(IN)TANGIBLE HERITAGE(S)
Abstract
The British East India Company envisioned Assam’s tea industry to be a predominantly colonial enterprise manned by British planters. Young planters came in from different parts of Britain and set out to curate a unique architectural style to accommodate their life on Assam’s tea estates. The resulting vocabulary of tea bungalows represented the adaptation of their architectural aesthetics to the region’s climatic conditions and material availability. The thermal comfort and elegance of these British tea bungalows inspired the Assamese gentry to replicate this architectural style in the construction of their own tea estate bungalows. These bungalows became regarded as a symbol of status and sophistication in colonial Assam. Further, the young British planters incorporated their way of life into Assam’s tea estate’s is fabric by surrounding their bungalows with kitchen gardens, sprawling lawns, golf courses and swimming pools. These landscape elements conducted a lifestyle that the Assamese gentry willingly assimilated into, thereby creating a culture of living in the tea estates. More than a century after, while the tea bungalows and their gardens stand as elegantly as before, the present-day society remains unaware of and divorced from the rich architectural and cultural heritage that the tea estates of Assam behold. Thus, the paper explores the architectural vocabulary of the tea bungalows of Assam, not as objects in the landscape, but as entities that were conducive to a certain cultural and social pattern. The paper investigates the way of life that was experienced within these architectural and landscape entities, along with the way that they are engaged with and experienced in the present day, post-colonial Assam. In doing so, the paper seeks to establish the tea bungalows and their landscape as a heritage identity for the power play and idyllic lifestyle that existed on Assam’s tea estates.
Barsha Amarendra is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati. For her doctoral studies, she is working on the project of ’Creating a strategic framework for the development of heritage-based tourism in the tea landscape of Assam’. Her interest in the project stems from her previous experience of working for sustainable development of heritage landscapes during her graduation thesis under the Chair of Landscape Architecture at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Following her graduation, Barsha worked as a garden designer at the Delftse Hout allotment garden campus, until her eventual move back to India, to begin working as a research assistant at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. During her tenure there, she worked on the Project of ‘Revising the Harmonised Guidelines for Universal Accessibility in India’, funded by the National Institute of Urban Affairs, India. In parallel to her research engagements, Barsha works as a Landscape architect, trying to realise the possibilities of curating experiential settings through her design projects.
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Friday 17th June, 2022