Orakandi Thakur Bari
The ‘Baruni’ festival is a celebration of a story and a place, a story of pride and a place to be proud of. A three days long festival is organised annually in Orakandi village (Kashiani, Gopalganj) to mark the ‘Baruni’ fair observing the birth anniversary of ‘Harichand Thakur’. More than hundred thousand pilgrims, mostly from the southern district of Bangladesh, take a holy dip in the tank of ‘Kamanasagar’ and ‘Dudhsagar’ adjacent to Orakandi Thakur Bari.
Harichand Thakur (1812-1878) worked among the so-called untouchable people of Bengal. At a very early age he accepted the path of religious reformation for uplifting this underprivileged community. Harichand Thakur sowed the seed of a reformed religion called MATUA to eliminate inequity between people. His son Guruchand Thakur (1846-1937) worked with Australian Baptist missionary C.S. Meed in a campaign to have the ‘Chandal’ people re-categorised as ‘Namasudra’.
In 1907 he appealed to the then Governor of Bengal and Assam for employment of Namasudra in government service. His next movement was to remove the disgraceful term ‘Chandal’ from the census report. He was successful in the process and the term was removed in 1911.
Maha Baruni Utshob is an ephemeral celebration by their followers to pay homage to their contribution in social reformation. Millions of devotees come to attend the ceremony by walking several miles. The primary objective of the project was to design a circulation through architectural intervention which will ensure a flawless mobility of a huge crowed while giving a distinctive character to this site (seven devotees were killed and scored more than 100 other injured in a stampede in 2005 while taking part in Baruni bath).
This project is proposed by Anindya Gaurab, a student of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). His studio supervisors were Mahmudul Anwar Riyaad and Tahajibul Hossain.
The master plan has been rethought respecting the age old sequential rituals the visitors follow while attending the festival. The problem of entry, exit, and Baruni snan (holy dip), all at the same point is solved with a combination of two unique buildings named as ‘Vog Mondir’ (it serves as the main entrance at the beginning and distributes ‘Prasad’ while leaving the site) and ‘Snan Mondir’ (bath plaza).
The ‘Vog Mondir’ separates the entry and exit flow in horizontal level, whereas the ‘Snan Mondir’ separates the pedestrian flow both horizontally (while entering) and vertically (while exiting).Every existing pond has been respected and reshaped according to the need of the new master plan. By making the best use of the site’s characteristics, the ‘Snan Mondir’ is placed in such a way that during the festival (dry season) the central plaza remains above water, facilitating the huge crowd to follow their bathing rituals, but in monsoon, while there will be very few people around, it goes under water, thus lowering the scale of the building. The Ghats have underwater platform which helps to prevent the water from being muddy and unhygienic, while some visual demarcations indicate the safety limit. The house of Guruchand Thakur and the ancient ‘Durga Mondir’ has been conserved with a new plaza. The temples of Harichand Thakur and Guruchand Thakur have been relocated to its original location where they were buried initially.
By introducing a new pond in front of the temples and the new ‘Mandapa’ at the other side of the pond, a minimum distance has been maintained, which will ensure the safety and better perception of the visitors. The temples are designed as a phenomenon, and not just some physical form. The corbeled surface of the temple will help nature to play on it, while birds will find niches to be suitable to make their nest.
People will not just remember the image, but also the smell and the sound of it. Four new pavilions have been designed where the followers will meet the descendants. The scale of the new plazas has been minimized by planting shading trees in grid iron pattern.
