HERITAGE EXPOSED IN THE RAIN

PANAJI

The month of July was marked by rain, wind and the damage these two natural elements left in Goa. In the chaos, some of the few remaining cute houses and buildings with tiled roofs were badly damaged, one of them even partially collapsing.

Many of these projects stand in stark contrast to the rest of the city, which has seen rapid development during the three to four decades of real estate boom, delivering high-rise buildings with modular architecture and design.

Campal, home to the family home of Dr. Jack de Sequeira, and São Tomé-Fontainhas, are two neighborhoods of the capital where such tiled-roofed bungalows with a ground floor plus one overshadow other modern architectural buildings. The old structures in these two neighborhoods, many of which are a century or two old, survived the July monsoon storm without much damage.

In the rest of the city, where such old heritage buildings are sparsely scattered among tall modular buildings of three, four and five floors, some buildings have not survived the stormy weather conditions of the past three weeks unscathed.

Take, for example, the single-storey building in the heart of the city, opposite the General Bernard Guedes rose garden and adjacent to the Woodland showroom. It belongs to the city’s Monte Cristo Vaz family, but is partly occupied by more than a dozen tenants, some of whom run their own businesses. Large parts of the brick-mud-and-mortar building have collapsed on three separate dates in the past two weeks.

At least half a dozen other similar buildings face a similar threat from the ongoing wrath of the monsoon. The most notable of these are: the single-storey building, the ‘Ding-Dong Bar’, near the CCP, the bungalow next to the Vaidya Hospital that once housed the Sundar Lodge, and the single-storey building near the Panaji Fish Market.

Goa’s laws on historic houses and structures do not cover most of these structures and only apply to houses in designated areas such as Campal and the Sao Tome-Fontainhas districts.

“Goa stands out from other Indian states ruled by Hindu rulers, Muslim dynasties and European colonialists. It has an amalgamation of styles in an intangible heritage of buildings, including residential, religious and administrative buildings,” says former Panaji resident and an ardent heritage and history enthusiast, Sanjiv Sardesai.

“They have a distinctive mix of structures that make them a feast for the eyes. Only a handful of these mud or laterite structures survive the ravenous eyes of builders and real estate developers,” says Sardesai, who founded ‘hands-on-historians’, adding that these distinctive buildings, which are passionately preserved all over the world, are being lost in the sands of time.

He suspects that the high maintenance costs, combined with the commercial price incentive, will mean the end of these structures.

Nevertheless, Sardesai says there is an urgent need for a “Heritage House Policy” that state lawmakers should seriously consider.

“Plans should be offered to owners of such houses, at least to begin with in the cities, to preserve these structures which give a distinctive look to Goa,” he said, adding that the collapse of the house on MG Road and the aesthetic house opposite the old Hospicio in Margao are symptoms of a slow death that this intangible heritage of Goa is heading for.