Gharat Puja – Village Baag
GHARAT – WATER MILLS OF HIMALAYAS
Working in a village in the foothills of Himalayas gives insights into culture and lifestyle of the mountain dwellers. The idea of localisation stems from working with natural resources available in ones vicinity. Even today this lifestyle is as close to carbon neutral as it can get.
Apart from Shelter and clothing and such basic needs of life, food is grown near to the village and fodder for the animals from the forest near to the village. Certain cereals, pulses and spices grown are to be ground before they are available in a form for consumption. This is generally ground with the hand mill or on a larger scale for community the setup was mechanized to make the process less energy consuming (which is used where there is availability of running water with a sufficient current their the similar system is installed but bigger in size to crush the grains and many more activities like wood cutting or even power generation).
It is a question on what constitutes appropriate technologies for rural systems. This has been discussed in brief in this article as well.
It is very important to keep the craft intact by making such systems with hands and making it available for use as well (without consuming extra resources from the market). The whole process of making a Gharat involves experienced Masons who build such systems from scratch.
Here the process of appropriate documentation of the Gharat making process is described. In that whole process there are many important elements the designers need to learn from such systems such as how our villages have been self sustainable so far to fulfill their needs in food, shelter and clothing.
This was completed using less than 10% material from the market and there was a time when even these resources were not available e.g. cement and torsional bars.
The whole process of the building documented and the document is shared below.
The goal of this documentation is effort is primarily to learn about the craft of Gharat making. While this documentation is not exhaustive, in our opinion there exist very few records of such details where tooling, technique and a design view is presented. Thus this documentation may also serve as a guidebook for others who may want to learn more about the process of making a Gharat. Going forward we will also try and see if this can be translated into local languages in the mountains to help the youth and generations to come have some reference to this historical craft.
