Heritage site in cHittagong
The modest tin-shed facade of Kadhurkhil high school at Boalkhali upazila in Chittagong tells little about the rich past of its mud-structure.
The 8300 square feet building is a testimony of the Swadeshi Movement, an anti-British demonstration during the colonial period.
To provide high school education, some enthusiastic people of Kadhurkhil village started the school in 1917 and decided to build the structure solely using local raw materials with a view expressing the solidarity of the Swadeshi Movement. The construction of the mud-structure took two years to complete from 1918 to 1920.
The building is 200 feet long from east to west and 41.5 feet from south to north, and flanked by a total of 74 pillars on both sides. It houses eight rooms with 20 doors and 23 windows. The walls are around 3 feet thick.
"There was another room in the structure on the west side that was demolished due to damage in the 1960s", said Ranjit Kumar Dey, who has been working as an office assistant at the school for 15 years. At present, five of the rooms are being used for classes while the remaining three are offices.
"We want to preserve it. That's why we did not demolish the building despite having accommodation problems," said Biswajit Barua, School Headmaster. The school has a semi-pucca and three more brick buildings for 860 students. .
Experts think that it is one of the largest existing mud buildings in the country. Md Amiruzzaman, regional director (Khulna), Department of Archeology (DoA), the government agency in charge of preserving antiquities, visited the building on August, 2013. He said, the mud building, known as "Maitte Kotha or Maitta Gudam" in Chittagong, was a common type of house for two hundred years till 1950. But the availability of bricks and other modern ingredients and the destruction of many mud houses in disasters resulted in the drastic decline of mud-buildings.
The unique building attracts many visitors throughout the year. Among others, representatives of Swedish Embassy visited the school in 2011 to marvel at its unique properties. Yet the existence of this remarkable building remains unknown to most.
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