In one of the side streets there is a row of old houses, now mostly shops and night venues, though incredibly at least one of them is still a residence (an old couple lives in it. I find it incredible because there is a venue right across that has loud music - some times with a dj - until the early hours of the morning every single evening. The couple keeps both the ground floor window and the top floor window ajar or even wide open for ventilation. So the music streams right into the house. They must hear it loud and clear even if they sleep at the back). Next door there is a day time business of some sort and the next house has a spiral as an ornament on a socle. The house has metal plates hiding its façade and seems to be up for restoration. At least I believe the base of the columns on the walls separating it from both neighbouring houses should be called a socle (I'm architecturally illiterate). The house must date from Dutch times and I might have thought in earlier times that that scroll-like ornament is somehow a baroque stylisation. Now I don't think so. It looks Hindu to me. The Cheriapalli or 'Small Church' in Kottayam - one of two Syrian Christian churches built around the mid-sixteenth century by refugees from Portuguese religious persecution on the coast of Kerala - has a very similar motif in its pediment (incidentally persecution or not the interior of the church has a wall painting that was supposedly done by a Portuguese or an Indo-Portuguese. The royal pleasure gardens of Taman Sari in Yogya were also supposedly designed in the mid-eighteenth century by a Portuguese, who was then apparently executed by the reigning sultan so as not to reveal the secrets of the architecture he had created. Nothing is known with any certainty as far as I know about either Portuguese. Portuguese history in Asia is often so obscure). The church warden who kindly showed me around told me it is a Hindu motif as several other items in Syrian Christian church architecture.
I like the idea of a probably Dutch period house inhabited by Chinese with a Hindu-influenced spiralling ornament. It seems very Creole. The sad thing is that one of the socles has a water meter leaning against the ornament and therefore putting pressure on it. It is also leaking badly. The funny thing is that the shophouse next door is a Kilang Besi or engineering works (I understand it contains a machine that presses or squeezes pieces of iron). The corbel on the same column also looks very vaguely Hindu to me. I understand why heritage-minded lovers of Melaka such as Lim Huck Chin eventually keep their distance after engaging with the place for years at a time (he wrote together with Fernando Jorge, a Portuguese architect, a famous book on the city). I went to the margin of the Melaka river early today during sunset. It was peaceful - tourists are mostly gone from the city. I was by Heeren Street. On the other margin there was the information centre mimicking Sumatran mosque architecture (a tall structure blocking the view of the Stadthuys), the water wheel (a fake) and further down all the new developments on reclaimed land on the riverside. Earlier that afternoon I had visited the Dataran Pahlawan shopping centre which juts right into the heritage site of the old Portuguese and Dutch fort. There is a replica of a Portuguese nau being built next door with the large prow pointing to the Porta de Santiago and the reconstructed sultan's palace. Both therefore sit right on top of a major archaeological and historical site.
The leaking water meter putting pressure against the Hindu-style spiralling ornament on the socle is actually a very minor matter compared to what is happening right in the centre of town. I find it annoying all the same. I am not one to point out to the shop owner what he is doing (heritage activists have a long history of trying to convince locals of the value of their shophouses, often to no avail). I am also writing this in a pub-cum-restaurant which occupies no fewer than three adjacent shophouses just across the street. I don't need to be a conservation architect or a heritage activist with the appropriate knowledge to know the shops have been modified and defaced in more ways than one (there is a fish pond full of colourful large koi with a footbridge right by the entrance, for instance). The incredibly cavalier way in which Melakans treat their heritage is actually disheartening, or would be if it were not for the fact that often the same happens in similar places in Brasil. The upper window of the Kilang Besi is also not the original shophouse window, and the owner has also destroyed his front porch entirely by making it level with the tarmac.
It is therefore perhaps best to enjoy Melaka but not really love it. It could be worse, however. Melaka could have gone the way of Singapore. Fortunately, being an economic backwater has helped it as people could not for a long time afford new buildings. Now however they can. It is incredible how centuries-old Creole worlds can be destroyed so fast and so nonchalantly.
 |
| Source: ബരഗുല് |
No comments:
Post a Comment