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LESSONS FROM BAPU KUTI
7 November, 2000
 We
had just spent the previous day at the Ellora cave temples. Our
share-taxi (really a landcruiser-sized jeep) back from Aurangabad
was 15 rupees (Rs15), about 30 cents each. What a deal, we thought,
until, one by one, the shared seating was filled to the overflowing
occupancy of 24 persons, with an average of 19 for the 30 km trip.
Blaring Hindi music, and no modesty remaining.
We bought tickets for the 6 p.m. luxury bus to Jalgaon, complete
with free Hindi movie and one person per cushioned seat. In the
evening we stayed at a clean hotel with white tiled bath and bucket
hot water. At 5 a.m., we awoke for the 6 a.m. train to Wardha,
arriving by 11 a.m. and catching an auto-rickshaw to Sevagram,
Gandhi's last ashram.
Twelve to 15 permanent residents still live there, with numerous
visitors, long and short term. They practice a simple agricultural
life and ascetic principles. At 2 p.m. the community spins-on
tiny portable spinning wheels-thread from cotton they grow, at
least 20 minutes per person, the time required to spin all of
the thread needed for one person's cloth for one year.
At 5 p.m. we were served a simple but delicious vegetarian (simply
"veg" locally) meal. Sitting on the floor, mostly in
silence. Fresh warm milk with jaggerie, made from evaporated cane
juice. Yellow rice, milddal (lentil stew), all the chapatis you
can eat-Rs15. 6 p.m. prayer, men and women are separated, as at
dinner, seated on the gravel courtyard, chanting accompanied by
a single one-string instrument.
The peace and simplicity of the place was profound. The fact
that this grounded spirituality is chosen, not required or born
into, makes it even more powerful. It was quiet. Their work-digging
in the fields, spinning, cooking dinner-is their meditation. Kindness,
truthfulness are their values. The buildings are simple mud huts
with mud and dung or stone floors and hand-made clay tiled roofs,
all made with local materials by local village craftspeople. Made
of wood and mud, by hands of humans, not the shaping of machines.
 I
wondered how such a simple hut and this way of building became
an expression of non-violence. At its base it is a kind of radical
democracy, where one's needs do not expand with one's means, where
what is taken from the earth is close to what one truly needs,
and where the fulfillment of one's needs do not consume the resources
needed by another. It is also a place of humility, a physical
expression of the spiritual equanimity between persons, non-hierarchical
relationships in a culture of caste, class, and bureaucracy.
Gandhi's house, Bapu Kuti as the residents call it, is a small
house, with a small entry porch, a sitting room for a few people,
woven floor mats, a small work space for Gandhi, a guest room,
a place for the sick to be cared for, an open verandah, and a
not-so-Indian-style bathroom (complete with custom-built sit down
toilet)-altogether, perhaps 450 square feet. Such a small place
with such large lessons, even for me today.
I left practice because I was weary of working on houses that
neither I nor anyone in my family could ever afford to live in.
I took up research and teaching to influence more people and more
buildings to evolve toward ecological integrity. This small home,
the joy of these people, and the millions I have seen on the journey
here-all ask me what I am doing, and if I have the questions even
close to right.
 It
makes one keenly aware of how little one actually needs to live
a dignified life. This in turn leads to another, more powerful
question. Is it not perverse to see industrialized technology
as progressive development of human habitat? Or any kind of human
development? Is my soft path version of it much better?
I suspect that I and the rest of the industrialized green movement
are off by several orders of magnitude. Certainly mere resource
efficiency and human comfort are not measures worthy of constructing
a new model of building. In the spareness of this place is the
emphasis of simple ritual, the circular events of community and
companionship. These people live well. They have friends, books,
an intellectual life, enough to eat, and the kind of human connections
and care rarely seen. But no real wealth, certainly few material
things.
The lesson of Gandhi's house is also about the nonessentialness
of convenience, about the nonseparateness of living and working,
and ultimately of self and other. Despite my modernist upbringing
in design school, I still imbibed the axiom that quality in buildings
was evidenced by embellishment. I still carry the embedded cultural
stories that comfort equals luxury and that quality of life improves
with the size of one's house. Yet here I see virtue and beauty
in a humane minimalism, the kind of inconvenience that filters
out the irrelevant and allows the perennial qualities in us to
surface. It is evident here that there is a different time, though
there are clocks and watches, there are also bells and chimes,
sunrise to sunset, season to season, festival to festival, field
work and returning from the field, cooking and being cooked for,
caring and being cared for, exposure to the elements and protection
from them.
The contrast of my home and work, with its isolation from the
rhythms of place, as compared to the pervasive connections to
sky, sun, shade, and breeze found here is immense. Here the machine
does not conquer the midday heat, so there is rest and time for
reflection, for quiet. Here there is not the uniform space of
home where every square foot of every room has light, heat and
cooling whenever we call on it. Instead of single uses in single
places, our concrete placement in the rational matrix, there is
a loose fit of occupancy and place.
Though there is electricity, it does not make bright the night.
In the darkness there is time for talking with other souls and
for mysteries of deep skies. There is time for rest. Fine work
moves toward light and most spaces can shift from sleep to work
to social activity, while the activities themselves move to follow
shade or breeze, from deep retreats to perimeter exposure and
back.
 And
ultimately all this weaves together in an indescribable simple/complex,
organic, living network of person-community-place. When was the
last time I heard spoken in my civilized progressive design school
the words beauty, truth, joy, freedom, love, non-violence, or
social service? When have I ever heard students called to virtue
without apology? When has simplicity and lessness been valued
over complicatedness and expressionism? When have I asked of my
students to create places as rich crucibles for human development?
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