STICKY GRAVEL DUST SECRET OF AWADH MONUMENTS’ LONGEVITY
WONDER MIX Lab test of plaster from a monument showed it was as tough as modern reinforce concrete cement (RCC) mixture of m15 grade
LUCKNOW: Septuagenarian Bhika Prasad, a menthol farmer in Shankarpur village of Kursi in Barabanki looks on his profession as a legacy from his forefathers. Little does he know that his ancestors contributed a lot in construction of the magnificent nawabi era edifices that have defied the ravages of time with little or no maintenance . During the nawabi era, Bhika’s forefathers were miners and the town Courci (as it was earlier spelled) was the mining hub for gravel, locally known as ‘kankar’.
LUCKNOW: Septuagenarian Bhika Prasad, a menthol farmer in Shankarpur village of Kursi, in Barabanki district, 29 km from Lucknow, looks on his profession as a legacy from his forefathers. Little does he know that his ancestors contributed a lot in construction of the magnificent nawabi era edifices that have defied the ravages of time with little or no maintenance .
During the nawabi era, Bhika’s forefathers were miners and the town Courci (as it was earlier spelled) was the mining hub for gravel, locally known as ‘kankar’.
In the nawabi era, especially during the regime of Nawab Asaf-ud-Daula (1775-1797), who was known as the architect general of Oudh, gravel was used as the main ingredient in construction material with lime and surkhi for construction of monuments, historians say.
“During the regime of Asafud-Daula, the city witnessed the maximum construction, which includes Daulat Khana, Rumi Darwaza and Bara Imambada, including the famous Bhool Bhulaiya (with some 480 identical doorways) Bibiyapur Kothi and many other buildings. In the construction of all these buildings, ‘kankars’ (gravel) mined from Kursi played a crucial role in strengthening the monuments,” said historian Roshan Taqi.
Gravel mining was also a major source of income for the people of Kursi, who were engaged in this work that continued for years, Taqi said.
‘’What has been used in the buildings is chuna (calcinated lime), the crushed course dust of pebbles or kankar, mined from a village Kankargaon near Kursi,’’ reads an extract from Taqi’s book ‘Lucknow Monuments: Conservation, Methodology, Problems and Solutions’ waiting to be released.
Taqi said on being mixed with the other ingredients in a certain ratio, the kankar powder formed a tough binding material. Taqi, who is also an engineer with PWD, began to study the material in 2005.
“Being an engineer, I studied the material to understand the source of its strength that is keeping the monuments intact even after 230 year,” Taqi recollected.
With permission from the ASI, Taqi extracted a small piece of plaster from a monument and sent it for lab test. It was perhaps the first lab test ever conducted on the building material used in monuments of the nawabi era.
The result showed that the material that was used some 230 years back was as good as the present day reinforce concrete cement (RCC) mixture of m15 grade.
“M 15 grade means the strength of 150kg/m square. It was a shocker for all of us,” Taqi said.
Historians said that the plaster also included urad, milk, sheera (sugar syrup), jaggery and sares (glue), the combination of which formed a sticky paste used to plaster the monuments. A few historians also mentioned that at the time of preparing the building material, labourers boiled the flesh of cats and added it to the building material. It made the material even more sticky and gave a good finish in the stucco work.
Kursi’s Kankargaon also finds mention on page 313 in the revised version of the first gazetteer of Awadh, 1877 that came out in three volumes. Historians said the mining work in Kursi declined with time and eventually came to an end after the First War of Independence broke out.
Bhika’s village Shankarpur and several other villages, all on the bank of river Sharda, are still a major source of gravel. If the soil is dug barely a metre deep, a thick layer of gravel can be found that has been deposited here over the years.