When Things and Buildings Stop Being Things

by-Himanshu Vyas

This relation of common man with Haveli's delights me. It is a relation which transcends popular and easily understood reasons like heritage and culture. Even their nostalgia can be explained and cherished. But when we see ordinary citizens, most of them who never lived or could own such splendorous Haveli’s, arguing and protesting their dismantling, the reason is somewhere deeper.

When an ordinary middle aged man, pushing his bicycle pedals, with a cotton bag full of vegetables dangling from handle, passes these haveli’s, he may not even look at them but their towering presence is a consolation.

He finds the same consolation as which is in his old and frail grandmother sitting whole day in chowk…occassionaly coughing …occasionally asking “paachho kane aasi?” (When will you return.)

Be it Daa’saa’s old charpai or Bhabhu’s gediya (walking stick)...there comes a point after history when things and buildings stop being things and buildings and become our Buzurg.

Of course these Haveli’s are heritage, but I do not see these Haveli’s merely as material heritage or staple for tourist camera’s. Again and again I wish to see them from that ordinary man’s lowered eyes. Buffeted from every conceivable direction in his struggle to exist with grace in today’s whimsically changing world, the ordinary man looks for a stable thing. For something which was there, is there and will be there. He perceives this unchangeableness in these Haveli’s which he doesn’t own but in a sense, is ‘owned’ by.

I lived my childhood in Bikaner. Then in Jodhpur and today I’m in Jaipur. At all the three places, if I return after a few months or years and find that an apartment has sprung where a khejdi tree used to be or a mall has displaced an ever present home, I sense something disappearing in my personal past. And these Haveli’s are a collective past of a complete society…a city … a civilization called Bikaner. They are the features of city’s face. Expression of its eyes and their presence lends the city a grace that comes with age. How, without them, will Bikaner be different from a newborn Noida or Gudgaon?

The world is changing under various guises like development, modernization, usefulnesse etc. And some of them are even necessary keeping in mind the changes in world. But are all these changes and developments an emergency situation! Couldn’t they themselves be redundant a day later! Nature too is constantly changing. But a Parijaat flower that blossomed one morning thousands of year ago looks and smells the same in 2012. If we site nature as an example of change, isn’t nature an example of stability too! Cant our creations too be lasting and what beautiful has been created, made to last? Instead of seeing reason in what world is doing can’t we make the world understand the importance of stability, a human pace and grace that flows from past? Isn’t it our duty too? As Nida Fazli says ‘jin charagon ko hawaon ka khauf nahin / un charagon ko hawaon se bachaya jay.’

And even literally these haveli’s have stood the storms. Imagine the Bikaner decades ago, when desert would saddle the storms and visit its lanes almost everyday. And Sun would make streets deserted. These haveli’s not only protected those living in them but reined the storms passing through the lean lanes between haveli’s. They protected and shaded the ordinary Bikaneri without asking for anything in return. Once they faced the storms for us, now that the ‘modern’ storms are about to devour them, who will protect them?

And there can be an equally profound exploration of their architectural and anthropological worth. Some of which are so obvious reasons to save them with cooperation and consensus of every soul concerned with them.