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Published
in Gulf News, January 16, 2007
A living history
One
of
our longest-standing family friends lives in Holmfirth, West Yorkshire,
in a dwelling called The Old Farmhouse. This being England, it's
not the twee name of a faux-country house built ten years ago. It
really is old (250 years) and it really was a farmhouse. It has
rugged stone floors, steep steps and old wooden beams. In the pantry
off the kitchen is a huge stone table that was once used to prepare
meat. The back door is knotted and thick, and still has the old
metal latch alongside the modern locks and burglar-alarm system.
Just
opposite, is the old barn of the farm converted into a modern two-level
home. Behind both houses, fields extend up the hill, dotted with
sheep and cows. Holmfirth is a pretty former mill town and incidentally,
the place where the long-running BBC sit-com Last of the Summer
Wine is filmed. Most of the mills still stand; a couple are
working, and others are being converted into housing.
Thus,
the landscape of the village remains relatively unchanged, in spite
of the demands of life around changing forever. And history has
been preserved; not in monuments and museums, but in daily life.
I once exclaimed at this and was told, "You're from India.
You have so much history around you."
In
truth, there's little of that history in my normal day. Few people
I know live in the houses they grew up in, let alone their
parents. I certainly can't go down the road and have a meal in a
pub that has stood from the 1600s, the way my brother in London
can.
And
now that the spiralling economy has torn much of my city to pieces,
there's little left but regret. How much we could have learned.
An old building doesn't have to mean outdated values. The English
city of Leeds has a fashionable mall full of boutique-like shops
set in a Victorian building once used by corn traders. In its market
place are carefully preserved Victorian mosaic floors that look
achingly familiar. Similar floors were being laid at the same time
in the far reaches of the empire - in bungalows in Bangalore. A
scant 100 years later, those floors were torn up and thrown aside
in the tornado of a real-estate boom. Why preserve an old bungalow
when you can sell to a high-rise developer and make a hundred million
rupees? Our respect for ancient history seems intact (usually because
the related structures have religious significance), but we are
able to tear down recent history with alacrity.
But
even the houses in Holmfirth seemed spanking new after I talked
to Guy. He lives on a 400-acre farm just outside London in a house
that has been in his family for 400 years. The oldest bit is a mediaeval
hall that is nearly 1,000 years old. Today, he and his wife Lucy
ensure the house stays intact by making it part of their livelihood
- they throw open sections of it for weddings and other functions.
The
house I grew up in no longer stands, so I consider myself lucky
that Kolkata hasn't suffered the same growth pangs as Bangalore.
As a result, I have seen the room in which my mother was born, and
visited the houses that my maternal grandparents grew up in. I've
been lucky enough to know my great-grandmother on my mother's side.
Beyond that however, things get a little hazy. I don't see it getting
much better in the future, because I certainly can't picture my
sixteen-greats grandchildren proudly saying, "My family has
lived in this seventh-floor Bangalore apartment for 400 years."
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