CONSERVATION
Bungalow on Tharangambadi beach
GUNVANTHI BALARAM
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The 19th-Century Collector's Residence in picturesque Tranquebar has recently been transformed from a ruin to a heritage hotel.
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BEFORE AND AFTER: The southern façade of the bungalow. PHOTOS: AJIT KOUJALGI
AS bungalows on the beach go, this is a pretty grand one. What's more, it has got not just the ocean, but history for a view: a stolid Danish fort looming over the sands on the one side and on the other, a medieval Pandya temple crumbling into the sea.
And now, you can stay and luxuriate here, where the twain seems to have met. For this 19th-Century Collector's Residence in picturesque Tranquebar — or Tharangambadi, as it is known in Tamil Nadu — has recently been transformed from a ruin to a heritage hotel by the Neemrana Group.
Simply called the "Bungalow on the Beach", it's the first hotel to be established in this obscure, but historical, beach town, once a Danish trading post, that lies 100 miles south of Pondicherry on the Coromandel Coast. And the local populace is the gladder for it. As postmaster M. Kodandapani observes, "Neemrana has done the town a service. Their hotel will bring more tourists to this charming, but neglected, place and boost the local economy."
A small, somnolent, wind-blown town which includes a sizeable populace of fisherfolk — 700 of whom lost their lives in the tsunami last Christmas — Tharangambadi is literally the "Village of the Dancing Waves". Down the centuries, the waves have often washed over the village causing havoc in varying degrees. In the last 35 years, the water has swallowed four streets, reveals M.A. Sultan, local photographer and amateur historian who has penned a booklet entitled Reminiscences of Tranquebar.
If Pondicherry is distinguished by its French legacy, Tranquebar is distinguished by its Danish past. Its relics include a gateway sporting the Danish Royal Seal, a fort that's Scandinavian in appearance rather than Dravidian, a string of imposing colonial bungalows and two early 18th-Century churches. In 1620, a Danish fleet landed at this spot on the Coromandel Coast, and its Dutch captain Roland Crappe immediately realised that its strategic location made for an ideal trading post. Ove Gjedde, an admiral in the Danish Navy, then negotiated a treaty on behalf of the Danish king Christian IV with the Thanjavur king, Vijaya Raghunatha Nayak. He acquired a 10-mile by three-mile-strip of the fishing village from the maharajah for a rent of Rs. 3,111 per annum, renamed it Tranquebar, and in 1622, built the Dansborg Fort. It was from where the Danish East India Company traded in spices, silks and other textiles until 1845, when it transferred the place to the British for a sum of £10,000.
From house to hotel
Its Danish relics lend Tharangambadi a curious, washed-out charm. The moment you enter its "Land Gate" you are transported back to another age and time.
how it stands today.
As you traverse the grandly named King Street, the main street that leads from the gate to the beach, you pass a row of colonial structures, which includes the elegant 1701 Zion Church, and the more elaborate 1718 New Jerusalem Church (in which lies buried Bartholomeus Zeigenbalg, a Lutheran missionary and Tamil scholar who set up the country's first printing press here in 1712 and published the first-ever Tamil translation of the New Testament in 1715), and the tattered 18th-Century Danish Governor's bungalow. At the end of the line stands the new hotel.
The building was in a state of utter disrepair, with parts of the verandah having collapsed when conservationists Francis Wacziarg and Aman Nath, who set up the Neemrana Group, came across it. The house had been sold by the local Nadar family to the Taj Group of hotels in the early 1990s, but the latter had done little to resurrect it. "It was nonetheless lovely," says Wacziarg. Records revealed that though the exact date of construction was unavailable, the building was over 150 years old. Arabella Matilda Peterson, widow of Danish civil officer William Christian Peterson, had inherited the building in December 1857. Ten years later, she had sold the property to Thiru Vellia Nadar, with whose descendants it remained for 125 years. For many decades it was rented by the British authorities and used by the collector as his residence.
`Intelligent' conservation
Wacziarg convinced his friend Sudhir Mulji to buy the house from the Taj, and when that was accomplished, set about restoring it in early 2003. The operation took about two years and cost Rs 1.5 crore. The gracious eight-room hotel opened on Christmas Eve last year, but the tsunami left it washed out a day later. Three months of repairs later, the hotel re-opened.
The building is as much an example of intelligent conservation as it is an evocation of the past, using as it does a minimum of carefully chosen vintage furniture, paintings and artefacts. Its high-ceiling rooms are named after old Danish ships and fitted with sheer single-colour floor-length curtains that billow like sails in the breeze.
Pondicherry-based architects and INTACH activists Ajit and Ratna Koujalgi have carried out the restoration using traditional material and techniques and the traditional skills of local artisans. The walls, for instance, have been treated with a traditional lime-stucco plaster using marble-dust and lime from burnt shells, combined with white cement and color oxides, polished by hand with smooth round pebbles from a nearby river.
"We used lime mortar and not cement not only because it was used in the original but also because it performs well in such a marine environment," says Ajit Koujalgi. "The collapsed roof and floor slabs were reconstructed using the Madras Terrace technique, which comprises flat burnt bricks-on-edge placed diagonally on wooden joists and stuck together with lime mortar. All the damaged wooden beams were replaced with recycled teak wood. Fortunately, it was not difficult to find a team of competent local masons and carpenters for this job." The lovely coloured cement stuccowork was carried out by talented artisan Veerappan.
The first-floor pillared verandah with flat roof that had been dismantled in the 1940s was replaced with a lean-to tiled roof, "because it is more in harmony with the rest of the Danish architecture in Tranquebar," explains Wacziarg. This deeply recessed verandah that runs around the building on both the ground and first floors is the most attractive feature of the hotel. You can sit there forever in a comfortable old armchair, reading, or simply gazing out at the boats bobbing in the sea, or at the (now somewhat pastiche) fort that was used as a warehouse by the Danish and as a prison by the British, or at the partially submerged Masilamaninathar temple (built in 1305 A.D. by the Pandya king Kulasekaran) whose beautifully carved gopuram lies on its side on the beach. The only other changes they've wrought is moving the staircase from a side room to the back of the foyer and put in new bathrooms, of course. "The new staircase is more efficient and adds to the visual grandeur of the hall," says Wacziarg.
All this for Rs. 1.5 crores.
`Restoration not too expensive'
"It's not always prohibitively expensive to restore an old structure," states Koujalgi. "The cost depends on what one wants to do — a hotel like this doesn't come cheap: luxurious bathrooms, air-conditioning, etc. But the abundance of manpower and craft skills in our country enables us to restore vintage buildings at a reasonable cost. The important thing is that we should have the will to do it."
Neemrana does. They are now negotiating with the Tamil Nadu Government to convert the old Danish Governor's bungalow into a heritage hotel. In the meantime, they've also started a dormitory facility (Rs. 150 per bed per night) in a nearby building constructed several years ago by the tourism department for that very purpose. It never got round to doing it.
History-minded residents such as Sultan, Kodandapani and Zion Church pastor Christian Samraj hope that Neemrana's entry will spark heritage and civic consciousness in the locals and in the authorities. It worries them that many vintage structures, both vernacular and colonial, are being changed unsympathetically, resulting in eyesores, even on King Street. Heritage buildings need to be listed and architectural control guidelines enforced to preserve the harmony of the old streetscape. At the same time, the town's roads, water supply, sanitation and solid waste management must be improved, they emphasise.
"If the Tamil Nadu Government invests a little interest and money in Tranquebar, the place could become a big tourist attraction," remarks the pastor. "The government of Denmark and a voluntary group called the `Tranquebar Association of Denmark' (which helped restore the fort) have gone on record to express their desire to contribute towards the preservation and development of Tranquebar," adds Sultan.
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