Bhoot Bangla Building Stories and Unplanning Interiors in a Bengali Industrial Town

Abstract

This essay explores the unplanning of interiors and the stories we tell about them. The interiors it examines occupy buildings that were originally planned under the British Raj for Asansol, a colonial/industrial town in West Bengal, India, but when empire and industry departed, the people who had been there all along moved into the vacuum left behind and became masters of the buildings they had served. With no formal titles to the properties and with eviction an ever-present possibility, they have, over decades, unplanned these interiors. Subdivided, repurposed, and ruined, their occupants unable to take full possession, unable ever to leave, these interiors have become bhoot bangla, which means, in Bengali, both ruined houses and haunted ones. Even their histories are ghostly and, in the absence of formal records, there are only stories to go on. How might we gather and evaluate those stories, and how can we — should we, given the precarious circumstances — retell them?

Drawing on structuralist understandings of story, and following the architectural theorist Sophia Psarra, this essay uses spatial thinking to construct ‘building stories’ that imagine, and thereby re-member, the buildings they story. At the same time, it explores how building stories can be themselves unplanned: on the one hand to reflect the (un)structures they story, on the other, to invite unpredictable adaptations, occupations, and hauntings of their own. It goes on to explore how these processes of unplanning can be generated and documented through practices of collaborative drawing, influenced by the work of illustrators such as the Glaswegian ethnographer Mitch Miller. The essay contributes new thinking to the practices of writing and drawing about architecture and place by considering how interiors, and the buildings they occupy, can be understood, and represented, as open, relational works.