In Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me, there is a full, tender chapter about Laurie Baker, the British-born architect who became a quiet revolutionary in Kerala. For readers who have encountered Baker through Roy’s pages, he emerges as a figure of integrity and invention. Yet Roy’s mention is also an invitation to look more closely at the man, and at the woman beside him, without whom his story remains incomplete.
When Laurie Baker first arrived in India in 1945, he came not as an architect but as a pacifist and conscientious objector, after service as an anesthetist with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in China during World War II.
A chance meeting with Mahatma Gandhi in Bombay redirected his life. Gandhi’s philosophy – that a home should be built with materials found within a five-mile radius – became the seed of everything Baker would later practise. But it was another encounter, equally formative, that would anchor him in India for good: his meeting with Elizabeth Jacob, a young Malayali doctor working with people affected by leprosy.
Elizabeth Chandy was the daughter of a distinguished surgeon from Kerala. When she married Laurie Baker in 1948, it was a union that crossed cultures at a time when such marriages...
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