Kutiya Geometries

On transatlantic plantations in coolie sugar belts in the Caribbean, beginning in the mid-1800s, indentured immigrants from India were composing their new migrant lives. Central to their new lives were their small, semi-private shrines called kutiyas—translated from the Hindi root kutis—which are small shrines tended by religious mendicants. These shrines were typically made for private worship and meditation, and were informed by prayer, and the body's motion in space (scientific measures, something like Le Corbusier's modular) and by the push and pull of cultural translation (imagination and daydreaming, something like Gaston Bachelard's poetics and imagination). This tussle between objective science and poetic imagination, between certainty and thought experiments, always bubbles to the surface when we dig for meaning. These tensions are quite often waiting to be "read," especially in the history of artefacts.

I use the term kutiya geometry to refer to the psychosomatic measures taken by Hindus in constructing a culture of self-preservation, held together by the perceived power and status of the artefact-ness of the personal Hindu shrine, within the physical and cultural landscape. I want to bring these kutiyas to your attention as artefacts in the fullest sense of the term proposed by the great Italian architect Aldo Rossi; in other words, not just as a physical objects but as a consolidation of history, geography, and structure connected with the general life of the city. The artefact of kutiya geometries reflects the ways in which one ordered one's life to measure up in a new landscape. The great beauty of the architectonics of the kutiya is revealed in our lack of knowledge of how many strands, of how many degrees, of how many cosmologies and twists of faith were used to guide the measure and scale. I suppose to figure this out would be as much a mathematical challenge as it is an historical one. We are sure, though, that many different strands of belief were reconciled somewhat to get the first stake in ground and to fly

Figure 1.

the first jhandi (ceremonial prayer flag) on tall bamboo poles. I see kutiya geometry also as the departure point for understanding the psychosomatic drive of meditation and religion in early Hindu communities.

Rossi's idea of "structure and connection" I take to refer to the economic and cultural relationships of the built form to its landscape and community. And although Rossi's references concentrated on the relationships between built form and the city, I am widening the measure of the kutiya artefact to refer to the general life of the state, the early colonial state and the later independent state, because their presence in rural settings assisted in defining Hindu Indians as rural and underdeveloped as against the urban "developed" Afro-Creole. In this case, the city within the state was pitted against the rural environments—which were relegated to the margins.

This understanding helps construct the Rossian "structure and connection" of the artefact to the general life of the state in the expanded sense of economic and cultural relationships. And in keeping within the frame of geometry, I shall circumscribe some coordinates and plots which should be taken together to form poetic entry points for the appropriate measure of shrines/kutiya artefacts that I believe have been ignored.

Kutiya geometry examined dreaming, imagination, and poetics of space and place well before Bachelard. In 1992, for his Nobel lecture, Derek Walcott wrote about witnessing the "Hindu epic the Ramayana." He writes in "The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory" (in What the Twilight Says, London: Faber and Faber, 1998):

Here in Trinidad I had discovered that one of the greatest epics of the world was seasonally performed, not with that desperate resignation of preserving a culture, but with an openness of belief that was as steady as the wind bending the cane lances of the Caroni plain. It was as if, on the edge of the Central Plain, there was another plateau, a raft on which the Ramayana would be poorly performed in this ocean of cane, but that...