Dakshina Chitra

Dakshina Chitra is a very popular heritage village located on the Southern outskirts of Chennai, on the way to Mamallapuram (previously known as Mahabalipuram). Some months ago I had visited this place with members of my sketching group (Chennai Weekend Artists). My friends were delighted with the sketching opportunities at this venue, and since then we have made two more visits to the place. I am convinced that we will be going there many more times.

During our second visit to Dakshina Chitra there was a performance by a troupe of drummers from a neighbouring state. In the short time available before the start of their performance I managed to do a couple of quick sketches of a couple of the artistes. These served as warm-up exercises to my main sketch of the day. This was a sketch of the Chettinad House. Chettinad is a small region in Southern Tamilnadu known for its local cuisine, architecture, and consequently its skilled masons, carpenters and craftsmen.

Our most recent visit was last month. This time there was a newly constructed building called the Chikmagulur House which caught my eye. It represents the type of houses seen in a certain part of Karnataka, a neighbouring state. As has been my practice over the last few months, I sketched this and the other sketches of the day directly in ink with a Hero 578 fountain pen.

My next sketch was of a cluster of thatched houses typical of rural Tamilnadu. We use different types of thatched roofing in this region. The roof in this cluster is made of river-bed reeds and is considered a higher quality of thatch roofing. The space under this type of roof is much cooler than under other types of thatch roofing which use the woven leaves of palm trees.

Villages in Tamilnadu have temples dedicated to a guardian deity. These temples are called Ayyanar Temples and the priests in these temples come from the potter community. As a result, the icons in and around these Ayyanar Temples are usually made of terracotta. Dakshina Chitra has showcased one such temple and my next sketch was of a white painted terracotta idol facing this temple.

After each sketching trip one of the members of the group posts a report of the visit and the other members then upload their sketches and photographs of the day into this thread. If you would like to see what others in my sketching group sketched on these visits please follow these links:

Dakshina Chitra - 1st visit.

Dakshina Chitra - 2nd visit.

Dakshina Chitra - 3rd visit.

A Well Spent Sunday

 Sundays are meant for making very optimistic, extravagant plans and then lying in and lazing the day away. At least that is my routine more often than not. However this Sunday was very different.

To start with I attended a class over the internet (a webinar) that started late Saturday night and ended at 3 am on Sunday. And, after a few hours of sleep we went on a long planned family sketchcrawl. My wife and daughter are very fond of sketching and painting, and this interest is also shared by quite a few in our extended family. We have driven out of Chennai on a few weekend  sketching trips in the past but this was the first time that we were doing this within the city. And this time my niece was also with us.

We had a fun time on Saturday deciding where to go and finally settled on the Marundeeswarar Koil at Thiruvanmiyur, a very old and famous temple very close to our house.We decided to spend around an hour at this venue and then drive down to a cafe for some much needed refreshments and a different type of sketching opportunity.

One of the problems with South Indian temples is that we cannot wear any footwear inside the temple precincts. The paving is usually in granite and this can sometimes be blistering hot. The four of us broke up and quickly went in search of something sketchworthy, and more importantly a convenient location to do the sketching from.

I ended up locating something that would not have been my first choice as a subject, but it had the advantage of a really quiet and shaded spot from which I could view it. In fact this spot was so secluded that many people went by without even realising that I was sitting there under some heavy foliage. 

My niece Ranjani plonked herself right along the main walkway and was soon immersed in her sketching quite oblivious to the passersby who paused and  gathered behind her to watch her at work. You can see Ranjani's sketch here.

My daughter Kalpana found a place with shade and a backrest too. It was also a spot that was rather difficult to approach and certainly not convenient for anyone to peer over her shoulder. I am sure that this must have been high on her criteria for a suitable sketching spot. Kalpana's sketch can be seen here. 

Nithi, my wife, was not to be seen anywhere. But she is a restless soul and we were sure that she would have finished several sketches in the time that the rest of us take to do even one, and that proved to be the case.

After we were done at Marundeeswarar Koil we drove a few miles South from the temple to a small but nice cafe called Tryst on the East coast Road. Unfortunately the view from our table did not offer any great sketching opportunities. But we did have a nice time there comparing sketches and having some nice stuff to eat and drink. Between gulps I managed to do this quick sketch of Nithi.

 I am adding this bit on Friday 9th Dec, a couple of  days after I had posted my sketches and photos. I finally managed to get Nithi's consent to put up her sketches too. One of her sketches is of a mandapam (shelter)  facing the Amman (lady deity) shrine. Her second sketch is of two fruitsellers engaged in conversation. Nithi does these in no time at all and then moves on to other things that catch her attention.

The House On Pillars

In the 1970s, after having lived as caretaker tenants for a few months in the quiet and unspoilt seaside neighborhood of Thiruvanmiyur, my wife and I made up our minds to put down our roots there. In those days Thiruvanmiyur was a suburb of Madras (as Chennai was then known) and most people thought that we were very daring and unwise to live in such a "remote" place. Although there were very few proper houses around, and an enormous amount of vacant land, it took us almost a year to find somebody willing to sell us a small plot. Land was not expensive then. In fact we paid only around US$ 350 for our plot. But the cost of construction was relatively high.

Although money, or more precisely our lack of it, was an important factor, there were a few other bigger hurdles. There were a number of permits and service connections to be obtained and, even in those relatively less corrupt days, it was a severe ordeal to deal with a very large number of minor and major bureaucrats. To add to our problems, those were the days of cement and steel shortages. In fact the cement scarcity was so severe that its supply was controlled by the Indian Government and rationed to consumers. And this of course brought a whole new set of bureaucrats into play. The shortage of materials and the consequent delays in the delivery of the materials made it very difficult to keep to construction schedules and stay within budgets.

Since steel and cement were the two major "problem" materials we decided to minimise their use in the house construction. We went in for a variety of roofing techniques, such as sloped clay tiled roofing, and hollow clay tile roofing, left our walls unplastered on one side, and went in for clay tile flooring. In addition to this we also decided to use pivot hinges for our doors and do away with door frames, had smaller but strategically placed windows, and reduced the floor to ceiling height, all in a bid to reduce costs. As a result we were able to keep to both the construction schedule and our budget. It also allowed us the luxury of building the entire house on stilts.

Since there were very few built houses around, our house was now visible from quite some distance in every direction. And unlike other houses which rested solidly on the ground the first level of our house was left entirely vacant. As a result our house came to be known in the neighbourhood as the "thoon veedu" or " house on pillars".

Some years later, when we had a few more neighbours, Chennai experienced particularly severe flooding, and the locality where we lived was also flooded. Although we had water in our plot, under the house, and all around us, we were unaffected by it. A number of people thought that we had been very wise to have anticipated this event and planned for it. Actually it had never occurred to us that the area could be flooded since that had never happened within living memory. We had built our house on stilts because it was located a little further away from the sea than what we would have liked, and we wanted to ensure that we had a good view of the water.

The first leg of our Kerala holiday

I took my wife on a surprise holiday. The surprise element was the destination. I had to check with her as to whether she could take a break from her work, and for how long. She was able to, and she agreed to leave the entire planning of the holiday, including the destination entirely to me.

The first leg of our holiday trip was by train. We took an overnight train to Kottayam where a friend had booked a guest room in one of the local clubs. Although quite disappointed with my choice of a holiday destination, my wife put on a brave and cheerful face. We freshened up, had breakfast and while my wife listened to some music on her iPod, I went out and made a couple of quick sketches of our first stop.