How this 300-year-old house migrated from Kerala to Gurgaon
new delhi — A 300-year-old house from Kerala continues to surface in the Indian media, once every few years. But each time it appears with more details, the myth grows.
There is an abiding reason for the fascination with Meda, as the house is called.
The original home of the typical old model two-storey tiled house is Mepral, in Pathanamthitta, in South Kerala. Then it sort of migrated. The house is currently located in Sadhrana, a village in Gurgaon, south of Delhi.
Who moved the house? And why?
Pradeep Sachdev, an architect based in Delhi, transported the house on trucks. But how, is a complicated story.
The house belonged to George Oommen. He inherited it from his father when he was a teenager. At that time, Oommen was going to school in Delhi.
He did not know what to do with the family gift. He kept it on the back burner, and migrated to the US, where he went to Harvard and became an architect.
Most of the family members too had moved abroad. The house awaited its guests, but none turned up.
But Ooommen had not forgotten his ancestral house completely. After all it was a gift from his father. Decades later he returned to India, and began wondering what do with the house.
Since Meda was near a river and the rains were plentiful in Pathanamthitta, the laterite stone floors absorbed water and had begun sinking into the ground.
The rest of the house was made of wood and tiles, and they weathered many storms.
Oommen, now 75, says he did think of raising the house on stilts, but the sodden ground might not have supported that idea in the long run. In any case, nobody in the family was willing to return and stay there.
Enter Pradeep Sachdeva, an architect, and Oommen’s friend.
Sachdeva offered to buy the 2,000 square foot house and then move it beam by beam, tile by tile to his farm in Sadharana, in Gurgaon. He thought he might turn it into a guest house for his friends. Oommen was delighted.
Sachdev, as the story goes, hired a team in Mepral and dismantled the house, each piece numbered, and the information entered into a register.
These were then transported by trucks to Sadhrana, 2,500 kilometers away.
The Kerala team was led by a master carpenter, Narayan Achary. Achary and his team put the house back together after months of painstaking work.
There are hardly any nails used in the house, as 300 years ago the practice was joinery by fitment, more like building blocks, really. Over the years a few tiles had been damaged, but over 80 per cent of the wood was good enough to be retained.
A kitchen and bathroom were added to the house. An iron spiral staircase replaced a wooden one that was giving away. And electricity and plumbing, of course.
The entire process of transporting the house has been documented in a film directed by Sudhesh Unniramcn titled ‘A house from Kerala’.
So Meda stands. But not where it used to be. It has migrated.