Bhoot Bangla: Building stories and unplanning interiors in a Bengali industrial town

This essay will explore the unplanning of interiors and the stories we tell about them.

These interiors occupy buildings which 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. 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?

This essay draws on structuralist understandings of story, engaging, following the architectural theorist Sophia Psarra, using spatial thinking to construct ‘building stories’ that imagine, and thereby re-member, the buildings they story. At the same time, this essay will explore 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. This essay explores how this process of unplanning can be generated and documented through a practice of collaborative drawing influenced by the work of illustrators such as the Glaswegian ethnographer Mitch Miller.

This article builds upon research undertaken in relation to the RMIT practice research PhD programme. It refocusses that work to consider more closely how interiors, and the buildings they occupy can be understood, and represented, as open, or relational works.