The Other Side of Laurie Baker
Elizabeth Baker, DC Books, Rs 90
A personal history of Laurie Baker, beyond his architectural adventures

It was 1945, a hot summer in Bombay. A young English Quaker and architect, Laurie Baker, was waiting for a berth on a ship sailing back home. With time on his hands, he accompanied his Quaker hosts to meet Mahatma Gandhi. Deeply impressed with his talk, Baker resolved to return to India and put into practice the ideas about housing that he had been thinking of and which his talk with Gandhi crystallised.

Baker, as everyone knows, did return to India, where he became a pioneer of low-cost housing, using traditional material as much as possible. Baker’s buildings and the architectural principles that he developed are famous and well documented, but his life outside architecture and the man behind the architect are still not so well known. This deficiency has now been remedied with this small gem by Baker’s wife Elizabeth. She is a considerable person in her own right. Born in Kerala, she became a doctor, an achievement for a woman at that time, served all over India, and retired from work only a few years ago. Ostensibly a memoir of Baker, it is actually a biographical collage, weaving in his wonderfully vivid letters and autobiographical writings, with Elizabeth’s recollections.

Born in Birmingham in 1917, Baker became an architect in 1938, just before the outbreak of World War II. A devout Methodist, he gradually turned toward the pacifistic Religious Society of Friends, better known as Quakers. This decision shaped his life. He joined the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, run by the Quakers, and served in London, tending to the wounded. The unit went to China and Burma. As the allied forces fell back in Burma before the Japanese, Baker joined the refugees steaming back. His account of the retreat is heartrending and the Burma experiences confirmed his pacifism: “The Burma episode convinced me as never before that war couldn’t be anything but wicked and evil.” In China, Baker helped out at a leper home in Salachi, before being forced by illness to return to England.

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