Inside the Grand Logic of Chettinad Mansions

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In a dry, unremarkable stretch of inland Tamil Nadu, spread across dozens of villages in the Sivaganga and Pudukkottai districts, stands one of the most improbable concentrations of domestic architecture in Asia. The Chettinad mansions are enormous merchant houses, some running two hundred feet or more from front door to back wall, built with Burma teak, Belgian mirror glass, Italian marble, English cast iron and Indonesian crockery, in settlements that have no river, no port and no obvious reason to be rich.

The explanation is that the wealth was earned elsewhere. The builders were the Nattukottai Chettiars, also known as Nagarathar, a Tamil mercantile caste whose name means town dweller and who by the nineteenth century operated a sophisticated banking network across South and Southeast Asia: Burma above all, but also Ceylon, Malaya, Singapore, Indonesia and Vietnam. They financed rice cultivation in the Irrawaddy delta and rubber and tin in Malaya, working through a system of family firms, agents posted abroad for fixed terms, and standardised bookkeeping. The money came home, and it was spent on houses and temples.

The plan and its purpose

A Chettinad house is organised as a sequence of courtyards on a single deep axis, and the sequence is social before it is architectural. You enter through an ornate street facade into the thinnai, a raised platform flanking the entrance where male visitors and traders sat without entering the house proper. Beyond that lies the first courtyard, the most public interior, ringed by a pillared corridor with small rooms opening off it. These rooms were where a newly married couple was housed, one room per couple, so that the number of rooms around the first courtyard was effectively a statement about the family's expected size.

Deeper courtyards become progressively more private: the second for the extended family and women of the household, the third and any beyond for cooking, storage and service. A grain store, a well and often a separate kitchen block occupy the rear. The whole plan is a gradient from street to hearth, and a visitor's status was legible from how far along it they were admitted.

The courtyards are not decorative. In a hot dry climate an open central well of air draws hot air upward and out while shaded colonnades stay cool, and the deep verandahs keep direct sun off the rooms entirely. The courtyard also caught rain, which was directed into cisterns. The houses were built to be occupied by very large joint families for a few weeks a year, at weddings and festivals, and to stand largely empty the rest of the time while the men were abroad, which explains their extraordinary size relative to any plausible daily population.

Materials, and the local craft that survived

The imported material list is the part everyone repeats: teak and chandeliers from Burma, crystal from Europe, wall to wall mirrors from Belgium, marble from Italy, crockery from Indonesia. This was possible because the families owned or dealt with the shipping, so a merchant returning from Rangoon could bring back columns as ballast.

The more interesting materials are local. The walls were built of a lime plaster known as karai, worked and burnished to a finish that reads as marble and stays cool to the touch. The polishing process traditionally involved egg white and a paste of palm sugar rubbed into the surface, which produces a hard, slightly translucent skin. It is labour intensive, and it is the single most characteristic surface in these houses.

The floors are the other. Athangudi tiles are made by hand in the village of Athangudi and a few neighbouring ones, using local sand, cement and oxide pigments poured onto a patterned glass sheet in a metal frame, cured in water and then sun dried. Because the tile sets against glass, its upper surface is glossy without glazing, and because the pattern is laid by hand, no two are identical. The trade survives commercially, which makes it one of the few Chettinad crafts that has outlived the economy that created it. The region also produces Kandangi cotton saris and Chettinad kottan palm leaf baskets, both now protected as Geographical Indications, the kottan receiving that recognition in 2013.

The collapse and the salvage trade

The Chettiar banking system was tied to colonial era South and Southeast Asia and did not survive its end. The Depression damaged it, the Japanese occupation of Burma and Malaya disrupted it, and the nationalisation of banking and the expropriation of foreign held land in Burma after independence removed its core business outright. Families returned to Chettinad with capital that could not be redeployed as it had been, and many moved on to Madras, Colombo and later further afield, entering industry, education and politics.

The houses were left. A mansion designed for a hundred relatives and a dozen servants is a liability when nobody lives there, and the traditional partible inheritance of the community meant that a single house could end up owned in fractions by dozens of cousins scattered across countries, none of whom could sell or repair it alone. The result through the later twentieth century was a brisk trade in architectural salvage: teak pillars, carved doors, Burmese satinwood panelling and Belgian mirrors stripped out and sold to dealers and hotel designers, sometimes leaving the shell standing.

The region is usually described as containing seventy six villages today, down from a larger historical count, and estimates of surviving mansions vary widely depending on what counts as intact. The Government of India has advanced Chettinad for World Heritage consideration, and a heritage hotel sector centred on Karaikudi has given some houses a use, including the well known thousand window house. Conversion is an imperfect answer. A house whose plan encodes a specific set of kinship rules becomes something else when its courtyards are a restaurant, but a roof that is maintained is better than one that is not.

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