and covered in white stone dust.
The skill set hasn’t given Mudde professional growth or the identity of an artisan uniquely skilled. Many like him face stiff competition from contractual labourers, preferred over the skilled ones for their cheaper wages even if they lack Mudde’s fine eye for detail.
Until about two decades ago, conservation architects themselves coordinated project management for restoration work and selected skilled craftsmen themselves. But in recent years, contractors are being hired, who pick workers available for cheaper, rather than those with better skills.
This, according to conservation architect Vikas Dilawari, is in keeping with the broader market trend across construction and other industries to execute large projects through a single contractor. Also, in many cases agencies that own these sites have less funding and resources available.
File image of restoration work at Asiatic Library. Picture courtesy: Prashant Nakwe
“Conservation projects have become turnkey projects now, and the agencies commissioning them want one contractor responsible for all aspects of it,” he said.
The workers hired by contractors for heritage projects are often floating migrants, who do not come from any traditional guilds.
“They are simply not able to work the way master craftsmen do, which affects the quality of the restoration work,” said Dilawari.
With this changing landscape of conservation labour, and with traditional guilds choosing different futures for their children, architects believe that future heritage restoration work is likely to be inferior in quality.
"The longevity of conservation work is dependent on material and skilled craftsmanship. These processes [of passing down skills] are generational, so the impact will definitely be seen," said Joshi.
"The decay has set in already, and we are seeing the negative impacts," he said, adding that if traditional skills become further sparse and prohibitively expensive, master craftsmen in the future will only get work in projects like niche luxury heritage hotels.
CASTE, CRAFTSMANSHIP & RESTORATION CALENDAR
File image of restoration work at Gateway of India, Mumbai. Pic courtesy: Prashant Nakwe
Mudde studied only up to the second grade and spent his childhood learning stone masonry from his father and grandfather. In the past 25 years, he has worked on the restoration of August Kranti Maidan, where Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India movement in 1942, Mani Bhavan, known for being Gandhi’s headquarters in Mumbai among others, and takes pride in being able to select stones of high quality, ensuring that each block of stone is cut, sized and placed with precision.
He doesn’t want his children to inherit his profession.
For decades, restoration work of heritage buildings in India has depended on the traditional, caste-based skills of hundreds of regional craftsmen and women across the country.
The Patruds from Latur have been hired to extract stone from quarries, and use it to build large sheds or simple household pestles for grinding spices. Over time, they were also sought after by architects engaged in heritage conservation and restoration, who needed craftsmen with specialised skills.
Mudde and his workers speak in a Marathi dialect specific to their caste group in Latur, a district in the basalt belt of Maharashtra’s Marathwada region. “We are also known as the Wadrs, and we know all about stone,” Mudde said, beaming with pride. “No matter how big or hard a stone may be, we can break it, shape it and make all kinds of things with it.”
Like the Patruds, there are different communities across India who practice different kinds of “building crafts” as their ancestral occupations. Conservation architects informally refer to these communities as gharanas (houses) or guilds.
But their numbers are gradually dipping.
Altaf Muwal, 45, migrated to Mumbai when he was 16 from Churu district in Rajasthan. He had accompanied his grandfather and other lime mortar masons from his community, called in for the restoration of the intricate floral relief work on the wall of Gol Deval, a 200-year-old Shiva temple located in the middle of one of Mumbai’s busiest roads.
In the past 25 years, he has been involved in some prestigious restoration projects including that of Rajabai Clock Tower, the Bhau Daji Lad Museum (formerly Prince of Wales Museum) and Elephanta Caves. But fewer projects are coming his way.
He estimated there were around 100-125 skilled workers like him in his younger days, but now there are barely five or six.
“No one wants their child to work in choona any more, but the work must be done, so someone else is taking it up. But they will not have the same motivation as those working in their traditional occupation,” said Muwal, who said he was fortunate to have landed a job a job to supervise workers for conservation architect Dilawari, but many have changed their fields because of lack of work, some returning to their villages or migrating to the Gulf countries.
Pankaj Joshi and Vikas Dilawari – prominent conservation architects in Mumbai – listed a number of guilds that they have worked with over the years: communities of lime masons and marble workers from Rajasthan; cast-iron and Plaster of Paris specialists from Uttar Pradesh; expert carpenters from Gujarat and Kerala; mosaic workers – predominantly women – from Andhra Pradesh.
File image of restoration work at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai. Pic courtesy: Prashant Nakwe
“Each guild has a mukadam or a main craftsman who takes up a project and then brings a group of people, often from his own village or community, to work on the site,” said Joshi, who brought Mudde and his group of stone masons to work on the Horniman Circle Garden restoration.
“Many of these workers have farms back in their villages, so they are not always available during the harvest season. Restoration projects have to be planned based on their availability,” said Joshi, who is also the principal director of Urban Centre Mumbai, a trust working on urban planning, conservation and sustainable development.
But the growing unpredictability of work has many aspire for a different future for their children, with better education and stable, ‘white-collar’ jobs.
“The next generation of workers is not interested in doing work that is so labour intensive,” said Ratish Nanda, a noted conservation architect and the chief executive officer of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, which conducts restoration of historical and heritage sites around the world.
“There is no formal education or training available for learning building crafts – these skills are passed down from father to son,” said Nanda.
File image of restoration work at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai. Pic courtesy: Prashant Nakwe
The number of skilled workers has dipped at a time when heritage monuments face new risks: air and water pollution have caused discolouration of the Taj Mahal; rising sea levels in a warming planet are impacting the structure of the Elephanta Caves, a world heritage site 10 kms away from Mumbai, and excessive rainfall is leading to perpetual dampness in the walls of the Basilica of Bom Jesus, also a world heritage site in Old Goa, according to conservation architects and local media reports.
The only way to prevent the total erosion of conservation skills, and to actually preserve the knowledge of traditional guilds in the future, would be through institutionalisation.
"Guilds require serious support, documentation and resource centres at the local, district, state and national levels, to train and pass on the traditional knowledge systems through systematic institutions,” conservation architect Joshi said.
“These institutions would require support initially, and after a few years of handholding, they could evolve into self-supporting employment bureaus and training centres for new and young craft persons.”
Muwal rues the dipping quality of labour in heritage conservation work, but he himself has not passed on his traditional choona skills to his own children.
Two of his three children are commerce students, and his eldest daughter is studying to be an interior designer, said Muwal, who recalls falling in love with heritage buildings when he first came to Mumbai as a helper with his grandfather.
“I even inscribed the year in which I came to Mumbai – 1995 – in a part of the temple wall,” he said, vowing to make a living in heritage conservation.
Keeping tradition alive In a large woodcarving workshop in Vasai, a city 60 km north of Mumbai, a pair of master carpenters and gilders is trying their best to pass on their traditional skills – and motivation – to their team of hired workers.  The Sequeira brothers, Minglesh and Benzoni Sequeira, come from a family with a 400-year history of carpentry. Today, they teach heritage restoration to some of their best wood carvers and gilders at their workshop in Vasai, Maharashtra. Aarefa Johari/The Migration Story The pair in question are the Sequeira brothers – Minglesh and Benzoni Sequeira – whose family has been in the carpentry business for more than four centuries. Native to Vasai’s Giriz village, the Sequeira clan originally belonged to the Paanch Kalshi caste – a community of carpenters – before they converted to Christianity under 16th century Portuguese missionaries. Two generations ago, their grandfather had a small, one-room carpentry workshop in the same place where the Sequeira brothers now run their booming business. Half of this business involves sculpting elaborate and intricate wooden statues for churches and other secular clients. The other half involves heritage restoration, which Minglesh says is “in our blood”. “Restoration is something that our forefathers were always doing, because old houses needed a lot of maintenance in those days,” said Minglesh, a jovial 52-year-old. In their own careers, the brothers have taken up the restoration of dozens of wooden church altars in Mumbai, Goa and Daman. “Many of these altars are 300 to 400 years old, and often the wood is terribly rotten from inside,” said 47-year-old Benzoni. Depending on the damage done to the wooden structures or statues, the brothers decide whether the wood must be replaced, or carefully restored after scraping, cleaning and disinfecting it. Along with woodcarving, the Sequeira brothers also learnt to specialise in wood painting and gilding (applying a layer of gold to a surface). Their expertise has landed them a range of other heritage conservation projects, including the restoration of Mumbai’s Bhau Daji Lad and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj museums, the JN Petit Library, Esplanade House and the Yacht Club. The brothers have 40 workers employed on daily wages at their workshop, many of whom are migrants from across India. Only a handful of these workers, however, are trained and skilled enough to work on heritage restoration projects.  Christopher Correa learnt restorative painting and gilding from his employers, the Sequeira brothers, in Vasai, Maharashtra. Aarefa Johari/The Migration Story One of them is Christopher Correa, who, like the Sequeira brothers, is a native of Vasai. Correa didn’t come from a carpentry family, nor was he academically inclined. He failed Class 10 and began working as a helper in a garage to earn a living. But he had always been good at art and drawing, which prompted Minglesh to offer him an opportunity to train at the Sequeira workshop. He started out by painting small statues, and now – 25 years later – he has come to specialise in painting and gilding. “I have done some restoration work at the [Chhatrapati Shivaji] museum, but working at these sites is hard for me because of my height,” said Correa, referring to his condition of dwarfism. “So I do most of my restoration work here, in the workshop.” To demonstrate, Correa displays a short statue of the Virgin Mary that he has recently begun to restore – a wooden figure half-eaten by termites and disfigured by corrosion. While Correa does not have children to pass on his skills to, the Sequeira brothers are happy that they have been able to train workers like him to be qualified. “All our new workers start out as helpers, and if we see that some of them are doing very well, then we can train them to do heritage restoration,” said Minglesh. “Not everyone can be good at it, because restoration is time-consuming work, and requires application of the mind.” |
Comments