The great wall of India

Houses of the past had walls built with mud and exposed to sun and rain for many decades with no sign of damage or decay. By Sathya Prakash Varanashi

What could be an effective solution towards eco, green and sustainable? If we select two – being local and being frugal – it may surprise most people. Haven’t we heard these words too often, which do not belong to our modern times anymore? It is too late to live local now in our hyper-urbanised contexts and frugal living is an unfortunate curse on the poor, to be eradicated at all costs.

Given such thoughts, can we relook at the local and frugal, not as a curse but as a studied choice? Something common that we see across India while travelling are houses with mud walls. How many of us observe them, without taking them for granted?

If we go searching for the local and frugal, every other region has much to offer, especially in natural materials like mud and stone. In an old house in the historic village of Manne near Bengaluru, one can still see the old walls built with a specific technique called “kudali ittige”. Typically owner-built houses, we can still meet the septuagenarian seniors who claim to have built the walls with their own hands.

Mud for construction was dug out from their own land, also to get irrigation ponds; so it’s a double benefit! After careful sieving to remove unwanted dry leaves, debris, hardened mud particles and such others, it is mixed with grass shreds and small stone pebbles. Depending upon the actual soil characteristic, they may add sand, silt or gravel, for mud with too much clay cannot be built with. After two to three days of preparing the mix with water and foot trampling, it is spread flat on ground to about 3 to 4 inch thickness.

Different sizes

Just before it gets set and very dry, the mat-like spread is cut into blocks using an axe to the size required. Since no individual brick is made upfront, this method allows for making bricks with different sizes as may be required by the construction of external walls, pillars, niches, thin inner walls or so. Primarily it is a variation in doing sun-dried adobe bricks.

Using the same mud composition, slurry-like mud paste is made to be used as mortar.

The wall observed at site has been partly exposed to sun and rain for many decades with no decaying. Mud consolidated has become like stone!

The soil varies from place to place, some good for cultivation, construction, pottery or even for toys. Soil for tubers is not good for rice – amazing to see the worldwide local variety within the same global material, without which early human civilisations would not have evolved up to our generation.

If we are to begin with soil and end with soil and if mud has sustained humans all these 200,000 years, it is not fair that we forget it.

(The writer is an architect working for eco-friendly designs and can be contacted at [email protected])

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