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A few years ago, while exploring Bhuj, a small town in Gujarat, India’s westernmost state, I came across a beautiful and initially enigmatic structure: a column supporting a fence decorated with hundreds of holes. It seemed to me a geometric abstraction of a gigantic tree – until a dove peeked out of one of the openings.
Soon hundreds of birds flew in and out of the large bird house. The locals told me that the structure was called a ‘chabutra’.
During my first four-month stay, and then on follow-up visits to Kutch, the district that includes Bhuj, I began to document the beautifully crafted birdhouses – taking photos, collecting local stories and capturing people’s memories associated with the structures.
The old bird towers I encountered were made of wood and stone. Newer ones are usually made of concrete and are much more colorful and vibrant. Every design is different.
Housing and feeding birds is common practice in much of India. But in different cities, the collective affinity for birds manifests itself in different ways. Some communities engage in the breeding of pigeons known as kabootar-baazi, which involves taming the birds, taking care of their health, training them to fly in a certain direction based on verbal commands, and preparing them for flight. flying competitions. Others focus on conservation efforts† Still others build chabutras.
In the Kutch district of Gujarat, elegant birdhouses can be found in most villages and hamlets. The buildings are paid for by residents and are often designed and built by masons who, while not trained as designers, are nevertheless able to express the ethos of their community.
The houses are not only places to stay for the birds. They also act as common areas. Older men and women sit in their shadows. Children play nearby. Festivals are sometimes held around it.
I prefer to classify the birdhouses as bird housing, as the birds, just like humans, use different types of residential buildings. Some structures are like sarais, or motels, a place where the animals can make short stops before continuing their journey. Others are multi-storey condominiums with as many as 40 floors.
If we analyze the chabutras from an architectural perspective, we could describe some of them as Indo-Saracenic, brutalist, postmodern, contemporary.
A chabutra may also be associated with the religious and cultural identities of his community. Many people build the buildings as memorials to deceased friends and relatives and believe that providing food is like feeding the souls of the deceased. Some Hindus believe that offering food to the structure is akin to feeding God.
It is therefore no surprise that large donations of birdseed are often made at important social events: funerals, weddings, births. In some cities, contributing grain to communal chabutras can even serve as a form of punishment, or mandatory community service.
While exploring and documenting the chabutras in Kutch, I visited dozens of villages in the district and spoke to countless people who help supply and maintain the structures. And while the historic wooden birdhouses in some places — Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s most populous city, for example — are well documented, no comparable attention has been paid to those in Kutch.
My goal with this project, which I’ve been working on for the past seven years, has been to help compensate for the lack of attention given to Kutch’s chabutras – especially in the wake of a devastating earthquake in 2001 which destroyed many of the famous stone specimens.
While the earthquake turned many historic chabutras into rubble, it also paved the way for the new structures we see today.
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