Tour de hidden heritages of Dhaka metro
Amid rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation to host an oversized population, Dhaka’s ancestral buildings - constructed between the 1900s and 1980s before the dawn of nuclear family culture - are disappearing fast. Here’s a website that is working to preserve electronic documents of the legacies and take you on virtual tours
For many people around us in the city, the most treasured memories are those of living at their grandparents' house during childhood.
The chitter-chatter with cousins on the long veranda, the sports played in the large courtyard or the family dinner in the common dining room are the stuff of cherished memories.
And the grandparents' house was where the members of a blended or joint family used to garner a lot of energy and feel freedom at its openness. Now, after so many years, every corner of the house has stories that make the descendants – currently separated in a nuclear family – nostalgic.
Keep updated, follow The Business Standard's Google news channel
Think of yourself as a descendant of a joint family. You are given access to walking down memory lane. Wouldn't you feel thrilled if you could take a 360-degree virtual tour of the house? Of course, you would.
Thespian Sara Zaker, perhaps, felt deep-rooted nostalgia while recalling the Kabir House built at Eskaton in 1952 by her maternal grandfather Syed Gholam Kabir.
Moving the cursor through the sequences of a 360-degree virtual tour of Kabir House, she reminisced about the lawn where she shared leisure time with her cousins, the room where her husband Ali Zaker took a seat as a bridegroom during her wedding ceremony and the rooftop where the tenants of the US origin used to occasionally arrange ball and barbecue.
"I felt the strong bonding of an extended family in the house. Not only my generation but also my next generations have emotions with the house. Our family members cherish a plan to keep the house as it is," said Sara while accompanying team members of Hidden Heritage on the virtual tour.
Recordings of descendants taking the virtual tour and their interviews can be found in the stories section of the Hidden Heritage website. Browsers can make a 360-degree virtual tour and navigate through the timeline of the house.
And then, there are exhibits of old photographs of the family members, photos of artefacts, furniture, interior and exterior arrangements and architectural designs of the house. There is also access to a GPS map of the house. All are well-arranged on the same web page.
Beside the Kabir House, there are 360-degree-angle digital documents of the Haturia House, Rajshahi House, Asaf Khan House and Revati Mohan Das House on the website www.hiddenheritage.org. This is the result of a collaboration of the Bengal Institute- Architecture Landscapes Settlements (BI) and the European Union National Institutes for Culture (EUNIC).
The header of the website is organised with flipcharts (photographs) of the five individual houses. Scrolling down, a briefing about the Hidden Heritage project and the partner organisations' logos will appear.
From the menu bars, visitors can explore any exhibited house in one click. For example, if you click on the window of Haturia House which was built in 1920, a dedicated page will appear with a brief description, history and the content icons: virtual tour, timeline, stories, photos, architecture and location.
In the Bangshal area, the then British Civil Service officer Khan Bahadur Muhammad Fazlul Karim built the house in 1920. The same year, a Khanka-e-Aliya (a place where Sufis meet and do their spiritual rituals) was established in the house, as per the request of Karim's wife Ulfatunnesa Khatun Chowdhurani, the youngest daughter of the Haturia (now in Shariatpur district) zamindar Gulam Ali Chowdhury.
The photos archived on the web page will introduce the visitors to the symmetrical single-storey Haturia House that was constructed following the Indo-Saracenic design of the Curzon Hall. The exhibits will also help get a glimpse of how the dwellers accommodate the ancient furniture and how the family host Majlish E Sama (a Sufi ceremony performed as part of the meditation and prayer practice) every week.
Why is this century-old structure still preserved and how do the dwellers feel about this? "I feel homesick when I go outside. Even the weekly congregation [Majlish E Sama] is so attached to my life that I rush back home if the day is Thursday. My subconscious mind alters me if any parts of this house get damaged," said Shiblee Md Fazlul Karim, grandson of Khan Bahadur Karim and the current muttawali of this waqf property.
Online visitors can be familiar with the Moghbazar-based Rajshahi House which was built in 1957 for the family of Murtaza Reza Chowdhury, who served as a state minister in the central government of Pakistan.
Emerging architects can learn about the house's asymmetrical space organisation of modernist architecture adopting pure geometric forms. From the stories section, visitors can learn from Irteza Chowdhury (current owner) how the house owner and his descendants loved to live in an open space that would also ensure privacy.
A virtual tour of Revati Mohan Das House – an elaborative mansion built in 1900 on the banks of the former Dholai Khal in the Sutrapur area – will introduce a neo-classical architectural style to the visitors.
Although the Das descendants are no longer living in the house, visitors can learn about the mansion and more about Old Dhaka from the descriptions by Dhaka Kendra director Mohammad Azim Buksh who is fondly called the encyclopaedia of Dhaka.
Lastly, architecture enthusiasts can visit the Asaf Khan House – the single-storey bungalow in Dhanmondi that was evidently designed to let the dwellers connect to a lawn, and surrounding greenery. Although it was built in 1960, Asaf Khan purchased it in 1973.
While sharing childhood memories, Asaf Khan's elder daughter Nehrir Khan said how the youngsters spent childhood like squirrels on tree branches amid the abundance of trees on the house premises. "The house was a social centre of our relatives," Nehrir reminisced in a video preserved in the stories section.
It becomes clear that a house is not merely an ancestral property. Rather, a symbol of family history, legacy and more. Architects consider such a house as a history of tradition, culture, domesticity and architectural craftsmanship.
Amid rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation to host an oversized population, Dhaka metropolitan-based ancestral buildings constructed between the 1900s and 1980s (before the dawn of nuclear family culture) are disappearing fast.
Historic preservation is a form of development. Hidden Heritage project's principal coordinator Nusrat Sumaiya believes, to redefine the development plan for the context of the present and future, is important for all sorts of creative professionals like urban planners and housing experts to learn from the past.
"To preserve the history: how the indigenous living had evolved in the changing urban architectural forms, what were the types of domesticity and more, documentation is crucial. Unfortunately, there are few documents about the houses built in the 1950s-1980s period. That's why the Hidden Heritage project has documented accessible houses," Nusrat told The Business Standard.
Initiated in late 2020, the project members tried to survey around 15 houses in Dhaka. But they were not able to get permission for access to all the houses due to ownership issues, family disputes and fear of realtors' attention.
However, with personal links, the team led by BI director general Kazi Khaleed Ashraf managed to survey the five houses and finally developed the website in September this year.
The project officials think that the five house owners and their descendants are enlightened and emotionally invested in preserving their family history and bonding.
"We are losing our memories while leading nuclear families. We are now independent but self-centric. So the Hidden Heritage project can help us rethink how our nuclear family life can be reshaped for better social bonding," Nusrat concluded.
