Two Videos:Decorative brackets of Gujarati wooden house

Click To Play:DeshGujarat Video

Click To Play:DeshGujarat Video

Ahmedabad, DeshGujarat

Demolition of 221 properties on Astodia road of wall city area in Ahmedabad has been finished by Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC). AMC was recently ordered by Gujarat high court to finish the task of widening this road within two and half months limit.

While 221 properties, in which most are older than 100 years were demolished, vendors of antique parts camped in the area from all over India. Most of the householders earned handsome amount of money in exchange of teak wood, gates, windows, wooden carved parts, wooden ladders, wooden brackets, wooden pillars etc.

In these videos we have tried to show you brackets of a house which was partially demolished at the time of shooting (This house is now rubble). Contractor fixed antiquity value of this house at 1.50 lakh Rs. He paid this amount to the owner and started dismantling it. Contractor Parallely fixed the deal of selling parts sourced from this house at half a million Rs with another bigger antiquity dealer.

Once upon a time wooden houses were part of the life in Gujarat, and now they have become lucrative antiquities. Most of the traditional wooden carpenters (Mistry community) have shifted to another professions and jobs. ‘Mistry’ was a community involved in wooden house making. They were not bachelor of architecture or engineering but they had wisdom of making efficient houses. They used to learn through tradition and were considered as blessed by ‘Vishvakarma’ engineers’ deity for wooden house making skills.They had set of rules about construction of decorative wooden houses, i.e. if they had to carve a piece of wood to fix it at front elevation of the house for decorative purpose; they would apply sharper tools to carve that piece of wood bit more deeper, because of the fact that people would be able to see such carving from distance only.

Ahmedabda city has rich heritage of century old wooden houses. These wooden houses were built in the time when electricity was not in existence and therefore these houses were designed in a manner to serve temperature and natural lighting needs. There were underground rain water harvesting tanks in each house that could store rainy water to address needs in summer and winter. Materials like Lime and wood were used in these houses. Today we can see forts and palaces which were constructed before centuries, because they were built using lime as a core material. Suppose, if they were built using cement, we could not witness them today, after centuries of their origination. While demolishing century old houses to widen the Astodia road in Ahmedabad, labors had very tuff time because houses were extra ordinary strong due to usage of lime in its structure.Related article(Gujarati) in Gujarat Samachar