Cultural Survival's Samudra Cottage
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Cultural Survival's Samudra Cottage
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Angels, they say, often fly close to the ground! The feeling is just that as you enter this secular patch of mud and greenery, smack in the middle of the city of Colombo. Then again, you wonder why on earth anyone would want to grow karawila and nagawalli on such commercially viable prime downtown property.
Ask that from the people who dreamed up tills idea of creating a comprehensive rural dwelling in the back yard of the Taj Samudra Hotel and their answer will be something like this: "It is as close to the earth as one can get. Think of it as a pooja to Mother Earth."
That essentially is the dominant theme behind the Samudra Cottage, an acre of prime city land dedicated to preserving a concept and a way of life fast disappearing in this age of fast cars and fast foods.
One of the city's best kept secrets for over a year, the Samudra Cottage is the work of the Cultural Survival of Sri Lanka, a non-governmental organisation which strives to recapture the knowledge of our past and utilize some of it in a palatable modern-day context.
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| Mudiyanse Tennekoon played a key role in creating Cultural Survival's Samudra Cottage. Above: The Taj Samudra looms in the background. |
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Done in collaboration with the Taj Samudra Hotel, the Samudra Cottage project has also reportedly attracted the eye of renowned British anthropologist David Bellamy, who had payed a number of visits to this solitary corner and enjoyed what it has to offer.
According to J. Asitha Perera, Chairman of the Cultural Survival of Sri Lanka, this land used to be part of the Taj's garbage dump. The hotel had readily agreed to give the land to the organisation for the purpose of recreating a bit of the real village, naturally at the Taj!
The result is a sort of local Disneyland, where antique Lanka has carved out a breathtaking niche for herself in the middle of the concrete jungle; but those who did it have taken pains to elevate the Samudra Cottage from a mere tourist showpiece to a remarkably factual masterpiece, where man could blend nicely with nature and where eventually both could emerge victor.
Says Manik Sandrasagra, a member of the Cultural Survival, often found sarong-clad and bare bodied, experiencing the place's riches: "It is not going back to basics. It is going forward with a full knowledge of the past."
It is that knowledge of the past, ignored up to now by our market-conscious planners, that this place seeks to surface. Everything you see here is biodegradable. Mud is used as a medium for development, not just construction, but artistic development.
At the heart of this sustainable ecosystem is the cottage itself, designed and built by architect Ashley de Vos, himself a member of the Cultural Survival. The cottage is very inviting, walls and floors painted with cow dung and constructed according to the old Sinhala tradition of home building with plenty of open space where elevated seating and sleeping sections are built into the walls. This eliminates the need for chairs, tables and beds, and occupants use hand woven mats and home made pillows to make themselves comfortable.
Perhaps the coolest dwelling in the city of Colombo, here one could sit and be lifted mentally to a place far away, a place where we city dwellers often long to be; a place really very close to the ground.
And the ground here is worth being close to. It teems with over 100 species of usable organically grown plant species, blended harmoniously with a hundred or so other species growing in the wild. In addition to a variety of vegetables, medicinal plants and trees, the cottage has its own paddy field, now lush with the rare variety of paddy, kalu heenati. A pond right outside the cottage is home to many varieties of indigenous edible fish, among them kaawaiya, luulla and handaya.
Presiding over their natural lusciousness is the traditional oil lamp-decked mal pela, the oldest known altar to the gods.
Those at Cultural Survival are adamant not to limit the Samudra Cottage to a mere tourist attraction. It should be a model, they say, to future developers, who should think of environment-friendly development for the future.
Says Sandrasagra, “It’s not being eccentric and it’s not going back in time. This is what we all long to have and yet don’t have. This is a very fine way to live.”
