Bulandshahr Legacy Festival

INTRODUCTION

Sir Frederic Salmon Growse was born in 1836 at Bildeston, a village in south-west Suffolk, England. He was a scholar at Oriel and Queen’s College in Oxford where he completed his masters. In 1859 he passed the competitive examinations for the Indian Civil Service and in 1860 he joined the Bengal Civil services with a posting in the North-Western provinces.

In his time in Mainpuri he understood that design and craft share a symbiotic relationship when practiced together. This led to his understanding on the importance of local buildings and crafts and he realized that the work of Indian traditional artisanship will not be appreciated or sustained until it would not profit Europe. This understanding made for “his model of architectural practice in India under foreign influence“.

A post by LatestLY was dedicated to Growse on his 128th death anniversary that infoemed:

Growse commissioned an unnamed “local native photographer” for the frontispiece and three other plates. There is a lithographed drawing of the wrath of Shiva by a Bengali artist on one plate. The other thirteen plates reproduce miniatures from a finely illuminated manuscript in the collection of the Maharaja of Benares, who kindly supplied Growse with photographic negatives.

Growse’s interest in the study of architecture emerged when he was transferred as a Joint Magistrate to Mathura in 1870. He was promoted as a collector and a District Magistrate after a year. The district town had an Anglican Church built in an Italian Renaissance style of architecture that had been consecrated in 1856. However, there was no Catholic Church there at that time. Growse, being a Catholic determined to construct the church in a befitting architectural style. He contributed one-third of the costs for construction of the church and secured some Rs. 13,000 in subscriptions from local residents. He laid out the ground plans “in accordance with ordinary Gothic precedent” but later the rest of the building became “purely oriental in design“. He wrote, “the carving in the tympanum of the doorways, the tracery in the windows, the cusped arch in front of the altar, the kiosks set along the roof, were all favorable specimens of native art”. It was a rare example of the Hindu temple’s shikara form of dome that evoked the nearby sacred Hindu shrine of Brindaban. The aim was to offer this church to a “mixed congregation of Europeans and Orientals” which stood as an example of Indo-Saracenic architecture before it became completely appropriated in India. The building infuriated the evangelicals and therefore, he was transferred to Bulandshahr before the church was even completed.

He was transferred from Mathura to Bulandshahr which was a purely agricultural region of the province where his “craft revival vision would be wasted“. However, he rebuilt the simple town “into a picturesque consortium of towers and gateways and arcades, and many handsome public and private buildings.” Growse initiated a “rebuilding” that, as he wrote, made the place into the “most architectural modern town of its size in the Province”. With the local skills available, he gave artisan-builders the freedom to put their artistry into several buildings in Bulandshahr. The funds were raised through public subscription because he found the Indian elite willing for his rebuilding path.

Thomas Metcalf in his book ‘An Imperial Vision: Indian architecture and Britain’s Raj’ writes:

Since the finances were supported through local gentry and merchants, Growse collected some Rs. 12,700 for the Bathing Ghat, and a further Rs. 14,800 for a masonry reservoir called the Lyall Tank, while Rs. 30,000 needed for the Town Hall was contributed by one wealthy landowner, Raja Baqir Ali Khan of Pindrawal. Many of them supported him in order to remain in favor of the British rulers but after recognizing that their collector’s view on architecture did not accord with his British superiors, they rebelled against contributing funds.

He grew vocal about the Public Works Department and its “tide of utilitarian barbarism” with tedious similarity that characterized all government buildings in towns with almost no distinguishing features. Growse was outspoken to charge that these “standard plans” were “forced upon universal acceptance throughout the length and breadth of the province, with little or no regard to local conditions as regards material, or the habits of the people, or the capacity of the workmen.” His work and resistance towards PWD in his obscure publications irritated the department which consequently got him banished to another remote post to Fatehpur in 1884.

Even in Bulandshahr he held archaeological excavations in some sites and was able to find inscriptions and coins which are currently sitting in different museums across India and England. He was also gazetted C.I.E. i.e. Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire in 1879 on New Year’s Day.

Growse took leave from Indian civil services due to poor health and retired to Haslemere, Surrey in England in 1891. E.B. Havell mentioned Growse as “a martyr to the cause” but by the early twentieth century many architects emerged to regard Indian artisans and building traditions much more sympathetically even if they felt their own ideas were superior.

On his passing away, in an obituary published by the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, Mr. G.A. Grierson wrote:

“In losing him, the world of Oriental literature has lost a fellow-labor, whose work, in its own peculiar sphere, was conscientious and thorough, and at the same time frequently graced by an eminently artistic style.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Saloni Tehri is a fourth-year architecture student from Jindal School of Art and Architecture in O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat. She is an ardent learner and researcher who likes to contribute to the cultural heritage and histories of places.