Sashikala Ananth's way to preserve Indian architectural tradition

Growing up in Chennai, India, in the 1950s, Sashikala Ananth could have had a very different life. In a time and place where women were largely home-schooled and controlled by male authority, Ananth’s family was highly unusual. In her family, which consisted of 15-20 cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, all the girls received an education outside of the home and were encouraged to pursue a chosen career path. Ananth’s great-aunt was a particularly influential example of this open-mindedness—married at 9 and widowed at 11, instead of being trapped in the house and tied down to domestic work as was the custom for a woman in her position, she became one of the first female college graduates in India and went on to work outside of the home for abandoned women and widows. The special closeness that arose over many conversations between Ananth and her great-aunt would be pivotal in Ananth’s later life.

After considering a career in acting (she had always loved to be creative), Ananth decided at 18 to attend architecture school.

After having been tutored by largely Western-trained architects and working as a freelance architect for several years, she experienced a first awakening. By chance, she heard about a traditional architect and builder nearby. This immediately aroused her interest, and she visited the man. In the hours that followed, a need grew in Ananth that drives her work to this day: she made it her mission to study largely forgotten Indian architectural traditions of Vaastu Shastra and to learn how to effectively implement and apply their wisdom in the modern world; it’s a task she continues to this day.

Her first challenge came quickly; her new teacher had never heard of a woman studying or working in the Vaastu Shastra tradition, and it required months of persistence until Ananth could convince him to accept her as an apprentice. The next ten years were an intense period of study, research and practice, in which Ananth accompanied her teacher to many temples and buildings for answers to find questions that had occupied her for a long time: How could the spectacular temples in Ellora, Puri Jagannath, Thanjavur Brihadeeswara, Chidambaram and Madurai, without the aid of mechanical devices, have been built with such precision? Who were the builders and from where did they get their knowledge? How did they understand space, form, proportions, and symbolism? Could this knowledge to help create a modern approach to architecture based on the spiritual search for meaning?

As Ananth searched for answers to these questions, she realized how important Indian traditions, which had been cultivated over thousands of years, were disregarded and neglected in her homeland – even after independence from the British. The more time Ananth spent studying not only the proportions, colors, and forms of various temples, but also understanding the fate of their builders, the more deeply it moved her. As her sense of connection to her cultural roots grew stronger, so did her sense of awe. Over time, Ananth experienced what she calls ‘spiritual awakening: “Spirituality is the deep inner commitment to an energy within the self that is very much part of the universal consciousness,” she explains.

Her awakening was further supported by a now ongoing study of yoga, begun at the age of 22. Taught yoga by several teachers in the school of Sri Krishnamacharya, Ananth had already experienced an energy shift toward knowing how to touch knowledge by trusting that it is already there in the natural systems, ready to be revealed to anyone who seeks it. “That is why people who work with the soil, who grow things, are able to bring out a certain wisdom which a person who does a technical job will never be able to touch,” Ananth reflects.

 Atop this established yogic foundation, Ananth’s Vastu-inspired awakening once again sent ripples of change throughout her life.

With it began Ananth’s integration of architecture and yoga as a way of healing the suffering of modern fragmentation. “Traditions look at a more holistic framework to assist people in integrating their parts in a way that offers wellness, well-being, and mental peace,” she explains. Chikitsa Vaatsu was Ananth’s first step down this path. A personally developed therapeutic design system, Chikitsa Vaatsu uses knowledge of yoga, behavioral work, and architecture to assist traumatized, ill, or suffering individuals to change the energy of their homes. While Ananth asserts that most therapeutic work is fear-based, she seeks to teach people how to change their suffering by empowering them to change their space. “I work with them, and they come up with a solution.”

When Ananth began to pursue Vaatsu traditions, yoga, and the integration of the two it was a lonely struggle. She fought to get each book published and her work respected. Throughout these challenges, memories of her great-aunt served as a lasting inspiration. From her great-aunt, Ananth had learned how a woman with guts could make a change in the world by following her dreams without breaking under opposition, even (or especially) in difficult circumstances. Today, however, Ananth shares with a smile, many young people are awakened to this, and the work is not the uphill task it used to be.

THE ESSENCE OF OUR FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS POLITICAL.

In fact, there are so many people pulled to Ananth’s work that she and her husband opened Ritambhara, an ashram in the Niligiri hills, in 2015. In Ritambhara, there are no sounds except the calls of birds. “We are following the tradition of Vanaprastha.” Vana means forest, and Vanaprastha describes the Indian tradition of going back to nature to become a teacher. “Your knowledge becomes not just deeper, but more extensive when you go back to nature and you learn from nature again,” Ananth confides.

With a focus on healing modern fragmentation, Ananth speaks compellingly of the consequences of information overload. In a world filled with stimulus and facts, she expounds, people have a tendency to randomly pick up information and put it in their heads without creating a pattern. With yoga, which consists not only of working with the body through Asanas but also with the breath and mind through pranayama, yama, and niyama as part of an 8-fold path, she teaches people to look deeply into their internal practices and relationship with the world. This helps individuals to govern what they are learning and why, where the knowledge is being placed, and how it is being used for practical applications. Through the intensely difficult work of reconfiguring the way people hold data in their heads and respond emotionally to it, a greater intelligence is awakened that supports greater insight and a sense of well-being. “It is not money or possessions that are going to give you well-being,” Ananth says with a nod. “It is how you balance the elements of your consciousness to enable an enlivening feeling rather than a feeling of oppression.”

‘Oppression’ is a loaded word for Ananth, who was born two years after India gained independence. She considers her work, and indeed, all work, to be political as well as healing. The nature of choice is political, Ananth believes; as a result, there is no such thing as a non-political person. She sees recovering “ancestor wisdom” or wanting to return to traditional roots, for example, as political.

For Ananth, the political, the spiritual, and the physical dimensions are threads that must be pulled together to heal the fragmentation of our modern world and to keep traditions attacked by colonialism alive. Though difficult, this is work that Ananth takes on with “happy attention”—she radiates contentment as she speaks of the satisfaction of having done what she had to do. “It’s a big task, so luckily, we have many people working together. It will not end in our lifetime; others must take it forward.”