Delivery room? It is next to the period room… Stunning Kerala Homes Designed for Women’s Bodies | art

A A chance conversation with a distant family member led me to Palail, the name given to my ancestors Tharavad. The latter is the name given to a home designed around women. Our system has been in place, in some form, since at least the 17th century. My great-grandmother, Balil Sridevi, was the last woman in my family line to live in one of them. This was in the village of Thulanur in southern India.

My great-grandmother belonged to the Nair community, a matrilineal caste whose origins are in Kerala. Historically, military nobility were those who served royal dynasties. For centuries, Nair boys left their homes at the age of 12 to train as soldiers before being sent to serve the royal family of Travancore. When the men return, they often sleep in outhouses – satellites of Tharavad Of women.

I spent several years researching societies around the world where women have built their own systems, communities, and institutions for my book Herlands: Lessons from Societies Where Women Make the Rules.. The title refers to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist novel Herland, which imagines a society ruled by women, although my interest was in the real societies that women built for themselves. I had hoped that my journey with Balayil would end, and it did, but not in the way I had imagined. Palayil was demolished more than a decade ago, as the matrilineal lineage system in which my great-grandmother grew up disintegrated, dismembered by laws written by many men.

When I finally went looking for it in 2024, I walked through acres of rice and found nothing but the groundskeeper’s house, the serpent shrine, an old gate and the neighbors who remembered it. the Tharavad In its glory it now exists only in memory. But its grammar – the rooms, the roads, the bodies built to embrace it – still exists in other places like it across Kerala.

This matters beyond my family history. Today, June 23, International Women in Engineering Day celebrates the contributions women make to designing and building the world around us. the Tharavad It raises a complementary question: what happens when buildings are designed primarily around women’s lives? While the houses were built by male craftsmen, they were designed to meet women’s needs, rhythms, and authority. Looking at it reminds us that the built environment is never neutral; It reveals whose needs, experiences and lives are valued enough to shape design decisions.

The house was a nalukettuwhich translates as “four corners”: a rectangular structure of jackfruit and teak wood, opening onto a roofless central courtyard called nadumutamwith four blocks named after the directions they encountered. These were not just houses where women lived. They were houses designed around the female body: its cycles, its work, its grief, its desire, its voice.

The buildings were drawn and built by male carpenters but the brief was determined by women. There he is alive Tharavad 20 minutes from Thulanor, called Kandath. It is now kept as a residence by its caretaker, Sudevan Bhagwaldas, who told me stories over ginger tea before driving me home. com. purathalams. These are raised, padded platforms designed for relaxing and sitting diagonally opposite each other across the yard. The men gathered on one side and the women on the other.

“It’s designed so that men can’t hear a word women say, and vice versa — even if you have to scream,” Bagualdas told me. Architecture not only protected women’s bodies, it protected their conversations.

The kitchen was located to the northeast. Architect Benny Kuriakose, who restored many of them TharavadasHe told me that this is because the monsoon winds in Kerala travel from the southwest, so the hot air in the kitchen is transported away from the house. The women’s bedrooms on the west side were spared the heat of the kitchen. Outside are smaller rooms: one for childbirth and another for menstruation. A menstruating girl can rest in this room. Her mother may have given birth to her in the afterlife.

In a Tharavad Preserved by Kuriakose as part of the Muziris Heritage Project, these rooms are shown in the architectural plan. A room on the ground floor with the words: “A corridor with rooms for menstruating and pregnant women.” I’ve been thinking about this passage a lot. During my research in the Herlands, I encountered many examples of women who created systems of care, inheritance, and mutual support. What surprised me about Tharavad It is that those values ​​were embedded not only in social rules, but in architecture itself.

In much of South Asia, the “old hut” served as an instrument of exile. Hindu practice Chopadi Menstruating women are treated as polluted. But some of my relatives insist that Balayil told a different story. There, they remembered the period room as a rest room. The menstruating woman would take care of other women in the house. She was relieved of household chores. She was not unclean. It has not been denied. Her body was expected, accommodated, and given a room of its own.

I only have one picture of my great grandmother who is a beautiful movie star. In Thulanur, the neighbors remembered her beauty, although they told me that she surpassed her mother, Balayil Kalyani. She held the keys to the main gate and the storage room where the jewelry was kept. Her name was written on palayla leaves. Her blessing was necessary before any business deal, marriage or naming.

Before World War I, Kalyani arranged for the roof made of dried coconut leaves to be replaced with clay tiles, modernizing the structure that protected her production line. This was a home for all the women associated with Kalyani: widows, single women, cousins, new mothers, and new mothers. Architecture protects them all. Kalyani insisted that Palliyal’s daughters should always live in a safe and secure home. This insistence – that we are protected, financially empowered, and do not need to be rescued – was instilled in me by my grandmother and mother, who heard it from their grandmothers.

Many Nair communities practice a form of union called sampadanamfrom Sanskrit Sama, equal, and bandham, A union is a comfortable sexual alliance between a man and a woman that can be dissolved at the request of either party. The woman did not move to her husband’s house. He came to her, and he could be asked to leave.

An arrangement like this needs a home to match. There was a path that ran around the outside of the house chuttu The veranda is illuminated at night with copper lamps. I’ve been told it was partly designed as a secret route for a conjugal visit. This practice ended in the nineteenth century. But architecture remembers possibility.

The other thing I remembered was lineage: lineage for women. “The birth of a girl child was more valuable than the birth of a boy child because of the role the woman played in physically carrying the offspring,” said Lekha NP, a gender academic in Kerala. “This ensures continuity Tharavad Legacy.” A girl arrived to the ringing of bells. Her body was the architecture’s raison d’être.

I don’t want to romanticize a system I come from but have not lived in. The architecture was generous, but eclectic. Tharavad They were class structures. While Nair women, most of whom were educated, read in the courtyard, lower-caste women worked in the fields outside, often under semi-slave conditions. My father’s family belongs to a lower class. His relatives could not be welcomed inside Palail. A home for women’s bodies, yes, but not for all women.

This system ended in the early twentieth century, and was legalized out of existence by laws that abolished women’s inheritance and made… sampadanam illegal. Balil Kalyani built a house for her daughters. The walls fell. But the lesson remains: keep your shelter, keep your independence, keep the key.

Herlands: Lessons from Societies Where Women Make the Rules, by Megha Mohan, edited by Harvill. To support The Guardian, purchase your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery fees may apply.